Category: Monday

“I shall do nothing in malice. What I deal with is too vast for malicious dealing. The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present,” – Abraham Lincoln

It was a pun but they did not see the fun. Yet, I am not writing in jest, but to follow the rhetorical footprints of President Bola Tinubu in his inaugural  speech that echoed another great man, Abraham Lincoln. I write, as this essayist has always done, with “malice towards none.”

When I wrote the piece, Obi-tuary, there was a tempest in the land. I did not even know until half-way through that Monday in early August when my attention was drawn to my phone. It was on silent mode, but the screen flashed like the restless winks of a war zone at night. The cannons unleashed, the night-sky brilliance a bloody omen. An incandescence without sound. It was not only phone calls but text messages. They clashed for living room in my device.

I didn’t pick any of the calls because I had indicated on the column that I only entertained text messages. But when I saw the messages, I gasped. Before I read one sentence, another had entered. It was like this for weeks. The messages said such things as “you and your generation will never know peace.” “Since you wish our candidate death, we shall also kill you.” Amadioha will perish you.” “Sam you think you can rubbish Peter Obi and go free. We go shoot you. That obituary na there we go put you .” “We must kill you.” “We are tracing you.” Many said lines like this, “We know where you live, expect us and say goodbye to your family.” “Tinubu is your slave master”. “Idiot educated slave.” “Your days on earth are numbered.” “You and your principal are in trouble. If we can’t get him, we will get you.”

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These are a few of them. Online, on Facebook and Twitter, it was mayhem. They posted false photos of me. One photo of man holding a goat with a sign, My name is Jonathan, was identified as me attending Goodluck Jonathan’s rally. Several posters of my obituary bloomed darkly.  One of them read the “shameless of a foolish man.” A TV station veered from professional integrity to host a guy who propagated that falsely. Yet, the hosts know who I am, my face and profile. I had to rebut it on TVC. Some wrote press statements that I had been fired. I discarded my phone number and tossed the SIM card. I got calls from well wishers on my other line showing solidarity and praying I survived it. A friend sent a text, saying “this too shall pass.”

It was a hectic time for me and my loved ones. I did not go to the office for four months. I was a hermit, except my trips for TVC Breakfast show, and I had go there in disguise. I attended no parties, no public events, and restaurants. I was as Americans say a home buddy.

But I forgive all. I forgive them who did not understand English enough to know that I was using a figure of speech. In the article, I said it was an electoral obituary. But I pardon their ignorance. If Jesus could ask God to forgive his foes because they knew not what they did, who am I? Ignorance is fatal, and I saw the danger for months. I also wondered, if they could turn Obi into Obidients and get away with mangling the word for their purpose, why did they not see my own wordplay? They make right their impunity to twist Tinubu’s name to all sorts of innuendoes. That is the nature of populism. They are 100 percent right; no other person has a right.

I also forgive their candidate who acted as though nothing happened. I thought he was not online. But he is a man who knows me personally and who I visited in Awka when he was governor. I forgive him because he was in the insular business of sealing minds in his favour as a politician, rallying tribe and church for a personal gain. I feel no pain for him and his “yes daddy” candidacy.

I forgive also those who should belong to an intelligentsia and who know about hyphens and metaphors but who shut their minds from the light. Some I have known for decades. Some I have worked with, played with and wept with over the fragility of a nation. The same wrote as though I was their monster. One of them I just saw a few days earlier. I forgive him for his lack of grace and finesse. One of them said he did me a favour for reviewing my book as though he did not get paid for his effort. Who was encouraging whom? I forgive him. One said I was not a seasoned journalist, referring to a newspaper report that described me as such. He said I was a seasonal journalist. At least, you should have seasoning first before you become seasonal or seasoned. I thank him for the unintended compliment. This same person called once to describe me as the number one columnist in the country. Maybe it was an inebriated moment. One of them had very bad words to say about the LP candidate and he had shared it with passion and sometimes bitterness because he worked with him as governor. But he joined the Obidient rage with such gusto that I wonder whether I was observing schizophrenia. He was not the only one. One other one had written bales and bales of articles over his abysmal stewardship as governor. Suddenly, he scented him as a saint. It was probably loss of memory. A tear for their memory. It is the tragedy of what an author, Eric Hoffer, designated as the true believer.

When I wrote about “closet Biafrans,” it was a hint. My article teased them out of the woodworks. They came hooting and raging. I forgive them for their pharisaic paroxysm, for not making the election about ideas but about tribe and church. My misty eye for them for failing.

I also forgive that man, who will remain anonymous. He called me and said, “Sam, why are you profiling a whole tribe?” I said I did not profile a tribe but a tendency of some within it. Then he said he had not read it. This man is too big to mention without sullying his majesty in Nigerian history. I respect him too much to name him. My tears for him.

Someone said I take my quotes from a book of quotes. I forgive him because he just revealed how he writes. He does not read like me and if it is envy over my cornucopia of learning, I also forgive him. Some of us don’t need to justify our depths. How will he explain my copious allusions to history, plays, novels, poems, philosophy, sociology and the Bible? I must be superhuman to get all of that together within a day. It is another unintended applause. I hail him.

Someone said, he does not read me because I write poor sentences and wrong words? Really? This guy’s column is never read unless by his family and myself occasionally. Maybe he does not know my syntax or my imaginative use of language. I forgive. I must say, no writer is perfect. Nor am I. Even Soyinka’s, Achebe’s and Shakespeare’s flaws are well-known. In his Cancer Ward, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote of a person, “You have the strengths of a great writer but none of his weaknesses.” I came upon this line in Kano during my youth service when I read the novel. So, I do not need to be perfect to be a great writer. As humans, we are not perfect either. As essayist William Hazlitt writes, “It is well that there is no one without fault, for he would not have a friend in the world.” Apostle John said, “If we say we have no sin, we make Christ a liar.” As for those critics, I pardon their perfection.

I also forgive my group I have been with for all of 50 years and how they turned against me because of my political stance even though they knew we were on the same WhatsApp group. They are a vital part of my identity today. Their vitriol tested friendship. But I forgive.

I also sought personal security then, and called the commissioner of police in Lagos and seemed to harangue him with my calls. He picked a few times and promised. Then he stopped picking and replying my text messages. It was then I knew I was all alone with God. Maybe he was too busy. I forgive his busyness.

If I forgive, I ought to thank. I thank those colleagues of mine who stuck with me in those trying times. I thank some who called from the southeast and stood by me and understood that I meant no wrong. What I wrote was only confirmed by the fiery waves of reaction. Instant prophecy, instant fulfillment. Some constantly got in touch with me. One of them worked with the LP candidate, and he was miffed by the herd of worshippers.

I thank Reno Omokri for his phone call and for his kind words when the storm came. I recall his words even now and also his stand for me on his platform. I remember getting calls from PDP chieftains. Indeed, one of them, now a PDP senator but then a governor, wondered if I was in my home, and whether it was safe. I told him I had already moved to somewhere anonymous. I thank my uncle, Prof. Nesin Omatseye, for his shout of solidarity in the press. God bless him. Of course, my close family, for standing by me. I thank The Nation newspaper family for understanding.

In all, the essay was about free expression in a democracy. If one has a candidate, it is in the democratic culture to allow others to scream. I had my vision for Nigeria. They would not. They wanted to skewer me because I had a dream. A dream of one country. They skewed it into a dream agency for one part of the country.

How do you pity a man who did not show pity when the world panted in pain? When women wailed on the streets and children squeaked, when bank halls crammed into stampedes. Murder, hunger, hospital emergencies, a whole economy choking on his back. His was policy as bloodletting. Nobody was immune. From plenty, even executives had to scramble for 200 Naira notes. And nothing was immune, not even bananas that rotted in the open sewer of markets because no one had cash to buy.  Food everywhere but not a bite to buy. In the Bible expression, money failed in the land. He presided over the purgatory of a nation. First came flood. That came scarcity. It was like a fulfilling of a Bible prophesy.

He was begged, cajoled, and pampered to show mercy? The quality of his mercy was strained. This essayist pondered this as Godwin Emefiele featured in a short video clip in the hands of his captors, the DSS. He first looked like a northerner in his cap and kaftan, his puny frame ejected from a vehicle as he stepped into an executive jet.

Executive jet? It was a moment in paradox. That is what we associate with snob, the indolence of the plutocrat, the class of contempt, the brigandage of the luxe class. They usually did that when they wanted to attend parties, soar to a conference in Abuja or Lagos to preside over loots, or when they had butchered and shared the choice parts. Or when their families, wives and kids, bored by the Jejune routine of our lives, flew to Dubai or London or California for fresh air. So, the last image of the jet is one of captivity. That may not last, though.

But as one looks at him, we cannot but wonder what triggered Mefi’s errancy. Why did he do it? When Buhari came on board, a few thought he would be fired. He cringed and rolled over in flattery and supine pleas. He was going to be a good boy. He was going to yell yes when the law said no. He was going to fret for them, perfume their farts, kneel with files as they sat cross-legged, stoop to be conquered, nod to the economy as their fiefdoms, play serf to their feudal commands.

So, why was any surprised as the time came for him to fulfil their righteousness? He was a perfect example of how not to be a pawn. First, they conned him to run for president. He took the bait. His posters were everywhere. He teased us with a pyramid of nothing in Abuja, got a media house to evangelise him.  We knew, like a eunuch, his rice could rise. This essayist blasted him on this page and he ran an advertorial to defend himself and attacked him with the flimsiest of logic. When he ran that advert, I knew he was gone. He did not want to resign. But he wanted to run for president. His ego bloated. He was a lord by the lords in Aso Rock. That is the Malvolio complex. He thought he had the master’s permit. The master never gave him nor defended him. He was on his own. He alone did not know it. He puffed on his own fantasy. He was ready for the fight. He had jets, we are told. He had vehicles lined up. He had a media outfit. He had the cabal. And, of course, he had cash. His case reminds one of the IBB years, when the gap-toothed fellow conned some top bureaucrats to run for president. They believed the saint. They went to hell. One of them, colourful Abel Ubeku of Guinness, did not survive it having withered all his wherewithal in that disaster of an ambition.

Who will save him now? Not Buhari, who stood firmly by him when he went full-throttle with his scheme. He knew it was not an economic policy. It was a gang-up against one man. He thought he was the ultimate beneficiary. He is not guiltless without Buhari, who defended him to the end.

Who will save him? Not the cabal. President Bola Tinubu, as a candidate, said it was Buhari’s men. He said they did not know the way to victory. In what I call his Lisabi speech, he mocked that Mefi and his masters poured ink into the money in the name of currency redesign. Stormy Petrel Malam El Rufai corroborated this. The men who did not want Tinubu to win the party nomination – and who lost – also did not want him to win the presidency, and they lost again. They had been losing since they won the second term and took the party structure from him by ousting Adams Oshiomhole. They owned the structure but did not win the party’s soul. Tinubu did. Mefi lusted and Mefi lost.

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Who will save him now? Not the media house he fueled and funneled with his generosity. They knew, too, that it was all a cynical game. He would lose. He would pay them to lose. But he alone would pay for it when time put paid to his ambition. They flattered, made him swell like the rice pyramid, and he too enjoyed the run. They gave him the disease of all megalomaniacs – the delusion of grandeur. They did not believe in him. But he believed them and in them, so much so that he believed in himself. Faith without charisma, faith without resume, faith without structure, faith in a cabal that looked elsewhere. The faith was dead.

Who will save him? Not his kinsmen. Reports tell me that he went on a nepotist spree of job offers. He comes from the Ika part of Delta State, and he binged on giving them jobs at the CBN. The jobs ran close to a thousand, and he deployed them to branches like Delta, Bayelsa, Kaduna, Kano etc.  This sort of practice ought to stop in this country. I attended an awards night by NIMASA a few years back, and it turned out that the awardees reflected the years that their kinsmen were the director general. This is not how to run a federation. From Mefi’s record, he had done the same thing. His kinsmen can only watch in impotence as their patriarch falls from grace.

Who will help him? Not the cash of the CBN. Not the new money no one can see. Not the billions he spent to do the policy. Not the accounts of the jets, or cars, or party funds. Above all, not the public he tormented. He is alone, the sort of tragic island of humans that populate Kafka’s writings, like Gregor Samsa, who turns into a giant insect. No contact with humans anymore. A character in Henry James’ novel, The Ambassadors, captures the life of Mefi in the following words: “I have lived a life for other people.”

But Mefi is a story of the pawn game. He was in the centre of all the plot to throw one man. All of the others, his fellow travelers, are happy in their ornate mansions, smiling to kids, tending their cattle, swaddling their kids, ogling their loot, hugging their wives. He is hugging a jail wall. He recalls a familiar figure in history, this time a cleric, a banker of souls. He served king Henry the Eight of England, who exercised his licence of the flesh to defy Rome and become a Christian nationalist. Cardinal Wilson served him with pharisaic mischief. When he fell, the cleric wept: “If I had served my God the way I had served my king, he would not have forsaken me in my old age.” Mefi is our cardinal of finance who fell, and who must contemplate the vanity of money and status as a hard reckoning opens up in the court. It is a lesson in power for those with an eye on posterity. Mefi followed a cabal like a herd, and now he must realise, as Joseph Conrad says, that “we live as we dream – alone.”

after just four years, his stewardship ends, and he leaves the post of speaker as one of the best players in Nigeria’s legislative history. He has handled the position, sometimes like a professor, sometimes like a technocrat, and sometimes like a man of the people. At one time, he made news by challenging the world on debt cancellation, and he was head of a body of international lawmakers and staked his claim on debt pardon. But on the local level, we also saw how he brokered ASUU into a quiet, challenged Buhari during the Endsars imbroglio to care for the police. Yet as he departs, we cannot forget the following: Petroleum Industry Act, Electoral Act, Omnibus Act, Deep Offshore Act, et al.  These are transformational acts that history will look back to with relish.

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We can say, Femi Gbajabiamilla, to parody Shakespeare, makes the House of Representatives fairer in the ninth. This is from Shakespeare’s line, fairer in the Night. But his era brought light to lawmaking. A tough act to follow as the tenth senate is set to take over the tent. But Gbaja – as he is fondly called – steps up

Before light made dawn, the heavens opened and touched earth. Abuja earth, that is. It was May 29. From my hotel windows, flashes and furies of rainfall obliterated distance. Cracks of thunder released contours of fiery lights but they were not bright enough to pierce walls of downfall from the sky. To quote Conrad’s preface to his novel, The Secret Agent, “there was a lot of light. But not much to see.” The weather crackled and caked the eye that morning.

The rain, I said, was to wash away an era, debris and all. It would soon peter out, no pun intended. By 8am, the Abuja air was quiet. Birds returned to their morning chirps. Tree boughs nodded in wait. Pedestrian footfalls yielded to the whirs of cars on the streets. Crisp with soft light, Abuja weather set the scene of a new era, a new president. Away from the prophets who saw witches and wizards their angels could not repel. Those who said he would not sit on his presidential chair. Who said the army would whisk him away at the Eagle Square. As this essayist quoted last week, “though there be prophesies, they shall fail.” Now, like Paul said, their tongues shall cease. It was also the end of fantasy.

One week has passed, a few things embossed on the calendar. He met with economic officers, including Mefi. He met with top military brass. He appointed Femi Gbajabiamilla as chief of staff and George Akume as secretary to the government of the federation. But it was a week of audacity that began with the phrase, “fuel subsidy is gone.” I had appeared on the popular radio-tv show, Berekete Family, to which I was invited to talk on the new president and his speech. My first take on his speech was its call to unity, as a nation of the brother’s keeper. The theme was haunted by the Lincoln quote, “with malice towards none, with charity for all.” President Bola Tinubu said, without working as one country, we could not tackle the huge problems bedeviling us.

 No sooner had the day ended than the labour upstarts started to stoke the flame. They forget that the Buhari government had said so before. Marketers, with an eye to profiteering, were hiking pump prices of fuel already subsidized. They were making a harvest from scarcity.

 NLC president Joe Ajaero saw blood and growled like a bush cat. This was the same fellow who hobnobbed with the Labour Party candidate, who is asking for a pre-determined outcome in the presidential cases in the court, who made love to Labour Party. He probably lost his ears when his candidate said he would abolish the subsidy as the first thing at swearing in, if in his fantasy, he won the polls. Suddenly, Ajaero is giving us a taste of his pugnacious hypocrisy. He has acted without a sense of the cooperative unity Tinubu asked for. Ajaero ran away from NLC because he lost out in his presidential bid and formed a parallel body he did not know how to organize. He exposed himself as they project ended up in smoke. It is like his anaemic career as a journalist. He should learn from the history of labour and its interactions with politics. The movements do not follow the coattail of political parties. The labour movement is about workers, and once a political party emerges and even bears the name of a party, it divorces itself from that movement. There can only be marriages in ideas, not in mechanics of operation, not in its hierarchies. British workers voted for conservative Margaret Thatcher and kept her as their prime minister for a decade.

Labour does not have to anoint a Labour party. After all, the Labour Party in Nigeria has been a nest of prostitutes, labouring for the highest bidder. It takes anyone who can pay its way. We have seen all kinds until this Elupee era. This Elupee is a marriage of tribe and church, of yes daddy and accents, not of work. After all, how many times did their candidate visit workers in the course of his campaign?

His call for strike is a call for partisan revolt. It is a strike for a pharisee. Anyway, the president’s abolition of the subsidy is the boldest move in the country in this republic. Maybe, Ajaero and his coven did not want to remove it. Maybe that was what his LP candidate told him. If that is the case, they are not only liars, but cowards. Removing subsidies is bound to, in the words of Vice President Kashim Shettima, come with “the consequences of the unveiling of a masquerade.” It is those masquerades labour should zero in on. Masquerades of cheats, of round-trippers, of vampiric profiteers, of shibboleth and saboteurs. He should look askance at those who make us pay for fuel around the West African sub-region and stretching all the way to Sudan. It costs us close to N400 billion a month. Instead, he is fighting with his liberator. This is the kind of policy that exposes how much excess we buy and how much we need. He reminds of the line from the poet Lord Byron, “he had no objection to true liberty, except that it will set them free.” What Tinubu has done modifies and stylises the echoes from the sometimes ambiguous words of Rousseau: “Force them to be free.”  So, Ajaero and company have become an unforeseen masquerade unveiled in their monstrous cruelty.

It is a moment not in austerity but realism. Why should the poor pay for the extravagance of superrich vermin? Those who have five cars, one for wife, one for school commute, one for self, one for servants, et al, will now realise that it is no way to run a culture or economy. Time to clip excess to cling to prosperity. We are pruning the fat. In the United States, most families do not have two cars. The cost is immense. If they have, they don’t use them every day. In the U.S., people carpool and share the cost. We cannot become rich by pretending to be “aje butter” first. We have to work to deserve to be “aje butter.” Even rich countries sweat at it. We have to turn the tide before riding it.

Again, palliatives are good, and Tinubu is working on it. But it is not even a long-term solution. In the two times we removed subsidy, once under Jonathan and the next under Buhari, the palliatives were a paradox. We replaced corruption with corruption. Those who had the palliative contracts, including labour leaders, saw it as opportunities to enrich themselves. So, we expect that the palliatives will work this time. But the main issue is how the saved money is mobilized for economic prosperity.

The two times under the two previous governments, they lacked the imagination and courage to turn the funds into economic expansion and opportunity.  Even then, they took the funds piecemeal and it gave us no peace. Hence, many objected with cries in the streets to Jonathan’s try because it was an avenue for corruption. We have to navigate a laissez-faire approach with interventionism, combine the strengths of Fredrich Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises on one hand with Keynes and Galbraith on the other, Hayek’s “minimum state” and Keynes’ demand-pull. It takes a man who knows the nexus of culture and economics to do it.

There is no better person to do this than Tinubu. He is the first literate president in Nigerian history. It is not about who can read and write. This is political economy and culture. That is supreme literacy. He understands commerce, having worked as a technocrat for much of his life. He understands law having been a senator. He knows governance and its intricacies since he was governor and the most consequential one in this republic. He understands culture and he is a consumer of it, from music to his growth among poor. He is both earthy and polished. He is immersed in Nigeria’s history. The story is told of his young days following a minstrel on the back of a truck on a tour of the southwest. He is folksy and has empathy for those who do not sound or worship like him. None of his fellow contenders have this experience. Vice President Shettima with a master’s degree from Ibadan and an elite banker in Lagos, Kano and Borno, and his travels and dynamics of his soul, is the most cosmopolitan vice president we have had in this republic and the most exposed in our history since Ekwueme. He too has a sense for the street having founded what we know today as the Civilian JTF.

With this combo, handling an economy like ours is in good hands. President Tinubu knows, like economists Karl Polanyi and Abraham Rotstein, that the economy is too important a matter to be left to economists. He understands the culture. We are seeing evidence already. Someone said with a whiff of exaggeration that within three days, the president has tackled traffic problems in the cities. The pains are there. But the solution has to come gradually.

In his meeting with service chiefs, he gave marching orders on oil theft. That costs us so much that from it alone we can tackle education and transportation in Nigeria. In a meeting with top Buhari officials, the U.S. treasury secretary Janet Yellen said Nigeria was not poor and that we were tying our money in fuel subsidies to an indolent class.

Rather than focus on strikes, Ajaero should, as a labour man, ask why his favourite party is in turmoil. He should follow the money. The “no shishi” party had a bank that rolled out fantastic profits based on the inflows from outside the country. They would not even pay for materials in the tribunal where their submissions and that of the PDP are colliding and making a mess of their so-called “robust” case as a Sunday columnist called it. That same columnist said Tinubu was not man enough to tackle the country. Yet the man who is “not man enough” has done the bravest thing in the republic. The same writer concluded that he can avail himself of an option to either follow the right path or the wrong. What a contradiction. Maybe he does not know human nature. If he does not know what it takes, why is he saying he has an opportunity? Not many who can write are wise and not many who are wise can write.