The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

  • Applause for Theatre Republic

    There was a play to be staged. The producer, who was also the playwright, needed a director to put the play on stage. Someone who should know recommended a director who knows his stuff. I was invited to a preliminary meeting between the producer/playwright and the preferred director. That is how I met Wole Oguntokun.

    It was around mid-year in 2014. We met one afternoon in the office of Sam Omatseye at the headquarters of The Nation in Matori, Lagos. Omatseye, Chairman of the newspaper’s Editorial Board, had just published a play titled The Siege, which he planned to stage to celebrate the milestone 80th birthday of literary luminary and Nobelist Wole Soyinka in July that year. Oguntokun came to the meeting with two members of his organisation called Renegade Theatre.

    It was a stimulating interaction. I got to know that Oguntokun was a lawyer and had an advanced degree in Law. I also found out that he was deeply into drama. Questions and answers about Omatseye’s play, and about the planned production, turned the office into a theatre of ideation and ideas. By the time the session ended, there was no doubt about Oguntokun’s passion and professionalism.

    This is how Oguntokun captured the play: “Charles Gordon was a British Army General, who was in charge of Sudan, Khartoum in the 19th century. He was asked to leave Sudan by his government, which felt they couldn’t hold Khartoum anymore but he thought he could hold it for his country. So, he refused to leave. Unfortunately, he met a man who was as zealous and strong as him in the person of the Mahdi, who fought to hold his country back from the British. The play is about the siege laid on Khartoum with Gordon unwilling to give up the city. It led to the death of Gordon during the face-off between Gordon and Mahdi’s men. The play is about people who hold and believe in their own ideologies; the two men fundamentally believed in the cause they were fighting. It’s based on a true-life story.” The drama doesn’t end with Gordon’s defeat and includes the British reprisal attack spearheaded by Lord Kitchener.

    The play is opposed to philosophies of exclusion and self-promoting ideologies that deny the relevance of diversity. Oguntokun treated its decidedly international colour with striking fidelity. To achieve a compelling interpretation, the director had four UK-based British actors in the cast, Sam Quinn, Angus Scott-Miller, John Glynn and Paul Garayo. I interacted with these foreign actors during another lively session in Omatseye’s office. The director had brought them to the producer/playwright.

    Ahead of the production at MUSON Centre, Lagos, on July 24, 2014, Oguntokun said: “It’s challenging because it deals with another culture, and we have to be careful that we stay true to the Sudanese culture in terms of dresses, music and mindset that existed at the time.” On stage, the serious issues were spiced with spectacle, producing what Oguntokun called “a fusion of play and dance.”

    My mind replayed this background when I heard the news of Oguntokun’s latest theatre project, which he described as “The birth of a theatre republic.” On September 11, he lifted the curtain on his Theatre Republic at Lekki Phase 1, Lagos. The place was formally opened by Soyinka who “attended the Ideas Cafe at the Theatre Republic to share lessons on his artistic journey of more than five decades.” Soyinka’s presence and participation testified to Oguntokun’s respectable professional rating.

    It is nearly two decades since Oguntokun in 1998 “emerged as a player on the Nigerian Theatre landscape.” His own artistic trajectory has seen him become Artistic Director of Renegade Theatre, and now President of the Theatre Republic, described as “a performing arts hub which provides production and rehearsal space for theatre and dance companies, musicians and visual artists.”

    “Everything is self-funded,” Oguntokun reportedly told Omatseye in a phone conversation that the columnist referred to in his column. This is where the picture becomes clearer, showing Oguntokun’s clarity of vision. As a playwright, stage and film director, and theatre administrator, Oguntokun has demonstrated a remarkable professional consistency. A report published last year quoted him as saying: “The stage is what it is; a place of beauty; a place where magic happens. It cannot be replicated in any other arena. It’s where I’m the happiest, where I feel complete the most.”

    Surely, with the Theatre Republic within Lagos, the megalopolis is in the realm of rarefied reinvention. Oguntokun said in the report, which was published while the republic was being built: “At present, there is no single venue in Nigeria with daily programming dedicated solely to the performing arts. It is our desire to create a self-sustaining performing arts organisation that will encourage copycat establishments around the country, which in turn, would help artistes realise their own artistic visions and thus create the ability in them to effect positive change in their individual communities.”

    A megacity deserves thriving artistic centres, and this artistic republic deserves an environment where it can flourish. The show has started. The Waiting Room, a play written and directed by Oguntokun, was staged at the republic from September 15 – 18. It will also run from October 27 – 30.

    The beauty of Oguntokun’s spatial presence is the promise of stability. It is his republic. It is also his empire. There is no contradiction, only a clarification of status and signification. But, obviously, stability is not the same thing as sustainability. The republic deserves decent support for its cultural services. The place is a fertile ground for corporate giants to sow seeds of social responsibility.

    Theatre is alive and alert, despite the potent antagonism of various anti-theatre forces. Oguntokun is proof that the thespian world is willing; but the outside world may be weak. It is food for thought that the report mentioned earlier quoted Oguntokun as saying: “The obstacles facing the presenter/producer from Nigeria are many and they range from unfriendly government agencies to non-supportive state policies.” But enemies of the performing arts and foes of cultural production are not to be found only within the structures of power. Philistinism is also alive and alert, regrettably.

  • The world, according to Mama Peace

    The world, according to Mama Peace

    A tear for Mama Peace. No, not a jeer. She owes us that much. Let our faces break up and tears course down in winding, tortured rivulets of sorrow. Or that’s what I feel. The former first lady does not see it that way, though. That is the power of the irony. She thinks herself in a sort of messianic light, not for society, but for Mama Peace. She feels wronged, she feels purloined, she feels betrayed. However, nothing will sway her or dilute her resolve.

    How come her $31 million was taken away from her, and no one understands her right to fight back. Others will call her naïve, and say let others take the fall on her behalf. But she says, no, it’s her money and the Magu-led EFCC must return it to her nest.

    Patience Jonathan is a naïve woman, and she flops about with a sort of dangerous innocence. She thinks it was right for her to open a dollar account, or dollar accounts and ply them with humongous sums of money.  Never mind she was only a permanent secretary and a first lady in those years, and no one could make a fraction of $31 million without raising a highbrow. She was high brow, she must have thought as first lady. So she was entitled to money that could raise highbrows. That is innocence, Mama Peace style.

    When she pleaded on the hustings in 2015 that she did not want to visit her husband in jail, she was as sincere as when she mocked Wole Soyinka’s regal beard. No one could be more sincere when she said, “there is God O! or when she insisted that she was husbandless in “my fellow widows.” Or when she asked a photographer “are you taking us alive?”

    Mama Peace had never bothered about her illiteracy. She has not tried to restrain herself, or attempted a lesson in civility or public etiquette. She had no need for it. She was perfect in her native ‘beauty.’ Some may have seen her as a hippo or anthropoid, or the unrelieved maritime shrew. But she saw herself as okay. We might say Patience was brash, bolshie, bashing, but she was never bashful or dashing.

     That is why we must feel sorry for her. She might have gone away with her money, if she was subtle, cunning and carted away the money in guises as others did, so that the EFCC would not discover or let them discover it at her boon companion’s peril. She would not.

    Her innocence is rare to see in history or literature, a fellow who is naïve enough to give herself away, unless we look at characters like Okonkwo or Oedipus, who saw disaster and pranced towards it. Critic Killam called it “insistent fatality.” But those are majestic figures, otherwise not naïve. But merely fated by their higher gifts to ignore their special follies, or what dramatists call “fatal flaws.”

    Was it not the same thing that propelled former Kano State Governor Barkin Zuwo to roar that he kept government money in government house? Was it not the same temperament that made Marie Antionette to wonder why the protestors on French streets would not take cake if they did not have bread? Or the shoe fetish of Imelda Marcos who made a potential museum and industry out her foot comfort.

    She was the opposite of what anthropologists and philosophers call the holy or saintly fools. They dedicate themselves to causes higher than themselves and play dumb in execution, and austere in their sartorial devotions, in their spare words, in the economy of their smiles and disdain for material splendour, in their sacrifices for the joy of others, in their recoil from personal happiness. Simeon in the Bible has been cited as one, as some Roman Catholic Popes, this present one looking like a modern-day version, or Mother Theresa. We also have them in the Buddhist tradition like Buddha himself as fictionalized by Nobel laureate Herman Hesse in his novel Siddhartha. Russian and French writers from Dostoyevsky to Victor Hugo have fed on it. In one of them, Hugo’s  The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasimodo – the hunchback – organises a festival of fools and he is called the Pope of fools. He exposes an age of sanctimony and moral desuetude.

    But Mama Peace’s story only exposes herself. Her revelations tell us two things, among others. One, she unveiled how people in high places take away money in stealth, except that she is not prepared to hide because she believes it is her money.

    Two, that her husband was not able to tame the wife.  She is the shrew that got away. An English newspaper once wrote that President Jonathan lacked the ability to control his wife. Jonathan could not play the tamer in Shakespeare’s the Taming of the Shrew where Catherina is made from a wild woman into a model of obedience, a play that modern stage directors and feminist rage have turned into a rebuke of the author’s misogyny.

    Humans like Patience Jonathan never have the skills of high office. She never acted, and never knew it was important to play roles when in such exalted positions. She was herself, and she was a happy woman. She spoke her mind, hurt people, humoured a nation, created traffic bedlam in Lagos and never saw a reason to apologise. She said she took the money to heal herself. May no one wish to spend such money in a hospital.

    The other lesson is the “Baboon dey chop, monkey dey work” syndrome. Just like we saw in the confessions of Dasukigate, people had easy access to public funds without labour. That is the primitive splendour of capitalism. They wanted to turn lazy hours into wealth. We have many of them. They are finding it hard these days because Buhari’s era does not reward the grandiose indolence of the Jonathan era. They are like the characters in Ben Jonson’s classic The Alchemist, where the landlord leaves the home to his servant to avoid a plague. But before he returns the servant has made a huge fortune from trickery, including by lying he could turn metal into gold, and had a pretty wench to boot. The master returns and inherits everything without a sweat. The play, ironically, was written before capitalism. So were the words of Christ, “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.”

    Mama Peace lived that world, and has not yet relieved herself.

  • Of rogues and vultures

    Of rogues and vultures

    Why should the EFCC chief call most lawyers rogues and vultures? The other question is, why not? The role of lawyers in a democracy just came to the fore, and what many are interested in are the insults rather than facts.

    It all began with the new NBA helmsman when he called for the stripping of EFCC powers. He wants it to stop suing people. It should only investigate. The new NBA chief, Abubakar Mahmud, knew he had rasped like a wasp, and somebody was going to buzz back.

    Magu rolled down his tanks and he fired salvos through his media man. He said most members of the bar are rogues and vultures. We were in the terrain of metaphor. Lawyers fought back with professional hubris. No, they were not rogues and they were not vultures. They are patriots and custodians of the law. They tell us what the law says in order to attain a just and egalitarian society.

    I am sure they were laughing inside their kidneys when they said that, including the NBA chief. Lawyers are important in every society, especially in a liberal and democratic society. But I am with Magu on the vulture metaphor. Vultures sniff rottenness. They are morticians of sorts. But the lawyers are also saviours and avenging angels. They are doves now, vultures now. Peace and death are in the loins of the lawyer.

    That is the problem with lawyers. They are on both sides to save us, a sort of redemptive schizophrenia. The problem is not with lawyers, according to some analysts. It is with the law. The law gives the interpreters too much room to pursue justice and injustice simultaneously. That inspired the lines from Arthur Baer: “It is impossible to tell where the law stops and justice begins.”

    When President Buhari addressed the NBA last year, he asked the law exponents to key into the anti-corruption scheme. Clearly they are an asset to fight filth. But the story gained traction because we all know that lawyers have fattened on corruption. How can a dirty hand clean up the dinner fork?

    One example is that lawyers have stood between the EFCC and conviction of many cases, especially high-profile cases. They adjourn and adjourn, and frustrate the cases. By that they glamorise public robbery, and encourage the governors, civil servants, ministers to come to their lairs, drink of their legal shenanigans, be free and sin again.

    Some of the culprits are the senior lawyers, the Senior Advocates of Nigeria. They go about charging billions to these ex-office holders who pay handily. So, the lawyers think: you stole, and you want me to defend you. Well, shall I have a piece of the action? Of course, the ex-office holder obliges and we witness a long-winded merry-go-round in the courts.

    Other than that, they cling to technicalities. That is their way of frustrating the courts and the search for justice in society. In its response, the EFCC chief accused the new NBA man of serving his interest. Magu accused Mahmud of defending former Delta State Governor James Ibori in a case that landed him conviction in London. We must add though that even Ibori prosecutors are in some boiling soup right now in London. I would like to know what Mahmud wants to say for himself on that score.

    More ashamedly, I have seen in the past few years SANs defend a client on a certain premise and oppose another client on the antipodal premise, and win both cases. Is that not intellectual fraud? Is it not the way of the vulture?

    I must note though that Magu’s EFCC has had to contend with the charge of impunity, but who advised the EFCC and who defended the EFCC? Of course, the lawyers. So, we cannot pretend that the lawyers -not all, but many prominent ones – are in the kitchen sink of corruption.

    In any society, nothing works without the law. You set up a social club, or a software firm, or political party, with two important staff-members: a lawyer and accountant. You steal with the accountant, and the lawyer waits to defend. The concept of the vulture comes out in times of recession. Companies go under and they become cadavers. Lawyers become undertakers, and they write the legal documents to certify their deaths. In the last recession, especially in Obama’s early presidency, lawyers rallied in major US cities presiding over the graveyards of firms. They flourished on the corpses. The tragedy is that we need them.

    Nigeria had so many stories of corruption under Jonathan. Who are the defendants running to for defence? The EFCC has its weaknesses in the fight for financial sanity. It has looked for the law to keep some people in detention without due process, including former NSA Dasuki. It had to find the law – and lawyers – to justify its position. It reminds me of a conversation I had with the late Gani Fawehinmi. He said if there was a case between a rich man and poor man, “I will find the law for the poor man.” Our SANs have been doing the opposite. In his poem, The Vultures, David Diop wrote: “You knew all the books you did not know love. “

    Corruption is rottenness, and anyone that allows it to fester is a vulture. Our SANs have not excelled for integrity. In fact, to be a SAN you don’t have to be a man or woman of integrity. You just have to excel in the technical virtues of the law. You don’t have to be a good man, you just have to be a good lawyer. After all, are we not witnesses to the case of two SANs who allegedly bribed somebody and about a dozen of them (SANs) backed them like the solidarity of Baal! It echoes the words of Will Rogers: “Make crime pay. Become a lawyer.”

    It’s this frustration that drove Shakespeare to cry: “The first thing we do, let’s kill the lawyers.” I won’t go that far. I want our lawyers to ape the Progressive Era in the U.S., when men like Theodore Roosevelt turned law into a platform for reform. We have a few in Nigeria who have taken the law as instruments of justice. I bow to them. But for others, I shed my tears.

    In his novel, The Great expectation, Charles Dickens paints the picture of London’s best-known lawyer, Mr. Jaggers, who is cynical, wealthy, contemptuous, manipulative but inevitably iconic and successful. Mr. Jaggers is about the most colourful brute fiction has painted for the law profession.

    I accept with thanks Mahmud’s suggestion that EFCC should not prosecute and investigate. That is scratching the surface, though. It works in England with the Serious Fraud Office. It is the battle between rational choice and institutionalism at play. When we have the right values, you don’t need to bicker over conflict of interest because the larger morality of the society will work the law to check excesses. In the United States, the attorney-general can prosecute anybody, including the president. Hence Janet Reno appointed Kenneth Starr, a Republican, to investigate Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadilloes. In Nigeria, the EFCC prosecutorial powers can be checked by the attorney-general. Aondoakaa did it to Ribadu under Yar-Adua.

    Mahmud put the cart before the horse. It’s like the call for a distinction between attorney-general of the federation and attorney-general of the government. It’s a meretricious colouring. If we have the right values, no one can abuse his powers without drawing umbrage and penalty.

    What we need is a good society. Law and lawyers will have no choice but fall in line.

  • Worrying verdicts

    In the last couple of weeks, sundry institutions, groups and individuals have come up with verdicts on the state of Nigeria’s economy and politics. The frequency and direction of these opinions have raised genuine fears on the future of the country.

    Some of the economic and political development indices highlighted have been so scarring and damning that one begins to wonder whether our leaders can possibly muster what it takes to wriggle out of the quagmire. Though some of these issues have been in public domain, the way they have been presented, left no one in doubt that we are really in turbulent times.

    The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) seemed to have fired the first salvo when it reeled out scarring indices of an ailing economy in urgent need of redemption. It said the nation’s GDP contracted by 0.36 per cent in the first quarter of this year representing the first negative growth in many years. The economy also suffered contraction in the second quarter and a slide into recession as the Naira depreciated, businesses declined and unemployment grew in leaps.

    A report by the United Nation’s on Nigeria’s Common Country Analysis also revealed “a deeply divided society on the basis of the plurality of ethnic, religious and regional identities that had tended to define the country’s political existence” It painted a gloomy picture of the country with most of the development and social indices registering at levels unacceptable.

    The report further observed that for decades, different segments of the Nigerian population had at different times, expressed feelings of marginalization, of being short-changed, dominated and oppressed, threatened or even targeted for elimination.

     A US Congressman, Tom Marino seemed to have upped the ante on these negative assessments when in a letter to the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, he urged his home government to withhold security assistance to Nigeria until Buhari demonstrates “commitment to inclusive government and the most basic tenets of democracy; freedom of assemble and freedom of speech” He faulted the anti-corruption campaign of the government for focusing almost exclusively on members of the opposition while overlooking corruption among some close advisors of Buhari. Marino also spoke on extra-judicial killings of 347 people in Kaduna and 36 pro-Biafra movement members and attempts to silence opposition.

    There are two strands of negative indicators that have been highlighted by these opinions-economic and political. As regards the former, we have been presented with an economy in deep recession characterized by Naira depreciation, overall contraction in economic activities culminating in huge job losses. There are also issues of galloping inflation and debilitating poverty as 64 per cent of Nigerians are rated to be living below the poverty line.

    The government has admitted the country is in recession and by that, it is unlikely to quarrel with these indicators which ipso facto are features of an economy in recession. It has promised through its minister of finance, Kemi Adeosun that the economy will be turned round in no distant time through investment in capital and diversification.

    The same sentiments had been shared by President Buhari who appealed for patience with an assurance that “we are going to get out of our economic problems”  They have also talked of a number of interventions to revive the ailing economy even as such measures have at best remained mere conjectures. A kite was recently flown about emergency powers which the president intends to seek from the national assembly to deal with extant challenges.

    Though no such presentation has come before the national assembly, there is everything to suggest that the idea is not going to be an easy sail. We would rather have Buhari kick off with the enormous powers he enjoys under the constitution before any resort to such extraordinary powers that could easily lend themselves to abuse given that absolute power corrupts absolutely. However, getting through such a request would seem a tall order.

    But the National Council of States, after a meeting last week said it had endorsed a number of measures for the government to deal with the situation. Curiously, such measures were kept under wraps. Ironically, such intervention measures are direly needed now to steer the ship of the nation away from the brink to which it is inevitably headed.

    There is massive poverty and suffering in the land occasioned by the economic policies of the government and something urgent must be done before majority of our people are consigned to their early graves. Before now, it has been a fad by the government and its apologists to blame the previous regime for the current pass.

    We have since moved beyond such buck passing and stereotypes. We have gone beyond the worn-out issue of how past leaders failed to plan for the future; failed to diversify the economy and similar rationalizations. We are confronted by extant situations that should task the creative energies and ingenuity of leaders to make the difference. History is surfeit with records of leaders who came at very trying moments of their country but were able to turn them around very positively. That is the kind of rare expertise, high credentials and uncommon patriotic courage the situation now requires.

    But, does the government as presently constituted have what it takes to turn around the fortunes of this country for the better. What of our economic managers: are they the best the nation can boast of in the present circumstance? Do they exude sufficient confidence in terms of experience and capacity to grapple with the complex situation brought to the fore by the recession?

    Perhaps, the UN recommendation that “transforming and diversifying Nigeria’s development paths needed a radical and new approach, especially by investing in people and in a strong more dynamic and inclusive productive informal sector” should be instructive. The question is whether we have seen the prospects of such radical and novel approaches?

    However, the success of new and radial approaches to our mounting economic challenges is intricately linked to the application of similar measures at the political front. For, the line between the economy and politics is a very thin one.

    The UN report spoke of a deeply divided society on the basis of the plurality of ethnic, religious and regional lines. Marino highlighted the absence of an all inclusive government and commitment to freedom of assembly and speech. He wants the US to urge Buhari to form a “government that represents the diversity of its citizens and allows dissenting voices to be heard”

    These systemic dysfunctions cannot be dismissed off handedly as the Minister of Information Lai Mohammed had tended to. So also are the issues of alienation, marginalization; of being short-changed, and threatened as aptly captured in the UN report. Though some of the issues raised by Marino may have been slightly exaggerated, it was wrong to have concluded as Mohammed did that his views were out of tune with reality; imaginary and ill-informed.

     If anything, they serve as a sad reminder to issues that are already in the court of public opinion. What is required now is for the government to take up these negative indicators and evolve urgent ways of resolving them so that our divided and fatally fragmented peoples can once again unite and pool their creative energies together for the better. And unless the political dimensions of these verdicts are addressed through genuine, honest and equitable approaches, they will continue to negate efforts at economic development as the Niger Delta case has shown.

  • Ekiti’s grazing law

    Governor Ayo Fayose of Ekiti State has just signed a law to regulate grazing activities in the state. Titled “Prohibition of cattle and Other Ruminants Grazing in Ekiti 2016”, the law provides for grazing activities between 7am to 6pm on a daily basis while any herdsman caught with firearms or any weapon whatsoever during grazing will be charged with terrorism.

    An offender is liable on conviction, to six months imprisonment without option of fine.Under the law, farm crops destroyed by the cattle of any caught herdsman, shall be estimated by an agricultural officer and the expense borne by the culprit.

    Emerging reactions to the law vary depending on which side of the divide they are coming from. But most reservations have tended to centreround the provisions of the law rather than the propriety of that piece of legislation. But, implicit in those reactions is a seeming consensus that some form of regulation on the activities of herdsmen is imperative.

    The first issue copiously canvassed is the seeming incongruity of aspect of that law as it relates to terrorism with the constitution of the country. Those who canvass this view, contend it is wrong to classify herdsmen carrying weapons including such light ones as arrows, knives, cutlasses and catapults as terrorists because such categorization runs against the spirits of the anti-terrorism law. For this school, the law on anti-terrorism is very clear and nowhere did it classify carrying such light weapons as an offence under it.

    The other strand of the argument is that exceptions should have been made by the law against these light weapons because herdsmen need some of them to ward off criminals and also contend with the vagaries and harshness of the environment in which they conduct their business.

    In this wise, it is reasoned that apart from attacks from robbers, herdsmen confront all manner of animals in the bushes and will be helpless in the face of attacks from those elements in the absence of such light weapons. There is a point here. There ought to be exceptions to the category of weapons the herdsmen could carry since in our daily lives, such light weapons are not against our laws. Herdsmen need some protection against some of the hazards they face while doing their business in the inclement bush environment.

    There is also merit in the argument that by handing down terrorism charge on any herdsman carrying guns and other light weapons, the Ekiti law is bound to come into conflict with the anti-terrorism prevention law. And to the extent that law is inconsistent with the constitution, it stands to be voided by the courts. When this happens, the state government would be handicapped in approximating the goals for which that piece of legislation was made.

    No doubt,Ekiti State government was goaded to classify carrying arms by herdsmen as terrorism given the pattern and magnitude of destruction that occur each time they attack communities. Such attacks usually leave in their trail sorrow and awe on account of the decimation of populations and properties comparable in terms, to terrorism onslaughts. The law would therefore strike as a desperate therapy to a malignant tumour- the objective being to ensure that Ekiti State is insulated from those ugly scenes that have been the tale of communities each time herdsmen strike.

    But this objective could still be approximated without having to enact laws that will at once, come into conflict with the constitution. The same aim can still be realized by making the carrying of dangerous weapons such as the AK-47 rifle and 24 rounds of ammunitionrecovered from a herdsman in Affa, Udi local government area of Enugu state and in other places, a criminal offence.

    The other issue being canvassed against the anti-grazing law is that it should have allowed herdsmen who want to relocate to do so at night. The argument is that it will minimize the disruption of social activities were the herdsmen to do so at night. With the pattern of the attacks by the herdsmen, which usually take place in the night with near invincibility, it will be difficult to persuade anyone with the above argument. Moreover, that will negate the whole essence of limiting herding between certain hours of the day.

    Ekiti State government must have taken into account the reality of the operational strategy of the herdsmen in arriving at the provision requiring all activities relating to herding to commence and end between 7am and 6pm. It would seem that aspect of the law was well designed. There is the need to regulate the movement of herdsmen so as not to give room for any subterfuge by the unscrupulous ones to attack communities while they are asleep.

    The law also struck the right chord by stipulating that herdsmen caught destroying the crops of farmers will have the value of such farm produce assessed by an agricultural officer for the culprit to bear the cost. This is apt given that at the heart of the conflicts between farmers and the herdsmen has been the wanton destruction of the crops of the former.

    This provision is even more germane and as has been argued in several quarters, the herdsmen are also in business and it will be wrong to despoil the crops of farmers or feed their animals with them the way they had hitherto carried on. The realization that crops destroyed by their cattle will have to be paid for, will make them more circumspect in the way they conduct their business.

    That way, a major source of friction between the farmers and the herdsmen would have been considerably reduced. By the same token, the constant friction that usually aggravates attacks by the herdsmen would have been substantially stymied. It is true that Ekiti State is not among the states where the herdsmen have severally wreaked havoc. But it has taken the bull by the horn by coming out with legislation to curtail the menace of the herdsmen.

    It is a step in the right direction. It is a bold statement that the government will not sit-by while its citizens are mowed down by a band that has scant regard for human lives. It is therefore pertinentthat the law should be despite some reservations especially as it relates to trying those carrying weapons and other light arms for terrorism. At any rate, our courts are there to trash out issues relating to the envisaged conflict between the law and the nation’s anti-terrorism law.

    Perhaps,Ekiti may not have gone this farwere the federal government forthcoming in dealing with the menace of the herdsmen. For, despite the serious danger which incessant attacks by the herdsmen portends for national peace and stability, the attitude of the federal government to it has at best, remained largely tepid.

    Even with the directive from President Buhari to the military and police to stop the recurring killings of hapless Nigerians by Fulani herdsmen, no concrete action seems to have been taken in this regard. That is why rather than abate, the attacks have festered. Matters are not helped by the inability of our law enforcement agencies to bring to book the suspects arrested for the dastardly massacre at Nimbo in Enugu State and elsewhere where such attacks had occurred.

    If things continue the way they are, more of the states that have been at the mercy of the insurgents will have no option than to go theEkiti way to protect the lives of their people. That is the unmistakable signal which the law has sent across. The Buhari regime should take vicarious responsibility for any eventual outcome of such conflicting legislations including the increasing lure of self-help to stem the scourge.

  • Like going to war

    Like going to war

    Sometimes we think when a war is over that it is over. It is the deception of the senses. The war comes again in new incarnations. There is still hunger. We still hear of murder. We still shrink at loud noises for fear a bomb has gone off, shrapnel is flying and bodies are falling. A crash, a thud, a boom.

    With the war against Boko Haram now smouldering, we focus less on the hordes hurling bombs and rolling into town after town with their messianic flags. Yet the news still nestles. Recently, women protested lack of food in the IDP camps. Pictures show images that recall the pangs of Somali tragedy. A little child with shrunken jaws, eyes popping out and legs spindly from kwashiorkor. Their homes are now empty land, if not still smelling of the bonfires of militant vanities.

    Most have no homes again. If they return, it is not to what was there. It’s all gone even if the house and the football field or the markets are intact. It is all different now because they have had different lives in the past few years. The meek is now a cynic, the fearful is now fearfully brave, the generous now poor and stingy, the fat is now lean, the athlete now limps. The farmer wants to be a farmer again but in vain. The yam seller has no farm, the teacher wants students, the student has to catch up or has become a mother now, and has to be a new student of something else: motherhood.

    So it is for the authority. It is a new society. Post-war societies are new societies. But making those new societies is like going to war. That is what Governor Kashim Shettima is doing these days. We witnessed it in eastern Nigeria and parts of the Niger Delta after the civil war. The society is new again, battered, broken, prostrate, in ruin. It has to rise again. It has to be born again. As Salman Rushdie wrote in the opening paragraph of his controversial novel, Satanic Verses, “to be born again, first you have to die.”

    The United States confronted same at the end of the civil war, and reconstructed large swaths of a mammoth continent. We saw it after the Second World War where the big hulk of Germany rose out of its Nazi ruins, or the Balkans after the nightmare of its dictators. Some Iraqi and Syrian towns rescued from ISIS are grappling with that.

    The job is a collective one, as Governor Shettima is doing. He is the fulcrum of the rebirth. He knows he cannot do it alone. Gone are the days when Boko Haram was only about 20 kilometres away from the state house. He never squished. Thanks to Buhari and the reinvigorated army, the government house and he will not know oblivion.

    The same collaboration is needed to rebuild the town. Maiduguri will have to be reborn in many ways, like Gworza, like Bama, etc., not only in physical infrastructure, but also mental and psychological. As Christ noted, “except a corn of wheat falls to the ground and die, it abides alone. But when it dies, it brings forth much fruit.” Now, the state cannot abide alone.

    The task has started. International envoys are coming around. BBC and CNN cameras click at scenes of hope and despair. Bono visited Borno, so did other top world celebrities, including our own Aliko Dangote. The Irish rock star has made quite a few donations, in cash and kind. Dangote is releasing tranches of the N2 billion he pledged. Recently, Governor Shettima and he visited a new estate under construction for the refugees.

    The IDP camps, though, are the centres of gravity. We see the remnants of war. We see easy morality, stealing goes on even in the midst of scarcity, especially because of scarcity. A baby boom is upon the north as though the IDPs want to replace the lost souls in a frenzy of casual promiscuity. It is a burden on boys whose virility preys on idleness and women whose fertility beckons procreation. Shettima and the government deal with about 50 births a week. The rich get richer, wrote Scott F. Fitzgerald, the poor get children. The government cares for them and also has to contend with another sort of fertility. Get the men and women to work again. Schools are being rebuilt; citizens are getting animals for farm and other supplies.

    The task is heavy. The federal government must have to play a major role. Part of the story behind the food protests was that the federal government is slow to play its part of an agreement with the Borno State government. According to the terms, the Borno State Government is supposed to supply the protein and the Federal Government has to supply the carbohydrates. Both are important, and complement. It reminds me of a story the late Chief Hope Harriman told of his time as a student in Government College, Ibadan. The students had gathered for their lunch. The eba was ready, and they waited for the soup with the protein inside. The British teacher saw them and wondered why they were standing idle. They replied that they were waiting for the other part of the meal. The teacher replied out of frustration, “why don’t you eat this while you await the other.” The students laughed and educated him that eba was nothing without the soup.

    Sources say Treasury Single Account issues have trammelled National Emergency Management Agency efforts to release funds for the food. This has to be sped up. TSA is good but people should not die. It will fulfil Apostle Paul’s words that the letter of the law kills. Let us invoke the spirit.

    Heraclitus said the law of life is struggle. One triumph challenges another spirit to triumph. So, post-war is like new war. In his play, Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht tells a story of a woman who loses her children while she profiteers in the Thirty Years War. When the war ends, it is as though it has not.  She learns that “in decent countries, folk don’t have to have virtues.” Virtues are taken for granted. In a place like an IDP camp, virtues collapse under the need to survive. That brings thieves, brigands, rapists, the hungry, the sick, the lonely. After surviving the war, they have to survive the peace like Cyprian Ekwensi’s novel of that title about the civil war. That is the new war, and it is our war. If we let it fester, it will come to us in our halcyon corner.  Governor Shettima needs as many helpers around the world as he can get. Happily, they are coming, if not enough.

     

    Kudos to a dramatist

    Wole Oguntokun is one of our unsung heroes. In a philistine world, he is fighting for the revival of a crucial part of our lives: the theatre. While governments do little and the corporate world funds flimsy entertainment, Oguntokun has set up Theatre Republic in Lekki, Lagos where Nigerians can watch plays, both Nigerian and foreign, from his plays to Soyinka’s to Greek plays.

    “Everything is self-funded,” he told me in a phone conversation. The greatest accolade we ever had in literature came from plays, yet we are not taking advantage of Soyinka’s gift of the Nobel Prize. Oguntokun is a theatre warrior, and he needs to get big-time support. No society thrives without high culture. Hence in Britain and the United States, billions are poured into the high arts by both government and corporate organisations.

  • Burden and glory

    Burden and glory

    I remember a moment in church as a teenager in the God’s Kingdom Society here in Lagos, and Pa Adedokun was presiding and visiting the city from Warri, where he then domiciled. A feisty and hoary preacher with biting anecdotes and Yoruba proverbs, he was once the station minister of GKS Lagos decades earlier.

    This moment was in the 1980’s, and he mused on the transformation of the city. In the 1960’s, he said, you walked the streets of Lagos alone and when someone appeared on the horizon, you adjusted until he or she came within touching distance. But everything had changed in the 1980’s, the streets bustled and people milled and bumped into and jostled past each other. Melee had replaced a tranquil street.

    That was a Lagos where Aboru or Iyana Ipaja or Abule-Egba sounded like Madagascar, far in the Milky Way, and outside the ken of familiar chatter. Lekki was alien and roosted as neighbour to an asylum. The late Chief Hope Harriman, the real estate mogul, once reflected on how he compelled his friends to obtain properties in Ikeja, now a highbrow part of the city.

    Yet, when Cyprian Ekwensi wrote his debut novel, People of the City, many thought he painted the quintessential Lagos. Yet he wrote of the 1950’s, the one that Pa Adedokun knew and never romanticised. Yet, harlots, thieves, brigands, hustlers, bigots, opportunists, money changers inhabited Ekwensi’s Lagos. It was the big, bright Babylon.

    By today’s standards though, Pa Adedokun’s and Ekwensi’s Lagos are coy. They are a shrunken tree compared to today’s overfed wrestler. But Lagos was not the only city on the rise. Port Harcourt was daubed the “garden city,” because its roads and bridges nestled by a dazzle of plants and flowers and arboreal appeal. Kano was growing out of its feudal rut into a commercial hulk. Calabar, though in decline on account of Lagos’ ascendancy, still streamed with culture. Ibadan was where Awo tenanted his genius. Enugu was, like Constantinople of the 19th century, the star of the East. Even Kaduna clucked with political hauteur.

    Each of these cities held a special appeal to the Nigerian soul. I recall an essay by role model Roger Rosenblatt. In the essay he wrote for Time, he pondered the world’s iconic cities. He urged young ones to travel because each city is an instance of the human range. So, he mused on “the logic of Greece, the fortitude of London, the grace of Paris, a city for every facet of the mind.”

    But over the years, Nigeria is looking like a country running out of cities. The failure of the Naira, the plunder by our political elite, the years of locusts of bad governance are taking a toll on the cities. If Ekwensi wrote about a time when we had rural-to-urban migration, the migration of today is both urban to urban as well as rural to urban. The people are not flowing to all the cities, not Kano, or Calabar, or Port Harcourt, but principally Lagos.

    Statistics show that Lagos, which is turning 50, is third in the ranking of world cities receiving throngs of people daily. The reason is simple. It is the only vibrant state in the federation. But that glory is potentially a burden. If other states are not working, Nigeria’s alpha governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, is unknowingly becoming the Nigerian rescuer.

    Lagos is the state generating much money, embarking on disruptive infrastructure work, illumining the night streets across the state, embarking on a large-scale employment programme, reinvigorating the rural reaches while facing a homeless horde and increasing army of restless youths. The roads bear the weight of tankers and endless streams of automobile. From Oshodi to Abule-Egba to Lekki, the city is humming with work.

    With a little over a year in office, Governor Ambode has had to face the reality of a country in doldrums, and he presides over an island of relative prosperity. Like metal to magnet, people will move to Lagos and seek not only shelter but also treasure.

    In an age where most states wait, bowl in hand, for federal allocation, Lagos is generating its own money, is swirling with ideas, partnering with industry and international agencies, spurring its staff to industry and imagination, challenging the federal government to rise to the brilliance of one of its parts. Just as New York or California is a major world economic power in its own right, Lagos is a power in Africa.

    In a less dramatic way, Lagos is Nigeria’s Europe where people are fleeing their misery to take shelter. In the case of Lagos, no one is drowning in oceans from capsized rafts, nor are they facing visa requirements or xenophobic hysteria or referendums over whether to accept or reject them. Nigeria’s alpha governor’s success has even helped to mitigate the crisis in the nation. If a naïve and incompetent man mounted the saddle, the challenge would have escalated today’s economic crisis. What if Ambode failed to tackle early surge of crime with calculated deployment of men, resources and strategy, what if he has not tackled the traffic mayhem with imaginative tinkering with nodal points and bottlenecks in the city, what if streets crawl in darkness and criminals bloomed with bloodshed and robbery! Thanks to him, Lagos is the Cinderella of today’s governance.

    But the story of Lagos and its evolving staying power show that cities are about imagination. Big cities make great countries. New York came from a coastal settlement like Lagos and lifted the United States. Like Ekwensi’s Lagos, London was a grubby city once and full of slime, crime and grime. Charles Dickens created Oliver Twist in his novel of the 1830’s. The then Prime minister, Lord Melbourne, hated Dickens’ London of underworld crime and he complained to the queen. It is a different London today. Paris rose from a rural fiefdom, the rumble of revolution, Napoleonic swagger, a series of republics, and the shaping of the hands and dreams of architects. It tempered Hitler who could not destroy such a beauty. When Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway lived there, he wrote an all-time classic on the city, and called the book, The Movable Feast. Hear him: “If you are lucky enough to visit Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.”

    Lagos beckons and it is always a work in progress, and it has been the steadiest in all of the federation since 1999. It must remain so, but the federal government must understand that it needs Lagos to succeed. It should work to support it by giving it a special status not only in budget but other aspects of national planning. When George Bush Sr. was president, he gave a special status to China. He saw the future, and it is today’s burgeoning super power. If Lagos fails, Nigeria wobbles.

    Hence we must give kudos to the work so far done by Ambode. The work ahead is still enormous. Caesar Augustus once said, “I found Rome brick. I left it marble.” The road to a marble Lagos appears long, but with the sort of work and assiduity today, a marathon can be managed. One governor or one president, does not El Dorado make. But when they do well, their impact cannot be forgotten.

  • Of EFCC’s arrests and detention

    Given the pervasiveness of corruption in this clime, the task of getting rid of it cannot be considered a mean feat. This is apparent from the constant recourse to the catchphrase ‘corruption is fighting back’ each time anti-graft agencies are faced with institutional hiccups or strident criticisms on their methodology for prosecuting that war.

    But this disposition could also turn out a great liability. It could turn out a subterfuge on the part of officials of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and related agencies to trample on the rights of the accused and seek to justify that travesty hiding under such nebulous suppositions. No doubt, the fight against corruption is at the heart of the survival of this country.

    Yet, in this crucial battle, the rules must be very clear. The standards must be straight. Else unscrupulous officials begin to conduct themselves in ways capable of whittling down public confidence and support for the campaign. There are recent incidents that have raised the momentum for the re-examination of the roles officials of the EFCC play in the arrest; handling of suspects and disposition of issues before them.

    First is the raging controversy over the death of a former Chief Protocol Officer at the Ministry of Defence, Desmond Nunugwo while being detained by the EFCC for allegedly defrauding a businessman. Accounts from his cell mates indicated that Nunugwo took ill and died shortly after his detention, as he could neither assess his high blood pressure and diabetes drugs due to inability to reach his wife because the investigating officer went away with his phone. This has resulted in claims and counter-claims between the family, the EFCC and the police. And until the riddle is resolved, it will remain as a sore point in the handling of detainees in the custody of the anti-graft body.

    If this incident does not sufficiently illustrate the indiscretion in handling suspects by some officials, the purported arrest and detention of former governor of Imo State, Chief Achike Udenwa by the agency last week, should drive this point home more poignantly. In a widely publicized statement, the commission had said it arrested and detained the former governor and would have him arraigned in court soon.

    It claimed this was precipitated by the inability of Udenwa to keep to the terms of the administrative bail granted him in the case of the N350 million campaign funds allegedly collected from the former Director of Finance of the PDP Presidential Campaign Organization, Nenadi Usman. According to the commission, Udenwa reneged on the bail conditions which required him to report to the agency when he is needed to do so, thus necessitating the revocation of the bail.

    But Udenwa issued a statement shortly after in which he strongly refuted the claims by the anti-graft agency. He gave a brief but lucid account of his dealings with the EFCC. He said, by a letter dated May, 13, he had applied for and obtained permission from the commission to travel abroad for medical check-up. Following this, he said the commission released his international passport which it had been holding to enable him make the travel. A new date of August 13 was agreed upon by both parties. But it later turned out the date fell on a Saturday, a non-working day for the agency and had to be further rescheduled by both parties for August 18.

    On Tuesday August 16, he said while he was in Port Harcourt for the PDP convention billed for the next day, he got a call from his guarantor that he was required by the EFCC in Lagos the next day being Wednesday by 10am, which he obliged. But when he got there, he met another officer who immediately confronted him with the claim that he has deliberately and consistently refused to honor invitations and could no longer be reached.

    Udenwa said the allegations were shocking to him as all his dealings with the agency should be in their file. Moreover, that was the fifth time he was honouring invitations by the EFCC in Lagos without any instance of failure on his side. Following this sequence of events and the curious haste with which the matter was released to the media even when he still departed their office the same day, Udenwa sees the action as a premeditated one. He said he was compelled to put matters straight because the claims could portray him as an unreliable person who may have other motives for allegedly not honouring the invitations in addition to putting his guarantor in jeopardy.

    The issues raised by the former governor are as weighty as they are damn serious. They hinge on the credibility of the EFCC. The sum total of his case is that the claims bandied by the EFCC on which basis it issued a statement alleging he reneged on the terms of his bail by refusing to honour invitations and could no longer be reached are false. He went further to support that claim by chronicling all his interactions with the commission, the number of times he had kept scheduled appointments with no incident of failure.

    Since Udenwa brought these issues to the court of public opinion, the EFCC has not disproved them. One is therefore, left with the inevitable conclusion that his account of his dealings with the EFCC represents the true position. He has been able to sustain his claim that the EFCC may be propelled by motives other than serious commitment to the war against corruption for its action especially given the sequence of events that followed that Tuesday.

    And if one may ask, how did the officer he met that day arrive at the conclusion that he reneged on the terms of his bail and could no longer be reached? How come the commission granted him permission to travel abroad by releasing his international passport only for an official to turn round and bandy false allegations under which guise she claimed to have detained and would him arraigned in court? What of the indecent haste with which the story of his purported arrest and detention was leaked to the media even when the whole episode ended that same day? Was the media trial intended to embarrass and smear his image before the public or what? These are the issues to ponder.

    We raise these posers because of the conflicting signals they throw up on the credibility of some of the actions of those charged with the execution of the war against corruption. Incidents like this reinforce suspicions that unscrupulous officials can go to lengths to subject the war to ends that are less than ennobling.

    That is where the recent observation by President of the Nigerian Bar Association NBA, Augustine Alegeh that the “war against corruption must be fought within the ambit of the law and any attempt to fight corruption through other means is corruption”, cues in very appropriately. Before now, the Joint Action, Coalition of Civil Societies in Nigeria had feared that the war could be bastardized by the actions of corrupt officials within the EFCC. That is the real issue to watch.

    The other strand of the argument Udenwa highlighted was that the case is about money for the presidential campaign election as it concerns all states of the federation and not Imo State alone. He said that as the PDP presidential campaign coordinator for Imo State, he and others involved have explained the details of the expenditure as it relates to the state and he has nothing to hide.

    It is either the EFCC is satisfied with details of the deployment of the funds for the campaigns or it is not. Where it happens the money has been properly accounted for in the execution of the plethora of activities preceding that election, it is incumbent on the agency to let the matter go. But if on the contrary, it has evidence that the fund was not used for the purpose it was released, it is at liberty to take the appropriate line of action. That is the way out of the current game that miserably conveys the impression that there is more to the matter than the fight against corruption. But the EFCC owes a duty to explain how the presidential campaign fund for Imo State is remarkably different from those spent in other states that nothing is being heard of.

  • Father and son

    Father and son

    What intrigues writers and philosophers about King Oedipus was not just that he killed his father and married his mother. It was that he didn’t mean to marry his mother and kill his father. He meant well for his people and himself. Dramatists say he had a ‘tragic flaw.” As the play winds down, you feel sorry for the man as his impetuous flamboyance leaves him. He is onstage, tottering, wailing, blind, flailing, dying, and arriving at the knowledge of his epic folly.

    When our own Ola Rotimi adapted that play to Yorubaland, he called his work, The Gods are not to Blame, and up till today, critics still wonder what happened to the king. I, too, wonder today as I look at the political incarnation of father and son in conflict in Yorubaland today.

    More intriguing is that Jimi Agbaje will be the last to call Bode George father. Yet, not long ago, the evidence compelled otherwise. George sees himself in a regal way in PDP politics in Lagos. Therefore, anyone who wants to ride on the party ticket must first bow at his portal. So, when Agbaje pooh-poohed progressives to duel Akinwunmi Ambode for Lagos governor, he enjoyed George’s nod.

    Even while the gubernatorial battle wore on, tensions bled between father and son. Agbaje and his men had sniffed a victory. They began to share the spoils before the game fell. In their premature celebration, they plotted to sideline the former military officer and party wheel horse. George, on his part, baited him. Not knowing they would be pole-axed by the diligent former Lagos technocrat, both waited for the polls. They salivated in vain for victory. Ambode bested Agbaje. Father and son sulked in silence. George had promised to flee the land after a loss but his feet and wings froze in Lagos.

    Until a new game beckoned. The PDP looked for a party chairman. A storm started brewing between both men. Both are eying the meaty prize. No one is ready to relent. They are spilling blood in public. It is official: son has divorced father, and father is irate at the vaulting ambition of the son. It had not been a great relationship between father and son. They never witnessed Shakespeare’s wish: “when a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.”

    Son did not acknowledge father gave him a platform to run for office. But we are witnesses to how George invoked his regal might to checkmate another renegade known as Obanikoro or Koro. Koro knew he was rigged out of the helmsman’s position in the primaries. He invoked all the deities of party and society. He fought with money and law and influence. He lost.

    George saw a gladiator in Agbaje to fulfil his selfish dream to own Lagos. He knew he could not do it himself. He wanted his son to do it. He probably had read writer Frank A. Clark that “a father is a man who expects his son to be as good a man as he meant to be.” Agbaje sold his progressive convictions for a mess of ambition and sought to fell his foes that serially defeated him in the past. Father wanted to ride son and son wanted to ride father. No one had the opportunity to mount the saddle. Both had a common enemy in the APC in Lagos. But they were not friends enough to fight the enemy.  So, both fell and never laughed nor cried together in public. Rather, they are eating their own flesh. An Agbaje sees George as ‘agbaya’, while George sees Agbaje as wayward and prodigal, or “omo ti o leko” (a spoilt child). Youth scowls up at age; age drips with contempt. He may be lamenting like Shakespeare in his play, The Tempest, that “good wombs have borne bad sons.” That is assuming that he has a good political womb.

    The Agbaje-George slugfest reflects the existential duel within the bigger PDP. It is a battle between interlopers and the mainstays, between renegades and faithful, between old guard and new feathers, between the worms and the bones, between the moles and the moulding. It is a battle between two morally fetid enemies. The end is not good. With one convention after another clipped by the court, by a technically happy judge and another imperious judge, the PDP is fighting over a carcass. Ali Modu Sheriff, who was a renegade in the APC before the PDP governors called him to be a legitimate renegade, planted himself into a mainstay. He rebuilt the party when the governors like Fayose, Wike and Mimiko, could not. Now, they seem to have found their rhythm, and they want him out. They used him and wanted to spit him out. They are coming back to their own vomit.

    It is not different from the case of George and Agbaje. They made Agbaje a factor in Lagos PDP, and they want to flush out the worm. George is paying for his opportunism just as the bigger party is paying for bringing a flawed character like Sheriff, with all his Boko Haram baggage, to head the “greatest party in Africa.” They gave two carpet baggers, Sheriff and Agbaje, the main floor to dance, and they want to pull the rug underneath. There will be consequences. The party is paying for its self-indulgence and opportunism.

    It all shows that George does not know how to be a father and Agbaje does not know how to be a son. History and literature abound with clashes like this. James Baldwin in his opus, Go Tell it on the Mountain, where father Gabriel never confesses he is Royal’s father before he died. Okonkwo was never wanted to talk or be like his father Unoka in Things fall Apart. Elesin Oba and his son belong to two worlds in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, expertly performed with binary flavour at the Freedom Square by Crown Troupe recently. Or Turgenev’s Basarov who dies disavowing his father’s world in his novel Fathers and Sons. Literary artists, like journalists, are fascinated with such dramas when father fails son and vice versa. But the United States had founding fathers whose sons we see prosper from generation to generation up to Obama. It can work.

    But the bigger PDP is fighting a more potent father: its ghost. It is at war with what PDP used to be, a swaggering, corrupt, bullying behemoth awash with money. They are holding on to a carcass. Just like a scene in the novel, Revenant, where the protagonist in cold weather hollows out the inside of a dead horse and slips inside and turns the carcass into a sleeping bag.

    If Sheriff will hang around, the PDP will hang. He will not give up, and the courts are there to give him mercy. Eventually, they will understand that PDP is an expiring brand and each of them could form different parties. My wonder, though: If PDP wins in either Edo or Ondo, who will be the authentic governor? Shall we have an interregnum while the courts nod to one candidate today and another tomorrow?

    Perhaps the answer is with King Oedipus or filicide. If father kills son or son father, perhaps there will be peace. That may not be solution, though. We shall have peace of the graveyard.

  • Rape victim’s ordeal and police

    Reports of the abduction of Dr.Ime Stephen, uncle to the 15-year old school girl, Mary Udo, allegedly raped at gunpoint by a police Inspector in Akwa Ibom State, represent the apogee of the travails of the family since the rape incident took place.

    It is at once a dangerous development that calls for the immediate intervention of the Inspector-General of Police as insinuations are very high that the incident has an uncanny link with the rape saga.

    Before his abduction, Citizen Stephen had reportedly escaped assassination attempt at his village house at Nyaodiong, in the MkpatEnin Local Government Area of the state. He had also petitioned the state Commissioner of Police, Murtala Mani, alleging threat to his life, that of his family members, attempted arson on his new house and malicious damage of property.

    He also had cause to visit the CP penultimate Friday to complain of frequent attacks on him and how to get justice for Udo. Before his latest fate, the victim was pressing hard for the matter not to be swept under the carpet after refusing to accede to entreaties from some clergymen and police officers sent to him by the Divisional Police Officer DPO to let the matter go.

    Those sent to him by the DPO of the MpatEnin local government were said to have persuaded him to pipe down on the grounds that the incident was not only a big shame to the offending Inspector but the police establishment he represents. But as things stood, Citizen Stephen would not allow the matter go apparently in deference to the rape victim who had said “it was a harrowing experience. There is nothing on earth that would make me forgive the inspector”.

    The little girl’s feelings are understandable given that the inspector not only allegedly raped her at gunpoint while returning from church but detained her for three harrowing days and made the family to cough out N10, 000 before setting her free. That is the height of criminality unexpected of those paid with taxpayers’ money to protect the society. It is a big scandal that by now ought to have attracted deserved attention from the police authorities.

    It is bad a thing that a police officer of that rank could degenerate to such a bestial and criminal level of raping a school girl returning from church at gunpoint. Worse still, he also had the temerity to detain her for three days and forced the family to pay N10, 000 for her safety. These are enough to ruffle public sensibility in saner societies.

    In an issue as serious as this, the minimum expectation is for the accused to be made to face the full weight of the law without delay. But all indications have not pointed to this direction. For, it is about a month now the incident happened without the public being availed the benefit of any serious action taken against him. Rather, what we find is an attempt by the police to paper the matter as vividly indicated by the emissaries they sent to the victims’ uncle.

    Unfortunately, Udo’s family would not have such things covered up because it could encourage policemen to take laws into their hands in anticipation that the system would have a way of protecting them. This column identifies with the Udo family in condemning this singular rape incident and the lawlessness that followed. It cannot and should not be swept under the table. It is a very heinous offence with prospects of further denting the image and credibility of the police force.

    It is trite that the course of the police force will be better served when it distances itself from the criminal activities of its men and officers by taking decisive steps to discourage the resort to criminality. Even if the police had need to apologize to the victim’s family for the bestial treatment meted to their daughter, that should not in any way detract from the fact that the accused must still be made to pay for his sins.

    The accused inspector whose name up till now, is being shielded by the police should immediately be made to face the music for the unmitigated disgrace he is to the institution. That way, we will be sending the right signals that those who abuse their positions of trust for self-serving reasons will not go scot free. That is the lesson that must be underscored most poignantly in the instant case.

    Curiously, the abduction of Stephen has added another dangerous dimension to the matter. This is especially so given that before his latest ordeal, he had escaped an assassination attempt to his life. He had also alleged threats to his life, that of his family, attempted arson on his new house and malicious damage of his property. All these were documented in a petition he sent to the state Commissioner of Police CP.

    Ironically, not much is known of the response of the CP to these allegations before the man was finally abducted from his house by masked gunmen who broke through the wall from the backyard. Neither is there any evidence of the provision of police protection to the man in the face of the serial threats to his life and that of his family.

    And until the CP speaks on the latest development, the impression we get is that the command did not take seriously the copious complaints of the human rights activist. But if the police did not take seriously the issues raised in the petition, the abduction has shown very vividly that either it underestimated the weight of the matter or turned a blind eye to it for inexplicable reasons.

    For whatever reason, it is sad that the fears of Stephen have come true. If the police had taken the matter seriously, they would have responded positively by building some form of security around the Udo family. Had that been done, we would have saved the police institution the embarrassment of having to contend with the reality of this abduction despite repeated complaints and allegations of threats to life and property.

    That is the burden the police has to shoulder given the latest development. It also suffers vicarious responsibility of having to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that this abduction is not in any way connected with the family’s insistence that justice must be done in the case of the inspector that raped, abused and extorted money from the innocent school girl.

    There is no better way to demonstrated this than a quick apprehension of the marauding gang that abducted Stephen. With the smashing of the gang and freeing of the rights activist, we will be demonstrating to the world very unambiguously that the cries of the witch at night had nothing to do with the death of the child in the morning. That is the uncanny reality that has been elevated to the fore by the unfolding events surrounding that rape case.

    It is important that the police authorities get to the root of the matter to demonstrate very clearly that the current twist is not in any manner linked to the family’s insistence that the offending inspector must face the wrath of the law. A quick apprehension of those criminals will not only disabuse insinuations of complicity but further shore up the waning public confidence in the ability of the police to protect and treat information given to them with utmost confidentiality.

    We now run the risk of allowing the impression fester that those charged with the security of the citizens can trample on and serially abuse such privileges and get away with them. That is the point where the predicament of Stephen now leaves us. We must work to reverse this ruinous tendency by promptly apprehending the abductors and secure Stephen’s freedom. The IG must act now to extricate the police from it actions or inaction that led to the current pass. But nothing untoward should happen to Citizen Stephen.