Category: Monday

Not many young persons know the story of Yakubu Gowon, or his role in the Nigerian crisis. But he is in the middle of a controversy today that reminds many of the civil war. The Governor-elect of Abia State, the former banker Alex Otti, is inviting the former head of state to party in Umuahia on his investiture as the chief executive of the state. There is no promise of aromas for the palate in the eastern kitchen. The isi-ewus and ohas are not steaming in the pot just yet.

In the age of IPOB and Labour Party angst, some in the east say Otti has made a wrong move. Gowon who presided over the civil war, they contend, is the last person they want on their soil.

Otti probably thought Gowon will epitomise a healing balm on a febrile hour. Otti is coming as a man of peace. Gowon also is coming as a reconciler. But IPOB and its adherents as well as closet Biafrans never believed him when he said, “no victor, no vanquished” when the war ended. They didn’t believe him when he went to Asaba with a mea culpa over the butchery of innocents in what historians call the Asaba Massacre.

Gowon has not written a book on his days as head of state, and he has not granted much of an interview. Maybe, if he said enough he would earn a hug and share a plate of isi-ewu. How many words and what syntax will suffice as penance? But would a book or a hundred interviews have moved a heart or stirred a handshake? It also reflects the dilemma and struggles of liberal Igbo elites like Otti.

It only shows how hard it will take to suture the wound festering since the 1960’s.  While my heart goes out to Otti the dove, my question is what will a Gowon do to visit the east without rancour?

Everyone knows we are not going to pluck our first female governor like a low-hanging plum. The story of Mama Taraba, with its breathtaking drama of a near miss, only gave a hint. But no one expected that the second time, it would look like a story of Jacob and Esau, or the narrative of Leah and Rachel. That is, the cheat of a switch.

In the first story, a woman. That was Mama Taraba. She was the broken heroine of her theatre. But she was not the arbiter. The role fell to the partisan imagination of her supporters chockful of feminists, APC members and many across the country partial to the novelty of her ambition. The imagination, as arbiter, was like Rebecca, who symbolized a dangerous imagination for the ages. Like Esau, Mama Taraba had no power to change the end result. Unlike Esau, she was not cheated. But some of her followers wanted to believe so.

She fought. She lost. She sulked and moved on. Rebecca cheated Esau for her beloved Jacob. Rebecca, according to Bible scholars, was a failure because that incident of a maternal trickster led to a dysfunctional family of feud, death and fear. So, she seemed to have won in the beginning. But, at last, her efforts yielded nothing savory. So, too, it seemed Mama Taraba, Aisha Alhassan, was on her way to victory in the gubernatorial poll in Taraba State. She fired the feminists into an expectant frenzy. It became an anti-climax. In mama Taraba’s case, we had two failures. One was the failure of a partisan imagination, and Mama Taraba herself who could not muster enough numbers at the polls.

 In another tale, another man would cheat the same Jacob by disguising a bride on his wedding night. He had Leah instead of the winsome Rachel. He had to wait in lust and toil for another seven years. The father of the brides was an example in the nexus of capitalism and romance.

However, the cheat in the Leah story was like the cheat in the Adamawa tale. It was a man named Laban, the father of the two girls, who cheated. Jacob was a victim of what is called a switcheroo. Rachel the pretty had to wait another seven years for the man. Leah was the interim love. But unlike the resident electoral commissioner, there was no one to hold Laban to account for foisting an unwanted damsel on a thirsty suitor.

That role came to our own Hudu Ari. He committed his act and disappeared. That was not the case with Laban. He cherished the privilege of impunity. He remained on his farm. He looked Jacob in the face and asked him to work for another seven years for him if his lust and body still wanted to ravish his Rachel. He leered in impotence as his heartthrob pranced about. She also looked back in futile longing. Time was a big chasm between them and a happy doing.

Now, we cannot see Ari the REC. He has fled. Law enforcement agencies cannot see the man who was accompanied by law enforcement agents to announce that Benani, or Aishatu Ahmed, had won. He aborted a baby in mid-trimester. NBA, take note.

Ten local government areas were still voting. But people did not give him credit. He is a seer. He had seen the uncounted votes. He saw that his favorite Benani had won. With his cap and glasses, the man who is also a lawyer saw numbers all of us had no eyes for. There was no need for the virtue of patience. He saw the end from the beginning.

Who knows, maybe he has a numbers problem. Those accusing him of N2 billion bribe have no evidence as yet. They, too, may have a numbers problem. Maybe the man has illusion of numbers. He imagines figures. He privileges imagination over knowledge, just like the great genius of the 20th century Albert Einstein who said, “knowledge is limited…imagination is more important than knowledge.” If he imagined Benani’s vote figures, he could imagine her victory.

But the story Ari the REC composed was a nightmare. He probably was in the league of math geniuses who peddle imaginary numbers. Imaginary units are part of mathematical scholarship. Hence we speak of x and y. If he can imagine it, then he can say it. He is not alone then. He might see himself, though a lawyer, in the company of the geniuses who started saying that once you multiply any negative figure as square root, you must arrive at a positive number. So, Ari believes he is a positive man. He found the square root of the votes, and positive results for his favoured Benani. You cannot blame him. He is seeing figures we cannot see. After all, there was a case of an American who had the disease of not seeing figures two to nine. At least, he saw one.

Ari calculated the votes his own way. The novelist Dostoyevsky in his small classic, The Man from the Underground, said the problem with modern society is that we mathematicise life. We think one plus one will always give us two. It is such an obsession with mathematical precision that gave us the nuclear bomb and Hitler. Hence, he opined that one plus one is not two. It is no longer life but the beginning of death.

Charles Dickens skewers this cast of mind in his novel Hard Times. In his Bleak House, he mocks a female character whose tongue falls into a claptrap of numbers once she hears someone mention any thing that sounds like a number.

Maybe we have a genius in our hands. A genius of rigging. Except that the Ari man did not carry us with him. He did not show us that he is such a genius. He has made a mystery of his formula, turned electoral math into an arcane science. He is suffering from delusion of mathematical grandeur. Or he should have prepared us first by telling his employers how exceptional he was not only in law but also numbers. He should have told Muhammadu Buhari and the INEC boss what was to come.

But he has given us an anti-climax. Did the hero experience a self-doubt. If not, why is he on the run? Or is he working out the formula that gave him the incredible Benani victory. We know math involves subtraction, multiplication and addiction.

Maybe he is trying to work on multiplication. Was he going to give them new names, new fathers and mothers, new jobs, and affix INEC numbers to them that Mahmood Yakubu, INEC boss, is not aware of.

Then we have the chicken and egg scenario. Did she prepare the acceptance speech because she was in cahoots, or was it the hope that was in her, in spite of Ari the REC? Benani gave us a speech about the historic character of her win. It was the dream of all women. Every girl who goes to school knows she can be like Benani and the sky, as Shakespeare says, is her oyster. Any woman can be a Queen Amina, Yaa Ashantewa, Nefertiti or Cleopatra, or Hilary Clinton or Margaret Thatcher. They can soar away in the high places of the earth.

They don’t want deputy. They want to be boss. They want to ride the bus. That is the interior monologue of women. They have a right to dream.

So, too, if a mathematician can invoke imaginary units, why can’t our humble genius called Ari.

There is no tragedy as searing as seeing a multi-storey building go down. The vista stops the breath and suspends belief. The eyes daze as in a dream. It covers a narrow breadth of space, but at that moment, it is the end of the world.

That was how the Banana Island seven-storey building collapse video came across to this writer. At first, news had it there was no death. But there are stories of a recovered body. As Stalin wrote, “A million deaths is a statistic, one death is a tragedy.” The real tragedy is the cockiness of the super-rich who live on that peacock island. That explains why a company could erect such a building and prevent inspectors access to the island. So, no one knows about it, except those who have a pass inside. The BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, cannot go about the streets of Lagos looking for buildings without permit. Now, in a highbrow area, an estate allows a company to operate outside the law because its money places them above the law and the common estate. As the proverb say, what the child does not want the elder to know, an elder will settle it. The lack of permit was a permission for a big loss.

Now, the matter has come to the governor’s notice and he has stopped work on it.  The island stepped on its own banana peel and it has come down to the floor, first as a building, then as a corporate concern.

The controversy over the status of Abuja takes one to an episode, long ago, in the days of colonial thralldom. A British writer, Margery Perham, had heard tales of the exploits of a kingdom known as Jukun, or Kwororofa in northern Nigeria. It was a predator as empire builder, its army almost of the aura and discipline, if not the butchery and grandeur, of Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, its wealth of inevitable fables. She wanted to cancel imagination with reality. But when she got there, there were no majesties, no superfine wealth, no empire, no mysteries. Just huts and goats bleating under hot sun, as my history teacher at Ife Olomola told it. Then she exclaimed, “An exaggerated glory.” More like a ruin than a reign.

One can muse on the historic paradox of the Federal Capital Territory. It is Nigeria’s first synthetic city. Only decades ago, it was a rustic place of humble citizens, much like Perham’s Jukun. The military anointed it the capital and our oil wealth sculpted it. Just like Washington D.C. that was a native Indian home before white politicians changed capital and gave it a new status above all cities. No one remembers the native Indians who were conquered and displaced with brutal force, as it happened to them across the country, especially in the age of President Andrew Jackson. He embossed a trail of tears on Indian and American history where many of the indigenes died as whites reenacted America’s version of the exodus in uprooting them from their homelands.

The indigenes of Abuja, unlike the Indians now flattered as native Americans, saw themselves in the backwoods of the country’s politics. They took their land from them, and the politicians wined and whined in glory while no one gave them any status as inhabitants. They were not concerned about 25 percent. That was no status. It was a calculus for power. It gave no money, no resources, not even leverage to their people.

Since they had no status, or, we could say, they had status anxiety, some of them wanted something. They were not even sure they had one percent stake in the Nigerian project. A group of them went to court for a humble plea. If they could be given the status of a state, they would be happy. So, they galvanized and went to the court. In the final analysis, they brought the matter to the court of courts, the Supreme Court.

It was a humble request. The Supreme Court ruled that they had made a good plea, and it ruled that Abuja was, in fact, to be treated like a state. It may not have the size. But a state – like a nation – is not a substance of size. They did not have the resources. Nor does a state, as a component or subnational, or a state as a nation consist in resources. It is a factor of consciousness or consensus. The constitution is clear on the matter of the status. But a querulous nation requires an arbiter. That is the virtue of the rule of law.

The indigenes only want to have the other features of a state like a legislature. But outsiders have come to imbue it with the ego of Shakespeare’s Malvolio. He is the servant in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, who read a fake love letter from his mistress. One of the lines read: Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have it thrust upon them.

Suddenly, the same Abuja that a few years ago was not sure if it was even a city, now has a strange status thrust on it.  It is now being described as a superstate. The indigenes must feel flattered by the word AND in the constitution. It is “and” that changes everything, according to those who want to give it a Malvolio complex. A rhetorical status, a superiority in word.

And, according to their benefactors, it makes them bigger than Lagos or Enugu states. It makes them more powerful than all the states put together because it is the only state with the status of AND. And is a great epaulette. The FCT is not only born great and has achieved greatness, it has greatness thrust upon it. That is the problem. Who thrust it upon it, like the fake letter of pranksters in Shakespeare’s play? This is the farce of the day. So, the FCT is not just the capital of the country. It is the capital of the constitution. Without it, the law cannot breathe. It must be a constitutional tour de force. Washington has no such status, nor Paris, nor London. A golden city, a golden state.

So, the indigenes must, however, worry. What does 25 percent do for them. It only makes somebody from somewhere else come to their city to call himself president. Even then, does that not make them stand tall? They don’t have the population of Lagos or Kano or Port Harcourt, and suddenly their percentage must count above those others because they are Nigeria’s synthetic city?

The interlopers of interpretation are taking away the definition of equality from the tenets of democracy. It says all men are created equal, all states are created equal too. For the so-called ‘And-ers,’ all states are not created equal. Some are more equal than others. Indeed, some are golden. If the oil states lay the golden egg that we all share, then Abuja is the state with the golden vote.

They belong to the antediluvian concept of democracy championed since the days of Plato. Such a concept believes in unequal people. Plato did not believe all men were created equal but he gave concession to a democracy of sorts. He preferred Sparta to Athens. Even Athens loved its slaves. In modern societies, including in England, only the gentry mattered. They were like Aristotle’s concept of the Magnanimous Man, who was a cut above the crowd in breeding and status. American society began that way, only white men with money had voting rights. There were no Indians in the drafting of the constitution. Slaves still broke their backs in plantations.  It took over a hundred years of independence before women could vote, and another half a century more before blacks enjoyed it. Today, they are still creating barriers.

They belong to the bracket of democrats who say votes should not be counted but weighed. No way for one person, one vote. Men like Benjamin Disraeli and Calhoun pursued the concept. They have been disgraced in public by the surge of time. When in the state of Tennessee in the United States a gang-up of white legislators expelled two black lawmakers, the system invoked its reflex to save its democracy. Their constituents voted to return them. That is the way of mature democracy.

That is what the And-ers want to upturn. They want to make Abuja into golden votes like the interlopers in Ben Jonson’s play, The Alchemists. Some fellows took over a landlord’s house and convinced themselves they could make gold. They failed as alchemists until the real owner of the house returned. They, like our ‘And-ers,’ turned out to be dead-enders. The ‘And-ers’ are our constitutional alchemists. They are giving the FCT an “exaggerated glory.”

It’s time to retire death – on the third day. It is also a time for the illusion of life for number three. A political party that came third is craving a fantasy of Easter. Like Christ, it wants to resurrect heaven-bound, as the icon of Nigerian salvation. Moreso as it affects piety as powerhouse.

From pulpits to populists, it has clutched at straws to make itself saviour. To such breed, Jesus himself proclaimed, “I never knew you.” Speaking to such starry-eyed adventurers, German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer asserts, “We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must.” We can see this brutal hysteria in their flirtation with violence by calling for subversion, by rejecting a process they took part in, by hugging interim government, by teasing the army. Its tactic? A tyranny of trolls. Soyinka calls them fascists and everywhere they plead guilty, online, on TV, on radio, on the streets.

They have also called themselves the third force, a badge that sits on their chests with historical inelegancy. Third forces have tended through history to fascinate but only as lovable losers. The only time they made headway was in France in its tempestuous Fourth Republic, and that was because its great avatar of the 20th century, the aloof, charismatic war hero Charles de Gaulle pulled an egoistic stunt by announcing his resignation. He thought his fellow citizens would mass, drooly-mouthed, and grovel to his rural home and beg him to return. No dice. He misread a proud people, inflating himself as indispensable in a republic of squalls and quarrels. Since then, the French have wobbled at a third force revival, including Francois Mitterrand. Third force is odd force.

Nor is the LP the first crack at the third force in Nigeria. If, it can be so called. Well, we might. First, because its candidate turned a moment of party turncoat into a momentum. Two, it came third at the polls. We pretended in the First Republic. But NEPU, Nigerian Middle Belt Congress and others had no national emblem. AG was strong, but no farther than the western region, and parts of Midwest. NEPU was northern maverick as Tarka’s party flailed with minorities. NCNC that started as a great nationalist umbrella shrank into an eastern rump under Zik. The Second Republic was no better. With NPP, GNPP and UPN as counterforce to the towering NPN, we had no other presence. Only puny upstarts like Braithwaite’s NAP that never woke up.

We might have thought that the rise of NADECO, the fortitude of PRONACO, and quite a few other such events would open the way for such an idealist dawn in the country. We never had. Enahoro, Soyinka and others have been proponents. In his The Man Died, the memoirist relates his effort to forestall the civil war by daring across the Biafran border, and wrote about the value of a third force to salvage a drift down an incline of blood and death. For this essayist, what we have had as the third force was the jackboot. The army was a primitive awakening in our history, and they always came with messianic guile. First, we hailed them, then we bewailed them. By the advent of June 12, they had reached the end of their tether. Many depredations after, Nigerians have forsworn them. They were a de facto third force that even their masters spat out and changed gear to civilian democracy even if they look like sinners in cassocks.

It is therefore a paradox that those who call themselves the third force should now be calling on that superstition to save us. When Soyinka said he wanted to debate Datti Ahmed, this essayist squirmed. How could the bard spar with a man not worth his intellectual spare part. In his War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy said: “It is better to bow too low than not low enough.” That was a call to humility. But Soyinka is above such stooping. Not a mental fit. I am happy it will not happen. This is a season where some of the so-called third force have spun a tribe of spurious intelligentsia. Some who had a level head had leveled their heads with bigotry of tribe and faith, and forgot their former selves of even temper and subtlety. They have become barbarians of thought. There is no chasm between them and the republic of trolls.

We saw one of them the other, the writer Chimamanda Adichie, go desperate. She wrote a piece in the New York Times that I skewered. Then she changed platform to The Atlantic. She wrote with innuendoes and half-facts and outright lies. She tried to con the America president and public by posing as a detached observer. She might have added that she campaigned for the LP guy, that they have had dinners together, appeared in public together, and they bonded in a funeral hour when the man attended her parent’s burial ceremony. She cited polls as evidence that LP won. She did not even acknowledge PDP in the polls. Here is a person who touts the iniquity of a single story. Yet, she sweetened to one. Her writings drip with evidence of a single story. In her Half of a Yellow Sun, she describes the Yoruba as lickspittle, the Fulani fellow is a sexual weakling who must yield way for the biceps of Odenigbo, the Yoruba academic at Nsukka is skittish and obnoxious and the Biafran minorities are turncoats. Even in her Americanah, Soyinka – not named – gets a jibe when a Yoruba fellow is put down as in love with only writers people cannot understand.

Not once in her letter to Biden does she cite any statistic. Anecdotes don’t make patterns. She may write fiction, but the 2023 poll is reality. As I noted last week, we had over 176,000 polling units in the country. But some are mistaking their backyards for all of Nigeria. The noise is mainly in the southeast and Lagos, and the rest of the country watches the theatre of the disgruntled. Even the Endsars crowd is a backrow crow of the choir and their throats choke often in the pietistic and tribal threnody. The Endsars youth wanted LP for one reason, the LP embraced them for another. One used the other. The young idealists did not know the bus and driver until they had left the station.

She refers to technology as though that same technology is not the solution. What we have is what the American novelist Don DeLillo describes in his work, White Noise. We are in an era of erratic decibels pieced together by an odd rhythm of blind rage. As DeLillo says, even technology does not help such persons. Hear him: “The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.”

Hence some of them do not know how to make technology work but to turn it into a Frankenstein monster.

So, if we wanted a third force, this is not the sort. The United Kingdom has sought its own as well and fallen short, especially with the party known as Lib Dem, or Liberal Democratic Party. From the Whigs and Tories duel centuries ago to the birth of the Conservatives, the country searched. When a coalition gave birth to the Labour Party that sent war hero Churchill squealing out of Downing Street, it was no third Force but, like APC, a coalition of opposition as counterforce to the Conservatives. The Liberal Party is the ancestor of the Lib Dem today but a different ideological makeup.

The idea of a third force – not so called – began in the US, with Theodore Roosevelt with his Bull Moose Party when he broke away from the Republican Party. He split the Republican Party vote with Taft and handed the victory in 1912 to Woodrow Wilson. America was to witness this later with the rise of Ross Perot, who gobbled up many George H. Bush votes and Clinton emerged winner. It repeated itself in Ralph Nader and his Green Party that rid Gore of his victory against the son Bush. This was what happened with APC victory with LP devouring PDP takings in  southsouth , southeast , it’s echo chamber in  Lagos and parts of north central. It is the way of democracy. This scenario restrained Donald Trump from running as independent. Rather he rammed his way into the party leadership, appearing both as maverick and mainstay. He would have lost if he didn’t. Bernie Sanders did same, and challenged Hillary Clinton for the Democratic ticket. We saw same pattern in the Philippines, Turkey, Hungary, et al.

In Nigeria, tribe and faith will not open the way for a third force today. The big parties know this. Even the LP knew this, hence it latched on to tribe and faith with the odd coupling with young persons from the south who rode a wrong wave. The rhetoric of youth often assumes southern youth and northern youth are one. In the Endsars imbroglio, what the young wanted in the south conflicted with the north. The southern raconteurs insult northern youths by appropriating their story.

While Jesus rose the third day, this third force is not rising again. It has committed suicide and embalmed itself after an act of political self-crucifixion.