The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

  • Court and conmen

    Court and conmen

    Ghost tsetse flies yielded their toxins to the court air. It infected young and old, big heads and small, politicians and lawyers, snoring SANs, governors and ministers, shut-eyed journalists. They turned heads clockwise and the other way. Their minds clocked out. Some nodded for stress out of stress. The most comic stiffened ramrod, eyes closed, heads immobile, like some sort of electrocuted zombies. Absent Obi. Absent Atiku. We were deprived the chance to know how they dozed. Vice President Kashim Shettima did not oblige the toxins, his eyes flapping and basking in their victory laps.

    But afterwards, Atiku’s and Obi’s eyes trembled with fury at the judiciary. Apparently hurt, they are hurtling to the Supreme Court. They may have to explain what the tribunal said about their con games. The judges said the petitioners gave promise without premise, advanced premise without evidence, evidence that stretched credibility, facts without figures, names without places, identities without names. They accused the president about certificate but presented a witness as expert without a certificate, and a copycat mathematician. How do you expect a primary to pick a vice president when the law did not say that. Was that not puerile. How do you want to make Abuja citizens democratic royalty? It makes their 25 percent into 100 percent if you could win 36 states and lose but fall short of 25 percent in FCT.

    What was the point of saying you had charts and tables attached but they were nowhere in sight? Why say votes were inflated and you had no figures? No mathematical explanation. No addition or subtraction. How did they want the judges to know? How did you present somebody as Amazon expert only for the fellow to have no letter of employment? What of the fellow who came as polling agent and said he visited about 20 polling units after results were computed at his own. So, he stopped time like the Old Testament miracle in the 20 polling units so he could visit them one after the other?

    You say polling units suffered irregularities without naming them. How do you turn hearsay into facts. You have three weeks to get your witnesses together, and you fail. When the proceedings are in full steam, you smuggle them in. Is that judicial 419?

    In trying to prove rigging, they revealed themselves as riggers, and what amateurs at the game! All eyes on the riggers. Obi deployed a phrase, “coterminous with justice.” The word simply means sharing a common boundary. Coterminous is not synonymous. If Obi wanted coterminous, it won’t help him. A neighbour is no resident. I wonder who the speech writer was.

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    The frauds are shouting fraud in court. Before the polls, the Labour Party acknowledged it did not have polling agents in wide swaths of the country. So how was it going to prove fraud in those areas? It must only depend on imagination. If Einstein said “imagination is more important than knowledge,” he did not mean fiction, he being a scientist himself. He meant imagination enriches knowledge. Knowledge precedes imagination. Hence, the Poet Shelley called for powers to imagine what we know. Elupee did not know. It merely imagined votes. That breeds fiction.  To bring fiction to court is fraud.

    As for Atiku and PDP, they had the resources and personnel to deploy agents in all the over 700k polling units. As veterans of elections, you do not only prepare for polls but also after. The big parties prepare funds to tackle post-election challenges, including funds to pay lawyers. With all the agents across the country, how could you not within a week get all the voting documents together and sort out discrepancies and inconsistencies?

    The PDP elite  know the facts from their agents. The facts disappointed them because they lost. Hence, they sought a crooked way out: exploit SANs to dazzle the bench. Their quest for IREV and electronic transmission is red herring. Is IREV not based on concrete voting and the forms filled by their agents? Is that not why the electoral law states that the INEC should choose its own options for releasing the results?

    The so-called Obidients set up an online portal to collate in real time the results of the polls across the country. When the numbers favoured Tinubu, they shut down immediately. Let them deny it.

    Lawyers who say it is impossible to prove a presidential case, deny history. It was done in a number of states in this republic. Have we forgotten how Kayode Fayemi, Rauf Aregbesola, Adams Oshiomhole and Olusegun Mimiko became governors? There was mathematical with forensic rigour. They sifted polling unit after polling unit. Additions and subtraction yielded numbers that judges could assess. It was their agents who made the forms and facts available. If we can do it in states, why not extend it nationwide? And they predated the age of IREV and digital speed. This essayist did minus and additions of Ekiti polls on this page and some accused me of prejudging the case, or taking the wind out of the prosecution. In the same way, some people wondered over my last week’s essay if I knew the verdict beforehand. They are venting their frustrations. I knew nothing better than the average Nigerian.

    I followed the proceedings that hollowed out Obi and Atiku. The obidients cut clips and video vignettes out of context and fed their folks. So, they raised hopes based on nothing.  They erected their own echo chambers.

    I also pity the greed of its lawyers who flatter the secret hopes of Obi and Atiku, especially Atiku. One of the petitioners’ lawyers was copiously quoted in court. Did he feel flattered or chastened? He had warned in his book that a lawyer must follow all the rules, including amassing all documents within time. The judges mocked him for not abiding by his own precept. Remember Isaiah, “precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little, there a little.” The scripture was teaching how we should be faithful to our written word.

    It is lawyers like those of the petitioners that prompted Shakespeare’s character with the madcap name Dick the Butcher in Henry the VI to say, “the first thing we do, let’s kill the lawyers.” The bard meant it in irony. But the point has never been lost on those who loath legal shysters. Jesus did not mince words when he proclaimed, “Woe unto you, Lawyers, for you have taken away the key of knowledge.” We know some SANs who make a case for one politician and take the opposite position for another. It is Janus-faced.

    Obi knows he can’t win in court. He is keeping the hopes of his rabid folks on the burner. He needs the movement. They fetishise his name and hallow his halo. He enjoys the idolatry. Obi cons his folks that he is selling democracy but he is retailing his own ego and ambition. Give him some credit. He speaks with practised charm, even if he could not transport his razzmatazz to the court. False stats about China cannot prove you won a polling booth. Such folksy bravura has its limits.

    During the campaigns, Obidients were told, including on this page, they were Tinubu’s ticket to victory but they jeered. Obi was APC’s hero. Ross Perot’s followers gifted Clinton the same grace against George Bush. Bush never forgave the billionaire with a southern twang. I likened the Obidients to Asahel’s folly in the Bible who ran, like Fela’s joro jara joro, without looking left or right in spite of warning until he rammed into his death.

    The same thing took them to court. They wanted to translate social media delusions into electoral truth. As Apostle noted, they are “ever learning but never coming to the knowledge of the truth.”

  • Soun, Christ and the gods

    Soun, Christ and the gods

    Such has been written about the Soun of Ogbomoso and how he swapped his cassock for an Oba crown. I congratulate him, and even would celebrate with him if I knew him. What I cannot accept is the view that being an oba or traditional ruler is somehow in consonance with Christ. Not in my Bible. Traditional religion has its own glory, but it has no embrace with the Christian faith. Any pastor who claims it is pharisaic and a liar. Peter wrote about a royal priesthood. But the royalty of Christ does not rhyme with an earthly thrown. It is not about the Soun alone. It is all across the country. Our traditional crowns are not the Christian crown of righteousness. They come from ancestor worship. They pay obeisance to gods and spirits. Any rite it performs, its dances, its costumes, its chants, its food, et al, are rooted in a form of worship. We may coat it with linguistic finesse and say we went to school, and we have disavowed the gods. But they follow the same rites to enter the crown. The priests and queens of the palace gods still have their place. The faithful in the kingdoms still thrive. The king cannot banish them. Even if you build a church in the palace, you are only involved in compromise. Can two walk together unless they agree? Asked Prophet Amos. The witch of Endor could not invoke Prophet Samuel, only a semblance of his beard. Hence Paul said: “No wonder Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” The same Paul said: “Come out from among them and be ye separate.” It is not my place to say a person was called by Christ or not when he decides to put away the calling. Syncretism is part of our history, hence our cultures absorbed Islam and Christianity. Those who have read Fagunwa’s A Forest of a Thousand demons see the dynamic. If it is accepted that a Christian faith can work with a traditional crown, it is cultural triumph, not a mystical truth of the Christian scripture. It is like the conundrum from philosopher Nitzsche about “the Roman Caesar with a soul of Christ.”

  • Exit of Mr flag man

    By Femi Macau

    Oddly, the designer of Nigeria’s flag, Michael Taiwo Akinkunmi, received the country’s national honour more than five decades after he designed the significant symbol. The delay was inexplicable and inexcusable.  The national honours were instituted four years after the flag was officially hoisted on Nigeria’s Independence Day, October 1, 1960, in replacement of the British Union Jack. The honours are for Nigerians who have rendered service to the benefit of the nation.

    After a campaign by Nigerians who felt he deserved a national honour, Akinkunmi was eventually honoured by his country in September 2014, under the President Goodluck Jonathan administration. He received the national honour, Officer of the Order of the Federal Republic (OFR), and was also symbolically appointed as a salaried honorary life presidential special aide. He was 78 at the time and a retired civil servant.

    He was in his early twenties when he designed the flag in 1959, after stumbling upon a newspaper advertisement calling for the submission of designs for the Nigerian flag ahead of the independence of Nigeria from British rule in October 1960. He was then studying Electrical Engineering at Norwood Technical College, now known as Lambeth College, in London.

    He said in a published interview: “I took details of what is expected to design a flag that would be used by a country that was about to witness independence. I took part in the competition and my design was selected as the best.”

    His design was a vertical white band with a radiating red sun, which was flanked by two vertical green bands.  It was selected from among about 2,000 entries as the winning entry because of its ingenuity and profundity. He got 100 pounds for his effort. The judges, however, removed the red sun, leaving only a green-white-green design for the national flag. The green colour signifies agriculture; the white colour stands for unity and peace. 

    It is striking that he won the flag design contest, which can be described as an art competition of sorts. As an electrical engineering student, he made an enlightening statement that artistic talent was not necessarily exclusive.   

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     He was reported saying, “I was well known all over the place. Everybody was calling me Mr Flag Man.” After his education in the UK, he returned to Nigeria in 1963 and rejoined the civil service in Ibadan. He had been employed by the government of the Western Region after he left Ibadan Grammar School (IGS) in 1955. He retired as a civil servant in the early 1990s.

    Interestingly, it can be said that he became anonymous after some time, until one Sunday Olawale Olaniran, then an undergraduate at the University of Ibadan, helped to put him back in the spotlight. Olaniran, who called him a “hero without honour,” was doing research on Nigeria’s history for a pamphlet when he decided to search for the designer of the country’s flag.

    “People said he was dead, that I should forget about looking for him and just write about the flag,” Olaniran was reported saying.  But he kept searching until he found the flag designer in Ibadan.  Akinkunmi was said to be living alone, and lacking proper care.  When they met, according to a report, Olaniran said he “was incoherent and kept talking to himself.”

    The researcher was moved to tears. “So, I got in touch with a journalist and we went back two days before Independence Day,” he said. “Even the journalist couldn’t believe the man was still alive.”

    Akinkunmi was a pensioner, but his pension payments were irregular, the researcher said, adding, “Some Nigerians went to him and donated foodstuff, clothes.”

    When the story of his sad situation appeared in The Sun on October 1, 2006, Olaniran said, it attracted the attention of many Nigerians who were unaware of his plight.  Two years later, in 2008, Olaniran was contacted through his blog by a representative of the organisers of the Nigerian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, who wanted to get in touch with Akinkunmi. 

    He later appeared in a special edition of the TV show, and got a cheque for two million naira. His son said the money “given to him by the telecommunications giant, MTN, when he was a guest on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in 2008,” enabled him to complete the building of his house in Ibadan. The house, painted in the colours of the Nigerian flag, made a strong statement about its owner.

    His eventual inclusion in the list of national honours’ awardees in 2014 was the climax of a difficult journey to deserved recognition.  It was a long road to that juncture.

    In June 2021, Akinkunmi unveiled a Nigerian flag described as “the world’s largest national flag” at an event at the Polo Ground, Jericho, Ibadan. The organisers of the event stated that they had begun the process to get the Guinness World Records to certify the said record.  The flag covered an area of 3,275.6 square metres, a length of 75.3 metres and a width of 43.5 metres. Before the event, the Guinness world record for the largest flag was held by the United Arab Emirates, and covered an area of 2,448.6 square metres.

    He said at the event: “I have always dreamt about Nigeria being at the front of every good thing and I’m delighted to be part of this historical event.” It was a testimony to his place in history as the designer of the Nigerian flag that he was at the centre of the unveiling of the country’s flag in pursuit of a world record.

    The Chief of Defence Staff of Nigeria at the time, Gen. Lucky Irabor, who made a surprise appearance at the event, highlighted the significance of the country’s flag, saying, “Let us always remember that the flag is not a mere symbol of Nigeria, it is a symbol of a United Nigeria. Let us work together for unity and love in the country.”

    Akinkunmi’s exit on August 29, aged 87, prompts a look at Nigeria’s history since its independence in 1960 when the flag he designed became the country’s flag. The country has witnessed ups and downs, but the green-white-green flag is unfaded.

  • NBS 4.1% jobless data: Myth or reality?

    NBS 4.1% jobless data: Myth or reality?

    t is not for nothing that recent data from the National Bureau of Statistics NBS, which put unemployment rate in the first quarter of this year at 4.1 per cent stirred up the hornets’ nest. Not only is the figure at variance with known trends in the country’s unemployment market, the abrupt drop raised more challenges than it was meant to resolve.

    In its Nigerian Labour Force Survey (NLFS) released last week, NBS said the figure is the outcome of recalibration in methodology using the standards set by the  International Labour Organization ILO and not that the government had performed better.

    The new survey methodology classified employed individuals as those who are working for pay or who profit and who worked for at least one hour in the last seven days. NBS said the figure aligns with the rates in other developing countries where work, even if only for a few hours and in low-productivity jobs, is essential to make ends meet, particularly in the absence of any social protection for the unemployed. It also bears close semblance with the figures in neighbouring countries- Ghana (3.9 per cent), Niger (0.5 per cent) Chad (1.4 per cent) and Cameroun (4.0 per cent).

    Going by this configuration, Nigerians are classified as gainfully employed if they worked for at least one hour in the last seven days even if the pay they received is not a living wage. This would at once sound absurd going by the peculiarities of the Nigerian labour market.

     Not unexpectedly, the new figure has attracted a deluge of criticisms with the immediate past Statistician General of the Federation/ Chief Executive Officers of the NBS, Dr. Yemi Kale leading the campaign. He picked holes with the one hour benchmark instead of the 20 hours previously adopted in calculating the unemployment rate in the country.

    Kale said he resisted the pressure during his tenure to reduce downwards the minimum number of hours to count as being employed on two counts. The first was based on the fact that the income generated within one hour was not necessarily a living wage while the other relates to the glaring inadequacies in deploying data so generated for general planning purposes.

    The 20 hours was decided because “if you work for that duration, you might be able to generate enough income that might sort of equate to what working one hour in the US is. Then you have a bit of more comparison”, the former NBS chief said. This makes better sense.

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    But the spokesman of the NBS, Wakili Ibrahim surprisingly launched a diatribe on the person of Kale seeking to discredit his tenure for daring to question the new calibration system. Though the NBS dissociated itself from Ibrahim’s invective as personal to him and not the official position of the organization, it came as a huge disappointment that Ibrahim left the substantive issues only to hurl personal insults.

    It is not just enough for the organization to dissociate itself from that poor outing of its erring staff, he needs to be reprimanded for the vituperation he heaped on the informed observations of the former NBS boss. At the least, he owes him apology for speaking in the very careless manner he did.

    But his harangue did not resolve in any significant way, the salient objections raised by Kale against the new parameter for calculating the unemployment rate. Not with the facts of the unemployment statistics on the ground.  Not with extant data released by the organization in the fourth quarter of 2020 which put the unemployment rate at 33.3 per cent.

    That figure placed Nigeria second in a global list of 82 countries monitored by Bloomberg along their unemployment standing. Namibia led in the unemployment list with 33.4 per cent while South Africa placed third after Nigeria. Key indicators including a report from KPMG estimates Nigeria’s unemployment rate at about 40 per cent with a projection that it could climb higher by the end of this year.

    Additionally, in its multidimensional report towards the end of last year, the same NBS had said 63 per cent of Nigerians were poor due to lack of access to health, education, living standards, employment and security. Before then, the World Poverty Clock had in 2018 rated Nigeria as the poverty capital of the world with 86.9 million of its people living in extreme poverty.

    Given the nexus between poverty and unemployment, it is startling that a country housing the poorest of the poor could all of a sudden, post unemployment data that compares favourably with those of the industrial and developed countries of the world. It completely lost sight of glaring disparities in working conditions, remunerations, purchasing power of different currencies and the standard of living in countries being so compared.

     Kale was on point when he observed the absurdity in comparing one hour pay in Nigeria with the US for instance. Is there really anything like one hour income in at least, the last seven days in our own clime? And what difference will such a meagre amount make in the life of the earner in a country where the average worker takes care of many non-working dependants?

     The new unemployment rate looks more of a myth. Sadly, this myth has been dressed as reality courtesy of a new parameter adopted by the NBS which classified employed individuals as those who worked for at least one hour in the last seven days.

    Apparently conscious of the limitations of the new parameter, NBS was quick to caution the government not go to sleep with the data as it does not indicate it has performed better in that sector. And we ask, if the data is not a good measure of the performance of the government in the unemployment sector, of what use is it then? That is the contradiction in adopting a methodology that is at utter variance with the peculiarities of our local situation.

    There are also issues with the sample adopted by the organization to arrive at the contentious figure. A sample that only relied on 35,520 households in a country of more than 200 million people cannot be said to be truly representative of the population.

     It is not just enough to plead that the new calibration aligns with the standards adopted by the ILO; neither does its allure lie in the argument that it conforms to the expectations of the World Bank or similar international institutions. What we should be craving for are country-specific guidelines that capture the unique situation in our country. Ironically, that is not the situation we are presented with.

    By what the NBS did, the new figure puts Nigeria in the bracket of countries of the world with the lowest unemployment rates in 2023 such as China 4.1 per cent, UK 4.15 per cent and USA 3.83 per cent. This paring is as ridiculous as it is deceptive given its glaring inability to isolate our peculiar job challenges to make for effective planning.

    We are exposed to the duplicity and inadequacies of the new method. Such pairing neither factors in wage disparities nor the yawning yaps in the development levels of the countries being so compared. Before now, the danger in sticking to economic and development models recommended by multilateral institutions irrespective of their suitability to our local situations had been eminently identified.

    That had been the driving force for agitations against the deregulation of the oil sector and the floating of Naira at the foreign exchange market despite promptings from multilateral organizations. Nigerians have since been living with the harsh realities of the two policies.

    Their capacities to further drive more of our people down the lowest rung of the poverty ladder have been manifest in spiralling inflation and untold hardship unleashed on the people. The situation will further swell the army of the unemployed and render worthless the new job projection by the NBS.

    If the NBS is serious to produce reliable data to aid policy makers defuse the unemployment time bomb, it must discard the new calibration system which classifies one hour work at least, in the last seven days as employment. One hour work is patently alien to our system. Its adoption can only produce counterproductive outcomes.

  • Atiku, Obi lost cause

    Atiku, Obi lost cause

    Pity Atiku. The court afforded him time. But he chose to fight like a beast scratching the air. He pushed his lawyers, SANs all, out of the fray. It was a tag team match in the ring, featuring Atiku Abubakar and Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

    But what an anti-climax. Rather than pounce like a Doberman, Atiku took the battle head-on with the stumbles of a charging ram. His grief was to look for what was not missing in a certificate. The Chicago State University had said President Bola Tinubu is a graduate. He wanted to look for other things.

    Credit him. He has good eyes for spellings, dates, signings and pictures. He noted that the school might have made mistakes. But his eyes lacked focus. But the issue was not whether he was a student. He did not address the fundamental matter. Did Tinubu attend CSU? If he spotted mistakes, who to blame? I think Atiku Abubakar should have sued CSU. It is they he has trouble with and not the fellow who went to school.

    And if he sues, he would be, not Tinubu’s foe, but advocate. He would save Tinubu the trouble of a court itinerary, of the discriminating itch of picking SANs or American lawyers, or expending dollars to restore the purity of his nomenclature and the sanctity of his paper certificate.

     He could not raise hairs over whether he was an honour student, attended classes or wrote exams. Without knowing it, Atiku has become a fighter for the Tinubu cause. He is a quintessence of the parable of the enemy being at peace with one.

    So, Atiku could become a certificate revolutionary. He could teach the university how not to make mistake with a certificate. Rather than being men who fought in election trenches, he and Tinubu could become pals who taught Americans how to write certificates. But it is nothing new in the Universities as a recent report says one out of 10 certificates show one form of error or another, including grades.

    Especially with a name like Tinubu and not Tom or Jerry. He could add another charge: Racism in spelling names or certificate racism. Has he heard how their broadcasters call African athletes in their country? Roll back tapes and hear how they pronounced Olajuwon, Okoye, Okafor or Adebayo, and he will have abundance of material for his bloodhound of SANs.

    In the case of Atiku versus Tinubu, the issue is not whether he was there or whether he graduated. If it was a clerical error, maybe Atiku should sue for clerical error. It is not Tinubu’s headache.

    Suing CSU is the only way he could have made something out of his adventure. For one, the case has closed in court and everyone is waiting for the verdict. He has no more prayers. If he goes to court, is he going to say the man did not go to the school? Or is he going to be the first person who had certificate errors?

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     What Atiku is doing is what American historians describe as the lost cause. It refers to the southern partisans of the American civil war, who would not accept that they lost the war. They keep hiding under the so-called folksy charm of the south. They romanticise black servitude and deny the tyranny of the slavery era. They propagate antebellum beauty and the superiority of their soldiers. They even say they did not fight the war to keep slaves. They merely wanted to assert a federalist principle. They twist it as state’s rights. They exploit such delusion to fight to upturn racial equality today. At a Mississippi rally, Ronald Reagan proclaimed, “I believe in state’s rights.” A code for white supremacy. The KKK and Donald Trump are a product of that depraved conscience.

    Not for them the modern credo of human equality. That It is not Atiku’s problem alone. He is often backed by the war cry of Obi’s supporters. They are twinedtwinned and twined in self-delusion. Atiku is a lone ranger vouchsafed to a populist rabble. Evidence is not material. They believe. It is faith without work, or faith without facts.

    While the rabble kept saying they won the election, they also called for the army. They parroted lies about Tinubu’s health, parodied to their own shame the fashion sense of then candidate Kashim Shettima until they exposed how old-fashioned they were. They latched on to certificate anxiety and drug apocrypha and called the university so many times that the school developed a standard response to their hysteria. They thought if they called many more times, someone would say he did not know the school.

    Atiku did not want to miss the train. He then issued a statement without evidence that President Tinubu was mounting pressure on the judges. Had he even taken time to examine whether his lawyers made enough case for his own victory? Maybe he did and discovered his SANs had a feeble offering at the Presidential Elections Petition Court (PEPC). Hence, he hollered at CSU for one last card.

    In the same breath, Obi’s men continue their melee. They were looking for blackmail. They threw ads saying ‘all eyes on the judiciary.’

    But they don’t want to win. They love a loser’s ecstasy. They love their misery as wannabe. It gives them vim and dynamism. It puffs their egos as phony intellectuals. They mistake rap for rhapsody. It is a masochist paradise. It is like pain without a pain killer. But pain is its own killer pill. In the paradise, they grieve, rant, squirm and rage. They illumine the darkness of their intents with deceptive glow, to skew narratives.

    It is the physiognomy of failure. It is not like Okonkwo or Oedipus, who saw death and craved it. Or the protagonist of Gabriel Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, who spends his whole life waiting for the husband of his obsession to die. They, at least, have wish fulfilments. End gives apotheosis. It will embalm their heroes and sheroes. But Atiku and his Obidients crave an epic in search of great men and women, a tale without end.

     They want a Sisyphean bliss, and they will keep getting almost there. Just like profitless adventures of Willy Loman in playwright Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman.

    It is the way of lost causes. We are seeing it with Nnamdi Kanu and his followers. The agitation is the success. Some of our clerics need such euphoric intoxication. They keep preaching for followers to keep hoping. It is such attitude that inspired a distorted reading of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, in a new book, Why the Bible Began by Jacob L. Wright. He writes about how the Jews wove failure into nobility and justify salvation with defeats. Their misery, especially with the Babylonian captivity, they sang the Lord’s songs in a strange land. According to Wright, they poeticise bondage. Even after Christ, Christians see the crucified and suffering Jesus instead of the risen Lord. In the epic The Iliad, Homer’s account of the fall of the Trojans beats that of the Greek triumph. He paints fallen Hector’s exploits as though a hero. In the same way, Obi’s folks and Atiku have turned pity into piety, despair into desire, the prospect of salvation into a salvo and savoir faire. Two baseball clubs in the U.S., the Red Sox and Chicago Cubs, found love among themselves for a century until they won. Victory deprived them of a fine illusion. Frank Sinatra sang, “Here’s to the losers, bless “em all.” In Paradise Lost, John Milton pens Satan into greater grandeur than Christ.

    The Obidients and Atiku will continue to guard and cherish their sweet melancholy, and even if they see victory, they would pray it never comes. And it won’t. They are like the main character in one of America’s classics, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence about the Gilded Age. The character spent all his life falling in love with his wife’s sister and another man’s wife. Decades later, when it is time to finally climb up the stairs to meet her, alone, he walks away.

  •  Shettima at Bookshop

     Shettima at Bookshop

    The sighting of Vice President Kashim Shettima at a South African Bookshop is making internet buzz. He sat, his eye popping between covers, like a student. Indeed, he is. It is what few know about him. When he was governor, his media aide, Isa Gusau, had lamented in an article that he had expected to follow his boss to the fancy shoe and fashion stores in Germany only to end among the scents and shadows of bookshelves. I sighted him once at a bookshop at the Murtala Muhammed Airport.

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    We can muse on leaders and books, but no leader who does not read can engage his duties. Leadership requires cerebral light. President Tinubu also devours books, and I know  as president he will find time for that. It enriches perspectives, whether to appoint a youth, to recalibrate an economic idea, to put an event or policy in perspectives, to handle a character conundrum. There should be no limit to what to read. ”Read only history,” Napoleon was quoted as telling some of his men. But he read everything from Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great to the poets and even English novelists. A man once eyed Babatunde Fashola’s official car as governor and recounted the books the governor was reading. Obama intrigued America with his reading list. Before him, John F. Kennedy, who popularised the James Bond series, was reported to have finished a tome overnight before deciding on the Cuban nuclear crisis with Soviet Union. He was enamoured of his predecessors who read. When a group of Nobel Prize winners gathered for dinner at the white House, he quipped, “This is the best gathering of brains in the history of the White House except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Jefferson loved his books. When his home caught fire, he asked, “Was not any of my books saved?” that was all he cared about. Another predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, always had a book on his table, and he was notorious for reading between meetings and tasks. Simon Bolivar, regarded as the George Washington of Latin America, devoted his formative years with a mentor who made him read all the classics and study with avid zeal. Charles De Gaulle’s reading list was so fascinating that writers mailed him their new books. Churchill boasted that he read all the volumes of Gibbon’s The Decline and fall of Roman Empire. VP. Shettima may have turned our attention to something precious: Reading.

  • Shettima: Leader as reader

    Shettima: Leader as reader

    Two recent viral pictures showing Nigeria’s Vice President, Kashim Shettima, standing and sitting in a space defined by an abundance of books, grabbed my attention. The setting was a bookshop in Sandton, Johannesburg, South Africa.   

    “He wasn’t in a hurry,” according to an eyewitness who accompanied him to the bookshop, Gimba Kakanda, the lead consultant on public policy and politics at The Cambridge Collective.  In a published article titled ‘Book-hunting with Mr Vice President,’ Kakanda said he witnessed Shettima’s “unquenchable thirst for books, profound intellectual curiosity, and insightful perspectives on writers and subjects. These topics spanned domains ranging from economics and philosophy to the intricate realm of politics.”

    Their visit to the bookshop happened on the sidelines of the 2023 BRICS summit in South Africa, August 22 -24, where Shettima represented President Bola Tinubu.

    “Sometimes,” Kakanda narrated, “he would sit in between reads and then rise to proceed to other sections. Senator Kashim Shettima appeared to have an interest in almost all kinds, except for, by his admission, motivational books, which of course are mostly superficial philosophical projections.”

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    At some point, according to him, Shettima said: “You should read this book. It’s Mariana Mazzucato’s enlightening opus, The Value of Everything. She offers a caricature of capitalism and a penetrating take on the subject.” He wrote: “With gratitude, I accepted the book.”

     ”A personal philosophy” informs the way Shettima buys books in the cities he visits, Kakanda observed, and quoted him as saying, “You know the most accurate portrayal of a people or culture is found in the books you buy in their communities. Such books are the most credible reflections of their realities and experiences.”

    Buying books is one thing, reading them is another thing. “But even as the collection of books grew, I had no doubt he was going to read them,” the eyewitness said, relying on history. He recalled: “I had personally observed Senator Shettima‘s remarkable ability to devour substantial volumes within a day and yet retain every intricate detail. One particularly memorable instance of this occurred in 2018, following the public presentation of former President Jonathan’s memoir, My Transition Hours, which distorted certain events of his tenure as governor of Borno State.

    “Astonishingly, merely a day after the book’s release, he had not only completed reading it but had also penned a comprehensive critique outlining the inaccuracies it contained.” Kakanda added that he had been struck by “such a feat,’’ considering that Shettima was at the time governor of Borno State, and had wondered how he found the time to read the book.    

    Another fascinating narrative about the book lover, by another writer, caught my attention as I tried to find out more about this leader who reads. In an article published some days before Shettima’s inauguration as vice president in May, Olayinka Olusegun, a former journalist who is now a farmer in Shaki, Oyo State, supplied corroborative information.  ”I have known him for 22 years,” he wrote.

     He recalled how, in August 2004, Shettima had requested that he should help get two copies of a book by Sam Nda Isaiah, Selected Writings on Governance, Democracy and Statecraft, quoting him as saying, “I believe in the Nigerian project and we can make this country work someday.” He had visited him in his office at Zenith Bank, Maiduguri, Borno State.  This was seven years before he became governor of Borno State (2011 -2019), 15 years before he became senator, Borno Central (2019 – 2023), and 19 years before he became vice president in 2023.  The writer said he delivered the books “a day later.”

    Interestingly, he also provided further information that may partly explain Shettima’s remarkable interest in books. “Not many know about his humble beginning as the son of late Ba Shettima, a man who sells religious books at Monday Market in Maiduguri,” he stated.  

     Yet another gripping eyewitness account, by a different writer, reinforced the narrative of Shettima as a leader who reads.  Isa Gusau, his spokesperson as governor of Borno State, painted an illuminating picture of their visit to a bookshop in Oslo, Norway, in February 2017. Gusau was then Special Adviser on Communications and Strategy to the governor, and they were in Oslo for “a Humanitarian Donor Conference jointly organised by Norway, Germany and Nigeria.”

    His published article is titled “Oslo: The ‘pains’ of shopping with Gov. Shettima.”  He narrated: “Governor Shettima and I arrived at Paleet shopping centre, a famous mall at Karl Johans gate, opposite the royal palace of the Norwegian monarchy in the city of Oslo. As we walked into the mall, I began to see branded items: clothes, shoes, watches, perfumes, name them. The governor kept walking. I was wondering what else he wanted. I tried to bring his attention to the items, he said he saw them. He stopped by an information desk and asked where he could find a store called Tanum. The officials pointed in the direction. We finally located the place and guess what, it was a mighty bookstore.

    “On entering, the governor wore a cheerful face as if he had landed on a diamond. An old man at the bookstore asked him his area of interest and Shettima said nonfiction, mostly books on Leadership, biographies, politics, history, economies, education and culture of different societies and nations. The attendant made some recommendations but before he finished calling book titles, the governor told him names of the authors and said he had read the books.

    “I am looking for books exclusive to Norway, something in English, written by famous Scandinavian authors,” Shettima said. After spending four hours of very patient stop-overs at different shelves, the governor picked dozens of books. I remember six of them he set aside for reading throughout our trip from Oslo to New York.  The list included Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations; Northmen: The Viking Saga, AD 793-1241; The Sámi Peoples of the North: A Social and Cultural History; One of Us: The Story of a Massacre and Its Aftermath; The Man Who Created the Middle East: A Story of Empire, Conflict and the Sykes-Picot Agreement; Germany: Memories of a Nation.

    “To my frustration, there were many other books he bought. Don’t ask me what happened next because we returned to the hotel with only a box full of books.”

    Shettima, who will be 57 on September 2, got a first degree in Agricultural Economics from the University of Maiduguri in 1989, and a master’s degree in the same field of study from the University of Ibadan in 1991. After a teaching stint at the University of Maiduguri, he worked in the banking sector, and later served as commissioner in five ministries in Borno State before he became governor.

    These testimonies highlight his bibliophilism. As vice president, he may well be a metaphor for the grade of well-informed leaders Nigeria needs for advancement in the knowledge-driven age.

  •  Not just about ministers

     Not just about ministers

    How the dances are over.  The ministers have scaled the rites of democracy that brought them to the big, cavernous temples of their offices. Over are the pangs of patience as to whether they would enter the inner sanctum. The president endorsed.

    Over are the theatrics before the senate. We saw the range of offices, the temperament, intellect, and sometimes burlesque acts of the nominees. The flourish of Alake, the tears and humility of Musawa, the two credits of Mohammed, the perorations of Alausa, Wike’s bumpkin charm, the “incestuous” acclamation of Umahi, being in the same family.  Some ex-governors materialized like monarchs without a train, who a few months ago would have regarded their screening as lese-majesty. Some nominees crackled with boasts and self-congratulations. Fashions raged a cornucopia of Nigerian colours. And of course, the peacock vanities of “take a bow.” Television screens beamed the testy moment of Nasir El Rufai and the portent of a petition. For some, like Oketete, the bow had no return.  Godswill Akpabio played the good chaperon.

    After that, it was time for oath. In the first dance, President Bola Tinubu spoke by picking them. In the second, they were a claptrap of voices, talking up their credentials. In the last act, they were silent again, except when they swore their oaths. 

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     Does an oath bear value here, or anywhere in the world? But that was necessary. The oath is not in the fashion, or in their grand and solemn visages. All that was an act. What is important is the oath in their hearts and acts, for there lies their integrity. “What other oath than honesty to honesty engaged?” asked William Shakespeare. They will engage their bosses, the president. But the real engagement is with their souls and that must shine, eventually, in their stewardships.

    Three names were absent, and most notable was the former Kaduna State governor. El Rufai’s post was power minister, and that now falls on Adelabu’s  laps.  So, why the small man of Kaduna? My reporting reveals the man is at odds with the APC elite. No one trusts him, said a top party man. “Tell me, who did he not betray since he started his public career,” observed one of them. “Was it Obasanjo, Yar’ Adua or Atiku?” No one was willing to wager on that man.

    It shows, as I have noted, that a good minister is not just about ability or the over-flogged word, technocrat. If El Rufai evinced it in BPE, Abuja and Kaduna, no chance this time. But a cocktail of factors makes a good leader or minister. A technocrat who is churlish, or lacks financial literacy, of emotional connection or social conscience will stumble, be he or she the jewel of their profession. A minister or an executive is a blend of qualities. Their great professionalism may matter only 15 percent.

    If you are minister of communications, the great concern is not algorithms but people. Hence, Oppenheimer was chosen to make the nuclear bomb, even if he knew just a fraction of the technology. His value was in superintending the pool of talent. When the First World War confronted France, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau was more at peace with his vision and his thinkers than the military. “War,” he said, “is too important a matter to be left in the hands of generals.” In 1982, recession bit the globe and economists were at a loss to explain how they erred. Henry Kissinger, a historian and former secretary of state, wrote an essay then and echoed the French man. “The economy is too important a matter to be left in the hands of economic experts,” he noted. Kissinger is a centenarian, and his mind is still plucking out new books. Paul D. Wolfowitz, the tenth World Bank President, never had a degree in banking or business but a PHD in political science. Jim Yong Kim, another world bank chief, was a physician and anthropologist.

    What is important in high office is a supple mind and a good character. You are not minister because you are a wonk. It helps, but it is not as great an asset as many of our analysts say. When Napoleon went to war, he took on board many technocrats with him, including scientists, intellectuals and poets. But he quipped that they were like “coquets. You can talk to them, but don’t marry them or make them ministers.” Even Napoleon knew that in war, militarism was not enough for victory. He read history, biographies, poets, plays and novels. When he saw that his soldiers were reading only novels, he said novels are for women and maid until he was reminded that he had over 30 novels with him. The “petit corporal” wanted for his soldiers a broader diet than only novels. His biographers observed that Napoleon’s forays into literature helped him to appreciate human sentiment and relations and the potency of words that helped him as the great military mobiliser in history. He memorized many poems including Homer, Virgil and even Tasso. Charles de Gaulle, the next great French man, became an unofficial patron of the literati. Andre Malraux was his close friend.  Our leaders must read. Few know that President Tinubu is a voracious reader. Vice President Kashim Shettima was caught, amidst the buzz of the BRICS summit, in a South African bookshop  as he often does when he travels. My father Moses quoted Francis Bacon to me as a little boy: “Reading maketh a man; conference a ready man; writing an exact man.” Reading must translate into action. The Bible that says “blessed is he that readeth,” also warns that “much reading is the weariness of the flesh.” So we had a Napoleon who read a lot and acted a lot. Even to read with appreciation we must act, too. In our pre-exam history class session with Professor Femi Omosini at Ife, he warned us, “read hard but play hard.”

    So, our ministers must understand that their jobs are not about expertise but humanity. Talent must yield to sentiment.

    But whatever a cabinet makeup, it is beholden to one man: the president. Every government throws up its cabal or what, in the days of Abraham Lincoln, was called The Trust, which entailed a few influential courtiers of his sentiment. Abraham had a team of rivals in which his foes became cabinet ministers. Obama popularized a book on that era by historian Doris Kearn Goodwin titled: A Team of Rivals. It inspired Obama to appoint his opponent Hilary Clinton as secretary of state. The Buhari era threw up a few. There are already whispers of those around President Tinubu. No administration runs without a few trusted fellows. Their influence will depend on their individual value and where the president lends his ears.

    A key métier for ministers is president’s vision, which is the first quality of a leader. The second quality is to make leaders. That is where the ministers and other appointees stand. How they blend will determine whether vision meets team. That is the ultimate motor that will drive his legacy.

  •  Lagos as a beacon

     Lagos as a beacon

    It was unexpected. The BOS of Lagos drew a list of commissioner nominees and gave it to the House of Assembly, but 17 returned a dud. Whatever the reasons advanced by the House of Assembly, this is not the way to play politics in the state of example in Nigerian politics. We understand that a legislative house is no rubberstamp chamber. But it is not created to be a contrarian place. We have heard that some of the 17 were merely technocrats and out of touch with local politics. If that were the case, was it not in the tradition of Lagos for the house to consult with the governor in the quiet and reach a consensus rather than open act of defiance. If some were technocrats out of tune with the grassroots, is it not true that a few of them did so well in the first term that they should be considered based on work more than faith? It cheers my soul that the elders are stepping in since both parties are under one party. It is a family affair. What stuns me is when religion is brought into the matter. When did Yorubaland turn to a place where religious bickering has overtaken virtue? The southwest must not lose its advantage as the beacon of religious harmony in this country. Every family is a twin of Islam and Christianity, and politicians and bigots must not set families apart. Good that BOS took the lead in endorsing Isese Festival. Even Jesus said let the wheat and tares dwell together.

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    Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu has been at work since his first term. Such  discord should  not come to distract him from his work, especially in pursuing his big-ticket items of infrastructure, housing and education.

    The president is in Abuja and the party  leaders  owe him a duty to keep his home state in calm waters while he navigates the larger Nigerian pond.

  • A disconnected king

    A disconnected king

    Ironically, Oba Abdulrasheed Adewale Akanbi, the Oluwo of Iwo, Osun State, is a Yoruba traditional ruler who has failed to grasp the fundamentals of his role as guardian of Yoruba traditional culture. He is not alone in this category. Aged 56, he became king in 2015 and has been at the centre of several controversies on the throne.   

    Oba Akanbi, last week, further exposed his cultural disconnection when he issued a statement banning “the practice of placing sacrifices on the road, most especially junctions, and blocking our rivers by dumping ritual sacrifices in them, which in turn causes floods.”

    He said: “Most sacrificial offerings are placed on the road in junctions. You will see palm oil and other dirty items as offerings on the road financed by our taxpayers’ money.  A road that should be maintained through collective efforts and patriotic dedication.”

    His so-called ban on road sacrifices by devotees of Yoruba traditional religion, also known as Orisa tradition, amounts to striking a blow against the religion. Perhaps he needs to be reminded that he is a product of Yoruba tradition, and is not expected to destroy the system that built him.    

    The Yoruba pantheon is made up of a multitude of divinities or orisas, with Ifa as the oracular mouthpiece of Olodumare, the Almighty in Yoruba religion. According to Prof. Wande Abimbola, a retired academic and Yoruba culture exponent, “Ifa is the heart and soul of the culture and philosophy of the Yoruba people.” The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 2005 added the Ifa Divination system to its list of the “Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.”

    Abimbola explained in an earlier interview: “Sacrifice is a code of communication. We don’t think that verbalisation is enough.” He also said a sacrifice could consist of liquid, clothes, food or animals. A sacrifice, ebo, is usually prescribed by an Ifa traditional priest, known as Babalawo, towards solving a problem presented by the person consulting the priest.

    The Orisa way of life is faced with potent challenges in a global village of multiple and contending faiths, some of which have the advantage of apparent dominance. The Yoruba religion, for instance, appears to have been downgraded among Nigeria’s Yoruba population in this day and age, the majority of them reportedly either Christians or Muslims.

    This situation has produced many disconnected Yoruba traditional rulers who are either Christians or Muslims. This context explains the emergence of Oba Akanbi and his ilk, who see themselves as modernising agents, across the Southwest region of the country. He has a Muslim name, and describes himself as “a representative of God.”

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    In 2021, for instance, Oba Akanbi, in a statement, controversially declared that “Idols must not be in a king’s palace… Our fathers who were monarchs who worshipped deities were wrong. I take a bold step to apologise for their mistakes. The damage deity worshipping by monarchs has caused us is monumental. I will lead the path to right the past mistakes in the Yoruba traditional system.”

    His latest attack not only shows his cultural disconnection but also his confusion about his powers in the country’s political context. He presented his hostility to road sacrifices as a fight to protect the environment and infrastructure.  If he truly seeks environmental and infrastructural protection, he can do so without unfairly targeting the Yoruba traditional system he represents. His self-assigned policing role is out of place as it violates the law and usurps the powers of the appropriate authorities, namely the relevant local and state governments.  

    His so-called ban on road sacrifices by adherents of Yoruba religion can be described as unlawful in the first place. Indeed, it can be said that his move against traditionalism violates the traditionalists’ right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and their right to freedom from discrimination, among others.

    Notably, the President of the Traditional Religion Worshippers Association (TRAWSO) in Osun State, Dr Oluseyi Atanda, in his response to the so-called ban, observed that “Traditionalists will enjoy their fundamental human rights under Section 48 of the Nigerian constitution,” adding, “If he is more powerful than the government, it’s left for all of us to see.”

    It’s unclear how Oba Akanbi intends to enforce his so-called ban. Also, it remains to be seen whether he can enforce the ban without being involved in further unlawful actions.

    Interestingly, the governors of four Southwest states, Lagos, Oyo, Osun and Ogun, declared August 21 a public holiday to mark Isese Day (August 20), which annually features celebrations of Yoruba tradition and culture. Isese is the Yoruba word for tradition.

     Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, in a statement, said the holiday “is a reaffirmation of his commitment to continue to provide the necessary support to traditional institutions in the state with a view to promoting our indigenous culture and tradition while preserving our heritage.” Ogun State Governor Dapo Abiodun said: “The decision to accord Isese Day a special recognition was to continue in the tradition of respecting the tradition of our people and ensure the continuation of the unity and harmony among the three major religions in the state.”

    Oba Akanbi should learn from the Yoruba tradition-friendly actions of the four state governments, including the government of Osun State where he is based.

    My participation in the 10th Orisa World Congress, in July 2013, at Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Osun State, was an eye-opener on the status of Yoruba religion. The variegated gathering, which included participants from the US, Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela and Mexico, demonstrated the appeal of the religion beyond its local provenance and brought instructive international perspectives. An all-male family of four from Cuba, a Chinese couple who lived in Venezuela and a densely bearded white American were among the alluring sights. Some of the foreign participants were captivated scholars, and not adherents of the religion.

    The five-day programme was the fourth in the ancient town, starting from the first one 32 years earlier, and six others had been held in Brazil, USA, Trinidad and Tobago, and Cuba.

    The event was organised by Orisaworld, “an organisation of practitioners and scholars of Orisa tradition, religion and culture,” said to have “individual and institutional members from over 50 countries,” which was founded by Prof. Abimbola in 1981 “to revitalise and rejuvenate the Orisa culture and all its traditions.”

    This is food for thought for Oba Akanbi, who is engaged in a self-defeating crusade against the Orisa tradition.