Category: Monday

He spins, he rolls, he turns his head, his fingers flick around his face as though fanning his sweaty brow. But he is at once unwieldy and agile, a bulky frame gasping for exercise. He is not a great dancer. The exertion is more impresario than a quest for physical wellbeing. But a dancer he is. His fame, like his frame, does not come from his mastery of the art. He is known for his cumbersome choreography than as a senator, but it is because he is a senator that people know him as a dancer.

It is part patrician pretension, part campaign stunt. He also comes from money, and it is also because he comes from money that he is a senator. His dance routines benefit ultimately from his family’s high perch. Otherwise, he would have become a mere old man, a fuddy-duddy embarrassing his ebi, his family tree in every social outing. He demeans that high society with his vulgar moves. You don’t twerk your ponderous flesh in the public glare. A family patriarch distorting their patrimony.

Shall we be grateful that a third-rate dancer entertains as though he is first-rate because he comes from what in these parts come across as first-rate money?

But what we cannot thank him for is that Senator Ademola Adeleke thinks he can dance his way into the government house. Comedy in the form of choreography is laying claim to the throne. But it is not in the tradition of African royalty for the court jester to lift his gifts as regal entitlement. No one hires a jester as heir.

By seeking to govern, he wants to capsize comedy into a sober art. But governance does not mix with vanity. A society will miss it if it tries such odd chemistry. It is for that reason that, even in Yoruba culture and history, we have not seen comedy in the palace except as comic relief. In a new Yoruba translation of Femi Osofisan’s novel Kolera Kolej, Professor Leke Adeeko raises the dual concerns in the tribe. He identifies them as ere (play) and eto (order). Order must take precedence over play, even as play takes its pride of place. That theme shines through in the novel that spoofs a community that has to regain its rhythm in an atmosphere of plague and shame in the search of a new name.

But  Senator Adeleke miss play for order and order for play, which is the tragi-comic order of his campaign.

Jesters appear across the continent of Africa. They are in the palace but not of the palace. In some palaces, they play roles of oral historians, griots, cautionary poets and what Yoruba call the oriki. Some of them pulse the palace with great drum rolls.

What Adeleke dreams is to tarnish the royal yard. As senator, if we remember him as a dancer, what shall we know him for as governor in terms of legacy? He would throb the whole palace into a thespian ground. We have not heard him speak with high emotion about education, the state of infrastructure, turning Osun into a 21st century highway of tech. He does not flirt with ideas. He twerks rather with the flesh. He is a sort of infantile enthusiast seeking a shop of chocolates. If he gets there, he could collapse into a sort of diabetic emergency. Is it for nothing that Elesin in Soyinka’s play, Death and the King’s Horseman, is not able to fulfil his self-sacrifice because flesh tugs superior to spirit?

It is not here alone. We are witnessing in Great Britain how a comedian managed to get to the throne in Boris Johnson. His hair, neither buoyant nor bouffant, was a wrong crown for the post but right for a clown. He amused. He saw his job more as a sort of cynical play in which he could outplay others as the official buffoon. Last week, the crown caught up with the clown. “There are many terrible things,” wrote the Greek playwright Sophocles, “but there is nothing more terrible than man.” There is nothing more terrible than men like Johnson, who do not know the compartment between comedy and gravity. In the end, gravity prevails, and the farce unveiled.

Adeleke is trying to joust with a man like Governor Gboyega Oyetola. Oyetola has danced in public. He has sung. He does not twerk, though. Neither does he propel his flesh to public vanity. That is the difference. There is a dance and there is a dance. There is sublime dance. There is vain dance. Oyetola has done many things to place him high and above the common run of men like Adeleke. Oyetola is not in vain dance when he makes education between 18 and 21 percent of the budget, when he reclaims land belonging to schools from land grabbers, when he keeps faith with pensioners after an era of bad faith, when he introduces smart school initiatives, when he enshrines Amotekun into law, or abolishes darkness with the Light Up Osun project. Or it in the field of health when vulnerable citizens get close to N500 million on a health scheme.

That is the dance we want in governance. Not the heavy sway of an aging man who is envying his own youth long gone.  Was he not the one that added another spasm of laughter when he boasted he would lard the campaigns with world currencies from dollar to pounds to Euros. He would also oblige with Naira to show how much of a patriot his pocket has always been. He has  no moments to ruminate about poverty and how to expand the frontiers of vision for a state of teeming population like Osun.

Osun will not flatter him the way the British did to Prime Minister Johnson. His hair was metaphor for the wrong crown. Many have mused over President Zelensky of Ukraine. He had a career as a comedian. But he did not run as a comedian. But Adeleke is a natural comedian, of the burlesque type. He cannot help it but run as a comedian. As for Boris Johnson and Zelensky, the British voted in a hero but had a comedian while the Ukrainians voted a comedian but had a hero. For Adeleke, we are having a comedian who, like a leopard’s skin, will always remain a laughingstock in spite of himself.

In Ola Rotimi’s play, Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, his character Uzazakpo is a comedian who always plays moral foil to a fumbling king. We have had such as far back to the Roman Empire. But even that role of restraint is not even the type that Adeleke can play. There is no sober in his humour. He is what playwright Samuel Becket calls Risus Purus, a laugh laughing at itself in his work Endgame. If the senator were of such fibre, we might have seen it in his output as an opposition leader. He was neither leader, not a real opposition. Dance is not strong emough to oppose ideas. Rather than caution, he wiggles the waist. What a waste!

So the Osun people know the serious from the farce. Even before the election, it is obvious he will not only be crestafallen, but his will be a clownfall.

The news came in while this column was done, but I squeeze my support of Kashim Shettima as the only vice-presidential pick of the parties who can be president. He is a man of knowledge and accomplishment, of courage and integrity, of loyalty and energy. A trusted and trustworthy fellow, articulate, a breeder of men who has never succumbed to cant or bigotry. Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has again shown he sees a good talent when he picks them and he picks a good talent when he sees them. Those who have followed Shettima as governor, senator and a warrior during the APC primary campaigns will only know that all those cries about Muslim-Muslim ticket is a red herring, away from the staunch beauty of a platform of doers, of the Tinubu-Shettima double barrel. More to come…

No one can doubt that Akwa Ibom Governor Udom Emmanuel would want to celebrate his 56th birthday without fanfare, especially in the aftermath of his presidential run. He is a man of Christian conscience and one of the sterling performers of this era with all he has done in about eight years of his stewardship to trsnaform Akwa Ibom. As he stamps his legacy, In Touch wishes him a happy birthday.

 

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 they on my television interview. Adebanjo, over to you chief.

The contrast between them cannot be more stark.

One is a systems man, until now a dapper figure in western suits. Akwete does it these days. The other forswears formality, even his smile threatens the peace like an overcast sky. He does not wear western suits, but he is always outfitted like a soldier even though in his Igbo attire.

Other than cutting a dapper figure, Chukwuwma Soludo is a man of figures. But Nnamdi Kanu is morphing into a sort of figurine in the souls of his followers. One has the guttural eloquence of a broadcaster. The other a soothing but seductive note of a rabble rouser. One nurtures the vote. The other tortures it.

But when both of them appeared at a photo op not too long ago, it was obvious that the helmsman of Anambra State, Dr. Soludo, rose early to the familiar Mohammedan refrain. If Kanu does not go to Anambra government, Anambra government would go to Kanu. So did the state chief executive visit the detainee.

A contrast, again. The detainee was the chief detention officer of Anambra State, in fact the Southeast region. Down in Abuja, in the wordless silence of his detention room, his region quakes for him. In his name, blood is shed, clerics kidnapped, Monday is quiet, the bushes night and day crawl with marauders, loved ones mourn, loved ones die.

But the governor came in peace, and he extracted the right words from Kanu, a rare smile from the lips of the usually sullen folk hero. When this essayist asked the governor how it went. He said it went well. Kanu said he never ordered the stay-at-home order, never asked for the sanguinary spasms, never called for kidnaps and ransoms.

I asked the governor, is the IPOB chief not playing humble because he is de-toothed by the state? The governor said he was no clairvoyant. He could not read the mind of the man. He was, like myself, being a faithful reporter. He might have reeled out the English bard: “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” But the heart of man, to quote the prophet of tears, is “desperately wicked, who can know it?” Soludo is not God “who searches the heart. I try the reins.” The Anambra governor has no such lofty, divine self-congratulations. He is no officer in Saint Augustine’s City of God.

One hundred days down the line, the Anambra State governor understands his first task as the chief executive of a state of entrepreneurial brio. For there to be commerce, he needs to have peace. He needed the trip to Abuja. With it, he could not only delegitimise the violence of his streets, he got the anointing for it. From the lips of the man by whom they swore and slaughtered. Soludo does not have to rely on official rhetoric alone. His voice, a boom of the Anambra orchestra, is backed by Kanu’s consent.

Only a few days ago, he affirmed that it was for most part a matter of criminals on the rampage.  The state unearthed some criminal lair, but what did they find? Not materials of political subversion, or revolutionary tract. Nothing on Half the yellow sun, or invocation of Adichie absorbing novel of the war. They clutched a book of gory accounting, not the sort Soludo saw while crunching the figures of the nation as a governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria. The book had records of names of kidnap victims, how much they menaced out of their frightened pockets, how they disbursed. It was the accountancy of the hood, of the blood.

Soludo has taken the war to them, but he knows it is a necessary distraction. He has set many goals, and the criminals have to be out of the way.

He wants to set the energies of the thinker to work. He thinks of Nnewi and Onitsha, and I drew his attention to the need to reach the state’s potential. He once told me and a few editors about a decade ago on how he lamented why Anambra can be elite in entrepreneurs and out of reckoning in internally generated revenue.

This is one of the issues the so-called OBidients have not asked their hero. He was there for eight years, but he is busy encouraging false narratives about his financial prowess, or lack of it. When the Soludo government clarified the figures of his so-called investment, they kept mum on it but continued with glorifying lies and more lies. They need to follow how the work is being done by the former CBN chief.

That is one of the cardinal sights of the man in the saddle. The way he puts it, he wants to set the tone for the markets to modernise. But he must put the right institutions in place, raise the stakes of the environment, and of course secure the peace. He reminds me that it is not just the Onitsha-Nnewi duopoly that is at stake. There are many areas of dynamism to unleash, and he is at work.

It is not just in making the business arena good, but connecting the state to the world, using its airports on its way to commissioning for that purpose, and leveraging its connectedness to the north, south and west. It chimes with his inaugural speech assertion to bring Anambra to the world and the world to Anambra.

It is a heady task, and he has been at it since he inaugurated a high-powered committee headed by the inimitable Oby Ezekwesili that included such iconic names as Pat Utomi and Olisa Agbakoba.

As I noted in an earlier piece, few are as prepared for public office as Gov. Soludo. He has shown the spirit in his first 100 days. There are quite of few more hundred days, and we watch his acts unfold.

 

Obiozor, Okowa and Dubai bed

 If you read the lamentation of Ohanaeze leader, Professor George Obiozor over the political plight of the Igbo, you would think he was sincere. Yet, was he not the fellow who congratulated the traitor of the South, Ifeanyi Okowa, over his pick by another traitor of the South Abubakar Atiku? In a congratulatory message signed on his behalf, he described Okowa as a “detribalised patriot, purveyor of morals and poster personality.” Anyway, the man is recuperating in his Dubai bed, and it might be that the cloudy and soporific effects of medication may be interfering with his interaction with reality. Maybe I should grant him that excuse until he utters another jeremiad out of de-medicated soul.