Category: Monday

Anytime I contemplate the crisis in Rivers State, I inescapably see the impish finger of love. In the miniature crisis of that oil-rich state, I see the vaster arc of the story of love not only in our history but the history of the world. A nation is nothing without the roles of its romances, especially among its political and military elite.

The bedroom, in its sultry and solitary silences of moaning and pillow talks, determines the public square whether it is a matter of poverty and wealth, war and peace, gods and bigotry. From the martial age of the gladiators to the digital ardour of the computer, we are bound by love. But this is not always sweet savour. Love stories, in their best, can be tragedies.

Perhaps that is why poet Geoffrey Chaucer crooned: “who is so foolish as a man in love?” Shakespeare calls it “wolvish-ravening lamb” in the saddest of all love stories, Romeo and Juliet.

In all our history, we see love stories if we peer deeper. We just witnessed the death of a failed romance with the passing of Nelson Mandela. The Madiba, who conquered the great army of prejudice and cruised into a history as a star among the pantheons, could not conquer the very person who kept his spirit alive in 27 years of captivity: Winnie, his love.

He came out, emboldened a race to freedom, taught a world the power of forgiveness, tore down walls of hate and fear, but it was sad to read his confession a few years after Robben Island that Winnie never spent a night in his bedroom.

Yet, before he died, he did not blame the woman he divorced. They were physically apart, but he never knew the joy of life the way other men embraced it. His romance, purely political, belonged to the world and it had no blood or flesh in its content. Not that the love for Winnie was all sexual. He might have surmounted that. But its content was more vigorous, ineluctable and infinite. He could not grasp it with all the might of a lion that had become the Madiba.

So it is with all Nigerian stories. If Dame Jonathan did not have roots in Rivers State, and has not exhibited a proprietary attachment to Okrika, maybe Jonathan would not have fought so hard against the spirited Governor Rotimi Amaechi. Maybe if President Goodluck did not love his wife so much, he might not have allowed the gangster rage in the state. Also, some say maybe Timipre Sylva will be governor of his home state Bayelsa today, if Dame Jonathan did not show so much umbrage against the man.

We have seen Dame Jonathan speak with so coarse and authoritarian a pitch that few persons with an office backed by the constitution can. But with whose backing has she carried such reckless men as Wike and Bipi, if not with the understanding connivance of the man at the top? Take way the romance between them and peace will probably have found a way. Probably.

We cannot even forget that the name Nigeria was borne out of the romance between Flora Shaw and the first governor general of Nigeria, Lord Lugard. The lady, a fierce and influential columnist with The Times of London, suggested the name. That might not have happened in the board room of colonial power if she did not share the bedroom with the helmsman of the protectorates that became Nigeria.

We have read so much of the Nigeria civil war, and all we encounter are the gory passages of blood, bullets, ogbunigwe, hate and all the fierce follies of human ogre. Yet we can say that it all began with the crisis of the Western Region that pitted the grand, rimmed-spectacled Awo with the barb-tongued wit known as Akintola. While historians have besotted their tales with the ideological and ego dimensions of the male hubris, they leave aside the juicy interstices of romance. Few have documented the role of Faderera Akintola in prodding the premier to defy the party leader, Awolowo. Many stories have made the legend, including the one when she yanked the phone from her husband and spoke defiantly to Awolowo. She announced to the sage that they were in charge of the region and he should not hand orders to the premier her husband.

We know the Western Region crisis, with its ensuing state of emergency, snowballed to a national crisis. That propelled the five majors’ coup with its ethnic reverberation and its inexorable push into our war of brothers. Further back into history, was it not the love of Bayajida, the eponymous northern figure, that birthed some of the major cities of the North, like Kano, Kaduna, Zaria, etc., the Hausa Bakwai and Banza Bakwai. One man’s romance sired a race.

When IBB was head of state, he created Delta State as a homage to his beautiful wife, Mariam. Even though Warri was a natural choice for capital, he chose his wife’s hometown Asaba. Interestingly, as narrated in Emma Okocha’s book, Blood on the Niger, Mariam’s father was killed by the federal troops in the pogrom of Igbo in the Midwest. IBB reportedly met her in those days.

If not for that romance, the role of first ladies may not have been elevated to what it is today with some doing well and others turning it into a platform for Jezebel’s acts. Major Debo Bashorun’s recent book, Honour For Sale, unearths how the first lady wielded powers that the husband in all his military majesty could not rein in.

And it is not in Nigeria alone that we have witnessed this as Mandela’s tale proves. Winston Churchill exploited his mother’s American roots to persuade the United States to help it out of the enveloping genius of Hitler’s army in the Second World War. “I have a latch key to the American heart,” growled Churchill. In that same war, the British royalty suffered a moral setback when one of their own, King Edward, confessed to Nazism and was forced to abdicate his throne.

We cannot forget as well that we might not have the Anglican Church today if King Henry did not want to divorce his wife for a Boleyn sister. England had to cut away from Rome, and all the stories of heroes and villains of that era with Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey, etc., would not have happened. Plays like the Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons and the recent Booker Prize winning series by Hilary Mantel show how love stories never die. Mantel’s latest release, Bring Up the Bones, has come across as one of the best novels in recent times. Paris bred its own warm narrative with emperor Napoleon and his wife Josephine. Everyone except Napoleon thought she was beautiful, and he changed policies for her and even crowned her an empress.

In a multi-ethnic state like Nigeria, this tale is even more potent. The President, a Bayelsan, is married to a Riverian, and we see its consequence. It shows that love knows no boundary, and if it can help solder different peoples and states, it can also breed soldiers of hate. It is an asset we can use. If we look across the country today, a number of governors have such interconnected romances, either directly or not. Governor Suswam of Benue State has boasted about his Yoruba wife. Rotimi Amaechi has shown that his wife is from across the Niger. The ebullient Godswill Akpabio often reminds all that his wife is from Enugu State. The governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, has often spoken of his wife’s Urhobo connection and an Igbo nephew. The urbane Delta State Governor Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan is Itsekiri with strong Edo and Urhobo pedigrees. Asiwaju Tinubu’s wife, Senator Remi Tinubu, is Itsekiri and Sylva’s wife Alayingi hails from Ibibio. Tatalo Alamu explained that part of Akintola so-called quisling attidue may come from a romance of his parents to have northern blood. So the western crisis may have partial roots in romances between the families of those who went to war.

All these are products of romances in quiet disinterested pasts. That is why all those who champion ethnic causes in this country should note that when they birth a boy or girl they are not sure whether they will be a Suswam with a Yoruba wife, or an Akintola with roots that reach far into the north. A child born is a gift to the world, and you cannot guarantee what winds of romance will catch them. This is a love not, readers, for the Yuletide. Merry Christmas.

For former President Olusegun Obasanjo, letters are not only a therapy. They serve as a locus of power. He is not a great letter writer, but he writes with great zeal, pouring out the constructions of his emotions through his longwinded sentences.

With his stumbles, he is not an example of how to write a sentence. This is not the age of the letter, but of the text message and email, and they call for laconic entries. Obasanjo wrote an 18-page letter. But it was originally longer. Interventions of close friends and associates compelled him to prune it and defrock it of its libel and vaporous excesses. In spite of the editing and lawyerly emendation, the letter was irredeemable.

Great political letter writers of the past, like Lincoln, Churchill, even Zik and Awo, did not go into meaningless streams of consciousness and interior monologues. Rather they provided insights into their times and roles. Novelist and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow turned his character Herzog into a neurotic letter writer, who wrote to virtually every great mind dead or alive and contended with them on the issues of the day and their days.

Obasanjo has written to virtually every leader since he left power in 1979. Each letter lionised himself and valorised his time in office while mocking the doings of the man in power. Shagari, Buhari, Babangida suffered the most from his irreverent barbs. The only real leader he did not undermine with his epistolary bombs was himself. If he had some humour he might have written himself and titled it, Dear me, in the fashion of the autobiography of writer, filmmaker and comedian Peter Ustinov, who addressed the book to himself. If Obasanjo wrote a Dear Me letter, it might have been to tell the world how dear he was as a great leader, and would have lacked Ustinov’s laugh at himself.

Yet if you read the letter he wrote to President Goodluck Jonathan, you are bound to be in two minds. He lined up a series of weaknesses of the Jonathan presidency but he did not say anything new, except the charge that President Jonathan was arming assassins and had a list of enemies numbering over 1000.

The fundamental question arising from his letter is, who gave Obasanjo the moral authority to say what he said in the letter. He is guilty of virtually everything he said in the letter. He accused Jonathan of running an undemocratic party. He was guilty of that and it led to a move by governors to oust him. He accused Jonathan of supporting elements of other parties against his party as if he did he not do so. He even sponsored the formation of other parties. He said Jonathan imposed Tukur and could not bring peace to the party. Did he not do that in the time of Audu Ogbeh, and he had to subvert his reign?

He charged that Jonathan promised to govern for one term, but did he not seek a third term? He upturned an otherwise brilliant constitutional effort because he did not get his dream for presidential longevity. He had the effrontery to report at Mandela’s death that he asked Mandela to stay for a second term. Mandela had a superior sense of history and statesmanship.

He accused Jonathan of being insincere about his proposed confab, yet he mobilised state resources and men to organise a conference only to botch it over the third term fiasco. On corruption, he set up the EFCC and ICPC to hound his enemies. Now, he is accusing the president of presiding over a worrisomely corrupt regime.

On the issue of killers, Obasanjo’s time in office witnessed the killings of star politicians, and none of the culprits was earnestly investigated or convicted. Bola Ige was one of them.

But I say to myself, why did Obasanjo not start the letter by apologising to Nigerians since the letter was more to himself than to the president. He should have demonstrated remorse that he precipitated the problem of leadership in the past decade and half. His term in office never set a foundation with his bumbling in the area of leadership by example, fighting corruption, power sector, infrastructure and health. The naira plummeted significantly in his era and more people were out of job when he left office than when he mounted the throne. He also imposed on us two leaders. One was Yar’Adua whose physical debility was well known to him. This incapacitated him, the presidency and the nation with the gory tales of constitutional stasis that threatened the democracy. Two, he gave him a deputy he knew was inept and lacked the intellectual rigour for that exalted position. Nothing in his Bayelsa stewardship recommended him.

We suffer the consequences today as he has delineated in his letter. He did not have the humble virtue to accept his role in this tragedy. Rather, he wrote with divine delusion, asserting that God used him as an instrument to install Jonathan as leader.

It is clear Obasanjo wrote the letter not so much out of patriotism but because the son has murdered his father on the throne. It is the political equivalent of an oedipal clash. The godfather has lost grip of the godson. The father’s ghost is now bewailing the parricide in public. He admitted that he had written to him in the past, but Jonathan had ignored him routinely. He wrote that Jonathan had told him that next to God and his parents, Obasanjo was the most important in his life. Obasanjo is therefore jealous of the Clarks, Anenihs, etc, whose voices find the president’s ears rather than his.

So Obasanjo’s letter was not about Nigeria. It is like his previous letters. He wanted to draw attention to himself. It is like the lines in W.H. Auden’s famous poem, September 1st, 1939. The poem lamented those who crave what they cannot have, and that is “not universal love/ but to be loved alone.”

Yet, we have to admit that nobody could have made impact with that sort of letter in Nigeria like Obasanjo. It is a testament to the failure of our political class to throw up a personage of Mandela’s mystique that only a person like Obasanjo with all his moral baggage can write such a letter with credibility. I will say I am glad he wrote the letter. I am glad that he said all the things that his party apparatchik would not say, or what his opponents will say with less potency.

Yet, I am sad that I am glad he said them. I am sad that I am glad because he alone could have said them. Yet we need Obasanjo to provide evidence for the allegation of a killer squad, and the list of the over 1000 targets.

President Jonathan will do well to address the nation on all the issues raised. They are grave and several, some of them have been raised in the media and by his opponents. He should not dismiss them merely as a catharsis of a frustrated godfather. They have implications for this democracy’s survival, and his legacy if he cares.

When he eventually soared into silence, we were shocked even though we expected it. His health became a drama not of an impending tragedy, but a spectacular ending. The sort of ending Shakespeare described as “sweet sorrow.”

Many craved the chance for a last peep at the dying man, even if he was in a futile rage against his dying light. Throughout his life, we saw the fighter who was a man of peace. He wanted to avenge the white man but he became a reconciler of races. He had a bad temper, but he lightened the world with his supernova smiles and his torso dances with children, if ungainly. Unlike his contemporaries, he did not die in office so he could live in the hearts of his people. He was the one who first invited his foes to dinner and then to share power. Later they shared the Nobel Prize. A statesman who felt cold comfort in a politician’s robe. A revolutionary with royal bona fides. He had every reason to be bitter, but he became a proselytiser of one world. A Samson in battle, a Solomon in council. Heroic and stoic.

He forgave everyone who in 27 years stole his vital years, a law career, the pride of family, gregarious bliss of friendship. He became an inmate, menial labourer, active vegetable, loner, wearer of shorts, mine worker, hewer of water and wood, an innocent in jail, at the beck and call of his white accusers.

He returned bigger than his superiors, became president, a statesman, citizen of the world, an activist for the world’s ravaging disease, a concert organiser, a host of presidents and students, and by the time he turned 95, he had morphed from human to a saint, from villain to champion. The pugilist who never relished an uppercut except against injustice, who never wept because they damaged his tear-duct at a salt mine, who hid his quiet solitude at not really having a traditional, stable family, who adopted the world as family. The man after turning 95 had become, in his odyssey from apotheosis to apotheosis, the most towering figure of the past 50 years. In company with such colossi as Churchill, Roosevelt, Lincoln, he belonged to the ages. So when Nelson Mandela died last week, we were relieved of the angst of expecting. We were taken out of our misery.

“Anticipation is more potent than surprise,” wrote poet Samuel Coleridge. It was a great and delicious misery. Never was a death so expected, and never was its arrival so celebrated. A celebration so solemn as the man.

Yet it is his death that strikes me in this column, and I use it to tell the story of Nigeria. I wondered, if we had a Mandela here, if we would have called for a national conference. He emerged from jail to face a South Africa on the verge of what many called a civil war. He faced ethnic suspicions, racial tension, intraparty fission, elite disarray, ideological warfare. His freedom had caged his country in chaos. He needed to bring them together.

Many say that was his greatest legacy, he who grew up a man of feuds became the symbol of one South Africa. In his death, that is the envy of every testimony. He acted “with malice towards none and charity to all” according to another reconciler, Abraham Lincoln, who wove heroism out of the throes of division.

It is the tragedy of us as a nation that we have never had a personage like him in all our history. Not even Herbert Macaulay, with all his nationalist grandeur, left this world with enough heft to hold very ethnic group in awe. All our heroes have been ethnic heroes, and all of them died ethnic champions. We have never had a truly Nigerian hero, one who fired our imagination unsullied by tribe or faith.

The closest would have been Nnamdi Azikiwe, who, after taking over the mantle from Macaulay, rose in stature, and fired our zeal as a polyglot liberal with easy charm and warm diction and bonhomie. But he lacked the moral stamina, first when he had to deny the partisans of his movement and ran away into hiding when he thought the colonial lords hunted him. He also could not rise above Chief Awolowo’s Action Group’s corralling of his NCNC footprint in Western Nigeria. It denuded him of the chance to be premier. Rather he paid Awo back in his ethnic coins by ousting Eyo Ita. So the Zik of Africa had shrunken into the Zik of Igboland. In the Second Republic, he presided over the NPP that was essentially an eastern advocate. When he died, after his nine lives, he was seen principally as an Igbo icon. Although we pretended it was a National burial, just as Ojukwu’s, the Igbo saw his funeral and the approbation of his life as principally theirs.

Of course the passing of Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, enmeshed Nigeria into its sanguinary chapter we call the civil war. He was unabashedly a northern imperialist with regal hauteur and a sense of entitlement to Nigeria for the North. His death was mourned mainly in the North. Nzeogwu might have thought he was doing an anti-feudal good, but he ended up with a profile of slayer of a people’s beloved. It made Nzeogwu a tribal champion.

For Awo, he had an austere pose, an almost ascetic grandeur. He was the most profound, methodical, and visionary of any leader we ever had. The greatest Nigerian ever, he crafted templates that all the other regions followed for governance. Few can doubt his role in turning the Western Region into a place of wealth and envy. Paradoxically when Awo died, it was not essentially a Nigerian death. It was a Yoruba death. Awo’s role in stealing Zik’s thunder in the West has irritated the Igbo up till today, so also were his assertion about starvation as a legitimate weapon of war. We cannot forget the oporoko and second hand clothes speech, or when he sent a Yoruba man to Sokoto to represent UPN at the polls even though the party had Hausa.

Achebe, no icon in that regard, described Awo a tribalist. A nation lives the way it mourns. In each of the deaths, the Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo saw them as the heroes, as their special tragedy. Each tribe was an exclusive club of mourners, jealous of their funeral woes and tears, their magnificent misfortune. The deaths of our icons have followed the big three patterns noted above. All the whites and black tribes, and Indians and other Asian indigenes of South Africa saw Mandela above the parochial traps of tribes and race. None of our leaders has been seen to have flown of their primordial cages. Perception is the problem. We don’t trust or even forgive.

It calls for extraordinary statecraft, an ability to persuade by words and deeds, by character and symbolism. We are not Nigerians yet. In many states, politics of ethnicity has ruptured prospects of harmony.

Mandela did not organise a national conference. He did it by example. This is the way our political elite should grow. United States President Barack Obama cannot build a coalition like Mandela partly because of his race and partly because of his inability to connect with people on an emotional level. This Mandela had aplenty. He combined a mystique of moral grandeur, a playful humanity, deep empathy to bring people to his side.

We want leaders who have mastered the “other,” a Yoruba or Hausa leader who can feel the Igbo deep in his bones the way President Clinton warmed to blacks in the US. Or an Igbo leader not ensconced in his tribal cocoon.

When they die, and all Nigerians mourn, then we have that sense. Gani Fawehinmi inspired close to that pathos, but he was an activist, not a political leader. Such a leader would not fall to narrow cant or tantrums, but will contain the Nigerian multitude, like Madiba did his people.