Category: Monday

It was all about the photos. They say photos don’t lie, but those photos exposed the lie of our democracy. INEC unveiled a report last week saying it had nothing to do with it. They were photos of boys voting, underage, innocent, deployed as soldiers of a dubious ideology.

They streamed the social media. They were in long lines. If they were not children, they could pass for a queue of pigmies. But the faces, beatific and guileless, gave them away.  They had thumb prints, posed before cameras, tossed papers into ballot boxes. An air of official sobriety clothed the march. But they did not have the bravado of guilt. It was the naivety of righteousness.

Everyone blamed the kids. The kids gave the votes away to the other party. First it was the PDP. That was in 2011. The second time around, in 2015, those who were in the opposition now benefited. Suddenly, those who triumphed in 2011 now fell in 2015. They turned critics. They had become losers. Those who howled foul in 2011 kept mum in 2015. APC would not shout because a big morsel of meat was in its mouth, apology to Achebe.

They accused the fathers of the boys. They accused INEC for registering the underage. The election was rigged from genesis. The game was over before the whistle blast.

The sapient element of the report is that the voter register was the same for both PDP and APC, but the results were manipulated. And the agency was the boys. Get the boys and give them papers, fake, fart, warts and all, count them and write the numbers and give them to INEC. Who would know?

Here is a paragraph from the INEC report: “It is on record that during the course of the 2015 General Elections, a particular political party called for the cancellation of the results of the election in six states (Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Bauchi, Jigawa, and Gombe) based on the allegation of underaged voting. Our investigation revealed that the core of the register used for the 2015 General Elections is based on the 2011 voter register. Interestingly, candidates of the same political party won the governorship elections in all six the states in 2011. There was no problem with the register at the time but when they lost in 2015 the register was the problem.”

According to the report, INEC can only do so much when the political elephants brush their way through the process and stomp on everyone on the way. What triggered the investigation was the conduct of the 2018 local government polls in which the Kano State Electoral Commission, rather than INEC, presided. INEC says the Kano State umpire did not use its register. But more fundamental was that we use human beings to destroy a system. More painfully, we use the innocent to soil an innocent document.

So, the boys were innocent. The register was and is also innocent, to all intents and purposes. But here is the irony. When the innocent boy interferes with the innocent document, we have corruption. So innocent plus innocent equals rigging. It was the sort of worry that made Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky write off civilisation in his short piece, The Man From the Underground. He said one plus one is no longer two but the beginning of death. In the same way, innocent boy plus innocent register equals no democracy but the death of democracy. The good has lost all confidence. It is a metaphor for Nigeria where we all talk of the good. We are anxious to go to church and mosque and pretend that we are actually a godly nation. It reminds me of a line in Bertolt Brecht’s play, Mother Courage: “whenever there’s a load of special virtues around, it means something stinks.”

What we witnessed in those elections in the north, including the Kano examples, is the deflowering of the northern boy. It is like Alexander Pope’s “the rape of the lock“. Sigmund Freud would call it the castration of the little boy. He is the one who has historically been used to commit evil in the north. They are the boy wonders of our elections.

It is the almajiri, who has no food, no clothes, no home of his own. The almajiri who walks the street, in rain and relentless sunshine, barefoot, worn-out bowl in hand, forced into a street minstrel. The almajiri who cannot read or write or make out any literate word in English. He cannot understand the lay of the land unless his elder tells him. They tell him to wield knives and kill and cause some of the tempests in the north, targeting those who do not sound like him or believe like him, or share the same morning cry to worship.

He is the metaphor of the manipulated. Almajiri is not a word for all boys. It is the word for the boy whose parents are poor, alienated and illiterate in a feudal tyranny. They are the ones Balarabe Musa has wept over, that Bala Usman serenaded. The boys of the rich are not called almajiri. They don’t need bowls or the beggar’s talent. They are clothed from wardrobes in London, Paris and New York.

It is the almajiri who morphs into a Boko Haram and swoons over the fertile flesh of Dapchi or Chibok girls. It is he who is easily won over into bands of hatred. He kills but does not have a chance to process his hate. He hates because he is asked to hate. He is not even allowed the naivety of the soldier that W.B. Yeats laments: “Those that I fight I do not hate/those that I guard I do not love.”

Northern boys get ruined before they become youths. In the south, the young are ruined systematically into angry militants. In the north, the young have faith in God and the elder. In the south, the young have faith only in themselves. Both are ruinous.

In INEC’s report, we see how the little boy becomes a tool of lies, a fool for a lie called democracy. The political elite of either political parties use the boy to install a system that will make him a beggar for life. He has no chance to learn and choose. He only follows.

 

The Buhari visit to the White House last week was a Trump card. It was his own circuitous way of making a mea culpa after calling countries like Nigeria “shit hole.” We fell for it. He took advantage of Buhari’s presence to gain a photo op and sugar-coat his conscience. Our president helped Trump’s cause when he said he did not believe the “shit hole” allegation. It was a power show as well. After all, we had to say thank you for giving us a line of jets that was also big profit for the Americans and those here who brokered the deal. It was a way to sooth a crisis back home over why the planes were acquired without due process. It was the triumph of diplomacy over naivety. Trump card won.

 

He was the master once in the state. Now, he is neither home nor host. But hostile is what he will call the treatment he is getting. Ali Modu Sheriff can no longer play sheriff anymore in Borno State. He must be chafing at his impotence, his peripatetic paralysis, a rolling stone gathering no political moss.

After playing a futile role as headsman of the PDP, he is now like a herdsman looking for pasture. He wants to return to the APC. But resistance awaits him from the party he once called home, a party he played a part, however dubious, in bringing into being.

We should look at what kind of a returnee he is going to be if or when he actually morphs into an APC man. Is he arriving in the penitential humility of a prodigal son, where everyone, including himself, acknowledges the extravagance of his wayward past? Or shall we say he will come as the golden fleece metaphor in traditional African society where a son or daughter is financed to study abroad? They return as the lone figure of enlightenment now ready to impart knowledge and bring prosperity to the subaltern quiet of the village. Is Sheriff the political version of that man of enlightenment?

Or is he like Jephthah, the biblical war hero who must pay with the pound of his daughter’s flesh, a humongous sacrifice, when he returns in the flush of victory? Shall we compare his return to that of Odysseus, as recorded in Homer’s The Odyssey, who must fight a battle of disguise? The chiefs in the village have turned themselves simultaneously into suitors and watchmen for his beautiful wife, Penelope, and are hoping to slay him as he berths.

Or shall we say he is the new Ojukwu of the APC northeast? Ojukwu returned after exile to an ecstasy of embrace from his folks in eastern Nigeria but he got a pardon from an opportunistic northern elite who turned this jubilation into an ululation of a political funeral.

So, where do we classify the bid of the Kanuri man who is like a public desperado banging his shoes to gain attention? His biography will help to situate him.

When he was governor, he started his notoriety. He was a poor performer and the media rasped him for undermining his pact with the people. He scoffed at the media and said his people did not read newspapers because they could not read. The media could write as much as they wanted but the people, in their ignorance, would not move in their deference of him, the governor.

But it was because of him that Boko Haram erupted in being. He did not educate the people, so they fell into the wiles of Mohammed Yusuf, who turned the sect into an alternative society. Where Sheriff’s Borno could not feed them, he gave them food. When they could not get shelter, Yusuf tented them. Where they lived alone, he gave them wives and a platform to breed their kind.

Sheriff became the harbinger of intellectual darkness in the northeast. Yusuf died and the group, now indoctrinated and empowered, unleashed venom on society. He did not feel any remorse. He saw himself as a man with good to give.

He duelled with Kashim Shettima, now helmsman of the state, but failed time and again. Governor Shettima was trying to repair and restore Borno. Sheriff fumed and wanted his successor to return the place to its antediluvian rot. In those years, especially under the inept Jonathan, Boko Haram soared as a bird of prey and Borno gradually turned into a wasteland.

He had formed an army of bigots and bandits. Yet he was not ashamed to join the APC and thought he could edge out the governor, so his goons could continue in their lifestyle of fanaticism and murder. He tried in the state and in the centre, but the new party was not going to bow to this sheriff. He eventually read the message and entered into a bargain with the enemy. He moved over to the PDP. He was an opportunist who wanted to ride on the party’s chaos. He was well-heeled, and PDP was still treating its gaping wound from the Jonathan defeat.  He was now suffering from a delusion of grandeur. They needed his money. He obliged, and thought by the time the party wheel horses were ready, he would have pocketed the PDP.

For a while, he was the top man of the party. But the wily party chieftains were bidding their time, waiting to recover from the APC spanking. When some of them, including Wike and Fayose, felt the party was ready, they battled him in conventions and in the courts. Eventually, they showed him the door. The party shunned him first. But the law did not save him.

He no longer can abide the humiliation in PDP. So he is coming home. He evinced the following qualities: incompetence, opportunism, arrogance. So where do we place Sheriff in the classic stories of heroic returns. Not as prodigal son, because he has demonstrated no remorse. He is no golden fleece as no one in Borno sent him on a journey of impunity and chaos. He is no enlightenment man. He fathered ignorance and darkness in Borno.

He is not Jephthah as he was no political war hero and he is not a type to sacrifice precious possession for principles. He is no Odysseus either. He needs no disguise and he cannot win his way to the party even when his fellow travellers like Gbemi Saraki have returned. Nor is he Ojukwu, who needs a pardon.

Where does he fall then? He belongs to the character in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, who wants to return home for love but finds herself an alien. So, Sheriff is a returnee as outcast. He comes to Borno to his house, not political home. He is like one suffering from political sokugo in Cyprian Ekwensi’s Burning Grass. We hope against hope though that the man will give up. Such men don’t give up until they give up.

 

Adams 2, Oyegun 0

Finally John Odigie-Oyegun will bow out as APC chairman. He will give way to Adams Oshiomhole, the former governor of Edo State. But it was not the first both men will battle in recent times. In the battle for Adams’ successor, Oyegun wanted a different candidate who went belly up against the present governor of the state. That was defeat number one. Now, the second one has now happened, and it is rattling him in his geriatric time, a man in about his eighth decade on earth. I hope the man will keep quiet and quit playing stooge at this age.

The first combat between the two men was through proxies. Now, it is a contact sport and we are seeing Oyegun go down the mud. So, we can say Adams has floored Oyegun both at home in Edo State and abroad on the national level. I think this is enough humiliation for the perfect stooge.