Nyesom Wike is a unique sort of orator. He does not command a bravura class of diction, or the magnificence of phrasing, the sweet bass, the rich sibilant or tenor. But his voice scratches its way to the people’s heart.

He has become both speaker and singer, a stagecraft he tops with dancing. His walking stick is a character in the ensemble. To say he is a speaker discredits his dance. To say he dances undermines his throaty songs. To applaud his singing will draw a lash from his walking stick.

His is a whole package onstage. No one compares with him today. Not even close. His is the emblem of the folksy performer as politician. Which may not be fair since Wike does not even perform in the sense of the actor. He is just who he is. A natural. A thespian art without the thespian act.

When he appeared on stage last Saturday, his performance rang across to another stage in the Niger Delta. His stage was in Port Harcourt but he reverberated in Warri. An earthquake with a tremor on the other side.

It was a piece of revelation. He had said it a day earlier, but he especially said it on live television. He said his series of projects he had been inaugurating, including 12 flyovers and cancer centre, came from the munificence of President Muhammadu Buhari. Buhari had released great tranches of billions, he confessed, that the federal government had been owing Niger Delta States since 1999.

Back in Warri, former Edo State governor Adams Oshiomhole echoed Wike’s words. He localised it to Delta State, and said Buhari returned N250 billion to Governor Okowa. After that, he unleashed N60 billion, before two other tranches of N10 billion each. We have not seen onstage theatre talk to theatre onstage. Real-life theatre has upstaged performance theatre. It is only in Nigeria. We have seen plays talk to plays, or works of art talk to works of art. For fiction, it is called intertextuality. We have seen plays talk to fiction, like Shakespeare’s play, Antony and Cleopatra, talking to Roman writer Plutarch’s work on the lovesick pair. Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi descended from Brecht’s Three Penny Opera that hailed from the ancestor of the tale, John Gay’s hilarious Beggar’s Opera. The stories of these operas, originally based on Prime Minister Robert Walpole, ring true to the skeins of extravagance, political whoring and corruption of Nigeria today. Wike’s revelation was no mean challenge in an age of financial haemorrhage of mythic proportion.

We would have expected that one governor, especially Okowa, would come out and say, no it didn’t happen. Or he would use the familiar pidgin phrase of the day, if it didn’t dey, it didn’t dey. Obviously, Wike didn’t lie.

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He said he has evidence of what he is doing with the money he received from Buhari. The only state that received huge chunks was Akpabio’s Akwa Ibom time before Buhari, and it was during  the days of Goodluck Jonathan.  Adams also announced that Edo collected N100 billion. The question is, what have the other states got to tell as their stories? We cannot say same of Edo State with the governor’s perpetual decibels of abuse. We have seen nothing in Bayelsa. In spite of the role a federal government plays in hemming in flood disaster, the state was not even ready for all its money. As for Akwa Ibom, we have seen huge investments. Governor Udom Emmanuel has a first-rate Ibom Air, unarguably Nigeria’s top airline that has just taken delivery of two airlines with about eight to join its sterling fleet. We have the Dakkada Towers, the smartest and tallest building in the region to draw in the oil majors. We know of the flour mills, Coconut factory, etc, and the plethora of road networks braiding the state. Even the consul general of the United States, Will Stevens, about a month ago lauded Gov. Emmanuel as the top state in the country in transparency.

Now, what have the others to show for the money? Where is Okowa’s accountability? Apart from raking in over N300 billion from the Buhari government, it recently secured loans through a rubberstamp house of assembly of over N250 billion for what he said were projects. This is a man who cannot meet up with pensions. In Delta, we cannot boast of landmark work of infrastructure. We cannot boast of schools in top shape. Old students want take over schools owing to official neglect, but he would not yield. He presides over a rot. Okowa is a parable of how not to be a governor.

Warri, the city that epitomises the state in history and resources because of the oil wells surrounding it, is a mockery of a modern city. It is dead. It is like  William Blake’s London ages ago when it was a slum.  The bard said, after going about the city, he saw “in every face I meet/ marks of weakness, marks of woe.” That is Okowa’s Warri, the once proud city of jocund youths with a greed for the future.

He has now supported a successor for his party whose certificate is under question because it would seem he was already an elder when he was in secondary school and had an unusual miracle of two handwritings in his life time, one when he was writing university exam and the other when he left the exam hall.

From Wike’s confession, there is one man to pity: Muhammadu Buhari. Today, many complain that he did not stimulate the economy. Yet, this man has released trillions to the governors who should have revived their economies by investing in people’s lives. It is a tragedy that he will take credit for their incompetence and ineptitude.  Shakespeare wrote: “We the greatest are mis-thought for things that others do; and when we fall, we answer others’ merits.”

Buhari’s minders have done little to take the heat to the governors who have received so much and done so little. It is power failure on Buhari’s part.  Last year, he gave N565 billion in bailout funds to states. This year, he has given over N700 billion. This is not just Niger Delta. It is the whole country. We have more accounting to do. It is just a pity that Buhari cannot talk for himself, hiding under a taciturn brow.

Wike has challenged his colleagues. Okowa, Duoye Diri and Godwin Obaseki should answer.

We have seen our fellow groan in a labour of lies. He is saying he never said he was Dr. Odili’s classmate and even schoolmate because, again, another lie bites the dust from his lips. This is what he said on live television. Why is he rejecting the fruit of his own lips? Granted he was misquoted, was he misquoted when he said some people do not have classmates but he has? Who was the classmate he was proud of? In what context did he say it? Was he not showing off his own classmate? Odili was in CKC when Obi, who COULD NOT gain admission to CKC in class one, had only a few years earlier been liberated from his diapers.

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The other point is for those who cannot reconcile their philosophical position with Ayo Adebanjo’s endorsement. When Soludo did same, it became tribal betrayal. When Adebanjo did it, he was a patriot.  Did Samuel Johnson not say “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel?” Soludo exercised the courage of his own privilege as governor, a man with inimitable credential and bonafides, a man in control of his own facts. The Labour man could not fight but eat humble pies. He knew Soludo could make mincemeat of him with more weapons in his armory. Remember his essay was only the first part. The man with the feminine voice is afraid of a growl from Awka state house. The man’s boom voice may turn into a leonine roar. He could claw deeper. For instance, do you remember when Soludo swept out a church of the comic cleric often known as Ndaboski? It is what is known as the Nwangene/Otumoye creek. In two successive budgets, the then governor of Anambra Sate claimed to have spent billions to dredge it. Soludo did not have to make such grandiose claims with fancy billions not accounted for. He launched into work, inspired more by result than by financial antics. He started work on it because of its environmental menace.

Those who were quick to invoke incongruous pens a few months ago are now quiet and cannot even engage the man on the seat who has vindicated this essayist on so many grounds. Their asinine souls have fallen short. Their tails wrap their hind legs and threaten a big fall. So, they whine, castrated and meek, in their cages. Their hoary hairs are now bleached by fear. No matter.

I don’t see why some persons are not happy with Anambra State governor for saying what he knows about one of his bumbling predecessors who does not know how to invest. The governor did not originate the question. Why accuse him for saying what he knew. Chukwuma Soludo did not even show zeal about the subject. He was dismissive in attitude. He said the investment is worth nothing. Then the usual irate mob started lobbing stones. It is like Jesus said to the Jews, “You seek to kill me for telling you the truth.” The Labour candidate’s sin is bad enough, but that is not the fellow’s worst offence against Anambra. What of the investment of Anambra money in his family business, or his offshore account, or the NEXT supermarket built while on the throne?

Read Also: FULL TEXT: Soludo’s statement on Peter Obi – History Beckons and I will not be silent (Part 1)

Soludo is a man of accountability. A former CBN governor would not and should not have done less in his interview on Channels. Failed governorship candidate Babatunde Gbadamosi was being petty interrogating intent as a strategy rather than content of fact. The Labour presidential candidate has been exposed as lying about what he left behind. He played a fast one on Obiano by writing a deceptive letter about the accounts. Later, cheques materialised to dry up the juice. He blindsided the accounts.

If that is not deceit or political conmanship, what is it? They can learn one or two things about investment from a former Lagos State governor. Against many naysayers, he invested Lagos State’s $4 billion and raked in $15 billion. Who is the great man for the economy? The man who invested for personal profit or the one who shovelled in the harvest for the state.

Recently when I think of Ayo Adebanjo, I remember Ernest Hemmingway’s novella, The Old Man and the Sea. It is a small but resonant epic. But it is a story that the Nobel Prize winner who died a suicide compels biographers to see as his self-portrait.

When French hero and leader Charles De Gaulle stepped into his twilight, he recalled Hemmingway’s masterpiece and wondered whether he (de Gaulle) was not an old man who had only a skeleton to tell his sojourn on earth. I am beginning to view the old man of Yoruba politics in that light. Grouchy Adebanjo may be the old fisherman in the tale who caught a big fish in the rough and tumble of the high seas but only arrived home with a skeleton. A shark had made a mincemeat of his great catch.  He may end up like King Lear, who earned no love from his three daughters and no love for himself and went into that “good night” a loner.

Many who follow his geriatric path must know that this man’s grouse did not begin with his endorsement of the Labour Party candidate. The endorsement is not an act of defiance. It is a symptom of a pathology. You can call it the contrarian syndrome. A man who must play spoiler in order to attract attention. His is an enterprise as stormy petrel. He is the public desperado banging his shoes to gain attention.

Adebanjo has been with the Yoruba political establishment since the days of the great sage Awo. Awo had many with him since he set up the Action group. Sklar and other scholars who wrote of Awo and his associates noted that the man put together a variegated pool. Some on the right, some on the left, some vibrant, others with slow, burning elan, others with the passion of an undercurrent. But Awo, who would leave a legacy of a man of inflexible principle, managed to hug every hog and wine with the swine. It was an early avuncular virtue to create a big tent for his people. He paid for it later with some of the so-called big men looking the other way, one of them was a mensch for the bench, the great Rotimi Williams. Maybe when we shall write a work on the sage, his capacity for rigidity may be traced to his sense of the futility of embracing the opportunists. He may have read Henry David Thoreau, who was Gandhi’s and Luther King’s John the Baptist as an apostle of non-violence. But Thoreau’s relevant point here was when he said, “I am not a joiner.” Why? Because it is like a pig that enters “a sty in order to feel warm.”

Men like Olaniwun Ajayi and Adebanjo survived because the party provided for him a home, a platform but, for most part, a career. And what a career it has been. But he never fought a good fight. Fighting a good fight is not part of the career. Adebanjo would rather fight an inconclusive fight. It provides a pretext to fight again, and that fuels the career. It allows you to hope for another day. The career is not about an ideological win. It is not about principle, except the principal thing is profit. It is all about the tension. With each battle, the career has hope.

In his book, Participations, Chief Bisi Akande calls him “organising secretary,”  a euphemism for a party hustler. Recently, Chief Segun Osoba lashed out at him in quite the same strain. He unveils him as an electoral coward who would stalk in the shadows while others fight in an election. He is not one to test his mettle in a poll. He has no stern stuff for that. He has no grassroots credibility. He has no organising skill. But he is an expert heckler, a serial complainant, querulous and quarrelsome, skating, baying, baiting and hating.  As an old man you expect him to mellow. Rather he bellows. He is no Isocrates who warned Greece before it fell. Or the blind prophet in Sophocle’s plays who restrains kings. He is bitter and swaggers in it.

But he is a schemer, too. When the group was in its tested hour, he was seen to work as a fifth columnist. No better evidence than one of the Afenifere’s best, the man Bola Ige. What this essayist wrote here on July 4, bears rehashing:

“When Chief Bisi Akande wrote is memoirs, My Participation, parts of it raked up dust, and this essayist called it the book of the year. One of the storms derived from his claim that Chief Bola Ige tarred both Ayo Adebanjo and Olaniwun Ajayi as traitors at the home of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Adebanjo and his followers went to town to call Baba Akande a liar.  I was one of the few who stuck to the elder statesman’s veracity. A confirmation has come from an unlikely source. In his new memoirs, The Road Never Forgets, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi  writes that he and his wife, Sade, were witnesses to the event, and he recounts in vivid  and dramatic detail what happened during a dinner at the chief’s Ikenne residence.

Ige had just left jail, and paid a visit to Awo. Awo asked him to join them for dinner when he sighted both men. “Uncle Bola looked across the table, and as he sighted some of the seated guests… he stiffened himself up in anger and refused the offer of a seat from Chief Awolowo…he bellowed and screamed relentlessly! “My Leader, I would not sit down with you for dinner with these (pointing across the table) traitors! No. I would not do that. These are traitors, My Leader. They should not be here with you.” The words exploded on and on in the book.  Although Ogunbiyi does not name them, he does not deny it was them on my television interview. Adebanjo, over to you chief.”

Indeed, when he complained about the Yoruba chieftains praying for endorsing Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, it was that same syndrome at play. He had been ignored. He was miffed. He probably wanted someone to knock on his door and say, Baba, let us talk. He looked out his window when a fly buzzed or a dog whined. But no human conciliator.

He wanted to exploit his acting position.  He is like the fellow known as Ellsworth Toohey in Ayn Rand’s work, The Fountainhead. Toohey has been ignored forever by Roark, another character, who would not look his way. So, he approaches Roark and asks, “Why don’t you tell me what you think about me?” and Roark replies, “But I don’t think about you.”

So, he thinks he can carry the Yoruba race because he is the acting head. And Fasoranti and the big wigs of the race just told him, Adebanjo may occupy the office, the soul, however, has abandoned him. The soul was present in the big names that went to Akure. He was invited but he “missed” his flight.

He started shouting like a kid, and saying he is still Afenifere leader. A leader does not yell. The tiger was shouting its tigritude.  Paul did not need to show Peter the chief of the apostles. You don’t grab a leadership, you earn it. Awo never had to tell anyone his status in the land.

But Adebanjo needs such vanity. He also has a delusion of grandeur of raising his spat with the elders to the status of a family feud. He has shown himself a nonagenarian but not an elder. Maybe he sees himself in the fights of such families like the Italians Nicoletti versus Castellani, who duelled for generations. Or the one told by Mark Twain in his Huckleberry Finn between the families Grangerfords and Sherpherdsons.

Adebanjo should know he is not so important. Neither is his endorsement.