The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

  • Not too young

    For theatre, he stood amidst young men and women.  He was not only the tallest in the room. He was the oldest. The young, swathed in smiles, applauded his septuagenarian hands on a document. He was giving the generation of those on his left and right the right to topple him. The gangling man had proclaimed it with the flourish of a signature. Henceforth, no one should gaggle the young.

    Yesterday, the youths railed at President Muhammadu Buhari for labelling them as indolent. Today, they are ill at ease when he signs a bill allowing them unseat him. He was aware of the dramatic irony when he quipped that he did not want them to edge him out of the high chair.

    What does the average Nigerian youth think about the bill? Is it a gratuitous gratuity? Is it a new dawn? Both political parties have intervened on the matter. The APC sees this as a new dawn to the young. Some see it as presidential mea culpa to the new generation after thrashing them with a rhetoric of condescension. Others, especially the opposition, see it at once as bribery and intimidation.

    Was the law necessary? Of course, anything that beckons brotherhood and inclusiveness is a good thing, especially in an age of Macron, the feisty and liberal exemplar of France, and Sebastian Kurtz, the 31-year-old, also feisty, if insular, leader of Austria. To bring the young is to stoke the energy of a new shoot. They are brash but inventive. Red-blooded with rosy thoughts. Reckless but sunny. Bumbling but bubbly. Adventurous, radical, edgy, greedy for change.

    This implies new dynamism for any society. But is it also good? Youth can ruin a society or redeem it. Youth played a role in our independence.  We can refer to the role of The Nigerian Youth Movement that rattled the British colonial power. Young women like Margaret Ekpo in the Aba Women’s Riot, or Funmilayo Ransome-kuti in the Abeokuta Women riots, a saga that sizzles in Soyinka’s Ake: Years of Childhood. Wild Christian, his mother, dynamised a narrative where Soyinka was an epistolary messenger of a revolution.

    Youth gave us independence. Zik, the lyricist of the age, gave us not only oratory but invested the movement with a soul. Awo, who was to challenge Zik, expanded the arsenal.

    But that generation also brought disappointment. In his Memoirs, President Richard Nixon opined that men like Zik and Nkrumah frittered away their energies fighting for independence. When it was time to govern, they only gave failure. Even Zik, who had soared with his Zikist Movement, denied them. The same  Zik, who claimed his life was threatened. Hear him: “Sir Gerald Whitley plans my assassination. I go to the “bush” whence I came. But if it is the will of providence that I should go by the bullet of a European assassin, I go with supreme confidence and spiritual satisfaction that I have served mother Africa to the extent of my physical ability.”

    Now these people were democratic. They rose on the popular vote. Yet, just like prime minister Tafawa Balewa and the upstart Aminu Kano from the north, youth ran in the veins of power. But the skein did not flatter their generation. The first decade of independence reeled to and fro with blood and corruption. Strikes erupted and politicians upended republican principles. Indeed, the nation unravelled, and what did we see? Young men from another segment of society who torpedoed the state. Nzeogwu and his men plucked out civil rule but imploded. Overshadowed by ethnic charges, a flux resulted in power in the hands of Yakubu Gowon, another youth of about 30. He was challenged by another young man of his generation and age bracket, Odumegwu Ojukwu. Brash could not mollify the waters. A 30-month war of brothers sullied the land.

    The nationalist elan and the distress of the 1960’s came from the youths taking the stage out of volition.

    With the civilian agbada and army fatigue, the nation tumbled. Gunmen flared up to teach civilians the disciple of soldiery. But it foundered because the army was already infested with the nation’s inner rottenness.

    IBB imbibed the maggoty legacy and turned it to cynical and sinister use. He inaugurated new breed politics. What IBB faced then, the Buhari “not-too-young-to-run bill faces today. IBB knew the handicaps of that generation: money, structure, experience. What followed were young men who became puppets of the old, a marionette politics. Before long, the charade peeled open.

    Sina Peters, who just turned 60, sang “asiko awa youth re o. E ye binu wa.” (This is the era of youths. Please don’t begrudge us.” He applauded his generation – also mine – saying “the young shall grow.” It was all a farce.

    Our political structure is not made for the young. To run, you need a “structure.” And structure works on money, often money stolen by the old in power. This is the hypocrisy of the system. It is also a system that sees rigging as guaranteed to scupper the young, even if the young person is popular.

    Gramsci announced the political society to illumine our understanding of the power of politicians and their hegemonic demons. They can use their money, influence and therefore ideas to suffocate a society. Nor is it a Nigerian thing alone. Trump tapped on populism because he had the money.  Obama added effervescence to the system but he was above 40. Centuries ago, in Britain, William Pitt the Younger became prime minister at 24 but that is rare anytime. The ancient world witnessed a contagion of young men in charge. Some of them were scandals on the throne. Nero, Caligula, Tiberius, et al.

    Yet, a big irony yawns. More Nigerians can now run. But the triumph is in theory only. That’s the tragedy.  Youths have the numbers but who owns the numbers? That is why critics say that democracy may be about numbers only when the majority owns it. When such scenario often yields the mob. Mobs yield to strong men, like Napoleon after the French Revolution. Majority does not necessarily translate into power. Hence Einstein said that “not everything that counts can be counted.” The bill, for me, is not a watershed moment but only a paper victory.

     

  • When Catholics took to streets

    There is no record in recent memory of Nigerian Christendom or any of its denominations embarking on nationwide demonstrations to protest perceived ill treatment.

    Not even the serial religion-induced Maitatsine riots in the north; unprovoked killings arising from a cartoon in foreign land and the bombing of churches by the Boko Haram insurgents could precipitate public protestation from the church. But that record of caution in the face of tribulation was broken last Tuesday when the Catholic Church took to the streets to denounce continued killings of helpless citizens especially Christians in the face of inability of the government to rein in the killers.

    The protests were scheduled by the Catholic leadership to coincide with the burial of Rev. Frs. Joseph Gor and Felix Tyolaha as well as 17 parishioners mowed down by suspected Fulani herdsmen at St Ignatius Catholic Church, Ukor-Mbalom in the Gwer-East local government area of Benue state at a morning mass service. Its objective was to bring to the fore the degenerate level into which the senseless killing of its adherents had sunk and the impatience of members with the failure of the state to stem the tide.

    And in the speeches by the bishops, they demonstrated their impatience with the continued killings in the face of the incapacity of the government to get a handle to it. John Cardinal Onayikan, the bishop of Abuja called for a halt to the killings but would not want it to be politicized as the ‘nation is in a state of emergency’

    Onayikan did not fail to warn that if the murderers were allowed to continue without being checked, it would come to a point when people will begin to adopt other means to defend themselves. And that to me is the central message of the protests by the Catholic Church.

    Elsewhere, the capacity of our security agencies to protect lives and property was called to serious question even as insinuations of religious and ethnic agenda were quite palpable from some of the speeches and banners. But Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue state inched closer to the crux of the matter when he pondered on the reason for the attack on the church.

    Hear him: “these people were in the church and not in their farms; by this act they have moved their narrative to other motives. We know our killers but they are not arrested or invited for interrogation; they have stated in several fora that they would ‘reclaim their land’

    There are weighty issues arising from Ortom’s statement. And as the chief security officer of that state, we are bound to take him very seriously. The first is that the priests and the faithful were murdered in their church while celebrating morning mass and communing with their creator. This casts the motive of the killers suspect especially given the rationalization by government functionaries that the crisis derives its oxygen from the anti-open grazing law, cattle theft and encroachment on grazing routes.

    Catholic priests have nothing to do with any of these touted causes. Neither were the other parishioners in any confrontation with the herdsmen before the attack. Those who did the killings know the terrain well such that they struck when the Catholic Church was having its morning mass. Definitely, the attack has nothing to do with any provocation relating to farmers/herders clashes except the contrivance of some demented persons to desecrate and offend the religious sensibilities of the Catholics and possibly cause religious uprising. And they really succeeded in hurting the Catholics by violating all that they hold dear.

    But in the pursuit of this weird agenda, they have aroused the consciousness of the Catholic Church to the reality of the danger lurking around the corner. Even with the hallmark restraint of the Catholic Church in such provocations, it was compelled by self preservative instincts to embark on the massive nationwide demonstrations witnessed last week. That was the first of its kind in our recent history and underscores the increasing impatience of the Church with the slide to the precipice into which the country is irretrievably headed. It is also a clarion call on the government to rise to the raison d’être for its existence and legitimacy or take vicarious responsibility for acts of omission or commission that sustain the increasing decline to the law of the jungle.

    Before now, not a few Nigerians have accused the government of passive interest in the killings, collusion or outright bias. It has also remained confounding that our security framework could be found wanting in neutralizing the rampaging killer herdsmen. We have equally heard of all manner of excuses for the inability to stem the tide including insufficient manpower. All that could as well be traded even as they cannot explain the inability of the state to halt the scourge.

    So when the government comes out to attribute the escalation of the killings to insurgents trained by Gadaffi or environmental and geographical factors, it is being very economical with the truth. Many of the communities under the mercy of the herdsmen view these excuses as part of the insincerity of the government that has allowed the killings to fester.

    Yes, there could be some environmental and geographical issues to the conflict. We cannot also rule out provocation arising from cattle rustling or some other remote considerations. But the crux of the matter evident in Ortom’s statement is land ownership. Those who have been turned refugees in their own land have severally alleged that their ancestral homes have been taken over by the herdsmen. And that is the real issue.

    It is needless dissipating energy on the factors responsible for the killings. What should be of essence now is the steps taken by the government to halt, arrest the killers and have them face the raw teeth of the law. It is curious that even after Ortom severally claimed publicly that they know the killer herdsmen security agencies have continued to ignore that vital lead.

    If they had acted on that information by arresting and interrogating the suspects, they may have been able to decode the unseen forces that propel and reinforce the near invincibility of the killer herdsmen. The inability to act on such lead is at the root of the suspicion that behind the killings is an agenda of some ethnic and religious hue. It is inconceivable that the killer squad has continued to evade the prying eyes of our security agencies such that they now pose more lethal threat than the Boko Haram insurgents. I do not even think the killer herdsmen are beyond the capacities of the natives to handle if it comes to that. Being largely itinerant, there is no how they could possibly overwhelm those they attack in their ancestral homes if they set out to defend themselves. After all, societies had their own way of self defense and preservation even in primeval ages. But as the locals have severally alleged, each time they set out to take on the insurgents, security agencies will intervene and disband them. Curiously, the same security is always taken unawares when the herdsmen strike.

    With the security architecture consequent upon the institutionalization of modern governance framework, it is no longer permissible for the locals to resort to self help. It would amount to a relapse to the atavism of the law of nature if we have to defend ourselves. But in a situation the government is unable to protect lives and property thereby failing to discharge its part of the social contract, what remedies are there for the citizenry?

    The contradiction arising from this poser is at the center of calls and warnings that citizens may be left with no alternative than to defend themselves since self preservation is the first law of nature. And when that happens, what becomes of the institution of government?

    We are tired of trite excuses or some other worn out rationalizations such that the Nigerian army came out with in its report on allegations by former Chief of Army staff, Theophilus Danjuma. Catholics took to the streets for an immediate halt to the killings. They took to the streets for the government to live up to its statutory duties or take the blame for the increasing lure of self help.

  • Not I

    Professor Biodun Jeyifo, my former teacher, is a critic of world renown who has used the agency of Marxism to periscope society, especially Nigerian. Last week, he did a good job analysing Soyinka’s Death and The King’s Horse man, acclaimed as the Nobel laureate’s best work. But he claims that the play is “fundamentally not about a clash of cultures … definitely not a drama about the irreconcilable antagonism of two different races or peoples.” He also quotes the author who would not have anyone interpret his work as such. Soyinka, a clever writer, knows how to choreograph the interpretation of his work. He succeeded in browbeating many a critic, even those of Olympian stature. The mighty Jeyifo reflected this in his otherwise wise piece in his weekly column in The Nation.       A work can be interpreted any which way by anyone depending on his worldview and the evidence he or she marshals  from the work. When the British wears a masquerade and a Nigerian policeman is afraid to address him, or when Pilkings does not want the king’s son to commit suicide, etc, you see clear signs of culture clash in which colonial authority tries to interfere in an entirely Yoruba cultural pride. Not I, says Omatseye to anyone who would impose a view of a book. Roland Barthes announced decades ago the death of the author. Long live the reader.

    The position that the play yields other points of view, even more potent ones, about transitions, about person versus tradition, quest of glory, the seduction and mystery of death, etc, are grandly realised by the author. They may even appear on a greater scale in the author’s thematic quest. But culture clash is inevitable as a powerful string in Death and The Kings Horse man.

     

  • The word and the law

    I saw both of them as fellow students of the Obafemi Awolowo University. We never spoke. We were not even acquaintances. Far away from my ken but in the boil of campus politics, Femi Falana was unmistakable as a stormy young man and nemesis of the university authorities. Kunle Ajibade I saw around and remembered as a youth of chiselled and parsimonious build, the lean and hungry look of a poet. He did not seem as ominous as the other guy, whose thunderous rebellion made you forget how small he really was. On campus, I thought Falana was just a young man in a fickle dalliance with Karl Marx because it gave his Napoleonic stature a desperate audience. I thought he was more vain than vexed.

    I was to build friendships with both of them outside the provenance of school. I did not even know it was the fellow with little flesh around his bones that was Ajibade when he and another with a potential for corpulence known as Dele Momodu took on a mainstay of the profession over plagiarism charges. He was introduced to me by Momodu in our African Concord days, and my first impression did not go beyond his ready affability and good humour. Subsequently, I saw he did not go to school just to pass literature exams. He was the real deal. But it was those early days when boys were trying to chart their ways in the world. We were in our 20’s. I did not know Kunle had a few years over me. I did not see him for a while until I attended an event at the NIIA, and Ajibade materialised in a white shirt and what Americans called Chicago tie. His tie flew, in obedience to a tepid wind, over his shoulder and back.

    As if anticipating my query, he chuckled, “Sammy, you see what they have forced me to wear. I don’t feel comfortable in this attire.” I chuckled in reply. Ajibade had landed a reluctant job as a copy writer in an advertising company. He was like an eagle trying to swim.

    Falana also got introduced to me by now Senator Femi Ojudu in my African Concord days, although we had met casually when he was a lawyer in the law chambers of the debonair Alao Aka-Basorun. He was still a lawyer trying to find his voice. He was also writing a column. My opinion of him as a fair-weather radical was undergoing a surgery then.

    This month, Falana and Ajibade turned 60, and they are no longer small in anyone’s mind, even if in height Falana remains close to the earth and Ajibade has forsworn fatness. They are two men who have exemplified two powerful forces in the battle against misanthropic society: the word and the law. Falana has fought with the law. Ajibade with the word. Both of them have collided with authority. Both spent time behind bars. Both did not allow themselves to be carried away by the scent of lucre, the languor of luxury, the seduction of power and the Mephistophelean opportunism of the upper class.

    A major event that demonstrated their principle was the watershed crisis of their generation: June 12. IBB was the villain of the age, and followed by the butcher Sani Abacha who Buhari, in a seizure of gratuitous gratitude, is eulogising. I may even say eulogising because Buhari will be the first leader in Aso Rock to praise that demon of our history as a hero. It was because of the fortitude of men like Falana and Ajibade that we have democracy of which Buhari is a beneficiary without fighting for it. Buhari was quiet when men died and others fled to exile. He never raised a finger against Abacha’s butchery and barbaric impulses as long as his foe, IBB, was stepped aside.

    It was hard to meet with Ajibade in those days of the June 12 crisis when he, along with Bayo Onanuga, Dapo Olorunyomi, (who turned 60 last year) Femi Ojudu, et al, locked themselves in mud wrestling with Abacha and his men. They did not stay at home. They lived in the suitcase, the SSS a step behind them. Ajibade was held and deposited in Abacha’s gulag. They threw the key away and no one could reach him. We feared for his life. I recall reading an interview in a newspaper granted by his beloved wife, and how she said when she missed him, she took shelter in his library. So, we get it. He was a man of words. The words that twitted power, that wrinkled a highbrow army, that blossomed with yearnings of the people. He left jail and survived the barbarous scandal of that era, and he has remained in the bosom of progressive thinking up till today.

    Falana, of course, was in the forefront of the struggle. We got closer when I was the secretary general of the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights and his fraternal shadow over me in those days was of great value, as well that of the president, the late Beko Ransome-Kuti. The work of CDHR was a dress rehearsal for the role Falana played in rattling the Abacha government. Of course, he was picked up with Beko. I recall attending one of the court proceedings in Abuja and I had a short chat with them before the Black vehicle took them away. I followed them, sneakily, until a vehicle blocked me and a man in suit wagged a finger at me as though wordlessly warning me I might join the ride as a co-passenger with the detainees.

    Abiola’s confidante and my predecessor, Olu Akerele, was to alert me a few days later that two vehicles were following me about town and my naïve soul woke up to the possibility that my life was in danger. I left town, also sneakily.

    Falana post-June 12 has boosted his profile as Gani’s successor. Except that Falana is still a confessed socialist but he has turned the resources of law to the services of justice. While some of his SAN colleagues have looked at law as only a meal ticket, Falana has become an exponent of law for the popular will. He does not see technicality. He sees justice. He knows in the words of civil rights icon Thoreau “that the law never made anyone a whit more just.” He does not believe in law for law’s sake. Hence he is an avenging angel of technicality, turning the strict construction of law for the liberation of the oppressed. I call him the best of his generation, just like Gani and, of course, his former mentor, Aka-Bashorun.

    When I look back at the corporate spectacle of Ajibade at NIIA, I muse about how his life might have turned had he not changed course. Imagine him today, a CEO of a leviathan firm, suffocated in a Manhattan suite, his visage grave like that of Shonekan, his language about profit and loss, his temperament of the mercantilist sobriety of the masters of the universe. In the air, in a private jet. On earth, in a Rolls Royce. At home, a palace lord. It is hard to imagine him not at peace with banter and ideas, with Death and The King’s Horse man or Things Fall Apart, or squaring off against Odia Ofeimun or waking me up in the morning about who won the year’s Nobel prize. Or in my private struggle when I rankled a certain political family, he was the only journalist and friend who consistently rang into my ears that I should stick to my principle. His inner chronometer was not made for the showy grandeur of the upper crust. He found his calling. He found his voice.

    For both men, there is still a lot of gold to mine at 60. In Shakespeare’s words, “the world is your oyster.”

     

  • Pacific Plateau

    As the APC takes its congresses away from the state, the party titans are looking towards the national convention. It was a hubbub of rancour and parallel congresses exposing a maelstrom in Nigeria’s ruling party. But only a few states had it together, and one of such is Plateau State. Before the congresses there were candidates who were expected to raise parallel dusts. Thanks to the mollifying hands of Governor Simon Lalong, it turned out to be an event of harmony.

    Candidates agreed to work together within the party. It is with this sort of pacific skill Lalong has brought to his state a relative tranquility while the region bows to the killings and depredations of herdsmen.

     

  • When Catholics took to streets

    There is no record in recent memory of Nigerian Christendom or any of its denominations embarking on nationwide demonstrations to protest perceived ill treatment.

    Not even the serial religion-induced Maitatsine riots in the north; unprovoked killings arising from a cartoon in foreign land and the bombing of churches by the Boko Haram insurgents could precipitate public protestation from the church. But that record of caution in the face of tribulation was broken last Tuesday when the Catholic Church took to the streets to denounce continued killings of helpless citizens especially Christians in the face of inability of the government to rein in the killers.

    The protests were scheduled by the Catholic leadership to coincide with the burial of Rev. Frs. Joseph Gor and Felix Tyolaha as well as 17 parishioners mowed down by suspected Fulani herdsmen at St Ignatius Catholic Church, Ukor-Mbalom in the Gwer-East local government area of Benue state at a morning mass service. Its objective was to bring to the fore the degenerate level into which the senseless killing of its adherents had sunk and the impatience of members with the failure of the state to stem the tide.

    And in the speeches by the bishops, they demonstrated their impatience with the continued killings in the face of the incapacity of the government to get a handle to it. John Cardinal Onayikan, the bishop of Abuja called for a halt to the killings but would not want it to be politicized as the ‘nation is in a state of emergency’

    Onayikan did not fail to warn that if the murderers were allowed to continue without being checked, it would come to a point when people will begin to adopt other means to defend themselves. And that to me is the central message of the protests by the Catholic Church.

    Elsewhere, the capacity of our security agencies to protect lives and property was called to serious question even as insinuations of religious and ethnic agenda were quite palpable from some of the speeches and banners. But Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue state inched closer to the crux of the matter when he pondered on the reason for the attack on the church.

    Hear him: “these people were in the church and not in their farms; by this act they have moved their narrative to other motives. We know our killers but they are not arrested or invited for interrogation; they have stated in several fora that they would ‘reclaim their land’

    There are weighty issues arising from Ortom’s statement. And as the chief security officer of that state, we are bound to take him very seriously. The first is that the priests and the faithful were murdered in their church while celebrating morning mass and communing with their creator. This casts the motive of the killers suspect especially given the rationalization by government functionaries that the crisis derives its oxygen from the anti-open grazing law, cattle theft and encroachment on grazing routes.

    Catholic priests have nothing to do with any of these touted causes. Neither were the other parishioners in any confrontation with the herdsmen before the attack. Those who did the killings know the terrain well such that they struck when the Catholic Church was having its morning mass. Definitely, the attack has nothing to do with any provocation relating to farmers/herders clashes except the contrivance of some demented persons to desecrate and offend the religious sensibilities of the Catholics and possibly cause religious uprising. And they really succeeded in hurting the Catholics by violating all that they hold dear.

    But in the pursuit of this weird agenda, they have aroused the consciousness of the Catholic Church to the reality of the danger lurking around the corner. Even with the hallmark restraint of the Catholic Church in such provocations, it was compelled by self preservative instincts to embark on the massive nationwide demonstrations witnessed last week. That was the first of its kind in our recent history and underscores the increasing impatience of the Church with the slide to the precipice into which the country is irretrievably headed. It is also a clarion call on the government to rise to the raison d’être for its existence and legitimacy or take vicarious responsibility for acts of omission or commission that sustain the increasing decline to the law of the jungle.

    Before now, not a few Nigerians have accused the government of passive interest in the killings, collusion or outright bias. It has also remained confounding that our security framework could be found wanting in neutralizing the rampaging killer herdsmen. We have equally heard of all manner of excuses for the inability to stem the tide including insufficient manpower. All that could as well be traded even as they cannot explain the inability of the state to halt the scourge.

    So when the government comes out to attribute the escalation of the killings to insurgents trained by Gadaffi or environmental and geographical factors, it is being very economical with the truth. Many of the communities under the mercy of the herdsmen view these excuses as part of the insincerity of the government that has allowed the killings to fester.

    Yes, there could be some environmental and geographical issues to the conflict. We cannot also rule out provocation arising from cattle rustling or some other remote considerations. But the crux of the matter evident in Ortom’s statement is land ownership. Those who have been turned refugees in their own land have severally alleged that their ancestral homes have been taken over by the herdsmen. And that is the real issue.

    It is needless dissipating energy on the factors responsible for the killings. What should be of essence now is the steps taken by the government to halt, arrest the killers and have them face the raw teeth of the law. It is curious that even after Ortom severally claimed publicly that they know the killer herdsmen security agencies have continued to ignore that vital lead.

    If they had acted on that information by arresting and interrogating the suspects, they may have been able to decode the unseen forces that propel and reinforce the near invincibility of the killer herdsmen. The inability to act on such lead is at the root of the suspicion that behind the killings is an agenda of some ethnic and religious hue. It is inconceivable that the killer squad has continued to evade the prying eyes of our security agencies such that they now pose more lethal threat than the Boko Haram insurgents. I do not even think the killer herdsmen are beyond the capacities of the natives to handle if it comes to that. Being largely itinerant, there is no how they could possibly overwhelm those they attack in their ancestral homes if they set out to defend themselves. After all, societies had their own way of self defense and preservation even in primeval ages. But as the locals have severally alleged, each time they set out to take on the insurgents, security agencies will intervene and disband them. Curiously, the same security is always taken unawares when the herdsmen strike.

    With the security architecture consequent upon the institutionalization of modern governance framework, it is no longer permissible for the locals to resort to self help. It would amount to a relapse to the atavism of the law of nature if we have to defend ourselves. But in a situation the government is unable to protect lives and property thereby failing to discharge its part of the social contract, what remedies are there for the citizenry?

    The contradiction arising from this poser is at the center of calls and warnings that citizens may be left with no alternative than to defend themselves since self preservation is the first law of nature. And when that happens, what becomes of the institution of government?

    We are tired of trite excuses or some other worn out rationalizations such that the Nigerian army came out with in its report on allegations by former Chief of Army staff, Theophilus Danjuma. Catholics took to the streets for an immediate halt to the killings. They took to the streets for the government to live up to its statutory duties or take the blame for the increasing lure of self help.

  • Megalomania

    No one of note has borne the title of Owelle since the great Zik. That is perhaps the genesis of Rochas Okorocha’s delusion of grandeur. Maybe he believes he is equal to the Owelle of Onitsha. To his credit, Okorocha has not made such a grandiloquent claim in public, although we know that he believes in himself enough to want to be Nigerian president.

    Were he a more sober man, I could have designated him the Cicero of our time. For if you hear him take to the microphone, the governor of Imo State is no small orator. He commands the stage, sports a supernova smile, even if he looks sometimes like a refinement of coarser beings. With wit and sometimes syncopation of sentences, he can hold you spell bound. He, however, turns out to be a Cicero counterfeit. He has neither the Roman politician’s girth of knowledge nor his immersion in philosophy.

    What is happening to the Imo State governor is not a defeat. It is not a shellacking, as some writers may want to invoke that beaten word. I can only reach to my childhood to see what might be a semblance of this sort of misfortune. When you are a governor, you choreograph a ward congress, and deploy your men and resources, and then you go to sleep. You expect to be woken up to the routine glory of your victory. But when you go belly up instead of a belly dance, I can only compare you with humpty dumpty, the mighty one who had a great fall.

    The only burlesque of the sort I can recall in our history goes back to the days of IBB when he, in his peevish manoeuvres, tried to foist a political system on us. It was a system called Option A4, an open ballot system where voters lined up behind their candidates at the polling station. In Ikorodu, a candidate had paid and mobilised his voters. But at the time to cast ballot, the man, in his showy damask, saw he virtually stood alone while his opponent’s line ran like a spectacularly long python. The diminished candidate saw his people on the other side. He yelled in suppressed hysteria in Yoruba: “Eyin enia mi da?” Translation: “My people, where are you?”

    That only happens when you think everything is made for you. You think everyone was born for you and they slave for you. Okorocha thought so, and he was mightily disappointed. He saw that his deputy governor, his senators, including Osita Izunaso, had swept him into the Imo River. He was drowning when the result was unveiled. What he expected was not what he envisaged. He must have been miffed. After all, barely a month earlier he had donated N100 million  and 27 vans to the same Imo State APC.

    He had done quite a number of oddball things in Imo State. Was he not the one who declared a three-week holiday and asked his people to surrender to the revelry of Christmas while the rest of the country was still moving from day to day in productive work? It was the same Rochas, who asked civil servants to quit work on Thursdays and Fridays in order to concentrate on the farm.

    Even then, we did not see the burlesque figure in the making. He was, after all, doing some great work, like distributing N100  as monthly allowance for students, cancelling PTF fees and levying all adults N3000.

    We cannot forget that Okorocha knew his people well enough to want them to be happy. And ribs pulsed with joy when he asked his sister to head a ministry of happiness and couples fulfilment, even if as a good listener to the people he had to readjust the name of the ministry.

    We were all still searching for formula to express our gratitude to him for volunteering his sister when he decided to show us he had had a long plan to make his family everlasting in Imo State. He found a lowly man to marry his daughter and then, in a puff of magnanimity, asked the boy to do the state a favour: be the governor.

    He must have been surprised that some people misunderstood his goodwill. He believed most of the people wanted his boy who was his PA, even less so, his house keeper, to lead his people from poverty to bliss. How dare anyone challenge his goodwill! Not even the priest. His men have described the Catholic Archbishop of Owerri Diocese, as plotting mischief. They said he wanted to intimidate and blackmail the governor. Okorocha ought to learn from what happened to his predecessor. It is not too late to act. But he is still  like an ostrich preening in the dark. He should not kick against the bricks. As a famous idolater who erected a statue for a disgraced man, he expected his people to worship him in kind.  He knew a prophet is without honour in his home hence he honoured the South African Zuma in faraway Imo. He may be quietly invoking the Lord.

    Okorocha had a sense of his hollow power when he started running about for refuge. He ran to vice president. No answer. To the president. No succour. He cannot run to the APC National Working Committee because he has to contend with not just Izunaso but, of course, Oyegun, who now sees him as one of the first to abandon him when Buhari chose Adams over him.

    Okorocha has a cousin in literature. He is Malvolio in Shakespeare’s play of mistaken identity, Twelfth Night. Just as Izunaso, Rochas’ deputy and others lulled Okorocha with a false sense of grandeur and control, so four characters gave Malvolio, the house keeper, the illusion that the great lady Olivia was in love with him. He poked fun at them. The puritan became pompous and boasted he would become the leader of the household. One of his quotes could fit Okorocha. “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”

    What Okorocha has been doing would beat many brewers of fiction. They could have described them as over-ornamented, rococo and out of joint with Nigerian reality. But politicians often make our imaginations look tame and lacking in creative audacity. But from what we have seen in the APC congresses, there are not a few politicians who have outsize sense of their own reality. We have seen this all over the country from the northeast to the southwest. Some who began as humble have grown fat like pigs of megalomania. They overrate themselves because some money has come their way.

    Many of them are now fringe players in their own parties. But Okorocha is the only major mainstreamer who is now drowning. A few were quietly humbled, even if ego still troubles them. Even though Okorocha fails, he will still not give up. Maybe he thinks he is a prophet not loved by his own people. Does he have a messianic complex? He will fire on in a replay historical fascination with failure in what a critic calls “insistent fatality,” which we find in grander characters like Oedipus, Okonkwo and Macbeth.

    Thanks for the honour

    I want to express gratitude to Nigerian students for voting me their favourite columnist/writer. It was a process that lasted six months across universities and polytechnics. It makes me self-aware that I am also under scrutiny by the young, who also read serious material as against the general and often misleading position that they traffic in vanity. Or that they are lazy or defined by the flimsy lifestyles of the yahoo boys. I am now more conscious that it is not just the intellectual cream of my father’s generation who adorned me with honorary fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters that are important. But also the young who take their future and this country seriously.

     

     

     

  • Saraki’s alarm

    Senate committee to meet with President Buhari on the allegation by its president, Bukola Saraki that Inspector General of Police IGP, Ibrahim Idris plots to implicate him in a murder case underscores the seriousness with which the red chamber views the issue.

    Saraki had reported to his colleagues that information available to him from Kwara state governor, Abdulfatah Ahmed indicated the police plan to implicate him and the state government using suspected cultists arrested for alleged murder. He suspects the transfer of some cultism suspects arrested In Kwara to Force Headquarters in Abuja after investigations had been concluded by the police and trial about to commence was meant to coerce them to implicate him.

    The plot in his calculations is part of the strategy by the IGP to get even over the declaration by the senate that he is not qualified to hold any public office within or outside the country in addition to being an enemy to democracy. Senators took serious view of the allegation and set up a committee to intimate Buhari on the issue.

    But the Police said they were shocked by the unverified and unfounded allegations. They argued that in the past, they had transferred suspects in high profile cases like those of the mayhem in Ile-ife, Osun state and Zaki Biam in Benue state to the Force Headquarters wondering why Kwara should be different. They said Saraki’s claim was capable of obstructing police investigations into the killings and promised to get at the root of the matter no matter whose ox is gored.

    As things stand, it is difficult to establish which of the two sides to believe. Neither should anybody expect the police to own up to the damaging allegation. It is now the words of Saraki against those of the police. But, the police are clearly at advantage given their statutory role in the maintenance of law and order. And even if they nursed such intention, they could find convenient excuses to cover up now the matter is in the court of public opinion.

    As the chief security officer of Kwara state, Ahmed must have felt sufficiently worried by the suspicious manner the suspects were being handled that he had to alert Saraki. Not being a novice to the intricate power game of the police in such matters, Saraki had to draw the attention of the world to his suspicion. He could not have done otherwise when such information was coming from the chief security officer of the state-the governor.

    It is clear Saraki had strong grounds to suspect something untoward given the manner some suspects were transferred to Abuja and the interpretation of the action by the authorities in Kwara state. Yet, that is not enough evidence that the intention of the police is to get the suspects to implicate him. I guess the senate president is fully aware that his alarm amounts to mere allegation and may have been raised to pre-empt any funny action by the police. It is also possible he could have more credible information than the much he found convenient to disclose to his colleagues.

    Perhaps, when the senate committee meets with President Buhari, more details on the information available to Saraki on which basis he raised the alarm would be unveiled. It is a matter of conjecture how the president intends to handle the matter. Whatever the case, he should ensure full investigation. Allegations of partiality of security agencies in matters concerning political opponents of the government are increasingly getting worrisome.

    It is not certain how the police intend to proceed on the issue. But with extant awareness on the alleged plot, it is incumbent on them to show that their investigations are neither tainted with bias nor deliberately skewed towards a predetermined end. Enough sensitization has been raised that the outcome of the inquisition must be seen to stand the taste of public scrutiny.

    The police promised to do justice to the case. It is vital they should not allow the intoxication of power or vengeance to blur their senses of justice. I am not sure Saraki’s intension is to pervert the course of justice. He is apparently concerned about the abuse to which state coercive apparatus can be deployed to settle political differences. Apparently drawing from the current predicament of his point man, Senator Dino Melaye, he may have fathomed he could suffer the same fate given extant sour relationship between the senate and the executive.

    This is not the first time the senate leadership and senators have complained of attempts by the executive to rope them into sundry allegations. A couple of months ago, Senator Isa Misau alleged at the plenary that a minister was coordinating a plot to impeach Saraki. According to him, when the senate was on recess, many people were going behind canvassing for the impeachment of the senate president on the ground that he was going to leave the APC. He said the plot was aimed at creating problem for him before that time.

    And just very recently, the sanctity of the senate was utterly desecrated and compromised when some thugs invaded the chambers and made away with its symbol of authority- the Mace. Nigeria was ridiculed in the eyes of the international community by the brazen impunity of the hoodlums and the inability of the security architecture in the national assembly to apprehend them. Obviously, security at the national assembly on that day was compromised. It took an ultimatum from the senate before the police said they recovered the Mace abandoned under the flyover. It was a disgraceful spectacle to behold.

    As I write, there is no credible evidence of arrest and prosecution of suspects. Investigations into that coup attempt against the leadership of the senate appear to have been abandoned for that red chamber. All these fuel suspicion of conspiracy of the executive in the sordid pass. So if Saraki cried aloud on getting information on yet another plot, he was just being human. The onus is on the police to show beyond reasonable doubt that its actions are in consonance with the dictates of its statutory responsibilities to the citizenry.

    Sadly, events in the country continue to point to the opposite direction. The number of key personages from the opposition being arrested for one infraction or the other especially as the elections draw nearer, fuels speculations that the objective is to decapitate dissent. It may be convenient to argue that the PDP has been in power for years. So it is not unusual to find a preponderance of its former office holders being quizzed for one infraction or the other. That appears plausible.

    But such rationalization is weakened in the face of the indifference of the same law enforcement agencies to other politically exposed persons of that party now hibernating in the ruling party. It cannot also account for the conspiracy of silence in cases involving some former PDP top shots who stopped being hounded immediately they pitched their tent with the ruling party. And when the minister of information, Lai Mohammed released his so called list of treasury looters, this conspiracy of cover up was manifest in his deliberate omission of even names of his party people facing the same inquisition.

    The bias was so manifest that an aide in the last regime had to come up with his own list of looters in the ruling party deliberately left out by Mohammed. Curiously, some of them are even facing prosecution while others were reluctantly eased out of the current government when public pressure became very intense.

    Those who allege political bias and persecution especially in the prosecution of the war against graft have sufficient grounds for it. Why not when the EFCC chairman, Ibrahim Magu publicly wore the 2019 campaign insignia of president Buhari at the commissioning of the corporate headquarters of that agency created during Obasanjo’s regime? As the 2019 elections approach, the government must guard against actions or inactions that suggest increasing intolerance to opposition.

     

  • Our system, our people

    Confronted by grave national challenges, our leaders easily rationalize them on some external factors. They either refer to how long it took developed countries to be where they are or hide under such nebulous excuses as we are still in the learning process.

    Ironically, nobody is prepared to attach a time frame to this process of learning. The reluctance to take responsibility manifests more in cases of dissonance between our behaviors and the systems in place to propel the country to modernity.

    That accounts for discussions in some quarters on the suitability or otherwise of the presidential system of government. Suggestions have arisen given emerging challenges that we may as well revert to the parliamentary framework. In all this, the impression conveyed is that our problems stem in the main, from the type of systems and institutions we adopted and not those who operate them.

    Though federalism is generally accepted as the most appropriate paradigm for political engineering in a multi ethnic, multi religious and culturally diffused society, what we have is an aberrant form of it. Our federal order is largely defective and has been blamed for much of the problems confronting this country. That much can be admitted.

    Resurging agitations for true federalism, fiscal federalism, devolution of powers and restructuring are clear indications of the imperfections of our federal order. Implicit in all this is the contention that the federal system as presently constituted is a great hindrance to genuine national development and requires serious adjustments to conform to the true tenets of federalism as espoused by such renowned authorities as KC Wheare and Eme Awa.

    The way federalism is conceived and practiced on this clime can be blamed for much of the parochialism that accentuates competition between the central authority and its constituents for the loyalty of the citizens. But, it is not in all instances, we should blame the system. There is the human dimension to it all. For, no matter the kind of system you adopt, its success will depend largely on environmental variables.

    Democracy is a culture. Every system needs a given set of attitudinal support for it to survive. Max Weber popularized the concept of political culture: the parochial, subject and participant variants. For him, what you find in well established democracies is the participant political culture. By extrapolation, that of new states is bound to vacillate between the parochial and the subject variants.

    Where does this leave us and how does it explain the challenges we face approximating and internalizing democratic ethos? Perhaps, it is apposite to recall a dominant view within political science circles in late 70’s which held that African culture does not tolerate opposition and therefore unsuitable for the practice of democracy.  Those who canvassed this view cited African traditional societies that abhor opposition and suggested ‘benevolent dictatorship’ as a model of leadership framework for emerging new states.

    How the benevolent dictator will emerge or his leadership attributes are beyond the scope of this article. But suffice it to say that this view may have contributed to the dominance of the military in the politics of new states and the phenomenon of sit-tight rulers. Though military rule has since gone stale due largely to pressure from the international community, the practice of democracy in these countries has continued to suffer serious reverses such that reinforces the benevolent dictatorship theory.

    Or how else do we explain the serial inability of our political parties to conform to elementary dictates of internal democracy in the conduct of such rudimentary activity as ward congresses. We saw much of that in the years the Peoples Democratic Party PDP held sway like a colossus. While genuine party members waited at their wards for that singular democratic engagement, results were written by some behemoths in their hotel rooms and offices and foisted on them.

    Impunity and lack of internal democracy became the greatest undoing of that party and contributed to its failure at the 2015 elections. When its leadership apologized for its failings, the understanding was that it was making restitution for its brazen impunity in the conduct of party affairs and running the economy. Given the above, it was the expectation that the All Progressives Congress APC would learn from the experiences of that party and avoid the pitfalls that brought it to the current pass.

    But events from its ward congresses and the governorship primary in Ekiti State failed to bear this optimism out. There wasn’t much in the outcome of the ward congresses that marked a sharp departure from the impunity of the PDP years. There were acts of vandalism and destruction of party offices as one group took advantage of the other by making away with election materials. Someone was even killed in Delta state while allegations of ballot snatching and writing of results were freely traded.

    Perhaps, the case of Imo state illustrates very succinctly, the depth of impunity and acrimony that trailed the entire exercise. Video clips trending in the social media showed the state governor, Rochas Okorocha in very hot exchange with the state commissioner of police, Chris Ezike and the national organizing secretary of the party, Osita Izunaso. They had gone to Izunaso’s house with the leader of the congress committee from Abuja ostensibly to retrieve sensitive materials for the exercise only for the man to disappear in Izunaso’s house in very cloudy circumstances.

    A bemused Okorocha was seen lamenting how the man could disappear with the presence of a retinue of security agencies at the scene including the police and the state security services. From all the discussions, something untoward had happened. It later became obvious that Okorocha had been outplayed by a coalition of his party men opposed to his plans to foist his son in-law as the governorship candidate at the coming primaries among other grievances.

    Apparently overwhelmed by the high level of conspiracy that played out, he rushed to Daura in Katsina state for president Buhari’s intervention. It is not clear how the president intends to intervene or what steps Okorocha has taken to push his case further. But while he spoke of some funny things that took place in the name of ward congress, his adversaries were busy celebrating a successful outing and victory.

    How Okorocha contends with the reality of having the rug pulled off his feet just like that remains curious. He is bound to fight back. The way the fight progresses, will define the pattern of unfolding political competition in the state. Whichever dimension it assumes, things will not be the same again. But he should take the blame that many of those opposed to him are key leaders of the same party dissatisfied with the way they perceive him running its affairs and the state administration.

    Perhaps, he underestimated their capacity for mischief. Fighting opposition from within the party and outside of it will prove very daunting for Okorocha. He will not find things that easy especially given his penchant to ‘retire’ any and every notable politician except himself and allocating elective offices to whosoever he desires. Those he intends to retire are bound to fight back to have him retired first.

    The turn of events brings to the fore, our reluctance or inability to play according to rules of the game. Ward congresses are meant to allow people at the grassroots a say in the choice of those to preside over their affairs. Democracy is rendered shambolic when that basic activity is denied through foisting of names generated by some influential persons. The issue is not as much with the systems we operate as with the conduct of individual political actors. It is difficult to make real progress in the practice of democracy when its pristine values are compromised for self-serving reasons.

  • Lazarus and the rich man

    Not many are thinking of Karl Marx today. But 200 years after his birth, he is thinking about us. He is in our rooms at night when power is out. In our work place when the salary is not paid. In our sick bed when we cannot afford to fly to London for check-up or treatment.

    While writers Kayode Komolafe and Isa Aremu glow over the revolutionary thinker, many are aching and in anguish. Yet faraway from our noses is the man who diagnosed our civilisation many years ago. Shall we show a little gratitude to acknowledge him? We should thank KK and Aremu for their historical sense.

    When I think of Marx, I remember the parable of Lazarus and rich man, and it reminds me that Jesus, in spite of his divine halo, was the first true political revolutionary. He anticipated the rise of capitalism, the rebellion of labour, the chasm between rich and poor and the propensity of humans to rise in angst for the equality of man. The French revolution did not need a Das Capital or Communist Manifesto, neither did the American revolution also require the bearded German sage that called for the workers of the world to unite. In the same way, Jesus saw before Marx that humans would gloat over other beings when those who lack would chafe over the few who have.

    It sounded like Marx when Jesus told his disciples, “a labourer is worthy of his pay.” The Roman overlords griped even when he proclaimed that “my kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight…” but he was hanged even when he forswore a revolution of the flesh. The combustible genie was out of this god on earth and they had to react.

    Marx was under the spell of the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. Even Martin Luther saw it as a story of the battle between rich and poor. Luther was a Christian revolutionary in his own right and the German rattled the Romish church before he also fell for his own materialistic lust: his sale of what was then known as indulgences. No perfect revolutionary. No Christian hero.

    So also was Marx. And so shall we forgive him. Two hundred years after, no one country has a socialist state, to say nothing of a communist society. North Korea is an impostor. Cuba is withering its tenets by the day as the memory of the Castros diminish. Russia has returned to the Pre-Lenin obsession with oligarchs. Eastern Europe eyes America more than Das Capital. In Africa Augustino Neto is dead. Amilca Cabral. Lumumba. Nkrumah. All fiascos of belief.

    Just like Jesus, Marx has shaken the earth: states and emperors have fallen, priests and scholars have been born, temples erected in his name, families broken apart, monuments built, fanatics and zealots sullied landscapes, wars and rumours of war bloodied our decades, cells and communes formed, movies made, many books inked, museums mushroomed. Luther asked God in the fiery moments of his personal travail: “Lord, let me not seem to have lived in vain.”

    Why is it that Marx is still king without a kingdom? First, he was a poor judge of human nature. He saw a society without leaders and without a state. He erred. He also thought human fellow feeling could upend greed and usher in his credo: “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” He forgot that wants prevail over needs, and that has been the motif of history. Lenin realised this early. So, he retreated after the Bolsheviks won, and he instituted the New Economic policy.  It was, in a sense, a new nexus between the idealist and the capitalist. The first time was between Engels and Marx. Engels, in a class suicide, collaborated with Marx, and gave the world the manifesto. With Lenin, it was Marxism that humbled itself for capitalism.

    When communism fell in late 19th century, it was because human nature could not abide oppression for too long. Even Shakespeare mocked the idea in his play, King Lear: “that distribution undo excess and each man have enough.” Man never has enough and distribution is often marked with bias and favouritism.

    But Marx was also wrong in his Panglossian view of history. He thought Germany was likely to be the first communist society because of its advanced capitalism. But it was a feudal nation that first had it and it happen not naturally but through blood and fury. Nor was Cuba a mature capitalism. We can say his idea was too intoxicating to his revolutionary priests to await the fruition of prophecy.

    But what was Marx’s virtue? He was a great diagnostician. He knew what was wrong. He knew the rich are making the world so bad that the sores of the Lazaruses at the gate are getting more ulcerous. And the worse it is the more dangers to the world. Many have become less interested in Jesus and less interested in Marx. Gyorgy Lukacs of the Frankfurt school who later renounced Marx said humans would make god of commodities. Who can tear away from cell phones today, or the car or electric consumption, et al? in this context, how could we have a society like the old Soviet Union? Even here, we worship human hair when we are not worshipping humans like music stars and Nollywood icons. Or bowing to the dictates of money-grubbing politicians. To mimic Medieval philosopher Peter Abelard, God has become man. And we love tinsels more than things.

    But Marx has helped capitalism. That is his virtue. After the second world war, poverty drove most of Europe to love Marx. It led to the Marshall Plan that poured finance and succour to Europe and embalmed the society with the welfare state. We have this in the United States as well. So, those who mock “stomach infrastructure” should know that it did not start with Fayose but has been the saviour of the greed of the money class. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels tore through capitalism and wrote: “What the bourgeoisie produces, above all, are its gravediggers.” It’s the opposite. Capitalism uses Marx’s ideas to stay alive while no country is interested in being a communist society.

    In the last capitalist crisis, Europe and the U.S. borrowed from Marx, nationalising firms like General Motors, paying the jobless and the sick while trying to repair the system for the rich. French economist Thomas Pickety traced this in his latest book, Capital in the 21st Century, and exposed the hypocrisies of capitalism and its staying power. Even in Nigeria, we have had tribes of socialists who still use Marx to diagnose our country but cannot go any further. After all, some of them are taking shelter in American universities and living the fantasy of enjoying bourgeois decadence while hypocritically attacking it. As Jesus himself said, the poor will always be with us. At one time Marxists thought the Lord lied. Even Marx believed in the parable of Lazarus and rich man. Jesus wants to abolish the world order. Christians are hoping. Marx wanted to save it for the masses, but Marxist are hoping against hope.

     

     

    A deep, dear loss

    I lost someone dear recently and it happened because the hospital nearby did not have oxygen. This is a missionary hospital. When the fellow was rushed there in a state of emergency, he was told they could do nothing and they should take him to the General hospital. Before his folks took him through the messy traffic of Lagos from Akowonjo area, he was designated BID – brought in dead.

    I thought how sad. How could any hospital be allowed to operate that did not have the basic life-saving facility? Of course, if someone in the well-heeled class had such emergency, he would be flown to London or Germany or Israel on a plane outfitted with oxygen equipment. The story of this fellow who died is the story between Lazarus and the rich man. The Lazarus always lose.