Category: Monday

By rolling out the ministers and their portfolios, we can see that the president put imagination to numbers. The ministries are many but so is President Tinubu’s creative juice. He brought creativity to plenty and plenty out of creativity. Some said they want more technocrats. We overplay the virtue of that breed. We forget that technocrats  are ministers not to advance their special skills, but to manage humans and society. A technocrat without social or political skill will fail. Hence, we must understand that they must combine cunning, emotional and social intelligence with their technical knowhows.

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It is intriguing that Governor Nyesom Wike gets the Federal Capital Territory. That makes him the first governor to get a third term. The law recognise  the FCT as a state, and the man who had two terms as governor of Rivers State is getting a new one outside his state, apart from being the pioneer southerner to get it. The law never envisaged such a boon. Hence French philosopher Baron de Montesquieu wrote in his The Spirit of Laws, “Laws are like the statues of certain divinities, which on some occasions, must be veiled.” The law veiled a third-term possibility until Tinubu saw it. He himself probably didn’t know.

The billboard sign, All Eyes On The Judiciary, was a lie in plain sight. It was raw meat in the cage to rouse a rabble. They appropriated the word ‘all’ to mean all Nigerians. But they are targeting a rabble in the first stage of a rumble. A rabble is like a pack of irate dogs with rabies.  Right now, they are like canines between growls. They wanted their audience to see the sign and rue, so they can ruin the state. But why not sue? That’s too prim. Their strategy? Intimidate the justices of the Presidential Election Petition Court.

They arrogate to themselves a monopoly of disgust. In their naivety, they assume that others have no eyes, no minds, and no rage. So, they could just get away with it. They sign on but expect others to sign off. They forget that if they write signs, others will assert rights.

The originators, cowards all, have not yet owned it in public. One wants to know why they did it, who they stand for, what goal they wanted to score. They should, at least, show some courage rather than hide behind a sign, especially now that their words no longer preside over the city.

Since the Advertising Regulatory Council of Nigeria (ARCON) has condemned it and started an inquest, and the Advertising Standard Panel (ASP) dissolved, the sponsors who were in arms for their liberty of speech should go to court and prove their innocence. Before then, they should entertain us with an unveiling ceremony of the sponsors, names, addresses, ideology, history and political faith. They lack the audacity of self-identity. They are the mice of the times.

Some shadowy persons and public commentators, including lawyers, are defending the advert, appealing to liberty of speech.  But I have not, at the time of writing, heard or seen anyone who paid their money to unspool the sign. Those invoking liberty of speech are either concealing nativist hysteria, or thumping their chests over their soldiery for a phony idea about the constitution. They should ask for refund because their money has not run its course in the skies where the billboards scowled.

They claim you can speak anything in the name of liberty. On the surface, have all eyes never been on the judiciary? If that is trite, what was the use of the advert? Is it to bore anyone? Of course, no one spends millions of naira on a billboard to make us yawn.

So, they know it is not intended to bore but to become boors, to stir a specific emotion.  If it was not intended as an underhand project, why not say who the sponsors are, so we can rebuke them for boring us, or for reminding us?

If they want to say it is mere words, why are they up in arms over mere words when it is struck out? Words have meaning. They do not jump out of vacuums. As Jesus said, “from the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.”

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The authors must be in psychic torture that their investment has flamed out.

I am exercising freedom of speech by writing this essay. Yet, the same folks asking for freedom of speech invoked obituary of my liberty of expression last year. What hypocrisy!

Some ignore the difference between speech and incitement. Machiavelli wrote, “when everyone is free, no one is free.” It means that humans, like their words, can exercise freedom so long as it allows others to exercise theirs. The best advocate of free speech in the English language was John Stuart Mill with his opus, On Liberty. I have read it at least five times since my classmate, Osagiator Ojo, introduced him to me at Ife. In spite of his advocacy, Mill pointed out two obstacles, offence and harm. You can offend, but do no harm, he asserts. Trump, the ideal of the advertisers, is trying to invoke the same liberty of speech, or its First Amendment, after he provoked a mob to overthrow a democracy, and even asked officers to invent votes. Trump is no model.

Or else, we have anarchy. When the Jacobins-led Robespierre ignited the French Revolution, he didn’t evangelise liberty alone. A crucial part of the agenda was not just egalite, but fraternite. Fraternity cohabits a world of give and take. The French revolutionaries became assassins of that ideal when they guillotined opponents. At last, they fell to the same guillotine themselves, including the brothers Robespierre – Augustin and Maximilien. 

It was to restrain speech that law philosophy introduced the concept of innuendo. It shows that words have reverberations. I noted last week that words are not innocent. They sparked wars in the past, including the Nigerian civil war. During the pogrom of the 1960’s, the mob invoked a specific chant that brought blood to their eyes.

What we have now are mobs made up of counterfeit men of ideas, lawyers who have soiled their gowns like debauched priests in cassocks, street oafs with new title and obsession, and clerics who view altars with rogue eyes. Hence, rather than follow the path of law, Oby Ezekwesili,  said they should all go online where it is even cheaper. She, a former minister and anointed patron of “Bring Back Our Girls,” is leading her followers from the garden to the jungle. It is what cant can do to otherwise sapient souls. A teardrop for her. Oby is still a refined one.

But the internet has become a city of refuge for the misbegotten. It is a place for cheats, liars, murderers, many of them posing as patriots that Samuel Johnson calls “the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

The internet is their jungle city. It is the city within the city, like Haruki Murakami’s opus 1Q84, a novel about an invented city within a city where there are two moons and humans come out of goats. All eyes will spawn that city except those who spun it. It shows how we can reimagine facts to a false end. To reimagine what we know is a gift of the human mind. Hence the poet Shelley urged it, or else we will lose the power of thinking. And as Einstein noted, “imagination is more important than knowledge.” But these people want to cancel knowledge and turn lies into fact, much like their closet hero Donald Trump. They are inventing an invisible city, like Italian writer Italo Calvino’s work of that title. Calvino noted that such cities, as the ones the billboard maestro cast in our skies, are “like dreams…too probable to be real.” That’s the catch – probable.

It is not only the place for the good, and there is a lot of it. But it is the bad that gets a devil’s traction. One of the main beasts are the so-called online publications. Last week, I attacked the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria and challenged the Guild of Editors as well as the Eze Anaba -led initiative. These online publications have no correspondents in Jalingo, yet they can report a flood disaster there. They have no accredited reporter in Aso Rock, yet they write headline news like others. Is this not fraud?  All we need is to prosecute them. But first, we can act like monitors of athletes for drug violations. We can pick a website at random that reports an incident, and interrogate how it got that story. When did its reporter go there? Ask for evidence. If none, then prosecute. It is a squad as truth detector.  We need fact to save a profession of facts. Only facts can rescue journalism. This way, we can wipe the vermin out of that space. No media like that can operate online in Europe or North America. Google abides it because we let them. Rather than bellyache over dwindling fortunes, the media elite should invoke law and propriety.

It is organisations like these that open the space for lawlessness.

They failed to stop President Bola Tinubu’s inauguration with lies, prophecies and acts of verbal brigandage, like calling for the army. Is coup cry freedom of speech? Now, the mob is online. Napoleon, who put down mobs, said “when the mob gains the day, it ceases to be any longer the mob. It is then the nation.” It is the ugly side of populism.

Billboards are for signs but not for sinners. Its sponsors knew its audience did not need clarification. Hear Murakami in 1Q84: “If you can understand it without explanation, you can’t understand it with explanation.” The billboard sinners knew that debating it would ruffle their purpose. Unlike Cinna the Poet who the Roman mob killed out of mistaken identity, we know the culprits without explanation.

It is very rare to see Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN)  berate anyone in public. The Trojan of works stylises his temper, even when you can hear a roar beneath his repose. He often chisels his diction and avoids public vitriol. Last week, he fumed and his ribcage rattled.

He asked the inspector general of police to investigate what some phony investigators in the name of journalism put in the public domain. They include Jacksom Ude, Yoruba Sheikh and Reportera.ng. Ude says Fashola “allegedly” has written the draft verdict of the Presidential Election Petition Court, and that he even wrote the 2019 Judgment.

The other online predator Reportera.ng wrote that the army had laid siege to Fashola’s Abuja residence.

The former works minister has also taken them to court. This is the first time that we are witnessing a high-profile person browbeat what Wole Soyinka has called the rodents of the internet. They live by impunity clothed in lies. They disdain fact or decency, and they wallow in their cocoons to whip up wild and unsubstantiated fantasies.

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It is not about Fashola, nor is it about Ude, Reportera.ng or the comedy of the name known as Yoruba Sheikh. This is a supine stagecraft by a cunning coterie of opportunists to exploit the fragility of democracy, the integrity of our judiciary and the value of the press. It also shows how they relish to pluck any target out of their ease by a swarm of predators who want to make a living from sensationalism, and sensationalism on the misery of others. It is Fashola today. It has been many in the past – CEOs, celebrity artistes, politicians, clerics, and many a citizen with neither a lawyer nor a platform to plead innocence.

In this case, this breed of vermin is part of the subversives who dreaded the swearing-in of President Bola Tinubu. They concocted all kinds of obstacles and generated false hopes and histrionics among a crowd of illusionists that May 29 would not come. They made common cause with street lowlifes, high-strung lawyers, tendentious intellectuals, religious mercantilists of the “yes daddy” variety and ethnic oafs who manufacture Aesop fables. These websites and their rabid purveyors stand by as their rottweilers of fiction. They distinguish themselves with their pigsty conscience.

They were the same breed who had exclusive vision to see the chief justice in Europe with then President-elect when he was here in Nigeria. They made him twins in one. A miracle. Their pious lords in altars seasoned them with their own apocrypha. They also had the big, dog ears to hear the phone calls between Tinubu and the Chief justice. They were the only ones who sighted Wike with one of the PEPC judges. They also knew that a PEPC judge resigned before we knew that he didn’t. They have invented an alternative universe, like the character in the Japanese novel, 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami in which a person cruises into an alternative city just by taking an underpass.

They are taking advantage of free speech. Free press is seductive, and American founding father Thomas Jefferson once swore that if he were to choose between a free press without a government and vice versa, he would choose the former. That was before the media skewered him as president over the Sally Hemmings affair. Fact is sacred but not as scare tactic. That is the creed of journalism. Fact without responsibility is murder. That is what these men are doing, and that is what has jolted Fashola from the irate pillow of his bed.

In journalism, you check your facts. No media house is perfect. Even the New York Times had to issue a mea culpa when it erred over reporting of the Gulf war and weapons of mass destruction. When we err, we acknowledge.

But these guys are not even professional. If they are not getting the preposition wrong, like Ude’s Keep “tabs with,” they foreswear correct idioms, like Reportera.ng’s “take siege of.” They are undermining the glories of the trade, including the textual propriety, language, tone and integrity. They don’t understand context and caveat. They just take liberties.

One of the dangers is their ability to flip in and out of lunacy. They seduce the audience by reporting facts today as licence to peddle rumour as fact tomorrow. They steal from traditional media, and that sucks in the unwary. It gives them the liberty to slaughter. It is licensed tyranny.

They know there is a gullible crowd waiting to consume. It’s like the warning in scripture about people who asks their leaders to tell them sweet things so they may be glad. Their victims are like a beast that is quiet when it is hungry but when the master serves up the meat, it begins to bay and brawl. Atiku Abubakar fed that hysteria of lies when he said Tinubu was arm-twisting the judges. Such irresponsible drivel. He advanced no evidence, but he brought himself to the sewer of the habitual evangelists of fables. They are willing to be deceived. It is like the line of the Italian Renaissance poet Torquato Tasso’s  epic, Jerusalem Delivered, “They drink deceived, and so deceived, they live.”

They know they cannot make good business by saying the truth. They do not have resources to fund good  journalism.  So, when they are not copycatting fact, which profits little, they fly to fiction.  Just as Lord Byron wrote in his famous poem, Don Juan, “You’d best begin with truth, and when you’ve lost your labour, there’s a sure market for imposture.”

This is a time for the Newspaper Proprietors’ Association of Nigerian to stamp out this infection. They have been tardy and ineffective. The Guild of Editors and the Eze Anaba-led initiative have a big task ahead. While many are wary of the contagion of coups in the sub-continent, the clear and present dangers are these rodents on X (twitter), Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, et al. They can turn democracy into a compost heap in a jiffy. Let it be known that media lies have set country against country before. It’s what Jesus foretold as rumours of war. It stoked Nigeria into the civil war. The Spanish-American war blew up because a certain media mogul wanted to sell his newspaper.

We see routine violations on a daily basis. Some websites thrive on theft. They wait for organisations like The Nation to deploy reporters, and have their reports written, go through the rigour of editing and different other layers of publication. They wait like agberos and ambush others’ sweat as their own genius. Some add snap and sweeteners for an air of originality. This essay will be on sites without authorization. Just last week, someone drew my attention to this column on a platform without even attribution. It is free-for-all capitalism. They also want traffic, if through traduce. I have reported before how a picture of a man with goat at a campaign rally I never attended was identified as me. Even though the person does not have my height, skin colour, nose, etc. There were even posters announcing a funeral while I am still alive.

Fashola knows some of these miscreants are out of the country. Wherever they are, law has no borders. The western world will slam consequences on those who want to traffic on such filth. An American Ude or Yoruba Sheikh will be in jail. They do so here because no one has come for them. The cyber law is not a lipstick on the statute books. It has teeth. Let it bite.

What gave him away were his shorts. I chuckled to myself, this man has become an oyinbo man. It was a high-taste, luxury hotel in Lagos, and Nigeria’s top novelist and two-time finalist of the prestigious Man Booker Prize, Chigozie Obioma and I had lunch just in time to board his flight back to his base in the United States, where he writes and teaches.

“I prefer the writing part,” he confesses as he sips a glass of juice to ride his rice and dodo to his bowel. We tried in less than two hours to solve the problems of the world and our dear country, and he had a lot to say. He had been in the country for about two weeks and had visited his family in Benue State. He complained about the state of poverty, and how everyone thought he had brought a haul of dollars. He hoped that Tinubu’s palliatives would come quickly. I added that he should be wary of those asking for money. While some of them were genuine, some would invent troubles for his money. He knew that. But we both agreed even that was a picture of the desperation in the land. He had praises for the expressway from Makurdi through Nasarawa State to Abuja. “I never saw a bump on that road,” he confessed. He was referring to the Keffi-Akwanga-Lafia to Makurdi road. It was Fashola’s doing, one of Buhari’s understated legacies.

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But he has a lot going on in his life. He was getting ready for a high-octane, Distinguished writer-in-residence programme at the “junior Ivy-league” Wesleyan University at Connecticut. The well-paid affair – I won’t disclose the amount – will take a full year and will give him time to write and teach elite literature about inventing. One of the works will be Italo Calvino’s The Hidden Cities. Meanwhile, he is also heading to Norway in September as one of seven “top living southern Saharan writers” at what is deemed the biggest library in the world, The Bergen Public Library or Bergen Offentlidge Bibliotek. They want to showcase such writers as Nadifa Mohammed, Tsisi Dangaremba, himself and Chimamanda Adichie, when she is not accompanying Obi to the court. He has also pioneered a writers retreat at a resort in Greece for promising talent on the continent. Four Nigerians, two fiction writers and two poets, are fellows.

The author of the Fisherman and the Orchestra of the Minorities was glad to announce that his third work, The Road to the Country, will be out next year. It is about the Nigerian civil war and intersects myth with realism to unveil the pathos and tragedy of war. With Kunle as its protagonist, the novel is described as “formally daring, acutely observed and vivid in its depiction of one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies.”

The well-known Economist magazine has asked him to write an essay for its “By Invitation” column. It will feature soon. Just before we rose, he said he had two things to say. One, the church has eaten the moral and spiritual fabric of the people. He was complaining as a Christian himself. He said, “Salvation is gift,” and lamented that pastors have weaponized fear turned it into a transaction. Two, the youth had now become servile to the cell phone, and it has stopped them from private rumination. “When I was speaking with my dad, he was pestered with calls, so we couldn’t have a smooth dialogue,” he observed. That, however, did not stop us from excavating our cell phones to take a picture to document a happy hour.

Joe Ajaero is one of the figures of this era who evokes derision of disdain merely by looking at him. He is counting on our memory loss we forget that once he lost an election and stoked hell for the Nigeria Labour Congress. He pried the union into two and rode a faction. He is the sort of person who loves it only when he wins. That is how he defines legitimacy. He is reviving that infection as NLC president. A man who speaks without polish or tact, he did not hide the fact that he is a partisan of the Labour Party, and has not accepted that his candidate came third in the polls. Hence he has approached President Bola Tinubu with hostile levity. His first impulse is to strike. That is what I call an agbero mentality.

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It is persons like him who made many in the 19th century Europe, especially socialists, to suspect labour’s foray into politics as a reincarnation of the master-servant relationship of capitalism. Hence socialists have had a fractious relationship with it. A historian called it the “contentious alliance.” That is the kind of attitude Ajaero’s NLC is perpetuating. How do you see strike as the first and last salvo to a two-month-old government. Why even the resort to apocalypse rather than engagement? When the issue of palliative was announced, NLC operatives wanted the money parceled through them. The government said no. They want the fuel subsidy regime to go the way of the past when labour leaders grew fat over the people’s miseries by cornering some juicy contracts. Not now, not for the boor of a leader named Ajaero.

Who would have thought that Philip Shaibu could anytime on earth be in stormy waters with his boss, the governor of Edo State? But here we have it. But the deputy peacock of the state and a courtier of Edo State Government House has gone to court. He is barred from meetings and mentoring. He can’t see memos and minutes. Godwin Obaseki’s ears are immune to the tones and tunes of his call. Shaibu’s phone hollers eight times but not a hello in return. He who was shepherd has become leper.

The man was silver of government cannot boast a medal. He is even worse than a cipher but something of a Lucifer. It is not what the rumour mill is saying. He confessed it. He wailed in the court. Obaseki did not only make him an outsider in government, he may be on his way out. The Golgotha called impeachment is looming.

It is not funny, if not tragic. Shaibu was, not long ago, Obaseki’s chief guard dog and enforcer, his matador, bouncer and muscleman. The troops responded to him as a herd to the sound of a lash.

Shaibu was a labour maestro, a darling of the worker. Hence he became a friend, follower and confidant of Adams Oshiomhole, the former governor of the state and one of the great labour mobilisers of his generation. He rewarded Shaibu by backing him to be deputy governor. Adams calculated that, with Obaseki and Shaibu in the saddle, he could go sleep. A nightmare ensued. Both boss and deputy ganged up against their benefactor. They wanted Adams to sulk while they sucked the milk of power. They made common cause until it is now common curse.

Shaibu set his face against Adams in the hope that Obaseki would be his eternal ally. But he is in the terrain of slippery slope called politics, and his blood now boils with the venom he spat on Adams. He was on top of the world when they were seeking a second term together. The streets churned. There was blood and fear.

They had a strategy. Make Tinubu the scape goat and assert Edo independence. With such a strategy, no one would remember that he had failed to deliver in education. The bad roads would not matter even if cars and trucks squeaked and sputtered over potholes. No one would ask if the finances lacked probity.

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Asiwaju Tinubu had said Osagie Ize-Iyamu was a better offer. Obaseki and co invented a chant. Edo no be Lagos. It was beautiful as it was cynical. It was a war cry. And the electoral machine was on song. Obaseki became an unlikely engineer of Edo nationalism. He whose forebears betrayed one of Africa’s magnificent thrones and sold its soul to the white man in the fraught era of the Benin Empire. He had suddenly become the patron saint of ethnic prowess.

It was no more the agenda of Edo future. It was a rage against a phantom who wanted to take over the state. Asiwaju was not taking over the state when he staked Adams for eight years, when Edo team came to  learn a thing or two from Lagos that even Obaseki is gleefully enjoying today. Edo na Lagos then. Sentiment upbraided virtue. No one was ready to address the issue, that Ize-Iyamu is an Edo man. He was the one on the ballot, not a Lagos politician who had been an acknowledged friend and defender of the state.

Yet the man who had not shown a pedigree of performance threw a wool over all. He became a hero. Shaibu helped with this narrative. But he was a mini-Adams in his day. He walked like him, talked like him, and of course, with his Khaki, he was a labour man in profile. He outfitted himself in that Labour attire when he dueled Adams and Ize-Iyamu. He preened like a peacock.

He was in the centre of many acts of chaos and violence. During the campaign, he received a rebuke from the Oba himself. That did not faze or restrain him. His boss, a member of the Obaseki clan, had no historic respect for the crown.

He was the chief rottweiler of the second-term bid.  He spoke never to Adams but at him and over him. Adams was a yesterday’s man. He had used and tossed him.

He thought he would be a bigger man. He wanted to succeed Obaseki. He had performed for him. He probably wanted to be rewarded as Jesus said he would reward his apostles when he said: “You are those who have continued with me in my temptations. I appoint for you a kingdom and you shall sit on my right and on my left judging the 12 tribes of Israel.” Well, Obaseki, who always looks like a man out of wrestling ring rather than board meeting, is not so generous as Christ. Shaibu says since he told his boss he, too, wants to be boss, he had become a pariah. Obaseki regarded it as ambition overdrive, a romanticism of desire. He had probably set his imagination to work on how he too would act as governor when he studied Obaseki’s acts and pageants – in exco meetings, sitting with a leg up on executive couch, barking orders, bullying special advisers, receiving VIPs, fuming about Bourdillon or downing a glass of whiskey. To deprive him of official ostentations, Obaseki took him out of his misery by making him an outsider.

When Shaibu strutted to the government house, it was ba shiga. He met the defiance and stony stares of the security men who often bowed and worshipped him.

He thought he was the shepherd of Obaseki flock. Well, what describes him in Obaseki’s eyes is the phrase, little flock. It inverts what Jesus meant when he used the phrase for his apostles. Jesus employed the phrase with affection. Little did not mean little. Just as Conrad used the phrase ‘little flower’ for a romantic beloved. But in its stark definition, little means small. He is small in Obaseki’s eyes, too small to fill his shoes.

But more potent is William Blake’s lines on the little lamb. He asked: “Little Lamb/ who made thee/ does thou know who made thee?” Shaibu is now the one who forgot who made him until he became little lamb after acting like a “tiger burning bright in the forest of night.” One may ask, like poet Blake, did he who made the tiger make thee. Obaseki, who made him a tiger has now softened him into a lamb.

Now, rather than a chief apostle, Obaseki sees him as an apostate. If he thought they had an understanding, he forgot Obaseki is an Obaseki, and to make matters worse, he is mortal. “There is no point swearing oaths if you are a mortal,” wrote Sophocles. And Obaseki belongs to a breed of men in which agreements end in arguments. Shaibu is now the sort of humans Shakespeare described as “never loved until never worth the love.”

Reading Shaibu’s confessional is like imagining a surreal drama. It was as though he was crying for help. His big boss was calling for his guillotine. His court plea might have been titled: My Inquisition. But who will help him? It was reported that he had a meeting with Adams. What sort of meeting could that be? Did he dobale, as the Yoruba say? How low did he go? Remember Tolstoy’s words that “it is better to bow too low than not low enough.”

Is he asking his quarry to query his present boss? Is he trying to change ship and align with his former target – Adams – against his former ally – Obaseki? Is that not a lesson in life. He did not fight with humility a few years ago. Now, his humble pie must fill his mouth as he tells Adams “I am sorry.” He fought Adams like a beast; he is returning like a lamb. Maybe he is foreseeing his political end, and he seems like a dead man testifying against his own funeral, apologies to Sophocles.

Maybe he is in denial. He is not falling. Shaibu may be under an illusion like Emperor Valentinian III when he was informed of the slaughter of Rome. He thought they were referring to his favorite cockerel. He replied, “but I just fed it a few minutes ago.” Such illusions are necessary when one’s back is against the wall. Like our deputy peacock. But reality is more unflattering.