Category: Monday

It is a quiet onslaught against the enemy at the door. In these days of stealth attacks and the rage of bandits, the great unknown is the identity. If we can trace where you buy and where you  work, we can catch you when you strike. Hence we cannot underestimate what the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, is doing by introducing a smart card that will mark every Lagosian with an ID. It is not a dumb one like the type we now have with the federal. This one codifies your activity and doings in such a way that you are integrated into the system.

It is billed as documenting your daily lives and interaction with government and public services, but it also creates a community that shields us while keeping tabs of the others, especially those on the fringes. It also covers the gamut of financial services and mobility. It is the beginning of a revolution of security, if sustained. It is a potent intelligence against the thief and burglar of our peace. It is pathway to modernity.

As Lagos has always being the pioneer of ideas in the polity, I hope this prescient innovation spreads and we can learn from it and reap as a nation.

From the effusions of the Christian Association of Nigeria, you would think we are living in a theocracy. They want to subvert Nigeria into God’s Own Country, a spoof of the United States’ self-congratulatory appropriation of the term. These self-styled Christian soldiers want to make this country a Bible belt without following the Bible scent. Nobody sent them from heaven.

They throw dirt. They reinvent hell. They make monsters of fellow mortals. They look askance at those who are not of our faith. They have, in their rhetoric and acts, created their own versions of Saint Augustine’s City of God.

Yet even the old bard of God did not espouse bigotry. Augustine never extoled a world where non-believers had no airings or hearing. This is what we have seen in their outcry over the Tinubu-Shettima ticket. But we are witnessing their wet dreams of a Christian inquisition. They want to crucify Tinubu or hang Shettima at the stakes. They are evincing the sort of racial rage of America’s Jim Crow era when whites ritualised the execution of black men after church. They go to church, chant hallelujah and amen, then go outside to ogle bullets as they dissolve black lives in blood and tears. For them, it is like a matinee, or family barbecue, grilled in the indignant coal dust of white fire.

They forget that Nigeria is a secular state. Nigeria is not a Christian state. It is neither a Muslim state. So, skewing the Christian pulpit to impugn a political party flirts with the law. They are not supposed to endorse a party, or desecrate another as they are doing. A pastor violates the law when he asks his folks to vote one party against another.

Of course, we cannot live as hostages in this world. So as Christians, we must engage. But not acting as bare-faced partisans. The law is not ambiguous on it. As lawyer Jiti Ogunye notes, some CAN members are flying in the face of the law. At the TVC Breakfast show last week, I warned that CAN can be sued for breaking the law and inciting Nigerians on the basis of religion. The Electoral Law says, in section 97 (1) that “A candidate, person or association who engages in campaigning or broadcasting based on religious, tribal or sectional reason for the purpose of promoting or opposing a particular party or the election of a particular candidate, commits an offence under this Act and is liable on conviction…”

It anoints the separation of church and state. CAN has fallen foul of this. They should refrain from a faecal stain in our communal pool. The Christian does not make enemies but follows peace with all men. Jesus gave us enough examples. Look at the Samaritan woman. Jacob’s well is an enduring metaphor of betrothal, but with Jesus it is outreach between the Jew and non-Jew, and the miracles that come out of it. Paul advances it by saying a person is a “Jew inwardly,” and not by appearance. Abraham’s children, Paul said, are not by blood but by faith. We are neither Jew nor Greek, but one. He opens the Christian arm. It’s not a call to arms. Hence Christ said let the wheat and tares dwell together. Jesus himself said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, then will my servants fight.”

What CAN does is the opposite. They make the Muslim a devil. By their hysteria, CAN is bonding the Muslims. Rather CAN should follow the Psalmist advice: “How good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.”

CAN is pharisaic. When the PDP chose a northern Muslim over a southern Christian, they said nothing. They were dead from the neck up. They also kept mum on the geo-political injustice. Now, they would rather have a northern Christian as number two, than a southern Christian as president and number one. So, they ignored Wike, a southern Christian, when a Muslim pooh-poohed him. But they are crying like hyenas for a northern Christian to play second fiddle. CAN is discriminating against the southern Christian. That is why CAN is described as the political wing of the PDP.

Other than defying the law, they are defiling the solemn oath of Christ. What they should do is to pursue the higher virtues of love, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. They should preach against corruption, lies and hypocrisy. Such agenda aims at Saint Augustine’s bull’s eye of the City of God. America’s Christian Right advances their own platforms, sometimes simplified as God, guns and gays. They have sullied the scriptures with their culture. German Christian Democratic Party furthers conservative policies but never carry the bible or cross the campaign grounds. Angela Merkel never quoted the Bible in public and was more open to Muslim immigrants than many of our CAN behemoths.

CAN should ape Moses who leaned over to learn from his in-law Jethro, a non-Jew, on how to govern.

The 30 men of God who attended Shettima’s unveiling as vice president is no big deal. Some tarnish them as mechanics, carpenters, et al. The media, without investigation, fell into the mania. Have they identified one after the other and said, Bishop so-and-so, is not a bishop but runs a mechanic workshop at Mushin? No such rigour. The media ignored the unveiling of the unveiling at the event. That is, Shettima’s adopted son Paul Ojukwu. None can say Paul is no Christian. No Biafran can deny the name Ojukwu. Name a southern Christian governor who can huff over adopting a northern Muslim he met at a shop, saw his talent, adopted him, sponsored him to acquire a bachelor’s degree, two master’s degrees and is placing him on the cusp of a PHD? Who can boast a cross-pollinated feat such as Shettima’s? many self-pollinate. CAN may see it as contamination because they have not commented yet.

CAN must learn to follow Christ and touch souls rather than torch crisis. CAN should move from the hustings to the Bible and research the sons of Issachar, who aligned with the right leaders because they read, like Christ enjoined later, the signs of the times. They knew David would be king before others.

I doff my heart to a true professional, Mike Awoyinfa, who just turned 70. Men like him are rare in a profession.

He has brought a revolutionary flair to his trade. He literally gave us a new journalism when he became editor of Weekend Concord. He injected an edgy, vibrant tone to news. He is unmatched in headline casting, giving it a joyous magnificence.

Whoever saw Mike’s headline can compare it to a box of candies. He knows how to make something out of nothing in news and he does not fear to humble the powerful.

In this age of bigotry, his best friend, an Igbo, was the blessed Dimgba Igwe, a man who was a twin to him and lived next door until death snatched the great Dimgba.

Mike is a great human being, a soulful columnist, a man of letters.

May he continue to flourish.

In an interview last week, PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar made himself an open Pharisee when he said he did not like a Muslim in the north to be on the APC ticket.

Who is he to talk about fairness or balancing? If he wanted fairness, why did he rig a southern Christian out of the ticket out of ambition? But for a mockery of balancing, he would not be the PDP flag-bearer.

He rigged the system in his own favour and enlisted a southern quisling like Ifeanyi Okowa to rid a southern candidate like Wike. He is a stranger to principles, except to parrot dead-eyed ideas and hop like a whore from party to party.

He lied on television, saying he didn’t support Tinubu in their earlier incarnation in AC  because of Muslim-Muslim ticket. He thinks we have no memory that he envied Kingibe when he paired with Abiola.

Atiku lobbied in vain to be on a Muslim-Muslim ticket. Even his anaemic rebuttal of Tinubu’s onslaught ran shy of the topic. He didn’t get the slot from MKO. He should deny and let all those, including witnesses like reporters and politicians, expose his tendentious lies. The ghost of Shehu Yar’Adua, who nominated him will choke his night sleep.

He wanted to soar as a historian and intellectual but goofed big time. His interviewers could not correct him that Abraham Lincoln didn’t fail any bid for U.S. president. Atiku also showed himself a dubious public servant when he paired with Yar-Adua to set up a business when still a customs officer. He might have been fired if it can be done retroactively. So, he flunked his history, flunked morality test, tumbled to the ground in the world of ideas. And he wants to be president? He should ask Okowa how he secured his rubberstamp assembly to get him N270 billion loan without any reading or legislative scrutiny. What governor! What morons of an assembly! No due process. Nothing in the interview provoked anyone to deep thought or messianic hope about our country. Maybe he did not get the right questions, but he, for sure, did not give a good answer for Nigerians about jobs, power, peace and coexistence. He cannot even balance his party now with governors not willing to campaign for him. He cannot even walk to Wike’s door and expect the hoarse dramatist not to yell him out of the neighbourhood.

Atiku is still the old Atiku, without originality. He needs to intoxicate us with audacity. Rather, he sterilised the hour he was on air. He has done little in his biography to inspire. Even his interview did not redeem him.  The time will come in the coming weeks and months to dissect this man who is making himself a desperado without desiderata.

Unless we love the truth, we cannot know it,” Blaise Paschal.

Some have mounted a firewall against the truth about Kashim Shettima. They may hear the fact, but they go deaf. When they see it, they go blind. Like Prophet Daniel, when they read it, they don’t understand. When they feel, they become like Apostle Paul’s prophesy about this age and men whose consciences have been pierced with a hot iron.

The SSS under an adversarial Jonathan government reported in 2012 that the militant Kabiru Sokoto came to Government House to kidnap Shettima’s children. He failed. Shettima was the governor of Borno then and he ferreted his children out of sight. If he was part of them, why did they want his kids? They attacked his convoy. Boko Haram leader Shekau named him among their wanted men. All of these made headlines.

In another instance, I unearthed a footage from a 2017 interview I had with him in Eko Hotel when I interrogated him on the Christians under his watch. No one knew this day would come when his tolerance will endure bigoted scrutiny. The footage is now viral. In it, he confirmed the testimonies of the Borno CAN chairman, Mohammed. Boko Haram torched churches to ashes. Shettima rebuilt. Sixteen of them rose out of the ruins. He had Christian perm secs and commissioners, an Igbo and Urhobo men as advisers. All of these were firsts in Borno history, virginal in the north. He sent the state pastors on pilgrimage, and devoted special funds for displaced Christians. His personal chef was a man named Peter, from Cross River, and he followed him to his home in Abuja. He trains his children. This could be testimonies of a Christian governor, but how many governors who profess Christ have this pious fortitude, or anything close to his empathy. He paid the Christians personal visits.

They want to give him a bad name in order to hang him. In their obsession with what they call Muslim-Muslim ticket, they are not peering his soul but his robe. Yet in their Bibles, Jesus says “Judge not according to appearance. Judge righteous judgment.”

The outcry over his candidacy is all about hypocrisy. See Edo State, for instance, a minority Muslim population thrives. Yet, it has Christian governor, deputy. No tears seen. There is no southern state without a Muslim minority, no matter how little. The noise by men like Babachir Lawal about a Christian minority in the north is self-serving. Some of the clerics have no justice in their churches. They fleece their followers, kiss the skies with their private jets, lap in mansions abroad and cocoon off-shore accounts as well as investments in blue-chip companies flush with tithes and offerings. Hence, Apostle Peter warned the flocks that they will make “merchandise of you.” They have become priests of politics instead of shepherds of erring souls.

If they cared about the country, why did they not make a heckle over PDP’s choice of a northern presidential candidate and party chairman? Is that also not a show of injustice? Is that not defiance of balance?

Those who dismiss the 1993 Abiola-Kingibe ticket have a negative mindset. They invoke the demons of our past rather than the angels. If it worked then, why should it not work now? When we recall that even in this country a Muslim prime minister and deputy were Muslims in the First Republic, a Yakubu Gowon, Admiral Wey and David Ejoor were Christians or that Buhari and Idiagbon were Fulani Muslims, they point to the fragile ethno-religious tension of today as if we never had it in those years. As if we never had Zango-Kataf, or we never had Maitatsine, or OIC.

We cannot live outside our past. Great nations borrow from their great ages and invoke them for a renaissance. The age of Renaissance was about that, a fervour to rake Europe out of a straitjacket of bigotry and warfare. The Renaissance gave us The Christian Reformation with Martin Luther, Calvin, et al. The founding fathers of the United States also burrowed the democracy of the Greek age. Men like Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams revived their visions and wrote newspaper articles under pseudonyms of the Greek philosophers. Today, their leaders whip up the air of their greats like Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt. It is the value of history. We do not take an oedipal view of history by killing our fathers. We filter their virtues. The Sophocles’ Greek tragedy adapted by Ola Rotimi for our circumstance only tells us that we can only run away from our past at our own peril. Soren Kierkegaard, the existential philosopher who was enamoured of Christian faith, noted that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward.” As American writer William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner was following a tradition of time concepts that harks back to men like Plato, Saint Augustine and even the French philosophes. That’s how all things become new. Time is what or when you make it. Soyinka tapped into it in his essay, When Is A Nation.

We have to decide whether we want a country where the confession of the faith will not matter except the content of their character and quality of their vision. It is not strange to us, not revolutionary. We only need to dredge it up and enjoy. If we had a Gowon-Wey combo, we can have Christian-Christian. If we had Buhari-Idiagbon, we can have Muslim-Muslim. When that happens, it will not be described as such, but as a Nigerian-Nigerian ticket. That is how I began that narrative a few weeks ago. We gave birth to prejudice by skewing and skewering us with the foul term. It is sometimes called rhetoric of discourse, a term coined from Michel Foucault.  Was it not in this country, in Jos, where Christians and Muslims celebrated Sallah and Christmas together as godsend? Not long ago, we had a debate over sukuk loan and Islamic banking, and Christian bigots opened spigots of prejudice. They spoke of Islamisation. Today, do their pastors not drive tithe-powered posh cars through highways designated Sukuk-funded roads? Did the road lead them to perdition? The top Israeli novelist, A. B. Yehoshua, in his work Mr. Mani, unveils a comedic scene where a Jewish woman on an emergency ends up in an Arab hospital in Jerusalem and an awkward scene of a Muslim treating a Jew ensues. They have the same human bodies and systems.

Part of this hysteria is to divert attention from the Atiku-Okowa crisis where even at their Osun rally we saw no Wike, Makinde, Ikpeazu or Ortom. Turning the heat on the Muslim-Muslim ticket will not wipe Wike away, or the scandal of Okowa as an unpopular imposition. As Shakespeare warned, truth sunk into the earth shall sprout again. Again, Apostle Paul said, we can do nothing against the truth but for the truth.

As I noted, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu made the choice of Shettima, and rather than interrogate the former Borno governor, they are feeding fat on poison. They should look at his cosmopolitanism, a man schooled in Borno, did his master’s degree in Ibadan, his Youth service in Calabar, worked in Kaduna and spent years as a bank manager in Lagos. The man who caused quite a stir when, as governor, he brought some of his exco members  to a place around Onigbongbo, Maryland, Lagos where he ate his favorite mama put delicacies like amala.

When the north yielded to a southern president, the south threw up Tinubu. Why would anyone want to pick the north choice for them? Some have said it is a cold-eyed choice because of the numbers. That line forgets that if we want a majority to anoint a minority, we do it by persuasion, not fiat. The northern Christians ought to play the game of persuading the overwhelming northern Muslim majority to embrace a Christian candidate. That is the way of democracy. The majority can vote a minority. We saw that in the choice of Obama. The blacks did not have the numbers. Whites voted the black man the most powerful person in the world. Today, if Kemi Badenoch makes it as the British premier, it will not come from minority black parliamentarians. Even now, as one of the top five, she made it by dint of whites.  Front runner Rishi Sunak is not white either. The northern minorities must play the politics of accommodation, not entitled intimidation. In the military era, the army brass accepted Gowon as head of state, even if his Angas tribe could not fill a room of officer corps. In Nigeria, some states have majority tribes, but they institute zoning formulas that embrace the smaller tribes. How did Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, a minority Itsekiri, emerge as Delta State Governor, or Godswill Akpabio of minority Anang clinch the top post in spite of the majority Ibibio. Northern Christians have models within and outside the country.

While the hubbub over Muslim-Muslim roils, few have asked what the streets of Kano, or Sokoto or Maiduguri want. The southern elite, ever sick of elitist self-love, want to bully the majority north on who should represent them.

They also forget that Tinubu himself may have chosen a Muslim running mate, but his life mate and wife, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, is a Christian and a pastor.  Who can beat that! Was he not the one who instituted a Christian worship every year in the state, and the first to turn over schools to Christian missionaries and plied his executive council with loads of Christians, including the most prominent Christian in Nigerian government today! Chikena!