Category: Monday

An air of vanity has bustled into our politics. Not since the prelude to the Nzeogwu coup of the 1960’s. The National Assembly stalemate examples it and has proved that we the people weigh like dust in their regal hands.

The quiet imbroglio brawls. But on the streets, indifferent silence. The vanity of politicians squelches the interest or welfare of the masses. The masses, ever their own enemies, have done their best to bolster the political class who look down at us in the malignancy of their disdain.

We have abided the impunity of political parties. So, the politicians do what they please as they please. I have said all along that we have had crisis in the APC since the upswing of this administration, and the APC is not, in a classic sense, a political party.

The idea of a political party is still foreign to this clime. Political parties are like football teams. Arsenal buys a Drogba today, and plays against Messi in Barcelona. Tomorrow, the players switch sides. In the easy morality of soccer adventurism, no one questions the moves. Each side hails the switch if, in their calculations, it will earn them the trophy at the end of the day.

Political parties are not conceived that way. Its members come as apostles and foot soldiers of an idea, borne out of historical exigencies. The members join to advance the world. But politics in Nigeria is immune to such high-wire thoughts. The highest we have travelled in this regard is to sacrifice the polity to the idol of the tribe or the altar of faith, or both.

We have followed this wounded path and taken it for granted. It is the tribal provenance of politics. But the National Assembly has fallen many steps lower in the moral slope. This is the nakedness of personal interest. It is not about anything but where bread is buttered, even if the society is not bettered.

We are simultaneously in the Machiavellian hole and Hobbesian jungle.  A man like Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki is holding the Senate to ransom. He is supposed to convene but he wouldn’t. It is not because it is in the interest of the country. It is because he wants to know if it will not become a gravedigger’s moment for his prestige as the number three citizen.

Both sides are guilty here. The APC wants him to convene to stir a house to bipartisan melee. Saraki is afraid he may fall to the guillotine. On the surface, it looks like a balance of power. But it is a balance of fear.  Each side is on a suicide march like the character in Sophocles play, King Oedipus. He sees his death and fall from grace but his suicidal impulse goads him to his end. The literary critic Killam calls it “insistent fatality.”

APC will suffer much if it turns the house of law into a template of anarchy. Saraki may suffer a loss of authority. Unlike Eleyinmi of Village Headmaster, Saraki does not like open confrontation. He is a sly, calculating villain, a subdued showman and a reptilian stalker with a Mephistophelean eye for the easy kill. Eleyinmi of Village Headmaster craved the bloodstain, the head butts, the mud splash of conflict.

That is why we are not having the kind of parliament in Medieval Poland that a critic described as a “divinely ordained confusion.” One thing is clear: this is a moot senate, with nothing serious on its agenda. The so-called tiff over INEC money is a storm in a swimming pool when no swimmer stirs the water and no breast stroke is splashing. In the end, a presidential power can enable the spending. We have operated an insipid, braindead chamber, with no romance of ideas or a pulse of the street? Between now and May next year, they would have only a mercantile zeal, sharing booties, hooting to the bank and plotting their return to the same parliamentary brothel of deals and sleaze.

Since they were prorogued, what have we missed as a nation that we did not miss before when they sat without their jaws locked? Nothing except vacuous theatre. Now that their jaws are locked, we miss nothing. It reflects why scholars call developing countries weak states. They are not strong enough to affect the literacy rate, make a difference between poverty and prosperity, between safety and violence. This senate has failed in that regard aplenty.

So, we are not missing Saraki. Rather, in an access of vanity, he is mistaking the headlines for popularity and paying homage to Obj and joining the recent series of dubious pilgrims making progress to Ota in a parody of John Bunyan. He who presided over  the demolition of three major banks with their blood trails of suicides, deaths, miseries and families ruined. That makes him Nigeria’s chief financial undertaker. He who never ran anything other than his own prosperity. He who survived a Supine Supreme Court verdict, an illiterate juridical handout by so-called wise men, who said it was a rumour that he anticipated his own prosperity in his assets declaration. I said he claimed to be a prophet of his own prosperity. He wants to be president. With all those credentials, no one else qualifies to be president. A tear for him.

Nor is APC acting mature by haranguing Saraki. There is nothing substantially useful for this country even if Saraki is ejected. It is no more than revanchist agenda. Vice President Yemi Osinbajo should be a playbook for governance for the red chamber. In a few days, he made impotent the concept of the state as impotent. With his SARS order, he gave us a glimpse into tomorrow, an argument for state police without ruffling the law. A triumph of imagination over technicality. A riot of debates bows to the quiescence of an order. He threw a dagger at impunity by ousting Daura.

We are quietly joyous at a tamp-down in the herdsmen crisis. This column had suggested that the air force should strafe the forests. That’s what they have done, and the guns, machetes and the swagger in the dark are fading. The air force, as angels over our soldiers, have made the sky lord over the so-called herdsman’s earth. For about a month now, Benue, Taraba, Adamawa, et al, have breathed relative peace unknown in the past year. Plateau knew peace until the bloody spasm winked into silence. To Buhari’s credit, this predated his leave. What we need now is the sustenance of peace, and justice on the arrested predators.

While the executive can boast a few kudos in spite of its major shortcomings, the senate, including Saraki, has not justified Montesquieu’s idea of the separation of powers.

 

Morning with the Nobel Laureate

In 2008, I had a conversation with Olawale Edun, the chairman of Vintage Press that publishes The Nation. He is one time commissioner in Lagos. He was hosting world renown writer V. S. Naipaul. My blood ran to the hilltop and I requested an audience for an interview.

“S’o mo npa e,” he asked in Yoruba. Translation, “Are you versed in such matters.” I said of course. He trusted me and set up an audience in his Ikoyi residence for the Nobel laureate. I had heard many things about Naipaul. He could walk out of an interview in a huff. His temper could boil like a volcano and he could cheer like a golden retriever. That morning I was to travel to Ekiti to deliver the Adekunle Fajuyi lecture organised by the cerebral governor-elect Kayode Fayemi, Jimi Agbaje, Femi Ojudu, etc. I wanted a quick interview.

Naipaul materialised from a car with his wife Nadira, and we chose Edun’s hefty library as the propitious place for such a fertile exchange. The interview lasted about two hours, and it was principally of a conversation about literature from Conrad to Dickens to Achebe and the relevance of the novel in this age. I remember asking him to pick his forte in the three planks of good writing: observation, perception or language. He chose observation and language. Of course, his spare and beautiful style earned him the comment as the best “writer in English writing today.” He had few kind words for Achebe, asserting he had little to write outside the customs of his people. After Things Fall Apart, his ink ran dry. He was quick to say, if he had offended anyone, “I am sorry.” But the bard had dropped his barb and darted out of town. After the interview, he said no one had tasked him as I did in the interview. Farewell to Naipaul, who passed on last week at 85.

Men in black. Hooded like goons of robbers. Eyes pop as though out of the dark. Mute, ominous guns like growls about to be heard. Gates on lockdown. Lawmakers cannot cajole but holler in vain. A dawn undone.

It was not a building complex that was under siege. Not the brick and mortar of the National Assembly. It was our memory. The fired DSS director, Lawal Daura, harked us back to our jackboot days. Do you remember June 12, and its many sieges? The siege of the press, the siege of the labour union, the streets as blood pedestals, the arrests of dissenters, the cacophonies of clampdowns. Smackdown on fragile voices.

It was no joy. As George R. R. Martin wrote in A feast for Crows, “A siege is a deadly dull.”

When you lay siege to a memory, you lay hold on a people’s future. So, that morning, when hooded men cordoned off the lawmakers access to their chambers, we were reminded that our democracy operates still without self-confidence. Behind it stood shadows of hooded men. Daura was, perhaps, a chief hooded man, more hooded than the muscular presences that morning. We saw them. He hid in the shadows. You will not see him and live.

We had seen it long ago. His defiance, his sense of primitive entitlement, his patrician airs, his disdain for the rule of law. The media cried, the civil society wailed, the law squealed. Daura’s ears could not hear. He did it with the dollars in Nigeria’s most famous apartment. He was stung by an onslaught on judges. He bifurcated the presidency. He became both the executive and legislative branches. He became the dispenser of religious justice to el-Zakzaky. He roared in steely silence to the courts by keeping Sambo Dasuki under leash.

He probably had read or heard of a French philosopher called Montesquieu, who gave the world the doctrine of the separation of powers. If he had heard of him, he had contempt for him. Hence he acted as though the government is one lumbering bully of a monarchy, where the people account to the rulers. Hence he by-passed his bosses and acted in cahoots with Saraki over the nomination of Ibrahim Magu as the EFCC boss.

He had no regard for the concept of a secular state even when the constitution is unambiguous in that sphere. So, he treated el-Zakzaky as though he manipulated Islam, thereby suffocating the secular commands of the law.

August 7 was only an emblem of his serial contempt for the higher principle of democracy. What he did first was to take a full measure of his bosses. He saw he could get away with insolence. The world was open for his antediluvian horrors. He took advantage.

We all saw on television as the female lawmaker screamed in a hysteria of rage and righteousness against the hooded men. They neither flinched nor assailed her. They planted their feet, their eyes unfazed, their guns unstirred. They knew all she could do was rant. Her voice would expire. Her muscles would mellow. She would acquiesce to  superior arms. She did. That was how Daura behaved. The civil society would scream and media would rage but Daura did what Daura would do.

Of course, until the reckoning. It came hours later when Acting President Yemi Osinbajo whisked him out of office. To those who first heard it, it was as though they dreamed. Daura probably thought that Osinbajo was a figurehead, and he, Daura, a figurine in the sacred grove.  The figurine inspires worship, trepidation and veneration as the symbol of the gods. No one eyes the statuette, not to talk of touch it, a sanctuary unto himself.

But the so-called figurehead Osinbajo knocked off the divine figurine Daura out of the grove. The figurine dropped and broke into a hundred splinters. How are the sacred fallen!

Questions have been raised about Daura’s collusion with the PDP folks. Some have even said that the APC folks had met and the PDP men were there early to overthrow an attempt to impeach Saraki. The interim report from the inspector general of police has not answered the questions. Is the IGP, a fellow traveller and partner in impunity with Daura, capable of a believable report? I doubt it.

First, what were the lawmakers, who usually traffic in absenteeism and often never show up at all or show up in late morning and afternoon, doing very early in the morning? Ben Bruce made a laughing stock of himself when he announced that APC folks were inside. How foolish the assertion! No such evidence unless the APC folks turned into spirits.

If the DSS men were there to stop the PDP men from frustrating the APC men, it clearly is not true because they were not inside. The APC has not the numbers to remove Saraki, and any such meetings will make no sense unless the APC plots of a kangaroo session, which will be unconstitutional. So, whose interest was Daura serving? Was he acting alone?

It still baffles many why Daura would want to embarrass his own mentoring figure, the president, especially when he was out of town. If he wanted to do in Osinbajo, he had his comeuppance. What is obvious is that the vagrant was allowed too much elbow room for too long to foment nuisance. He should not have been allowed if he was not endorsed. He had already done so much havoc and thrown the administration in defence mode. The case of Jones Abiri hangs over the government still. Even the NUJ and the information minister had been caught in the web of authoritarian lies. It is not over until a new atmosphere of rule of law prevails. It is then we shall know whether it is just Daura’s stone-age volition, or whether others buy in who have not freed themselves from the impulses of the barbarian.

Osinbajo would not have fired him if he cleared from him? We need to get to the bottom of this. Saraki “Eleyinmi” has denied any hands in it. But his name has figured because the former DSS chief seemed to have cooperated with him more than Buhari in the course of his disgraceful stewardship. But no evidence. So, the charge makes little sense.

Daura has gone, and I hope he has gone for good. He held periodic meetings with editors and acted as though he was a feudal lord talking in contempt as though he owned the country. I had told some of my colleagues that if I ever attended any such meetings I would have been walked out after giving him a piece of my mind.

August 7 should never come our way again. It was a caveman’s moment in our democracy, what Joseph Conrad calls “a night of first ages.”

 

Seiyefa, the man of letters

Mathew Seiyefa, who replaced Daura as DSS chief, was my classmate in Government College, Ughelli, and I was pleasantly surprised to hear of his new posting. Nothing about him made us think he would end up as a secret service mogul. To us, he was a man of letters. He was perhaps the best student in the whole class of September 1973 in English. He wrote clear, elegant sentences with an eye for images and ear for music.

I recall his essay published in the school magazine, The Mariners. It was titled, “Guy way: an incessant cankerworm.” It was an essay that I read many times in those days for its beauty and message. The term “guy way,” as he put it “entailed extremely immoral acts,” and described the guys as “social misfits” “never-do-wells,” “the most undesirable” persons who “were in the wrong place at the wrong time”. He also said they had no place in civilised society. Seiyefa earned A1 in English at school certificate and no one could expect anything less.

I recall once when our English teacher, a Ghanaian named Tieku, who graduated from Pennsylvania, asked us to write an essay. He singled out Seiyefa’s as a model essay and read it out to the class.

With the benefit of hindsight, I should have seen the secret service in him. He was a cheerful and dignified introvert, a lethal virtue in a secret service person. From his essays we also could have gleaned his social conscience. The guys, Seiyefa wrote, were antipodes of revolutionaries.

One of the images of him was when we were preparing for school certificate exams. The introvert walked up to the blackboard and wrote, “Barely three weeks to exams, boys still unprepared.” He verbalised it with an impish smile.

The choice of verb distorted the news headlines. Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki did not defect from the APC. He was forced to defect. “Was forced” is a passive tense, which connotes that the subject, that is the senate president, did not take the action out of his own volition. He was temporising. But word leapt to his ears that a query letter was in the offing from Oshiomhole’s office.  Eleyinmi fled in spite of the billowy pride of his agbada.

You cannot expect him to respond to the query. The police had just chafed him, and Eleyinmi scoffed back at the IG, acting above the law by not showing up at an invitation. To wait for an APC censure would make him a query letter writer. That would sully his status as a man some people have started to designate “oga na master.”

He stepped out of the APC portal because he had to follow his troops, who had gone to prepare a place for him in the big PDP mansion he had abandoned with regal flourish only a few years ago. Since his men had moved, the clamour revved up for him to scoot over to the other side of the senate aisle. Some wondered why he sat transfixed. But it was the immobility of indecision. The plan had not panned out as envisioned. Some bigwigs had retreated, like Wammako, who thundered into Sokoto last Saturday. Shehu Sani, his near-bouffant hair unfazed by age, looked the other way as his colleagues faded away.

So, Saraki goes over, his hands clipped like the authentic Eleyinmi. And unlike Eleyinmi, some of his colleagues disappointed him by baring their hands of a different political hue. It was like what was said of the Renaissance and reformation era in Europe. “Erasmus laid the egg,” went the saying. “Martin Luther hatched it. But Erasmus said the plumage of the bird was of different colour from what he expected.”

Saraki and his gang laid the defection eggs but, in the fullness of time, some eggs did not hatch. Saraki would call them bad eggs. Saraki waltzed away as the leader of a minority. He did not want to go over naked, exposed as the usurper. A usurper morally, if not legally. By remaining as senate president, he is overthrowing a throne that he once occupied.

He has handed over to himself without a ceremony or oath, or Koran, especially without a holy book since he has embarked on an act of political sacrilege. Like in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, he is having a wedding and a funeral on the same throne simultaneously. He is mourning, without admitting it, his office as senate president but he is having a new wedding with it as a minority leader still sitting still on an immoral throne. He is also wedding again a party he jilted about four years ago. He is like Banquo being haunted by the legitimate owner, Macbeth, except that he still sees himself as Macbeth. The usurper in him is yelling out Banquo’s words as Macbeth arrives: “Avaunt and quit my sight/ let the earth hide thee/ thy bone is marrowless and thy blood is cold.” Only a cold, calculating Eleyinmi can pull off that farce of spectacular somersault and schizophrenia.

But more striking has been Eleyinmi’s trouble with the father figure. He has never loved to bow to a father. He started it in his biological state in his relations with his father Oloye. It is a classic Sigmund Freud drama playing out before our eyes. Freud gave birth to psychoanalysis with his theory based on the myth of King Oedipus. The playwright Sophocles turned it into an immortal work of art. The man married his mother and killed his father.

Bukola Saraki takes from father but hates to show gratitude to father. Oloye loved him, nurtured him, and even started him off on the path of commerce. But he was not a good manager. He ruined a major bank in the country with his managerial ineptitude. He became a governor in the shadows of Oloye, and that made him see himself as the master of the Kwara universe, even if his stewardship was not transformational. The story goes that when he was governor, he never wanted to be in town or at venues where his father was scheduled to appear. This was a case of oedipal self-regard. He gave his father a black eye. He never wanted to be a father’s “son.”

This sort of ingratitude only comes out of insecurity. Greek historian and philosopher Tacitus calls that a fear of gratitude.   He said “men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden…”  So apart was he from his father as he dabbed about on his peacock throne as governor that some mischief makers went about with unfounded allegations of his paternity. Make no bones about it. Oloye was his father. Eleyinmi only had anxiety about his sonship. He was uncomfortable accepting authority.

As governor, he did not feel his powers complete, hence he wanted to become president. In that position, he would have outflanked his father. But he could not do much in the PDP. He had a problem with the hierarchy. He wanted to be seen as the heir but the north thought he was not north enough, and the west and south thought he was not south enough. He became, and still is, a factor of ambiguity in Nigeria’s geopolitics. It is unfair to him, I must say. He should be seen first and foremost as a Nigerian. This anxiety of geo-identity may lay at the bottom of his oedipal problems with party hierarchies. Oloye has been supplanted by party hierarchs as father figures in his life.

He glided over to the APC, and it became the same story. He seemed to have eaten the humble pie by withdrawing any zeal for the post of president. Alas, he was forced again to look for a position of president that would work under another father figure also designated president. Even to obtain that, he fought by stealth. The hierarchs did not want him. He slunk his way like a night cat onto the position of senate president.

Having given his party leaders a punch in the nose, he expected them to kowtow to him. He had not stooped, but he conquered the house. He met a President Buhari, who was too lofty to stoop. It became a standoff of one father against son who did not want a father. For him, it has not always been about vision, but spoils. Was it a Freudian slip when he complained about juicy offices he wanted and did not get? He lamented about “Lagos, Lagos” and Katsina, Katsina.” He did not say “roads, roads,” or “schools, schools,” etc for the poor. He said he did not care for position. So why not step down? This is hypocrisy writ large.

That standoff led to the worst senate in history. He has now moved over to the other side. A new act has begun in Saraki’s quest to exorcise a father. Will he find fulfilment there?

The point as to whether he might become a senate president till the end of this tenure or whether he should be removed is a moot point to me. The eighth senate is, to all intents and purposes, a dead chamber. It cannot achieve much. If Saraki wants the perks and insolence of office till May next year, it will not extricate him from the shadow of historical infamy of a man who usurped a throne until it expired. If the senate prorogues indefinitely, the president has the executive powers to fund INEC elections and other necessities. Eleyinmi already has met his Balogun. It is all over but the puffing.

 

An Imam of peace

The Imam was the man. Not those who wielded guns and machetes and spilled homesteads and streets with the gore and blood of their fellow humans. He was a cleric in his soul, not for the ceremony of piety or extravagance of sacerdotal powers. Abdullahi Abubakar kept about 300 Christians in his mosque and looked the goons in the eye and said he was not hiding any Christians. That is what Biodun Jeyifo called truthful lie in his book on Nigerian literature. The 83-year-old man did not blink. He could not fight. He had no arms. He had love and his tender heart routed the army of jackals in the name of God and tribe in the recent Plateau genocidal rumble.

Governor Simon Lalong of Plateau State gave him due recognition, brought him before camera lights to his office. The man looked fragile but his act rippled with muscles. He is a Muslim, but he is a lover of God first. He is not a sectarian bigot. His blood hums with universal sentiment. Governor Lalong also recommended him for national award. This is the sort of national recognition that makes sense, not the ones handed to charlatans who con us in the name of God, in the name of the people and in the name of tribe.

We cannot live a lie and expect the truth not to hunt us down. We are living one now, and it refers to the haunting barbarism of the herdsman. We make them seem like supermen and so we go supine. They brandish weapons we cannot match.  They move around like spirits, spectral entities that we cannot see.

We make them ghosts of plunder. They slaughter men, women and children and we only mourn afterwards with rhetoric of surrender. They throw flames that raze thatched houses, and our IDP camps swell and swirl. Their animals gorge on our farms, and we become spectators of our own misery.

They growl about our homesteads and our voices are stuck in our throats. They rape our women and we are impotent. And some say the system as it is works for Nigerians, and they expect us to accept.

That is the tragedy that the herdsman has foisted on us. Yet the irony lies in the line that the federal government has projected. That we should not restructure the country. The argument is that the Nigeria will work as it is. It means the centre remains pampered and cash-rich to the detriment of the states. The geographical physiognomy of Nigeria will be out of joint. The states, the towns, the villages, the hamlets should be run as it is. But the herdsman has even changed that very structure that President Buhari, Vice president Osinbajo and others have glorified so naively.

For the past three years at least, the herdsman has skewed what is left of the so-called federal arrangement. They have been attacking and displacing people from their towns and villages. The herdsmen are taking over people’s lands and occupying them. We have seen this, especially in the marauders’ hotspots: Benue, Taraba, Plateau, Kaduna, Adamawa, Zamfara, et al. We saw it even in Sokoto State as the new terrain of prey.

They are not acting like the Jukuns of old, the war-like tribe that launched forays into fragile kingdoms, plundered but returned home with spoils. These men conquer and occupy. Those who do not occupy, return to the forests. So, if they have elections today, the IDPs become new blots on our electoral maps. Who votes in their villages and hamlets? The herdsmen? If the herdsmen don’t vote, at least the territories have been lost in the electoral equation.

If people who occupy 10 villages converge on an IDP camp, shall we re-register them for elections? What of the leverage of their abandoned homes in the geo-political calculus in state and national polls? Of course, it is virtually obliterated. Ten villages will become one IDP camp, one unit. Gradually, the herdsmen will become accepted as owners of those displaced villages, and they could rename them and own them as their own property.

So, they begin as thieves and murderers. They are accepted as legitimate owners of other peoples’ towns and villages. Eventually, INEC enfranchises them. They will elect officers to national assembly, and their bigwigs stake their rights as governors. This is restructuring in reverse, or de-structuring. The ghosts materialise as landowners. They will own the crops, turn the churches into homes, knock out the pews, pulpits and vestries, overthrow the languages and customs and impose their own. A new cartography is born. So, is the federal structure sustainable as it is?

This is the implication, and no one should expect that the owners of the land will not rage and plot their return. It is a different matter if they arrive as legitimate migrants and occupy a tract of territory legitimately allotted to them by the local authority. Yet we know that the indigene-settler crisis takes its roots from the Babangida years when he turned a settler colony in Plateau into an autonomous local government area with concomitant political powers. The elevation from settler to proprietary rights has lit the tinder of unrest since then. The verdant peace of Jos yielded to the ominous clouds of fear and loathing in that temperate city. This can only be traced to this crisis of legitimacy.

In a stern and unrelenting voice, Governor Seriake Dickson of Bayelsa State has warned Buhari of the implication of a skewed federal system and its implication for Nigerian security. Hear him: “It is very clear that Nigeria’s lopsided federal system and over-centralisation of security powers and the politicisation of security by several agencies are a major cause of instability and poses a threat to national stability.” He waxed poetic when he spoke of “the politics of insecurity and the insecurity of politics.”

With the herdsmen, the lopsided structure Governor Dickson assailed is getting more so and turning Nigeria into a bonfire in waiting. We hope not.

When Buhari and Osinbajo visited Jos recently, the Plateau State Governor Simon Lalong spoke fervently against the land grabbers, and the vice president gave his official assurance. But he used the language of a dove instead of a mother hen. A dove yields. A mother hen shields. She yields no territory in protecting her own. Osinbajo said those who have been displaced shall be returned home. He should have waxed martial.

A mother hen would have said, those marauders will be flushed out and arrested. Weeks later, we have seen no sign that the marauders are even threatened. The governors have no powers to flush them out. Hence Governor Yari symbolically vacated his powers as chief security officer and Governor Fayose, in acerbic humour, called on hunters to hold the forte.

“When you correct this abuse of the federal system, the governor of Benue and Taraba will be in the position to mobilise the security resources of their states…,” noted Dickson.

So, what is stopping the security forces from deploying our soldiers to not only displace these criminals but also arrest them. Is that not a better solution than the verbal diarrhoea of some of the officers of Buhari’s government like the defence minister and inspector general of police who inspire division in the land.

Kaduna State Governor Nasir El Rufai has said that these men’s hiding places are the forests in the north. So, we have two major places where these people hide: either in the displaced villages and towns or in the forests. If we know that, why are we dithering? There are quite a number of forests around the areas they operate. They are not what the anonymous poet described when he wrote: “Into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.” But these men have no soul to find. Why not conduct reconnaissance, deploy drones and soldiers and level the goons?  If the goons are mobile, we know the forests are not like the forests in Macbeth moved to  the impostor king. That’s why I asserted recently that it is either the government is not serious or it is incompetent, or both.

We are in a state of war, and as Governor Dickson noted, this is the worst we have been since the civil war. Yet, we are acting like Gowon did in the early days of the Nigerian civil war when he dismissed the rumbling of Biafra as mere “police action,” until Ojukwu bared the Igbo fangs. Or in the early days of the Second World War when the Allies still trusted in Hitler’s humanity and some people called it the “phony war.” They learned the hard way when blitzkrieg growled to town with blood trails, pockmarks and fallen soldiers.

Some churches have begun a seven-day prayer and fasting to stop this. We sometimes disturb God with our folly. The Bible says “to obey is better than sacrifice.” This sacrifice of the churches would be gratuitous if the government obeyed the constitution and did the right things, which are within its powers. If the soldiers comb out these goons, arrest and quickly prosecute them in nimble courts, no prayer will be invoked. Dickson said, “if the people are under attack by gunmen, that is the more reason why the security forces and the President as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces should lead… to repel the attacks.” The fire next time would be an illusion. But we vex our spirits.

The prayer and fasting call reminds me of my encounter with a young man in Rhodes Island, United States when I attended one of Chinua Achebe’s colloquiums at Brown University. The young man, an undergraduate then, said when he was in Nigeria, his mother always urged him to pray over everything he did. He always followed her advice. However, since his American sojourn, he had never prayed and he had never had any problems.

The U.S. leaders made such prayers unnecessary because they did the basic things. Apostle Peter said God has given us the things that “pertains to life and godliness.” If we do well they will redound in our “glory and virtue.” Because our government has not manifested the virtue, glory is eluding us.