Category: Monday

In war, when the enemy camp keeps quiet, danger looms. When Obasanjo dances, expect a letter bomb. When he was in government, his foes fidgeted because, within 24 hours, impeachment dangled.

In the military, surprise is a stealth bomber. The enemy with superior army and armoury can fall to bombs from the blues. Neither the President nor even the public saw the Owu chief’s latest incarnation of public rage.

As President, he danced with a senator’s wife, and knifed the fellow, Chuba Okadigbo, hours later with impeachment as Senate president. He even sweetened the dress rehearsal for another senator at a party by tossing a piece of cake in Adolphus Wabara’s mouth. It was a mockery of homosexual romance. The next day, his fellow senators dismounted him.

So, when Obj graduated with PhD from the Open University, he had to dance. In his life, PhD has not always meant a doctorate degree. It means pull him down. He loves to lionise himself by bringing down foes in high places. Since he vacated office as military head of state, he has ripped apart others from Buhari down. His book, My Command, was an egoistic trip in self-promotion.

The video portrayed the old man spinning on the dance floor with his wife. His feet looked lithe, dabbing about with the lightness of a teenager. With something like bole (roast plantain)  in hand, he embodied an omen: his impish smile as he moved from one part to another in a magisterial sway of the dance floor. Obasanjo does not know an innocent floor or dance. Muhammadu Buhari was to find out soon in his epistolary umbrage. The Owu chief is the most dangerous dancer on earth. His dance beats the Oro in Yorubaland or agbasa dance in Warri or the others around the country. They don’t rattle presidents.

Obj’s interventions never sheds new light on the state of the nation. It sheds new light on the scheme of the old man. He did not say anything original in his verbose, long-winded sentences. But he summarised, ironically, the state of the nation. There is a certain mood of reluctant gratitude that cheers to the public heart when an Obasanjo intervenes. He takes advantage of some facts. Unlike other former heads of state, he is articulate. Two, he knows how to spice it with a certain dose of what the Hausa people call dan iska, a reckless guttersnipe’s bravado. But his carries a high dose of respectability. He is sincere in the words, and that is the danger. But he is not sincere in his motive. Obasanjo often flips out a two-edged sword: one side to the opponents’ chest; the other to clear the way for his agenda.

So, when he says Buhari should not run again, he reflected the mood of a significant swath of the land. When he says, the man runs a nepotistic style, you just need to look at how he recruited men of the SSS and wrapped it around his Katsina roots. Or why he has failed to rejig the security apparatus, or why he asked his Benue elders to embrace their neighbours after herdsmen’s rapine.

When the Okikuola says Buhari’s health disqualifies him, he is referring to the lack of transparency in the publicity of the state of his physical wellbeing. He is no doctor. He has no inkling what the man’s health is. But he exploits public ignorance for good effect.

He excoriates the President with lethal broadsides on the war on corruption and needles him about Mainagate, perhaps the most burlesque act of official buffoonery. It is anti-corruption laughing at itself. How an attorney general becomes the anchor man in defence of corruption is perhaps, like the NNPC saga with Baru and Kachikwu, the most foolish emblem of self-indictment in the government.

So, Obj knows how to fight. But we can even see, in his false attempt to be a hero, that he was not fair on the subject of the economy. He did not get the word out that Buhari has stabilised the naira, boosted our foreign reserve, galvanised our agricultural production and reined in the vanity of imported excesses, such as rice and toothpicks. He should have highlighted these while showing that the statistics point in the right direction. But statistics are not satisfaction. The table graph of high performance does not translate to the luxurious aroma of the dinner table.

But what is more important in the letter is Obj’s solution. He says he wants to start what he called a third force. I laughed when I read that. The first time the idea of a third force was mooted was when he was in charge of the Nigerian Army in Ibadan during the civil war. Wole Soyinka had advanced the idea to him with the late Biafran soldier, Victor Banjo. Obasanjo, playing the fox and military toady to his bosses, frustrated and paralysed the move. Soyinka relates in graphic detail those sly and heady days in his memoirs, You Must Set Forth at Dawn. So, Obj took that term from his arch foes, Wole Soyinka, and wants to appropriate it to himself. Does he believe in the third force, his coalition of the willing Nigerian, called the CN?

Obj’s public life has not been about building. He has been about taking. He never worked for any triumph of his life. Benjamin Adekunle worked the Third Marine Commando into a heroic machine. The swashbuckling commander was fired on the battle field and redeployed. The war was almost over. Obj, who took a bullet in the buttocks, took over and claims the credit for winning it. He became second man in command to Murtala Muhammed. The fierce general was overthrown. Obj enjoyed the benefit, his army fatigue immune to even the smell of gunpowder.

He was in jail during the Abacha junta. He was released and everyone, including IBB, begged him to run for President. He won even though he mocked NADECO and other forces that fought and died to flush out the military.

Obj has been an opportunist and a beneficiary of other people’s sweat. He is the Paulo Rossi of Nigerian political history. He is sweatless in struggle but he wears the crown. He has never lost because he has never gambled. He has been like the opportunist tiger who takes over the carcass of other less-sinewed cats.

So when Obj came out to lash out at Buhari, it was all in character. He installed Yar’adua, knowing of his imperfect health. Yet, he came down on him before the man succumbed to illness. He descended like a predator bird on Jonathan because, as a source told me, Jonathan was not listening to him. He tore his party card in an extravagance of public disavowal. Yet, he knew the Vice President he gave to Yar’adua.

Now, Obj has never built anything in his life, except relatively sweatless projects, such as Otta farm. The throne has always been ready for him. He asked Buhari to dismount. But he has always mounted free horses others trained and decorated. Even in pushing for a third force, he says he wants to “join.” A founder does not join. The use of that word is a Freudian admission that it is a strange territory for him. He is the vulture, not an eagle. He does not kill, but waits and whets his appetite until the meaty prize arrives. He did same in the third term bid. He baited and waited. But when it failed, he played Peter and denied any hand in it.

He said both PDP and APC are now cesspools. He wants a third force. But where is he going to get the so-called new breed? The bigwigs of APC will not leave their party. As Achebe wrote in A Man of The People, who will spit out a sweet morsel that good fortune has tossed in his mouth. Many top APC men are happy and “chopping.” The PDP guys are not happy. But he already condemned them. If he succeeds, then Obj will have turned opportunism into a genuine trophy. Just as he took the term “third force” from Soyinka as a form of revenge. Or is he going to build a party of malcontents. Can malcontents rescue a nation of discontents?

Lai Mohammed’s response was cynically self-celebratory but did not address the issues of nepotism or MainaGate or other matters of moral temperature. That was a clever copout written with the African backhanded deference to age, but not without a jibe. So, if Obj said the right things, the question remains, is he the right person to say it?

The cow moos past. The herdsman belts a whip. He does not look at you or even acknowledge you. As you think, he is mere savage, no literate tongue, no keen gaze, and immune to your latest fancies: a tv show, or happening tie, femme fatale, or the high-end restaurant even if his cow ennobles the cuisine. For you, he is here to sell his cows. The space between you connects you in fact but not in spirit.

You think him an outback barbarian; he sees you as a showy and interloping infidel, even though his nomadic feet sweep through your backyards, highways and, of course, farmland.

He has a concept of you as you do of him. Yet in between, no dialogue. You think he is a seller of cows. He knows you are wrong. Cows are mere emblems of his identity. He does not only think you don’t want him to earn a living. He thinks you don’t want him to live.

He thinks your highways and your cars and your backyards are incarnations of the devil. They disrupt the rhythms of his peace. Too much population. Too much technology. Whither his way of life? His way of life is not just to sell cows. His way of life is the cow, but it is also to move in the woods, to twirl a stick, to follow the scent of history, the path of his forefathers, amidst lush, dewy grass, under a sky’s merciful blue and grey rage of torrents. He eats on the go beside his alter ego the cow, watches his maker blaze his trail from one arid land to another rich pasture. When in a grip of a carnal zest, he deposits his tumescence on the go, sometimes on a naïve nubile or deposits a child like the unseen parent of the protagonist of Ayobami Adebayo’s novel, Stay with Me. He follows his spiritual lead more than a commercial deal.

When we say the herdsman’s life is about the cattle, he wonders why we don’t get it. That is the crux. We are facing the deadly impulse of antiquity in the age of cell phones and Instagram. Whither twitter? That is the challenge of the age when an Emir of kano reels out figures of the dead in what should be a moment of funeral sentiment, when Miyetti Allah yells out self-righteous indignation that smothers the grief of the bereaved, when the president tells the Benue elders to accommodate their neighbours when they are counting their corpses.

If we say modernity is right it is because we see it as inevitable. If they say the herdsman is right it is because they see him as unchangeable. When unchangeable confronts the inevitable, 73 souls expire in a night raid in Benue, a farmer plops down in Ogun, a political chieftain waddles away with his captors in Ondo, Americans and Canadians are whisked away in a fatal abduction in Kaduna, a head herder flares up in a press conference, a Mambilla Plateau draws blood on its scenic swath.

Do we know the herdsman? Does the herdsman know us? Does any of us care? A deaf wall has sprouted between us, and we inhabit our own echo chambers, luxuriating in the eloquence and sonorities of our voices.

For many of us, the herdsman is one image. To them, they are more complex. Why was it that in the past when the herdsman held a dagger in his pouch, no one was afraid? Or when he had a dane gun, it was perceived as self-protection. They held it in the event of game or peril from a savage beast. But not now. It is because society has evolved from a place of trust, and that is one of the narratives lost in the crisis.

As Kaduna State governor Nasir El-Rufai has said repeatedly, some of the killers are Bororo Fulani. Many of them are now jobless because of another factor of modernity: capitalism. Some big men now own great numbers of cattle and employ fewer herders. As the machine is depriving workers of jobs, capitalist thinking is driving these boys into unemployment and ominous despair. They are thus Hobbesian candidates: angry, alienated and dangerous. The have sticks but no cow to whip. So, they head for our brood and blood.

The herdsman and his sponsors’ claim to not want change is therefore self-serving and hypocritical. The business has changed and created an army of vicious young men. And this leads to a yet unresolved piece of the puzzle. When the herdsman clashes with a local in which his cattle consume farm crops or a herdsman is killed, or cows are rustled, a reprisal follows. When it erupts, we don’t see any trace of the offended herdsman. We see new men, guttersnipes armed and raging like a pack of hyenas. The question is, if the herdsman is innocent, how come such waves of attack come after they leave in anger?

That is the sort of question I want El-Rufai, our security agents and even the Miyetti Allah to unravel. The next question is, who arms them? Are the employed herdsmen not in cahoots with marauders? These episodes of weaponised outlawry cannot come from jobless criminals if there is no backing from well-heeled men. Is there a connection between the owners of cattle and the weapons in circulation, or is there a shadowy force yet undiscovered in a reign of rampant barbarity in the country?

We cannot solve this problem by planting ourselves behind a deaf wall. It is because we have not decided to talk to each other but at each other that we are at each other’s throats in a state of incendiary paralysis. No dialogue has begun. No trust yet. Why, for instance, did the Afenifere and the Ohaneze go to Benue State to condole the bereaved and the Arewa Consultative Forum was absent? Were they invited but turned it down, or were they not invited at all? Either case points to the deaf wall wailing on both sides.

As I noted last week, this is a time to cooperate and not compete over who spews out the fiercer rhetoric. The Yemi Osinbajo panel makes sense. But I suggest the Plateau and Nasarawa models where mutual understanding precedes template. Since independence, we have had many panel reports in the archives and we seem to worship them as monuments, although they give us opportunities to make monuments of our lives. The choice is ours.

Ambassador Dapo Fafowora retired from the editorial board of the Nation newspaper and we feted him as only a man of such honour and erudition deserves. He is 77, and has served this country with distinction. First as a career diplomat culminating in the United Nations. He was the president of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, a commissioner in Osun state, amidst other engagements. He is an honorary fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters. From The Nation’s inception, he maintained a back page column until late last year. In his clear, persuasive style, he illumined many of Nigeria’s contemporary issues. His contributions to our editorials are so unique, we can only try in vain to replace them.

But what many do not know are his sense of humour, his disarming humility, his anecdotal repertoire of our country and its elite, and a gregarious soul. He knows how to throw a barb without a hint of being mean. Amidst wine, food and banter, every member of the board rose to pay tributes to him. And laughter was a recurring theme of the afternoon. I started the event by saying facetiously that he was going, among other things, because of the “imperatives of biology.” But Professors Adebayo Williams and Ropo Sekoni cut in impishly and asked, “do you mean ‘old age?’” Laughter. Both men taught me literature at Ife and their former student was not going to get away with verbal cunning, a sleight of a phrase.

Everyone had a unique thing to say about him. Eventually when he rose to respond, he also had something to say about everyone, unveiling his free flow for devastating humour, laying waste rib after rib. Yet on more than one occasion, he almost broke down in tears, his tongue seized, his eyes moist. We had to clap to bring the old man back to cheer.

We are all going to miss you, Ambassador, but you promised to pop in once in a while. We shall hold you to that account.

I don’t believe that hell is a place of fire. The scriptures are vivid enough. Hell simply means the grave or death. But it boils only in the fancy of those who view God as eternal terror, which negates David’s notion that “his mercies endure forever.”

This is no theological column and so would not pry into the interstices of scripture.

Believers of hell conjure a huge phantom fire, an inferno of justice that demonises our Maker. Even at that, we lack the patience to wait, so we make our own hell here on earth. John Milton who wrote Paradise Lost believed in hell but he also confessed to the seduction of human mythmaking. “The mind is its own place,” he sang, “it can make heaven of hell and hell of heaven.”

We have thus pre-empted the afterlife and fomented our own hell. Today, the incarnation of hell is one word: herdsman. The bad ones are the very nature of the devil – sly, wily, deadly. First they give us meat, then they make mincemeat of us. Their herds cannot speak, hate no one, are whipped about as they cry in pain in rain and relentless heat, are delicious, bought gleefully and greedily, lavish our feasts, nourish our body.

But the herdsman is often wordless in spare, nondescript subaltern wear, whip in hand, face without expression, sometimes stooped, or sitting watching the mammals munch away on verdant fields.

The sombre vista of caskets in Benue State last week signalled a Tiv funeral hour. The same happened in Taraba, as my friend Bala Dan Abu documented during a visit to the swaths of slaughter. At night they fell, were shot, slashed, in searing bonfire. But the Tiv and their leaders carried their dead, in brown boxes, laid them to earth, tears pouring down as though from cloudburst. The emotion was no less grim in Taraba.

But the herdsman does not want to be seen when it does ill. He is a barbarian with guns and machetes and a coward with murderous eyes. He does not strike in daylight because that is the province of the brave. His cowardly rapines rattle at night because his deeds are evil.

Like Mephistopheles, the herdsman concocts a reason to shed blood. They even deploy a grander word: rustle, even if it is the right word. For them, it is human blood for cow, homo sapiens funeral cries for the moos of cows. This is a perversion of exchange, a macabre tit for tat.

For believers either of the Koran or the Bible, this story contradicts the well-known divine exchange. In the two books, Ibrahim or Abraham loves his son but is poised to slaughter his son in divine obedience. But at the nick of time, the animal materialises. The maker says no to human sacrifice. He provides the animal for the slaughter. Ismail or Isaac lives. Man cannot go for ram or cow.

In traditional religion, it is animals, including fowls, that go for slaughter. In Achebe’s Arrow of God, a cynical priest feeds his family with the spoil. Even when humans are used for such sacrifices, we call it savage.

The irony of the human exchange for animal slaughter came up graphically in the novel, Museum of Innocence by Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk. A 12-year-old is forced to deal with the horror of a human struggling to survive a car crash on a day when all of Istanbul is a slaughterhouse of rams. The spectacle of a human sacrifice becomes so horrifying for a people who happily kill rams in the Feast of Sacrifice.

This herdsman’s logic is called false choice or equivalence. The debate is going the wrong way in this country. It should not be about justifying the killing of humans. Neither, too, should it be about playing down the criminality of cattle rustling. For sure, the stealing of cows is real. According to my investigations, the cows are ferreted away by a collusion that cartoons how our political and bureaucratic elite make away with our resources without ethnic or religious discrimination. To steal the cow, you need somebody very close, a Fulani who is not a herdsman. He works with a Hausa and a native of the middle belt village. In quite a few cases, a traditional ruler is the kingpin. The cows are “herded” surreptitiously to a waiting truck by these emergency herdsmen who are not often Fulani. The truck is manned and driven, not by a middle belt person but a southerner and the animals disappear.

Some traditional rulers have become rich, owning mansions and flashy cars. One of them was arrested and forced to release a truck of cattle whose heist he had organised. So, the story of cattle rustling can incite a man who travels miles on foot in heat and rain. But how does a cow stolen amount to human blood? Not just one human, but whole communities reeling in blood and tears. The rustling is a misdemeanour, but the murders are caveman cruelty. Murderers have no place in human civilisation. The rustler should be prosecuted and jailed. The murderer-herdsman should be sentenced to death, or life imprisonment.

The other level of exchange was the blame game. This was between Benue State Governor Samuel Ortom and the Nasarawa State Governor Tanko Al-Makura. Ortom said his neighbour governor Al-Makura was hoarding the goons. Ortom was nervy, teary and out of sync with reality. The same Awe Local Government Area that Ortom said the herdsmen were hiding is the same place Al-Makura is giving food, clothing and shelter to his fellow Benue citizens who escaped the Herdsmen’s noose. Ortom ran to Abuja to cry. Why didn’t he call Al-Makura and resolve the matter without the hysteria? A leader should be calm, especially aplomb, in times of turbulence. The Nasarawa State governor did not pay him back in his own brutal fantasy. Rather he is working with other governors and security chiefs to tackle the problem.

The other exchange was time. Call it grandstanding. Town crier Ayo Fayose gathered hunters to recreate the Ekiti Parapo brio in a 19th century throwback. The picture is like a scene in a period movie. But he roiled a martial spirit against what might or might not be an impending invasion.

An eye for an eye has pervaded the country because of failure of leadership. Agriculture minister Audu Ogbeh reflected the mindset called the pedagogy of the oppressed. He was thinking like his oppressor when he said we have not done enough for the herdsman. Ogbeh is too old to show such facile and infantile wisdom. His call for colonies makes no sense except he wants the people to colonise the areas. Some governors are not ready to give up their lands.

The problem can only be solved, especially in the middle belt, by following the Plateau model. Open grazing has shed much blood. But to ask the Fulani herdsmen not to graze does not solve the problem without a clear institutional framework. Otherwise, it is a declaration of war. But Ortom did not want war, and he shouldn’t. Before anti-grazing law we had violence. With it, caskets crawl. So, it is not about law, but alleviating distrust.

That was the point made by Plateau State Governor Simon Lalong, whose model has mellowed his own state. He brought every group together in a state of 53 tribes, including the Fulani, and they agreed on a cooperative formula. So, his goal is to stop open grazing but he wants to be sure other conditions are right first. He said the right thing, though misunderstood for emotional and partisan reasons. He said he advised – not warned – his fellow governor Ortom.

A state of war cannot resolve this crisis. Even if it does, at what cost? The herdsmen and the Miyetti Allah are not spirits. Why can’t they sit together with others and find a solution? This is where leadership comes in. Also nonsensical was the rhetorical levity from the Inspector General of police who dismissed the crisis as “communal.”

Leadership is absent from the centre. The presidency should learn from Governor Lalong and lay the template for cooperation, not distrust. Gandhi said, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Without a template, bloodbath will persist, and we shall continue to treat each other like the person who would not accept a gift shirt from a naked man.