The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

  • Atiku’s UFO

    Atiku’s UFO

    It’s an oddball name.  A term like special purpose vehicle, or SPV, may not, on the surface, convey to the mind an aspect of commerce. For one, we may think it as an actual physical, moving contraption, like a car. It may even conjure a picture of an armoured tank, or a special car designed to protect a VIP, like a president or army general. It could also be like an unidentified flying object, or UFO. An unidentified company flying in corporate clouds. So, SPV is for VIPs. Or UFO as an SPV is also for a VIP.

    Indeed it is, if you have a man like Atiku Abubakar in mind. According to the revelations of Michael Achimogu, who will go down in history as an election-era whistleblower, Atiku thought his company called Marine Float is a sort of UFO in the business world.  He made it a UFO before it became an SPV. No one can identify it before he registers it. The company is named Marine Float, not Atiku Inc. in a business sense, Atiku dies, so he floats the new company and he resurrects in another name. Apostle Paul says, for a new testament to be born, the testator must first die. Except that, as this story goes, the act of rebirth as a commercial spirit, a new company owner, failed because Atiku could not transit. Just like the guy in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman who could not transform from flesh to spirit. No one could be a Christ. Atiku could not re-enact a Christ-like rebirth. He could not pull off a business Houdini or transfiguration.

    Even as a marine spirit, he could not float. Americans and Russians have stealth submarines and no one sees them until they strike. As a politician, he went into battle with his flanks wide open, even to a spy. He got exposed. In Nigeria’s superstition, the marine spirits were at work. He could not perform the rites the water spirits wanted. So, they got angry. Witches do not forgive. We can only expiate them. Atiku did not learn that lesson.

    Some have said, especially Atiku’s men, that the tape was fake. It was not Atiku’s voice. Atiku himself has not denied it. Maybe it is hard to deny himself. Or maybe, he is too cocksure that it is not him and he disdains it too much to comment. If it is fake, it is possible these days for a person’s voice to be faked indeed. Artificial Intelligence does fraudulent wonders. It is called deepfake voice technology. It happens. Maybe Achimogu faked Atiku’s voice. Maybe not. So, when the APC media team made the noise about the need to arrest the PDP candidate, maybe the Atiku people are not bothered because they feel the man has been faked. It is not voice alone that can be faked. Faces also can be faked. We are seeing it already in Hollywood.

    But the only way to find out is to investigate. Even the Atiku team did not have the courage to ask the EFCC to investigate. They have not exercised the courage of their own innocence. They don’t want to re-enact the theatre of the American presidential candidate Gary Hart who challenged the media to go after him. He claimed to be a holy man until a photo-journalist caught him with a svelte eve called Donna Rice on a beach. That turned his trajectory from the White House to the dog house of American politics.

    If it is a fake voice, we have technology to prove it. In fact, there are other ways to know if it is true. All EFCC needs to do is investigate Marine Float and the comings and goings of its invoices. We do not need the voice alone but also invoices. We can see ledgers for treachery. We can know the inflows and outflows and identify what is and was afloat in the company accounts over the years. The voice recording is just the tease.

    Two things are germane to this narrative. One, it reveals the slippery terrain of political relationships. Many top guns must be looking at their aides and wondering, who is the Achimogu among them. But it is not today that trusted men betray. Judas, like a green snake, is a natural poisonous tooth in the shrubbery. Maybe, they should start asking themselves whether they offended an aide, whether they treated them shabbily. But how do you define shabby? It is a problem in deploying favours, and whether you have given enough to stay in the favours of your workmen.

    The other issue is double standards in the media. When, as Festus Keyamo noted, the APC candidate Bola Tinubu was under severe scrutiny over drugs and certificate, the mainstream media hungered and thirsted. They made calls to the United States and sought court records. They kept investigating the drug matter after even the United States government through its embassy had come out with a clear statement on any case in court. They persisted and sought out voices to keep the matter afloat. The same was done with the certificate matter, even when the Chicago State University said he was not just a graduate but a model student or scholar.

    They did their job but turned partisan by badgering after the matter had been concluded. There is even a sense of frustration among some media gate keepers since they have no new angles to explore. It reminds one of the novel of Daphne Du Maurier titled Rebecca, where a woman is obsessed with another woman whose voice she does not know, whose face she never sees but has only access to her scent. The same applies to the fellow in Gogol’s short story The Nose. It is short piece about the written word where innocents are accused of stealing his nose. They have left the substance and are looking for shadows.

    In this Atiku-Achimogu saga, the media is struck by the numb disease. While the claim was on the social media for a while, it was ignored. Hence, it seems, the media team of the APC brought it to the open. The story may be true or fake. It is the job of the journalist to excavate and to do it without a flavour of a witch hunt. When this election cycle is over, I wonder what journalism scholars will say about the media of this time. What will students writing their term papers and theses say about verdicts and news judgment and fairness in the newsroom? Will they be proud of today’s gate keepers and their reporters?

  • Anyaoku fairer in the ninth

    Anyaoku fairer in the ninth

    Enter BOS of Lagos. Enter Chief of Staff to the president. Enter Obj. Exit boredom. The boredom had to disappear as former president Olusegun Obasanjo walked into the Metropolitan Club where the old and retired men of industry meet to recall old exploits over tea, and dine. This time, they gathered to mark the 90th birthday of an illustrious citizen, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, former Secretary of the Commonwealth. It was time to celebrate a man who distinguished himself in the course of his career. I have known him for a few years now, and have always prayed that we shall celebrate his ninth decade on earth.

    Many gave tributes, including the BOS of Lagos, who waxed eloquent and reeled out his virtues, and there was a touching moment when he described himself as “your governor and your son.” Others spoke, including an absorbing tribute by his friend who recalled his full life accolades like 31 honorary doctorates across the world. When Anyaoku spoke, he lamented the decline of the nation and denigration of the green passport.

    As I looked and heard the many tributes and his own short acknowledgment, I wondered that few knew some of the exploits of this man. No one recalled that during the civil war, his wife Olubunmi had given birth to a child, and he had to travel to Biafra to rescue children and also provide supplies. He had to undertake nocturnal flights in rickety aircraft to dare bullets and soldiers to land at Uli Airport. His wife wondered why he would abandon their new -born baby. He replied that their baby, then in London, was privileged unlike the ones in the heady hour of death and misery. Few also know that as Commonwealth secretary, his role in trying to secure M.K.O. Abiola’s release from detention brought ire to some of Abacha’s partisans and he escaped assassination plot. His family was also in danger. In spite of that, he met Abiola and also Abacha. He had to take a flight out of the country with the help of another head of state.

    When OBJ rose to speak, he said he worked with Chief Anyaoku when he (OBJ) was a member of the Eminent Persons Group that included former Australian leader Malcolm Fraser. In his dramatic way, he recalled how Fraser “looked down on me,” and he decided to deal with him. Anyaoku intervened for peace, and OBJ replied, “Don’t general me,” to the diplomat’s plea of “please general.” Peace prevailed. But we get a hint even from OBJ’s confession why he is no longer a factor in world affairs as he was in those days. It is because of his lack of finesse that his eminence is now only tolerated in Africa.

    The chief drama of the day reflected something of Obj. He announced his arrival by walking from the main table where the celebrant, Anyaoku, Governor Sanwo-Olu, Gambari, Buhari’s chief of staff, were seated. He walked to the back of the hall to meet Anyaoku’s wife, Olubunmi, who did not want to share the spotlight with her husband. He pulled her from her seat, put his hand around her waist as though a father taking a bride through the aisle. Anyaoku smiled at the spectacle and a hubbub overflowed the hall. But rather than set the woman beside her husband, OBJ retained his seat beside the celebrant, so he was sandwiched between husband and wife. So, what was his point? To put husband and wife together or split them? After that, he recalled Olubunmi Anyaoku’s wife left her handbag behind, and Obj walked out of the main table in a flourish to the back seat and picked the bag and held it up so all could see his act of generosity. At last, when all were leaving, Olubunmi sat beside her husband of many decades. What Obj put asunder, God eventually put together.

  • Edo train kidnap

    Edo train kidnap

    Barely 11 days after the attack on a sub-station of the Nigerian Railway Corporation in Igueben, Edo State and the subsequent abduction of passengers, the state government last Wednesday, announced the rescue of the last two victims of the kidnap saga.

    Edo State Commissioner for Communications and Orientation, Chris Nehikhare who dropped the cheering news also disclosed that seven persons, including two traditional chiefs were arrested in connection with the train attack and kidnap. That would seem a great feat and somewhat a timely response especially when weighed against the background of previous experiences in the hands of the kidnappers. More importantly, the disclosure would appear to have brought a closure to the kidnap riddle, at least, from the point of view of search and rescue operations.

    But that is not all there is to the train attack and subsequent abduction of the passengers on that ill-fated day. This is more so as the attack came barely one year after the Abuja-Kaduna train attack in which 14 passengers were killed and 65 others abducted in a harrowing encounter that was to last several months.

    The fact of this is sufficient to raise some curiosity as to what could have accounted for the relative timely rescue of the Edo kidnap victims without casualties. This is especially so given all we had been told about the difficulty in engaging such criminals in armed confrontation and the potential risks the captives face in such situations. So what really happened? How different is the circumstance of this train abduction from the previous one?  I will return to this.

    Accounts of how the incident happened and the number of those abducted vary. But the account of the state police command would suffice.

    According to the spokesperson of the command, Chidi Nwabuzor, “on January 7, 2023 at about 1600hrs, an unspecified number of herdsmen armed with AK 47 riffles, attacked the train station at Igueben, Edo State and kidnapped an unspecified number of passengers who were waiting to board the train to Warri in Delta State. The kidnappers, who shot sporadically into the air before kidnapping some passengers, left some persons with bullet wounds”.

    Initial reports put the number of those abducted at 31. The state government was later to clarify that based on intelligence reports from security operatives from the area, 20 people were actually kidnapped contrary to 31 earlier claimed. At the time of this clarification, the government also said that seven of the abducted victims had been released leaving a balance of 13 people.

    Before this clarification, two children and a woman had reportedly secured their freedom in circumstances that suggested security agencies had no hand in their flight to safety. One account said the kidnapers released the children and called on their parent to come to a particular spot to collect them apparently as they were finding it difficult to continue their journey with the slow pace of the children.

    It is also not clear how the freedom of others were secured by the team of security agencies comprising of the Police, the Army, the Navy, the Department of State Services DSS, hunters, local vigilante and the Edo State Security network. What is important is that the state government mobilized the arsenal at the disposal of these agencies to comb the forests, track down the hoodlums and release the victims.

    This effort paid off as all the abducted victims were released unharmed. There is little information as to whether security agencies actually engaged the kidnappers on any armed combat. Neither are we told that any of the victims paid any ransom before their release.

    From the accounts of some of the freed victims, it does not appear there was armed confrontation before their release. The issue of ransom payment remains a remote possibility in view of the circumstance and pace of the release of some of the victims.

    What appears more likely is that the herdsmen involved in the attack were operating in a terrain that is not really their own. The forests they operated belong to the indigenous communities in Edo State. And there is a limit beyond which they cannot possibly hold on under the heat brought to bear by the armada of security agencies deployed to fish them out.

    Apparently faced with hot pursuit, they may have been running for safety, changing locations and in the process unable to hold on to a large number of captives. That may have accounted for the relative ease with which the abductees regained their freedom. This may remain within the realm of speculations in the absence of any information from the security agencies to that effect.

    But it does not in any way diminish the sacrifice and gallantry of all those involved in the rescue operation. It is obvious that without the pressure mounted on the hoodlums, many of the victims would still be in the dungeon of the criminals facing all kinds of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man as they are forced to call their relatives to remit humongous sums of money as ransom.

    One other thing that seems evident from this encounter is the issue of collaboration with locals in this heinous crime. The state government said that seven suspects were arrested in connection with the attack. There is no information on the identity of the other five arrested suspects. But two of the seven are traditional chiefs from the area.

    That immediately throws up the suspicion that the herders were operating in connivance with locals, this time traditional chiefs of the area. That should not be surprising given the manner the attack was hatched and executed with precision a few minutes before the arrival of the train. Those who planned the attack are privy to the arrival schedule of the train. They are also aware that there is no security presence in that train sub-station for which the federal government should be blamed.

    They may have secured the services of the herdsmen given the sophisticated weapons at their disposal and their knowledge of the surrounding forests. They may have calculated that security agencies are unlikely to massively invade the forests to confront them for fear of casualties as had been the case. But, it was all a miscalculation.

    There is a big lesson from the Edo incident especially for similar kidnap attacks by herdsmen in the southern parts of the country. It has always been a huge puzzle how herders abduct and hold on to their victims in terrains other their own localities. A cursory appraisal of the modus operandi of the herdsmen in kidnap incidents in terrains in the southern parts of the country shows they are reluctant to hold on to their victims for a long time.

    In many of the kidnap incidents that regularly take place within the boundaries of Imo, Abia and Enugu states along the Okigwe-Enugu expressway, the kidnappers strike late evenings and compel their victims to raise quick ransom before dawn or face death. That was how the Prelate of the Methodist Church of Nigeria, Samuel Kanu-Uche and some of his bishops were made to part with N100 million before dawn and released.

    The reason is not hard to fathom. It has to do with the difficulty in the kidnappers holding on to their victims for long because of the uncertainties of the local terrain they operate. A serious attack on such localities by security agencies will likely produce results akin to the Edo State encounter. Kidnappers know this. And that is why they embark on quick fixes.

    That is why they make quick bargains and release their victims before dawn. It also quite revealing of the characters that engage in these kidnap incidents along many of our highways. There is also the issue of sophisticated weapons still in the hands of the herdsmen. The Edo incident has shown that kidnappers even with their AK-47 riffles can be attacked and victims released with minimal casualties.

    If this strategy had been adopted in earlier instances such as the Abuja- Kaduna train attack, the country would have been saved the harrowing experience of bowing to the dictates of the bandits. Perhaps also, if bandits know that they will be massively attacked and possibly decimated, the lure for the inglorious business would have diminished considerably. These are some of the lessons from the Edo incident.

  • Kanu and complications

    Kanu and complications

    Releasing Nnamdi Kanu, the detained leader of the proscribed separatist group, Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), is not a simple matter. It is a complicated issue.

    Anambra State Governor Charles Soludo, who intervened in the case, sounded simplistic when he made a “passionate appeal” to the federal government to release the detainee “unconditionally.” He also spoke simplistically when he said: “If he cannot be released unconditionally, I want him released to me and I will stand surety for him.”

    The governor was reported to have made the comments at a political event organised by his party, the All-Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), on January 14, and he was likely influenced by political considerations and circumstances.   

    Interestingly, he tried to guarantee that Kanu would not take flight if released conditionally, saying, “I will house him here in Awka.” He also said: “We need him released to end insecurity in the South-east.”

    The problem is that history may repeat itself should Kanu be released to Soludo. It is noteworthy that, in November 2018, the Federal High Court, Abuja, had ordered Kanu’s sureties to pay N100 million each to the court for failing to produce him in court since he was granted bail in April 2017.

    The three sureties were:  Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe, a Jewish High Priest, Emmanu El- Salom Oka BenMadu, and an accountant, Mr Tochukwu Uchendu.  The sureties had challenged the trial court’s order. 

    It is ironic that Soludo sees Kanu as a solution to insecurity in the Southeast.  His group is known for using terroristic methods in its fight for an independent “Biafra land” made up of Nigeria’s five Southeast states, and parts of the South-south geo-political zone. In 2020, IPOB illegally launched its Eastern Security Network (ESN), which it described as “a vigilance group.”

    Notably, the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Usman Alkali Baba, last year, accused “the IPOB and ESN” and “the pro-Yoruba secessionists” of working to stop elections in the Southeast and Southwest respectively. His representative made the accusation before the House of Representatives Ad-hoc Committee Investigating the Attacks on Offices and Facilities of Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).  He highlighted attacks on INEC facilities in Osun and Ogun states in the Southwest, and Ebonyi, Imo and Enugu states in the Southeast.

    The IGP, represented by the Deputy Inspector General (DIG) in charge of the Department of Operations, Mustapha Dandaura, said the Southeast secessionists “have been attacking our personnel, they have been killing our personnel. They have been retrieving arms from members of the security agencies, not only the police – the military and other paramilitary organisations that are there.”

    Does Soludo expect Kanu to stop his fight for Biafra? Is Kanu ready to do so? From all indications, insecurity in the Southeast is mainly due to IPOB’s activities, and it would require a reformed Kanu to reform the group.

    But there are signs that IPOB has become a Frankenstein monster beyond the control of the people who created it. This makes the group more dangerous. It is unclear who is in charge of the group now, considering the enforcement of the five-day sit-at-home declared by Finland-based Biafra campaigner Simon Ekpa, even after Kanu had opposed it. 

    There was strong evidence of divisions within the group as zealous enforcers ignored Kanu’s disclaimer, and violently implemented Ekpa’s controversial order that Southeast residents should stay at home from December 9 to 14, 2022.

    The question of leadership and control of the group is critical. Ekpa’s move, and its outcome, show that it should not be taken for granted that Kanu is in charge.  So, it is uncertain that Kanu’s release will help to put an end to insecurity in the region. Ultimately, the authorities must demonstrate capacity to uphold law and order in the Southeast.

    The Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF) and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, said he was “not in receipt of any application arising from the public statement made by the governor, either through the judicial process or extended to me as the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF).”  He explained that “when a matter is pending before the court, the right channel through which any request or perhaps concession can be presented for consideration is through the judicial process.” This further shows that Soludo had approached the matter simplistically.

    IPOB argued that Soludo’s call for Kanu’s unconditional release was belated, adding that the matter had also gone beyond “the issue of surety or no surety.”  Its Media and Publicity Secretary, Emma Powerful, in a statement, pointed out that the Court of Appeal, Abuja, on October 13, 2022, “discharged and acquitted the leader of IPOB and all the remaining eight-count amended charges preferred against him, and consequently directed for his unconditional release.”

    This is not the whole truth. The Court of Appeal, Abuja, on October 28, 2022, ordered that the enforcement of the judgment releasing Kanu be put on hold pending the resolution of the federal government’s appeal filed at the Supreme Court. So, it is untrue that Kanu is being detained unlawfully, as IPOB claims. It is also untrue that the federal government is “in grave contempt of the orders of its own court,” as the group claims. 

    Kanu was first arrested in October 2015, and granted bail in April 2017 in the course of his trial for “alleged offences of conspiracy to commit acts of treasonable felony and other related offences.”

    He fled the country in September 2017 following “Operation Python Dance,” a military exercise in the Southeast during which “rampaging soldiers” allegedly invaded his house in Afara-Ukwu Ibeku, Umuahia, Abia State.

     He had reappeared in Israel a year later, in October 2018. He had grabbed the headlines yet again with a tweet in January 2019, saying, “I am back in the UK to continue our excellent work to liberate #Biafra from the pit of darkness, Nigeria.”

    He was re-arrested in Kenya and brought back to Nigeria in June 2021, about four years after he mysteriously disappeared from the country.  

    Kanu’s case is multidimensionally complicated, and the complications are striking.  

  • Fantastic voyage

    Fantastic voyage

    It has been long coming. Like the man awaiting a beloved one, we have stood on the train station, waiting for the hoot. We had hope, but no help. From year to year, decade to decade and a century dovetailing into the next, the weary beloved knows the journey is not an easy one.

    It started with a promise, and how lofty it was, how cheery. It was a hope, but it was a grandeur, a train slashing through the city. The man who etched the hope became known as a sort of prophet, an engineer, a fantasist. As prophet, he had no canon. As an engineer, he was a glorious impostor. As a fantasist, he dreamed, as most dreamers – alone. We all dream alone.

    But he was none of these. He wore a faith cap, but he had no noted pedigree of piety. He did not have any degree as certificates go. But he certified himself in hearts across the state and city. He was just a workman and warrior with the pen and news. Now he was also news as governor and performer. The theatre was on the streets, in schools, on the road, in hearts and in his stamp of hope.

    We called him Jakande or LKJ, a journalist whose trademark project would generate a journal of a journey on rail tracks. He was a man of spare means. His office spare. His car spare. His pocket spare. But his greed for the future was anything but spare. Of course, he never spared his Tom Tom that made his face bustle around the jaw as he licked and chewed. When he died, no one mentioned diabetes, and even if its sugar worked out any malice, it was of little effect on a man who departed the earthly train in his ninth decade.

    He learned his greed from another man of niggardly disposition. Many have come to call him spare, too. He, too, called Awo, had a greed for the future. If LKJ  was no prophet, he was only an engineer of human souls. He never had a head for design. But he was shaping and mapping a fantasy, making a huge, locomotive toy for adults. He was an engineer because he was first a fantasist. He was an idealist by that definition. As D.H. Thoreau noted: “idealist nations make the most machines.” It begins with the toy. Toys excite children. Toys excite adults, too. Big toys. You must think like a child to make toys. To make a computer, think of video games. Now war games. The computer came to birth in the chills of the Cold War. Like the Wright Brothers, you must think about flying high to meet the angels. As the French poet Rimbaud writes, “genius is the recovery of childhood at will.” Hence Jesus said all little children should come to him, and that all should be like children. The United States is often likened to a juvenile culture. President Ronald Regan, at 70, habitually posed like a boy as though a cowboy in a movie. Trump has exemplified the boy adult, a farcical version of a Lincoln, who also would not underplay the power of the séance.  His wife, Mary Todd, always thought her dead son was alive each time he visited the séance.

     But the same culture gave us the marvels of today. So, the fantasist is good. Years after LKJ, the fantasy haunted us. Buhari stanched the dream and recanted. Repentance is about acts, not mere rhetorical confession. After stopping the dream in Lagos, he did penance on a national scale by giving trains in Lagos-Abeokuta-Ibadan and others. Lagos, the springtide of development weighed heavy on Buhari’s conscience. Jakande haunted Buhari to compensate as president.

    But it is not just him. When Tinubu came on board, he revived the project. When some doubted it, the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, revived history in a public video of truth against malicious naysayers. Tinubu, a governor and younger, dreamed the same as Jakande but a different one, too. He came to modernise and re-draft. Babatunde Fashola (SAN), now the Trojan of works, became an “actualiser” and laid the first earth, “babying” the fantasy. One by one, block built on block, but he could not conquer time. No one can. Others had to continue. Progress is a relay.

    The project seemed to suffer another abortive act in a successor. But as Shakespeare said, truth sunk into the earth shall spring forth again. Enter the BOS. Enter a new belief. He promised but he was not going to torture us with hope. Fantasy chides the believer. In between hope and reality, humans have invented lies, cruelty and deaths. The promise of paradise in all religions has forced humans to erect civilisations and savagery. Before it becomes true, prophets lie, followers maim and torture, death camps are instituted, worship houses duel against each other, families divide, lovers elope, lovers abandon love, countries go to war, cults fume with daggers, fanatics overtake the fantasy with sullen stares and apocalyptic doctrines that compromise the purity of the faith, merchants profit, vandals plunder, patriarchs reign. Sometimes, hope is a curse, hence Apostle Paul says charity is better than hope.

    Read Also: Lagos Igbo community root for Sanwo-Olu

    It is that charity, that love that transforms hope into a blessing, that the BOS of Lagos has done with the train. Both blue and red lines will make us move. The city will move again. The trains will chortle as the people shuttle.

    It will bisect the city, and dissect it. It is a progress in a city signposted by molues and area boys. That generation is passing before our eyes. We have BRT, and that turns the agbero into an anachronism.  But gradually. In his play, The Road, Soyinka spoofs that tribe of men who con the people and profits on road tragedies. In another voice, Soyinka prays for the traveller while asking him “To set forth at dawn.” The train, blue and red, is a new dawn that LKJ fantasised and that Tinubu re-dreamed and set the template for realisation. As Nixon wrote in his memoirs, a dream unrealised is “like a baby that is stillborn.”

    But Soyinka wishes the traveller “marvels of a holy hour.” Soyinka does not trust roads very much as we see in his works, whether in Death and King’s Horseman or Madmen and Specialists or even in his novel, The Interpreters. In his The Road, the novelist Cormac McCarthy peers glumly at apocalypse. Jack Kerouac portrays a soulless journey through America.

    Trains are a different kind of journey. They form their own visions, their arbitrary pathways through human crowds and alleys. America was redrawn by the rail. It reconnected a continent as a nation. It set the pace for its first burst of prosperity.  This essayist will visit the other milestones of the BOS soon.

    But it is the work of dedication, a fury of fulfilment. The people know that hope is good when there is no doubt. You cannot argue against a monument. No one can quibble over it, even though humans want to deny the evidence of their eyes. Man was made just, says the scriptures, but he has made many inventions.

    The invention of the train, its hooting and whirring across the state awaits the invention of a naysayer. We shall see if they deny the comfort of their seats, the landscape before their eyes and the ears that respond as the coaches chug along and rumble by.

  • Emerging election realities

    Emerging election realities

    The grim picture of what the unceasing insecurity holds for the coming general elections was again brought to the fore by two seemingly opposing events last week.

    The first was a statement from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) indicating that the outcome of the elections could be hampered by persisting insecurity in many constituencies across the country.

    In the words of the chairman, INEC Board of Electoral Institute, Abdullahi Zuru, “If the insecurity is not monitored and dealt with decisively, it could ultimately culminate in the cancellation and or postponement of elections in sufficient constituencies to hinder the declaration of election results and precipitate constitutional crisis”.

    He said in view of the fact that election security is vital to democratic consolidation through free, fair and credible elections, the commission is doing everything to ensure that intensive and extensive security are provided for election personnel, materials and processes.

    It would appear that what Zuru said was somewhat misconstrued in some quarters warranting the INEC chairman, Mahmood Yakubu to clarify that the commission has no intention to alter the timeline for the election thus the thought of any postponement does not arise. This has been viewed in some quarters as a U-turn from the statement credited to Zuru. But that is not really the case. I shall return to this shortly.

    The other event that has direct bearing on election security in the country was the statement by President Muhammadu Buhari that “God has helped” his regime to clear Boko Haram in the northeast. The president who said that the threat of terrorism was the most critical security challenge inherited by his administration expressed delight that normalcy had returned to the affected states in the northeast.

    Buoyed by this claim, he declared that he had fulfilled the commitment he made in his May, 29, 2015 inaugural address to frontally and courageously tackle Boko Haram terrorism and stabilize the county. In a way, the two statements appear contradictory. I proceed to interrogate them so as to put them in their proper contexts because they have direct bearing with the topic of this article.

    Zuru’s statement that the lingering insecurity in some constituencies could impose serious challenges for the conduct of free, fair and credible elections goes without saying. The fears he expressed are not also new as they had in the past led to inconclusive results in some states on account of pronounced violence during elections. But the issue goes beyond the usual violence witnessed during elections as desperate politicians strive to outdo the other.

    Then, we did not have the kind of manifest challenge to the authority of the state by all manner of radical groups and non-state actors professing one weird ideology or the other. But we are now home to such challenges with some openly competing with the state for the loyalty of the citizens.

    In many of the states where these groups operate, little or no governmental activities go on there even as reports of the groups levying all manner of taxes on the communities abound. In one of such communities, a notorious bandit was turbaned so that he would allow village farmers to go to farms. That is the kind of situation Zuru was talking about and the issue can only be ignored at a great consequence to the coming elections.

    Even now that electioneering campaigns are on, political parties are afraid to campaign in many of those areas for the fear of the unknown. These facts are available to the security agencies and the political parties in the affected states. They are not anything to hide. Just few weeks back, we had the speaker of the Borno State House of Assembly lamenting that Boko Haram insurgents are still in control of two local governments of the state.

    He lamented that contrary to the impressions being created, there is absence of security presence in those two local governments as no officials of government dares visit there. Borno is not alone in this. Elsewhere, bandits, Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), unknown and known gunmen and sundry criminals have taken firm hold of some constituencies terrorizing the people there..

    Read Also: Millions of uncollected PVCs force INEC to shift deadline

    In some states in the southeast, people are afraid to visit certain communities for fear of coming into harms’ way. And there are no campaign activities going on there for the same reason. With barely six weeks to the elections, it remains a matter of conjecture how elections will possibly hold in those constituencies in the prevailing circumstance. That is the issue in context.

    The matter is more pronounced in the northeast and northwest where Boko Haram insurgents, ISWAP and the omnipresence bandits have reduced life to a verity of the Hobbesian state of nature. In a previous article in this column, the view was canvassed that the INEC and the security agencies should come up with a list of such impregnable areas so that working together, they can come up with a comprehensive strategy not only to secure the places but to ensure that successful elections are conducted in those places.

    But this would seem a tall order for a regime that is in a hurry to take credit for diminishing the security challenges.

    That brings us to the claim by Buhari that he has fulfilled the promise in his inaugural address to frontally and courageously tackle Boko Haram and stabilize the country. Not many will agree with him in that claim when the Boko Haram insurgents and their sister ally in terrorism ISWAP have now spread their tentacle beyond their original confines to attack a Catholic church in Ondo State and elsewhere.

    Not with the train attacks in Kaduna and recently Edo State that led to the kidnap and dehumanization of captives left at the mercy of their captors for months. It is difficult to sustain the claim of having frontally confronted the insurgents and stabilized the country. This claim is a sad reminder of the one made by the same president in December 2015, barely six months he was sworn in. He had then claimed that he had technically defeated Boko Haram.

    He had then also claimed that the insurgents had been brought to such a weak level that they cannot muster sufficient capacity to attack military establishments. Seven years thereon, the war is still going on. That says it all. So the issue raised by Zuru is very fundamental for the overall success of the coming elections. There is no need papering it as Yakubu appeared to have done.

    It has nothing to do with altering the timeline for the elections. Neither is it suggestive that the elections can be postponed. No! He was only drawing attention to extant realities that could impose serious constraints for the successful conduct of the elections. And in this, he is with many.

    This has nothing to do with the regular electoral violence that comes with the do-or-die disposition of our politicians. It has nothing to do with the prospects of violence during elections. The issue is boarders on the breakdown of law and order in some constituencies as the elections draw closer.

    Definitely if urgent measures are not taken to restore the authority of the government in such violent areas, there are little prospects of elections holding there. That is the reality of the situation before us all. The overall impact of the festering insecurity and contrived violence during elections can on be ignored at a great risk.

     Just recently, a former IGP Hafiz Ringim disclosed that 520 people including nine NYSC members died in Niger, Jigawa, Bauchi, Kano and Kaduna states following the violence that followed the election of Jonathan as president in 2011.

    When you add up the disruptive effects of electoral violence and the prospects of elections not holding in constituencies that are in the hands of non-state actors the startling picture captured by Zuru becomes more glaring. The situation calls for quick intervention to stabilize those constituencies and guarantee the future of the elections. The risk of the situation painted by Zuru is clearly there.

  • A failure and a deadline

    A failure and a deadline

    It is understandable that President Muhammadu Buhari wants his presidency to have a happy ending. But finishing well demands more than desiring a good finish.

     With about four months to the end of his second and final four-year term in office, President Buhari, who has doubled as Minister of Petroleum Resources since 2015, is still doing more talking than acting concerning the monumental sleaze in the country’s oil sector.

    As usual, he recently talked tough, directing security agencies to end crude oil theft and pipeline vandalism in the Niger Delta before he leaves office on May 29. If he couldn’t tackle the problem in more than seven years in office, can he do so within the time left? His directive can be described as dramatic and his deadline unrealistic.  

    He gave the directive to troops of the Joint Task Force Operation Delta Safe, in Effurun, Delta State, and Port Harcourt, Rivers State, through the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva. According to a statement issued by Sylva’s Senior Adviser (Media & Communications), Horatius Egua, this month, Buhari “directed that no litre of crude oil should be stolen in the country again, especially in the South-south.” “He wants crude oil theft eliminated by May 29, 2023, as one of the legacies of his government,” the statement said.

    An unbelievable number of oil-theft points were discovered last year following the federal government’s controversial N48bn-per-year pipeline surveillance contract with a company, Tantita Security Services, to check the massive oil theft in the Niger Delta.  The company is linked to Government Ekpemupolo, popularly called Tompolo, the former leader of the militant group, Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta. He was quoted as saying “I think we have found over 58 points that have been tapped in both Delta and Bayelsa states.” It’s unimaginable how many more oil-theft points will be discovered as the operation continues.

    It is not only intriguing but also alarming that the identities of the thieves who built these theft points and ran them have not been revealed. Are they unknown? Are they unknowable? Tompolo was reported saying his firm is “only providing intelligence for the security people to assist to do the work.”  The discovery of oil-theft spots should lead to the arrest of the thieves. If the country’s oil thieves are not caught and punished, it simply means the authorities are fuelling oil theft.

      ”It was a professional job,” said NNPC Group Chief Executive Officer Mele Kyari after he saw the oil-theft facilities. This observation underlines why those responsible for building and operating them should not be at large. He lamented that thieves had been stealing the country’s crude oil for more than 22 years but the theft had escalated to today’s staggering levels.   

    Chief Executive of Tantita Security Services Keston Pondi observed that “It is obvious that a lot of people are complicit in these illegal oil activities,” and suggested that people in the security sector, host communities, and even in the oil industry, were involved.

    It was bad enough that the federal government contracted a private security company to monitor the country’s oil pipelines. The action amounted to an abdication of responsibility and an admission of incapacity. It is worse that the authorities have also demonstrated weakness by failing to promptly identify and arrest the thieves, and prosecute them.

    This obvious tardiness suggests that the authorities did not expect the exposure done by the company, and were unprepared for the logical next step after the discovery, which should be identifying and arresting those implicated in the crime. The detection of the oil-theft facilities is not necessarily a plus for the company because it merely highlighted the government’s minus.     

    Notably, Sylva, through his representative, said at an event at the Petroleum Training Institute (PTI), Effurun, Delta State, last October: “Oil theft has denied the country of an estimated 700,000 barrels of crude oil per day. The adverse effect of this is the drop in the production of crude oil and decline in the national income.’’  It is estimated that more than $3.3bn (£2.9bn) has been lost to crude oil theft since 2021.

    It is noteworthy that the Buhari administration now claims that its “renewed efforts in tackling crude oil theft” and “scaled-up security efforts” have jacked up production from about 900, 000 barrels per day to about 1.5 million barrels per day.”

    But that is not as unproblematic as it sounds. A rise in oil production doesn’t necessarily mean a rise in oil revenue.  According to a report by the Auditor General of the Federation (AuGF), more than 17.877 million barrels of crude oil “valued at $1,020,969,281.12 (One billion, twenty million, nine hundred and sixty-nine thousand, two hundred and eighty-one dollars, twelve cents only)” were exported from 2016 to 2019 without proper documentation.

    “This gives rise to either non-repatriation or delay in the repatriation of export proceeds,” said the report signed by the immediate past Auditor-General, Adolphus Aghughu, and submitted to the Clerk of the National Assembly on June 29, 2022. In other words, there was room for corruption. The report focused on pre-shipment inspection and monitoring of crude oil and gas exports by the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning.

    How did this happen under Buhari as president and minister? News of sleaze in the sector calls into question his presidential and ministerial roles.  Crude oil is Nigeria’s main export, and it is disturbing that the country continues to bleed terribly from the effect of scandalous corruption in the oil sector.

    A government that flaunts an anti-corruption badge was expected to cleanse the country’s oil sector. The Buhari administration has been a disappointment in this respect.  His anti-corruption stance in his first term continued after his reelection in 2019.  In his eight years in power, he was expected to tackle corruption in the country’s oil sector.  It can be said that he failed to do so.

    Buhari’s order that the security agencies should end oil theft before he exits on May 29 reflects his awareness of his failure in that critical sector, and also shows that he doesn’t want the oil issue to soil his legacy.  But from all indications, it’s too late. 

  • Atiku complex

    Atiku complex

    Last week, this essayist wondered at Atiku’s math for dumping five or six governors and replacing them with Ayu. The other mathematical oddity was harped on again last week by the APC governorship candidate in Delta State, Ovie Omo-Agege, when he lashed out at Atiku for selling the Delta Steel Complex that cost the Federal Government $1.5 billion  for a paltry $30 million. He has not explained the math to us. How does minus become plus. I am nonplussed.

    Maybe Atiku is the new Math genius in town and he knows something about figures that we do not know. But the man has no speech in this as in other matters. Ifeanyi Okowa has had nothing to say about that as governor of the state. Okowa, who is Atiku’s running mate, is running from facts. If Delta supports Okowa, it means the people are lining behind the man  who collaborated with the rapist. It is like applauding the gangster who defiled the spinster of the family. Abomination!

    Rather than address the issues raised by Omo Agege, Okowa keeps saying the man has no power to say the facts. Omo Agege has accused him of wasting the resources of the state. Delta collects more money than any state in the Niger Delta. But it is one of the worst developed. He should go next door to Akwa Ibom where another PDP governor, Udom Emmanuel, is doing work after work, project after project. This essayist challenged Okowa to come clean on his involvement in the Premium Trust Bank and that he asked the state agencies to open accounts there. The banks who gave him loans are not willing to disburse because of this. He has kept mum, and that is why the Atiku campaign is not flowing with cash. Okowa has not responded.

    Can we see why Tinubu calls Atiku Mister Privatise? I think he is also Mister Seller. The other guy is Mister Stingy who would not even pay his state government for his posters. He is robbing his own state of Anambra. Maybe that is his definition of stingy. It is stinging.

  • Police escorts

    Police escorts

    It would seem sufficient attention is yet to be given to the predicament of police escort personnel in the face of the escalated insecurity across the country. This is especially so given the recurring attacks on the convoys of prominent personalities across the country and the high number of deaths of security men in such encounters.

    The regularity of such attacks and the attendant loss of security aides have taken such a dimension that should task the creative energy of the leadership of this country. Nobody is really insulated from the fatalities of the unceasing insecurity that has reduced life to a verity of the atavism of the state of nature.

    But, the increasing plight of police escort personnel in the hands of sundry criminals, can only by ignored by the heartless; those who regard them as expendable objects. Questions are beginning to be raised regarding the value the society places on the lives of these servicemen. Their story has been that of a sad harvest of deaths as one influential personality or the other is waylaid and attacked by rampaging criminals across the country.

    And each time such attacks occur, what we hear are stories of the miraculous escape of the targeted VIPs; how they managed to flee into safety and the divine powers or man-made objects that facilitated their escape. But that is just one side of the coin. The other side has been a tale of sorrow and awe characterized by the killing of many if not all of the police escorts and some other civilians in the attacked convoys.

    The trend has become so common that our policy makers seem to have taken it for granted. Yes, there has been the absence of strategic thinking as to why police escorts should be dying in their numbers after such attacks. If such situations had been given serious official consideration, measures should have been in place before now to minimize the risks police escorts face each time they are attacked. There is yet no evidence of such measures. Little wonder we have continued to harvest deaths each time convoys of VIPs are attacked.

    In October last year, gunmen attacked the convoy of the senior pastor and General Overseer of Omega Ministries International, Apostle Johnson Suleman close to Auchi in Edo State. Apostle Suleman was lucky as he escaped unhurt. But the four policemen in his escort and some other civilians were not that lucky as they were felled by the bullets of the demented criminals.

    Apostle Suleman had attributed his survival to divine intervention. It is however, well known that his survival was also facilitated by the bullet proof vehicle in which he rode. The story may have been different if he rode in a regular vehicle just like others that fell by the bullets of his attackers. It is nonetheless good a thing that he survived the assassination attack to tell the story.

    Around the same period, Senator Ifeanyi Uba was attacked around Nkwo Enugu-Ukwu in the Njikoka Local Government Area of Anambra State as he was returning to his home town Nnewi. The attack left some policemen, officials of the State Security Services, SSS, and civilians dead. Police put the casualty figure at five.

    The state Commissioner of Police, Echeng Echeng who visited the scene of the incident, said there were bloodstains everywhere indicating that the attack was bloody. Uba was lucky to escape unhurt. His miraculous escape to safety was also attributed to the bullet proof car in which he was said to have rode.

    Yet, just last week, a former governor of Imo State, Ikedi Ohakim was attacked by gunmen around Orieagu in the Mbano Local Government Area of Imo State as he was returning to his country home. The attack as usual, left four of his police escort men dead. Ohakim who managed to escape the attack gave a vivid account of the circumstances of his escape.

    He attributed his escape again, to the bullet proof vehicle in which he rode on that ill-fated day. He said that even when his attackers shot and deflated the tyres of his vehicle, his driver displayed uncommon dexterity and managed to drive to safety because the tyres were manufactured to stay afloat even when they are suddenly punctured.

    But one thing that stood out in the account of Ohakim, was his disclosure that those who attacked his convoy were well-trained professionals. He said pointedly that his attackers had nothing to do with regular recourse of security agencies linking the IPOB with such attacks. That should be instructive. 

    The list of such attacks on VIPs resulting to the death of police escort personnel and the escape into safety of their principals is endless. While it remained a thing of immense joy that the VIPs in each of these attacks managed to escape courtesy of the bullet proof vehicles they rode in, it was sorrow all through for the families of their escorts and aides who got killed because they rode in regular vehicle.

     Not unexpectedly, the relative ease with which police escorts and other security personnel attached to the convoys of VIPs succumb to attacks has begun to raise questions. There are questions as to why they easily succumb to the assassins’ bullets each time they come under fire. Is it that they are easily taken unawares or their positioning incapacitates them from mounting any serious defence and resistance? Why has it been easy for the marauders to overpower and kill them and escape into safety without the security personnel mounting counter attack and serious resistance? Or is there anything in the disposition and comportment of these security escorts that easily lend them vulnerable to these attacks?

    These and more are some of the posers inevitably thrown up by the worrisome loss of police escort personnel each time they are attacked by sundry criminals nursing one agenda or the other. Curiously, there has been no serious inquisition (at least not to public knowledge) as to why these escort personnel are felled in their numbers each time such sudden confrontations occur.

    One would have expected especially given the regularity with which police escort personnel succumb to attackers’ bullets that the country’s security leadership should have gone into brainstorming sessions on how to confront the scourge and minimize the casualty level encountered by its personnel in such attacks.

    That does not seem to have happened given that the incident has more or less become a recurring decimal. Is there anything wrong in the behaviour and conduct of these security personnel that easily exposes their vulnerability? What of their numerical strength and the way their vehicles are positioned in such convoys? Is it possible to minimize the risks to their lives by increasing their numerical strength as well as the number of vehicles a VIP should provide before such services are accorded them? Is it not proper that a comprehensive review of those entitled to security escorts and the minimum conditions are reviewed to inject clauses that will bar the deployment of security escorts to all manner of people?

    If such people must use escorts, is it not possible to mandate them to provide two vehicles for the escorts with one riding in front while the other at the back? There is no doubt that with such an arrangement, the security escorts will be in a better stead to confront potential attackers and reduce the risks they face each time they come under the fire power of the criminals.

    Those who are unable to meet these conditions should have no need for such escorts. But there is also something in the conduct of some security escort officials that predispose them to easy attack and overpowering by their attackers.

    Apart from instances such escorts took recourse to unlawful acts such as the shooting of a couple at a night club by those attached to a popular musician without any just cause, some of them are known to have gotten drunk while accompanying their principals to social functions. At some other times, they are seen firing indiscriminately into the air just for the fun of it. But the wasted bullets are funded by the common tax payer.

    What magic do we expect if such drunk and very relaxed escorts suddenly come under serious attack? Something urgent both in the training, deployment and modus operandi of police escorts has to be done to reduce the casualty level that results from such attacks.

    Police escort personnel are fathers, brothers, husbands and relations of some people. They do not deserve to die in the manner we have seen in recent times. They deserve protection just like their principals in the bullet proof vehicles.

  • Kenimani complex

    Kenimani complex

    He was a PHD before he had a PHD. The first is an attitude while the second PHD is a certificate. The first played out as student, soldier, politician, head of state and ex-head of state. The second PHD was bestowed as ex-president. The first came on the street, office, family lounge and war room, battlefield and on the street. The second was in the classroom. The first as spoiler, the second as scholar. The first was in his character but the second was written in characters. The first PHD is a study in impiety. The second was in the study of piety.

    In my days as a staff writer of the African Concord, my editor Lewis Obi asked me to do a cover story on the man. It was the military era and IBB was president. Olusegun Obasanjo had made news the way he did often: criticising the government. Lewis Obi drew my attention to what his biographers had started to call him. PHD. What did it mean? Pull Him Down. In researching the piece, I encountered a phrase that came from the lips of urbane writer and editor Stanley Macebuh, who had worked with him. Macebuh described OBJ as “crafty, very crafty.” For former ruler, every good guy must come down.

    If you examined the life of the Owu chief, you would learn that he loved that character. He loved to pull down so he alone could be on top. He loved to tarnish others to burnish himself. We saw that when IBB was president. Since he left office as head of state, he only had bad things to say about his successors. He never gave private advice but gushed out public scolding. He knew he had immunity. His former boys would not ruffle him. So, he exercised it in impunity. No one could arrest him until he dared Abacha. He hit Shagari, clobbered Buhari, threw broadsides at IBB. He alone had the pure record. Hence when he became president, he relished the name baba. He was, after all, the father of all. He reveled in it.

    Until, of course, he started to reveal himself as what Yorubas call agbalagba akan to kos’inu gorodom. (The mighty crab that fell into a drum). It is eminently untranslatable. But it means an elder who has become a big disgrace. We saw that in Odi when he played a butcher. We saw that in the third term agenda when he was the ‘grandfather of corruption,’ as reechoed in his Hard Talk interview of the BBC. He invoked the phrase “overheating the polity,” when the country sweltered from crisis to crisis. He was the one who visited families, ate pounded yam and danced with the host’s wife as though cuckolding the host. A day after the jollity, he engineered the man’s overthrow from elected office. He choreographed a constitutional conference and torpedoed it. OBJ set up two corruption agencies as the godfather who bribed lawmakers with N50 million each. He had his own phrases. He manufactured “do or die” politics. Where was his holy spirit when assassins shot down foe after foe? He was the one who often evoked God but played Mephistophelian theatre. His intimates accused him of incest, and son kept a wife away from him.

    But OBJ came in the news again because he sought to be the man of the new year. He, as he often loved to do, wrote a letter. In picking the LP candidate as his endorsee, he ambushed the word mentee. He does not sully words alone. He is like Fyodor Karamazov of novelist Dostoyevsky’s tome, The Brothers Karamazov. He is the old man who soils everything he touches. That also is OBJ. he calls himself a mentor. When did it start? Even the LP guy cannot even track it. Maybe he was unaware of the mentorship. Not when OBJ  was the kingpin of kidnapping in Anambra State. Ngige, a governor, turned into a limp hostage of official bandits. Who was the “banditeer?” Was he not the same man who clipped the LP man from Anambra mandate as an APGA nominee? Is that mentoring or evil monitoring? If it is, then we know the kind of candidate he is pushing: a bandit candidate? Even the LP man will not be so proud as to associate with the man who kidnapped, muzzled and even overthrew people in his state, and for a while made Anambra State into a target of the east wind. Remember, the east wind in the Bible howled and bustled with locusts and plagues and deaths. When his government gave Chinua Achebe a national award, the bard threw it out of the window and cited the bastardisation of his home state. Read part of Achebe’s response: “I have watched particularly the chaos in my own state of Anambra where a small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in high places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom. I am appalled by the brazenness of this clique and the silence, if not connivance, of the Presidency.” Achebe will not be proud to see that a candidate from his home state who was purloined of his democratic right is hobnobbing with him.

    But OBJ does not care. And he loves the hysteria around him. He is a bored old man in search of new excitement, like a juvenile out of school. But what is more fascinating in this narrative is his perennial fear of his own people. He is afraid of anyone with a Yoruba blood who asserts any form of popularity. Unless he is under his shadow until he chokes him. He did it in his letter writing. In a new book, The Letterman, Mojeed Musikilu, unveils OBJ’s epistolary wars. He may be a letterman, but he is no man of letters. He often fought with his kinsmen. He did not want Awo to be president. He fought against MKO. He conned and frustrated Bola Ige. Now, he sees Tinubu as a big and present danger.

    He endorsed the LP man, not out of love or principle, but out of what the Yoruba call etanu, or what my folks in Warri call jiga belle. It means malice, but a special type of hatred, silent, sly, malignant. Jigger, called jiga in pidgin English, is a variety of bugs that hides inside toes when one steps into a puddle and you have to cut the skin to scoop it out. That is the sort of malice he abhors. He has a mind of puddle hosting jiggers. OBJ has jiggers inside the belly of his soul. It is a deep-seated pain in OBJ when a kinsman wants to be great. He loves “a kinsman in trouble,” apologies to Achebe, when he bears ambition he despises. He wants to be the only man from the Yoruba race to have been president. OBJ, therefore, sees Tinubu as a mortal threat. It is what the Yoruba also designate as Kenimani complex. It literally means let my neighbour not have it. I am the only one who should have. He hates his folks enough to make them foe. This contrasts with the Omoluabi syndrome.

    It does not matter to him that his endorsements have failed over the decades. He is a chameleon who makes a foe of endorsement today into a friend of endorsement tomorrow. Since he abolished history from schools, he thinks he has inflicted the nation with amnesia. We cannot forget that he called Atiku a thief before he endorsed him and before he started calling him a thief again. He cheated the LP man before he started making him his John the Baptist. He wants us to forget our history, so he can be our fabulist. OBJ is a confidence man, like the character in Herman Melville’s novel, Confidence-men. He tries to fit into the shrubbery by assuming the colour green. But he is green in the eye. He is envious of his younger ones. That is a dangerous thing to do to a coming generation.

    Was it not the same Owu chief as military head of state who had a dialogue with a fellow tribesman who pointed out geopolitical injustice under his watch? He called in Yar’adua and he fired General Olutoye hours afterwards. OBJ has not denied it. Maybe he has a grouse against his ethnic group. He wrote his book My Command as revenge rather than as history. Hence, Alabi Isama’s A Tragedy of History announced its R.I.P. with dozens of countervailing evidence. OBJ’s war memoir is now no more than an artefact of mendacity.

    OBJ grapples with what psychologists call the fear of gratitude. He does that even to his own people in the Southwest. He needs to be grateful for what Yoruba have done for him. He needs to be grateful for education, for breeding, for a career in the army, and for becoming head of state and president. He rose on their backs even when he did not like them. The rest of the country voted for him even when the Southwest did not because he was a Yoruba man. It was seen as Yoruba’s emilokan moment then. He defeated a fellow Yoruba man, Olu Falae, but he got it because he was Yoruba. He rode on Abiola’s back, the same man he campaigned against over June 12. The same Abiola, who had prostrated to Soyinka to beg the Nobel Laureate to stop campaigning against OBJ’s ambition to be scribe of the United Nations. How grateful OBJ is.

    We can see how bitter he was. He is not happy that even when he was head of state, his kinsmen did not regard him as the Yoruba leader. He has not even said thank you to General Alani Akinrinade, who worked Biafran surrender when he was in a wild goose chase in Igboland. Maybe he was paralysed by anxieties and intimations about his roots in that part of the world when he took over as commander of Third Marine Commando from the legendary Adekunle.

    He may be envious of his fellow tribesmen. It is his right. But neither of his PHD’s is of any righteous value. He often loses in his ward during elections, so the Yorubas have been telling him that for a long time. They are singing to him the words of the bard Ebenezer Obey, Ma gbe keke e lo/ a’o ba e sere mo. – Go away with your bike, we are no longer playing with you.