Category: Monday

While we mourn Queen Elizabeth, we should not forget that Africans groaned under the English monarchy, a big iniquity of history. She was a decent soul but why not, after inheriting wealth and splendour borne of the blood and treasure of African sacrifice in the slave trade. Shakespeare wrote that “he who dies pays all debts.”

I wonder if she could pay for the disruption of millions of lives who worked the sugar plantations. Novelist Daniel Defoe quipped, “No African slaves, no negroes; No negroes, no sugar; No sugar, no islands; No Islands, no American continent; No American continent, no trade.” I add no sugar, no diabetes. The flourishing sugar trade ushered in the English breakfast we know as continental breakfast today.

Read Also: Why I wished Queen Elizabeth II ‘excruciating’ death — Uju Anya

I call it “the sweet disease.” It’s a haunting metaphor of the predation of that era. Vandals’ kids wax wealthy enough to enthrone lifestyles of refinement, a la Thorstein Veblen’s “theory of the leisure class.” I call that whited sepulchre. Inside are Africa’s dead bones. I will not go so far as Prof. Uju Anya. But we should read our history books, including works of English historians. We will learn that King Charles III has an eerie kinship with Charles II ,who was, like the present one, “working hard accumulating sins to repent of,” according to historian Simon Schama’s tome,

A History of Britain. Volume 2. He debauched with 12 illegitimate children. Charles I, more conservative but tactless, was beheaded and led to an interregnum, an age without kings, under the butcher Oliver Cromwell. We study history to liberate the mind.

Thanks, we are beginning. The BOS of Lagos is making it compulsory again for primary and junior secondary.

ASUU strikes have become something of a right, a presumptuous rite, a routine blight. Some may say it is a pageant, a half- pageant, or even no pageant at all. A runway sans runaway model. It often has a beginning, but then we never witness a middle but always never an end. If no pageant at all, it is an elaborate non-starter, a sort of Beckettian no-man’s-land. A promise as an end. A dress rehearsal replacing the main thing. A hundred meters race where the umpire exhausts the gun on false starts.

So, the pageant is only a sort deception, like the yarn of the witch of Endor where the whole apparition is an imitation parade.

Here we are again in a rut. The federal government says it has conceded all it can, and the ASUU folks are merely intransigent. ASUU flays minister of education Adamu Adamu for bad faith, and even adds that they never had a meeting with him. Adamu says they have agreed on everything but backlog of salaries. ASUU chief, Professor Emmanuel Osodeke, went as far as turning it into a partisan Golgotha, a lobbing of bombs by calling for Nigerians to vote out the APC, as though the same ASUU had not met deadlocks after deadlocks with virtually every government since I was just beginning my secondary school in Ughelli in 1973.

Yet we cannot tell this story without accepting that the education system has not much jewel to give, and that our governments, including the Buhari administration, have not privileged the enthronement of the mind.

The ASUU strike, for this essayist, should not have happened. It should not plod along like a weary reptile with bellyache, if the government had leveraged the power and resources of state to degrade the allure of strikes from impasse to passe. It does not mean funds alone, but generating its fund of goodwill, connections and muscular clout to reconcile compassion to duty.

In the end, when anything fails, it is government that fails. We cannot escape that. It is the job of government to bring it to an end. Charles De Gaulle returned to France for the first time as the Second World War was ending. He had fled in a heroic flight at the nascent turmoil of the war when the army elite betrayed the country. Now, he knew his country wanted something new. The Nazis had crumbled, so had the Vichy regime. His country gasped for new leadership. At a rally he quipped, “Nothing is missing but the state.” This essayist would not go that far in the ASUU imbroglio, but something is missing in the state. I would not go as far as to quote Shakespeare’s Hamlet to say “something is rotten in the state…” But there is a rut to stop.

The government needs to understand it is bearing a burden it does not need. It needs to set itself free and rid itself of the Sisyphean rock of power it is carrying up the hill. It does not need to hold the universities in its grasp. As Professor Jide Osuntokun has asserted in an insightful column in The Nation, the universities already have autonomy. The law has given them power to break out of the cage. The government denies it. ASUU is lying to itself. It is witchcraft. ASUU should exorcise its witch of Endor, and act like Macbeth to Banquo’s ghost and scream, “Avaunt and quit my sight. Let the earth hide thee. Thy bone is marrowless and thy blood is cold.”

As Professor Tukur S’aad, a former Vice chancellor at Minna, explained in various notes and his interview at TVC Breakfast show, the universities are kidding themselves thinking el dorado lies in the bosom of Aso Rock. He executed his liberty when he was VC and his school flourished.

The government can only give so much. The VCs are members of ASUU, and the majority of the council members are ASUU members. They are charged to run their institutions. They should strategise on how to source funding. They, as Professor Saad did during his time, can look at student fees, corporate partnership, crowd funding, grants, scholarship, et al. What stops them from charging fees, and turning the universities into de facto agencies like NIMASA or JAMB. What stops them from making enough money to pay N4 million monthly to its choice academics when they make the money? As a university teacher in the US, I never taught a class that could not pay for itself. If the numbers were too small, the course would cancel. Lagos did not know how to make money until someone said it could. Others now are learning. Some screamed it was wrong to bond with Bonds in government until somebody put in N3 billion and harvested N17 billion for Lagos. We should not act coy at opportunities, like the fishermen who waited for Jesus to point to the boon of fishes shimmering at the other side of the river.

There are two wrong presumptions. One, that university education must be free first. It can in Nigeria, but the universities should not wait for a decadent political elite to do that. Two, that they must rely on government to get their money, and, if not, there would be trouble in the land.

That was what many thought during the coal miners’ strike that paralysed Great Britain until Margaret Thatcher broke their backs and turned a shareholder logic into a vogue. She became one of the longest reigning prime ministers in history, in spite of her excesses. We must understand one thing: university education is not cheap.

It is not for nothing that the top 100 universities of the world are predominantly in the United States and Britain. The schools get little from the state. We have many resources, including within the universities themselves. The councils are not marketing enough because they feel they have no right to do so. The federal government should not exercise martial rights in a democracy. Prof. Osuntokun says ASUU should try their autonomy in court. I say, they should exercise the courage of their privilege, and advance the course of their advantage by exercising their autonomy, not in strikes but by striking out on their own. They don’t need the court. The have the power. Let us see if the government can stop them. You have the right not to use your right. But that attitude is impotence. Prof Saad asserts rightly that it is the councils that run the universities, not the state. Let the state miss so that you don’t miss it.

The reason ASUU always looks to the centre is their socialist, Marxist mindset. They see the state as the end-all of all things. It is time they liberated themselves. This is not a communist heaven. They are too aluta to alert themselves to new vistas of hope. If they charge fees, it does not have to come like bullies but by conscious engagement with students, ASUU and parents, and laying bare the projects and challenges and charting the path forward. The indigent students may get special attention if they are exceptional. All of this can work with a template. They should wean themselves like a child. This is a feeding bottle ASUU, scrambling and drooling for the nanny to stop shaking the bottle but hand it down.

It was not so years ago when I was a student. We had bursaries and lapped ice cream on Sundays. We only had five universities. Today we have many without a development plan.

The ASUU folks ought to look inward. They also should get past their obsessions with idealism. I have drawn attention to their pharisaic posturing as a group that calls for a federal system while they run a unitary union choking state universities, compelling all chapters to bow to the centre. It is cracking gradually. They enforce checkoff remittance in an imbalance of 60 per cent to the centre and 40 to the local chapters. Yet they cry that Abuja is a vampiric centre of the nation’s financial bloodstream. Soviet Russia is dead. Cuba is on life support. Gaddafi went the way of public lynching. It is time to rethink.

The ASUU-FG story is like Prospero, Ariel and Caliban in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. The oppressor and oppressed are in bondage and both need to declare their independence. The oppressed, when free, still embraces the master. It is called the Caliban complex. After his plot to kill his master Prospero fails, Caliban says, “How fine my master is.”

It is time ASUU personalised what Rousseau says of the masses, “force them to be free.”

Or else, the students will suffer under the duelling elephants. Reflecting on the superpower grudge of his day, Lee Kuan Yew said: “When two elephants make love, the grass suffers.” ASUU needs neither war nor love, but imagination. As Poet Shelley wrote, “We need the power to imagine what we know.”

The legacy of Mikhail Gorbachev is akin to that of mighty Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who wrote among others the mighty novel, Fathers and Sons. Gorbachev inspired hate at home but love abroad. Ditto Turgenev, who an envious Fyodor Dostoevsky described as a German. Gorbachev’s fellow citizens thought he brought down the great Soviet Empire. The main character in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons is named Bazarov, a nihilist who calls for all institutions to come down. When asked what should replace them, he says let them come down first.

Many believe Gorbachev wanted it so. Before his Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring), the country had waxed into an edifice that no longer edified. Richard Nixon called it a first-class military but third world economy. If he tweaked it, he wanted something better. Some railed back at home, even a coup failed. While trying to save his country, he bedevilled it. He ended the Cold War, birthed a new generation of East European leaders, trashed the Warsaw Pact, and enthroned America atop a unipolar world. His is not alone in history as leader of principle who pleased the world at his people’s expense. Remember Anwar Sadat, who made peace with Israel and gave prosperity to Egypt, things that eluded Nasser. The Arab world made him a pariah and was assassinated. In India, Nehru preferred a Hindu nationalism to the world-beloved Ghandi. Ghandi is beloved less than Nehru at home. Gorbachev departs in a world where we hail those who love the clan more. A paradox of globalisation. Even as Gorbachev goes, I question Shakespeare’s assertion that “he that dies pays all debts.” Russians still believe the man owes them their pride and place in the world. He took away their miracle. I disagree.

The theatre lurked in the news.

The setting, London. The characters, politicians. The air, intrigue. There was neither a climax nor denouement. It was like a Harold Pinter play where what is seen and what is said cloak what is done. The action took place beneath the prattle. If the faiths wear mystery as a robe, politics advertises it.

So, we had little to believe or chew from the lips of Nyesom Wike, a battering ram as bride of the political class. There was something showy about how he unveiled what happened with his fellow politicians in London. Of course, Wike is no Nnamdi Azikiwe. The latter knew how to huff and puff. He was a man of letters, colourful in attire and wordplay and the thespian art of the gesticulator. The Owelle of Onitsha craved the spotlight and the spotlight craved him.

But Wike is an original. We saw him step out of the aircraft. His eyes hidden behind moony spectacles, his scowl a comic spectacle. His stride, near slouch, near swagger, had the menace of a Mafia don. His voice of scratchy bass would have been good for a comedian, except that Wike is funny when he does not want to be.

But Wike and his peers were funny, if they did not mean to be funny, when they said the meeting was not partisan, and it was all about making Nigeria a better land for all. Now, what was it about London that whisked them away from home? Was it about the weather? No, it is an oven just now. Was it because it was a colonial metropolis? Hardly. Number 10 Downing Street has a tenant who is packing his bag while the prospective new one, maybe male or maybe female, is trying to pack enough votes to pay the rent.

Such meetings are inspired by two reasons. One, it is part vacation, a time to splurge and inhale moments of European luxury. Two, as a shelter against the eavesdropper, the tattle-tale.

But Wike must be having a time of his life. All want him. Is it because he has such a big haul of votes or because a big haul of cash? It is not for play that his party members once described the PDP as Wike Inc. He must love to be called the beautiful bride. Zik was the first to earn that accolade, when all the parties sought him. On its front-page picture, The Daily Times feminised the Owelle, giving him the look of a runaway success as a runway model. It was an aesthetic coup.

Wike, with his retreating paunch, with his gait, with his goggled mien, does not have the sort of model physique of the Owelle. A newspaper will risk its circulation and Wike might sue for abuse of form, or impersonation. So, he is a bride as battering ram, like the wife of Bath in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. As a bride, Zik displayed pride, plume and peacock. Wike, with hoofs and horns, is charging at his suitors.

Wike met with Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and that made news. Not as much because they had met before, and this may have a momentum. It was a continuation, it seems. They met in France, now in London. Governor Masari boasted Wike will work for Tinubu.

But what gave the better buzz was when the old fox slinked into the tale. Obasanjo with Peter Obi and Wike in a meeting? What was it about? Obi had met with Wike before. Also with the Owu chief at Ota. So, what was the old fox looking for? Obj is not only an old fox but also a tortoise, as a creature who creeps into any Nigerian tale like the folk tales. As a tortoise, so as a fox, a dual incarnation. Like the tortoise, this fox is often to no good. After he met with the APC flagbearer, he probably thought he had conceded too much. He had crafted the indelible symbolism of southwest unity behind the Jagaban. He had to confuse the air, and travel with Obi to London. Obi might need Wike more than Wike needs him. For all his open bluff, Obi thirsts for the traditional structure, not the amorphous hope on the unknown mass as structure. Obi has not had a big-name politician behind him. Not even a local government chairman. Is he trying to go back to his vomit, the PDP, by courting Wike or ride on Wike’s back? Is he eyeing his pot of cash? Obi is not capable of the adventure of abandoning his crowd like Zik did in the nationalist era.

So, what we had was the old fox, the tortoise and the battering ram as bride.

At the bottom of all these was the meeting with Atiku. They both had broken the ice? But has the ice melted between them, or merely broken? I think both still bear glaciers in their hearts. The glaciers have frosted further with Atiku’s utterances like his assertion that Wike could not deliver. Wike fired an iceberg in his theatre with his song, “As e dey pain dem, e dey sweet us.” Both cannot step over the chasms of hate and bile, and embrace. It will be a bearhug full of spikes. Or what the novelist Ousmane Sembene called “the perfidy of words and the hypocrisy of rivals” in his short story, Her Three days.

So, what we might have had in the meetings was a stalemate, dialogues as ellipsis.  This essayist does not see any good coming out of the meeting between Wike and Obi, in spite of the hectoring negotiator in the Owu chief. In his new book, Leadership, the 99-year-old Henry Kissinger espoused what he called “strategic humility” as a means of achieving political goals. He cited German post-war leader Conrad Adenauer, who eased Germany back into the mainstream of world powers. It’s what Oliver Goldsmith wove in his play, She Stoops to conquer. Bashorun Gaa practised it in the intrigues of the Oyo Empire. I don’t see humility in either Atiku or Wike. In the same book, Kissinger identified two types of dysfunctional negotiations, the psychiatric and the theocratic. The first sees negotiation as an end in itself. It is all talk, and no substance. The second sees the other party as infidels. No way out in that as well. From Wike’s statement beside his side kick Ortom, the meeting with Obi and Obj was the former, and the one with Atiku the latter.  It was all a huffing and puffing without puff-puff.

Meanwhile, Wike will continue to bask in his bridal status, like the character in Oyono Mbia’s play, Three Suitors, One Husband. The Wike meetings had the false air of a party, atmospherics but no specifics. It’s like Pinter’s play, The Birthday Party, where the event had all the rituals of party, a festivity without felicity.

So, rather than have a husband, the suitors surrounded the so-called bride, like Penelope until Odysseus the husband arrived. But we have to wait for Wike’s day of wedlock. Until then, we have to take the mood of Oyono Mbia’s other play: Until further notice.

The Nigerian Bar Association committed a paradox: It broke the law. The NBA, with all its SANs and learned folks, knew the campaigns had not started. It flags off September 28. Yet, they invited the presidential candidates to mount their stage to unfurl their agenda. I wonder what INEC has to say to this. Of course, the candidates would appear so as not to seem to ignore them.

This NBA conference will not be forgotten, not only for flying in INEC’s face, but also while its lawyers turned into thugs and barbarians, breaking down booths and installing general mayhem. But that was not before some could not stand the heft and eloquence of Kashim Shettima’s delivery and so turned it into a fashion statement. They, too, did not understand fashion. Instead of focusing on his suite of ideas, they followed suits and shoes. Many of them knew but turned to mischief, saying he did not dress well. They were addressed by the social media with photos of high-fliers in the west, including Joe Biden and models, who dressed the same way. So, Shettima beat them in ideas and in the idea of fashion.