After hiding under the shadows of his votaries, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo took off his veil. On the ordinary level, it was the unveiling of his ambition for the number one post. But for others, including this essayist, he did not just unfurl a dream. He cracked the calabash.

He was, by that singular act, challenging his mentor to a duel.

For some of us who did not believe it was true, the announcement was a theatre as a giddy act because it began as a furtive play. His ambition, that is. Then he decided to hit the jugular. He said it in no unshaken terms.

But he knew Asiwaju Bola Tinubu was running when he declared. He knew Asiwaju was interested when he was a commissioner under him. He knew Asiwaju Tinubu was interested when he nominated him – Osinbajo – for vice president. Never mind the mendacities Osinbajo – the man of God – has allowed to fester that Tinubu did not nominate him. I don’t know if Osinbajo can, as a man of God, go to the pulpit and, in the words of the Psalmist, “swear (it) to his own hurt and change not.”

So, in the sphere of knowledge, he knew that Tinubu was eyeing the post, and intended to run once Buhari’s time had run its course. That explains why he did not say it out loud. No doubt, he had a right to any position as a citizen of the republic. But there is right and there is decency.

If he intended to run, why did he not go to his leader and say, “I know you want this position. But, you see, I have been where you put me in the past six or seven years, and I want it. I know it’s your dream. I have seen some things, eaten some things, touched some things and done some things and I believe I should give it a shot.”

But rather than avail himself the class and panache of this dialogue, he amassed his team, and they pointed the pistol.

Poor indeed that they started challenging Tinubu’s supporters in public spaces, leading to turf wars. In all these, he kept a silence. A silence that was full of bows and arrows. It was the way of the coward.

But the first narrative he encouraged was that he did not come out of Tinubu’s benevolence. If he did, why would he hold on to a ballast of an independent man? So, he let the lie to bloat that Tinubu had no hand in making him vice president. Bisi Akande, the elder who had words of praise for him as brilliant lawyer, also narrated how his journey began to that royal perch. Osinbajo never responded, not a thing. Now, he edits Tinubu out of the story, and says it was Rauf Aregbesola and Ibikunle Amosun, who took him to then candidate Buhari. Who were these two men in the APC top brass in 2014? Aregbesola was Osun governor, and he was influential only because he held Asiwaju’s coattail. Ditto Amosun, who was Buhari’s toady. They were not in the high flame of the politicking. They were followers. So, if they took Osinbajo to Buhari, then someone sent them. In his Participations, Bisi Akande narrated how it happened.

Even Osinbajo’s own account is perfidious. He forgets that he once acknowledged Tinubu when the times were insipid in the past. Fibbing, in this regard, is not Christian. But he has been caught in a lie. Again, the fact that two intermediate party leaders took him to Buhari underwrites Osinbajo’s status  and stature then. No one knew him on a national scale. He could not have even run for senate without help, or even house of representatives.

He barnstormed his home state of Ogun recently. He knows he could not have even run for a post then without help from Lagos. He was no factor even in his home state when he was executing Tinubu’s audacious vision for justice in Lagos. Now, he acts as though he is the legitimacy of Ogun State. With his relative obscurity, he knows he was no factor in 2014, and today he is vice president. He has forgotten his obscurity, and he thinks that it is convenient to forget Tinubu so he can assert his own ambition. Hence the narrative of ingratitude.

He did or could not confront Tinubu with his ambition because he did not have the courage to do it. He is battling with what historians and psychologists have designated as the fear of gratitude. It means I can’t acknowledge those who made me a success because it will diminish my stature and accomplishments. Since ancient times, especially in Rome, according to Edward Gibbon’s classic, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A certain emperor killed all those who knew him when he was a slave. The historian and philosopher Tacitus wrote: “Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure.”

It is narratives like this that are yoking him to the Akintola saga in the First Republic. In spite of revisionists, Akintola remains a Yoruba quisling. He was first a hypocrite before he became a traitor.  He wanted to play incorruptible by arguing with Awo about party members’ role and activities in government as though he did not know before he became premier. It is that hypocrisy that bound him with enemies outside who pissed inside the house.

In obvious reaction to my last week’s parable, the vice president said it would be a betrayal for him not to run for office. You betray anyone with whom you have a pact, either moral or legal. Does he have a pact with Nigeria that once you serve as assistant to the president you must serve as president. He spoke it with an air of inevitability. No one has a pact to run for president. A right? Yes. A pact? Nada.

He owes loyalty to where he comes from, not where he wants to go. And when he became vice president, he even discharged, as a task, a vision that Tinubu suggested to the administration, especially school feeding. Tinubu’s idea: I hope they won’t dispute that either.  The job was taken out of his ken and given to a new minister who is yet to explain to the public and the children how two billion Naira was spent to feed kids who were at home during Covid lockdown. The idea came out of Tinubu’s cook book, but the chef failed the palate. So, for a man who says he will continue Buhari’s legacy (still a question mark), he could not even execute Tinubu’s idea, just a little of his vast array of vision.

By elevating to Nigeria above a group, he was guilty of Samuel Johnson’s words: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Every rise in politics begins from a cell. To move on, you have to always negotiate with that cell or you sell out. In Greek mythology, dramatized by playwright Euripides, a man sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia for country. But his heart is not in the right place. A wasted tragedy.

Osinbajo’s assertion that he owes no one any debt reminds me of Buhari’s inaugural speech in which he said, “I belong to everybody and  I belong to nobody.” That never happens in politics anywhere. It was even plagiarised. An old man, the greatest French man in the 20th century Charles de Gaulle. He uttered it in May 1958. Neither Buhari nor his speechwriter has said sorry to that French man’s grave. It was intellectual corruption. In using the phrase that he owes no one any debt, he was battling with his conscience. Some are asking, if he could do this to the man who helped him, who else can he not do this to? They might see him as a “Man dressed in a little brief authority,” as Shakespeare says.

He probably ate a forbidden fruit. Maybe he gobbled the king’s meat, and how palatable it was. Daniel in the Bible rejected the king’s meat. He thought it would defile him. But Osinbajo might like the morsel. In A Man of the people, a novel about politics of this sort, Chinua Achebe asks impishly, who will spit out a morsel of meat that good fortune put in his mouth? Achebe knew, like Daniel, that it is an unclean thing. Maybe it is that gastronomic temptation that is troubling our vice president.

 

ALAAFIN’S SONG

Alaafin is gone. What a waste. The man was stately, proud and imperious. My first encounter with him confirmed my view from afar off as a Nigerian definition of the enlightened monarch. It was at my book presentation on  Governor Abiola Ajimobi. Alaafin Adeyemi spoke smoothly, and i recall him stride into the moorlands of international history and diplomacy, alluding to Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. A fan of In Touch, we spoke sparingly but unforgettably, and he once said, “Sam, you are very important to me.” I spoke to him last on his last birthday and promise to interview him on my TV show. I feel a personal loss. The Urhobo say, oto riemu ( the earth eats great things). Roman leader Pericles wrote in a funeral oration, “The earth is a sepulchre of famous men.”

But when he died, the social media was more interested in his wives and women, the elder’s libido and many conquests. it gobbled a lion’s share of our editorial board’s time. I observed that perhaps social media has made sex an obsession of the modern imagination. Maybe. But it has always been in the culture. Hence we had Sigmund Freud, who turned civilisation into a matter of romps and orgasms, whether for a priest or an emperor. Rome and Greece had erotic tyrants like Caligula and Commodus. Kingdoms went to war over a woman’s beauty. The history of the Church of England rose partly after the allure of a woman’s flesh. The Trojan War shed its blood over Helen. Even today, Putin and his lover is a part script in the evolving Ukraine war.  A British MP resigned for ogling porn in the Commons. Thinkers have written seminal works, like Herbert Mercuse’s Eros and civilisation. Soyinka knows a thing or two about old men besting younger men in tackling pulchritude when he wrote his immortal A lion and the jewel. So, we should stop the swoon over the old man’s grave.

 

Even he who appoints him as one of his chief apostles cannot stop an about-face. He is the Lord of lords and King of kings. Yet, when it’s time to pick his man of treasury, he settles for a man of treachery.

When Judas assumes that office, he is not like Peter the Rock. The world must want to know his answer to the question that Peter, son of Barjona, gives for the ages. The question is, “What do people say that I am?” We might also have flipped it for Judas. Who is Judas?

Judas is a sly, obtrusive disciple. In one one of three times he speaks for the records, he berates a woman who splashes his lord’s feet with a special ointment. He envies his maker, so he loathes such an ornament on the lord. He wants it on the poor. It is one of the enduring episodes of perfidy in all scripture. The other times are no less etched on his memory of about-face: when he asks Jesus if he is the traitor and another when he returns the 30 pieces of silver. The worst, though, is wordless, a kiss. A semiotic silence.

Jesus sees through his false grandeur. He lashes out at the artificiality of his peroration. The man does not care for the poor. He does not care for anyone other than himself.

Jesus says the poor will always be with us, a prophesy that has defeated some of the best statecraft from age to age, through the Pericles of Athens, the Caesars of Rome, through the philosophical magnificence of the Enlightenment age, the honour rolls and ruins of the French Revolution, the 19th century reforms of Britain, the fantasies of the American century. Not the 20th century heroes – Churchill, Lenin, De Gaulle, Mandela, Awolowo, FD Roosevelt, Ghandi. Not the most heroic of systems, the fortitude of ideas from Ricardo to Marx, the abattoirs of wars and the temples of peace have made the poor vanish. But even Jesus brings his gospel for the poor.

Judas is a hypocrite. But Jesus comes short of saying it to his chief accountant. He does not need to say it. He already knows the hour is coming. But not many in the fold know Judas to be such a menace of the pirouette.

So, when he says one of them is going to betray him, some of them are aghast. Judas knows that Jesus knows. But he does not care anymore. He might have changed his mind after all the noise about his coming treachery. He might have said “I can’t challenge the man who makes me.” The man who takes me from the miry clay to the gravelly way to the marble palace.

But in spite of widespread knowledge, he is quiet, plotting and plodding. He is on his way. He is going to do it anyway. Does Jeremiah not say before that, “the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked?” And he asks, “Who can know it? I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins.”

It is another question why he chooses him and put him on that high perch?

After all, even the father in heaven chooses the most beautiful of the angels, Lucifer, as a mighty one of the cherubim. The devil betrays and turns all his work not only upside down but sets off a rebellion against the Almighty.

So, it gives the father in heaven many moments of unhappiness. Lucifer is a snake when not a lion or when not on the mountains tempting the Lord with bread. It is he who Peter describes as a roaring lion, but Apostle James says it is a lion that can be resisted because it has no destination. It merely wanders. Unlike the Lion of the tribe of Judah. There are lions and there are lions. So, it is not so much that the Judas of heaven, just as the Judas on earth, can be beaten. It is that he has happened at all.

When Jesus tells him that the poor will always be with us, he is also implying that the earth will always have Judas. But the Judas on earth like Lucifer in heaven does not care that they embarrass the master. They love the idea. Many years later, Macbeth’s acts of Shakespeare’s play will be called a vaulting ambition, and the poet John Milton rekindles the idea in his opus, Paradise Lost. That is because Lucifer, just like Judas, has no repentant heart. In Milton’s epic, Satan is a gorgeous rebel, and he swears, “All good to me is lost; Evil, be now my Good: by thee at least Divided Empire with heaven’s king I hold.”

In spite of his conviction, Jesus does not take him away from his position as the financial director. He is loving the position he is given. And rather than get humble, he waxes puffy. He colludes with his master’s foes. He accepts any inducement, and he is known as bowing to 30 pieces of silver. In today’s money, it is no more than 500 dollars.

It does not matter to him that the Lord is lamenting the perfidy. He says, “I am exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death.” He also sees other little acts of lack of faith. The other apostles cannot say their prayers with him. They sleep when their eyes of understanding should be awake. He climbs the mountain, and asks his father to let the cup pass. The father says nothing. His own temptation is going to come and go. That of the father, from the great Satan who morphs from Lucifer, is still tormenting the world. In fact, in one account of the Gospel, it is the Devil who “entered into Judas.” Here the heavenly treachery conjoins with the earthly one.

He also says, the son of man goes as it is written of him, but woe to him by whom he goes. There is no betrayal without camouflage. He works with the Pharisees and other enemies, and hands him over to the way of Golgotha. While Judas commits suicide, master Jesus, ever the lord, rises. It’s like the words of Julius Caesar. “The things that threatened me never looked but on my back; when they shall see the face of Caesar, they are vanished.”

But what many will remember is not only that Judas knows that everyone knows he will betray but he does not rethink and renew his loyalty. He plays the part of another parable, a man known as Brutus who is egged on by his mother to tempt Caesar. Caesar makes him into a trusted adviser and rising star in Rome. But he, too, ends in infamy.

No one, however, forgets the kiss. It is an open one. Not like the kiss of affection in Russian writer Anton Chekhov’s short story of that title, where a person swoons, wonders and wanders about for the Romeo who kisses her in a party. Judas’s own is not a party. It is, in a parabolic sense, a prelude to a beheading, however futile. Judas kiss is a perversion. It is murder cloaked as love, a tender act as signal, as giveaway of the identity of the master. He is setting up the one who sets him up. It is a kiss that will attract a hiss for generation to come. One thing, though. Judas is better than many, even today, who come after him because, at least, he shows remorse before hanging himself.

A SECOND COMING

We don’t need to remember that he did it. It remembers us. That he stood for all when the world was crumbling under a disease. Great leadership shines out of a cauldron of crisis, the blue flame of a fire. Bill Clinton regretted that he did not have a crisis like 9/11 to confront in his boring era of prosperity and peace. Hence scandal stalked him as an odd sort of spice.

No one asks for a time of misery as an opportunity to excel. A great leader basks in crisis but does not summon it. What is the point of leaders if not great challenges? We saw Covid-19. The world trembled. The BOS of Lagos saw and conquered. He also showed the way even when the centre quaked and looked for direction. Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu did it. His other accomplishments are big in themselves, but they seem small because he did the first thing first: he saved our city. So all the roads, the educational ideas and strides, the healthcare work, housing, the economic reforms including gigantic projects on agriculture, all look puny by comparison. In his novel, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad writes, “our strengths are accidents arising out of the weaknesses of others.” Covid-19 was not planned, but it was bigger than anything. Great leaders excel in war, disease or economic depression. Covid-19 chose the BOS. The BOS smoked it. If we did not live, if Lagos descended into a China, or Italy, there will be lament instead of roads, mass graves instead of homes and school yards, tears instead of bridges.

No wonder, it was the Lagos State Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) that first gave its nod for his second term. Others followed. Recently, the Governance Advisory Council (GAC) in Lagos threw its august weight for another term for the slim, boyish, energetic man, the governor with a folksy air and face of casual charisma at the helm in Lagos. It’s indeed a second coming as a glorious truth.

Just after the Appeal Court reinstated Ebonyi State Governor David Umahi, my memory woke up to our lack of memory. Just last December, three judges fell under the gavel of the Nigerian Judicial Council (NJC). The reason was simple: They were judicial adventurers. They gave us a paradox:  The judge as a guilty party.

They were guilty of what has become a maggot of this republic. It is the case of what we now know as judges of courts of coordinate jurisdiction.

They have disgraced in public the time-worn principle of equality. Because the law says they are equal, each of them wanted to act like George Orwell’s Animal Farm. So one judge wants to prove that they are more equal than the others. It created the sort of stalemate that the great scientist, Albert Einstein, said of our species: “Before God, we are all equally wise, and equally foolish.” With such stalemates, equality becomes a stalemate instead of a virtue or even a source of right. Each judge is equally foolish, and equally wise. One cancels the other.

Each judge is trying to universalise their jurisdiction. My jurisdiction is better than yours. Here Hobbes takes over Locke, and equality is defenestrated.

We saw the same recently when a court ruled that Umahi should vacate his seat as governor. Another court of equal power elsewhere in the country, ruled that Umahi could remain in power. It is the vulgar version of what we called “two fighting” as kids. In this case, it is adult delinquency.

Two courts, one in Abuja, the other in the southeast, ruled on behalf of the same judiciary, the same republic, the same law. But they gave us two verdicts, two justices. It mocks the idea of one law, one judiciary and one nation.

That explains why the NJC, in a slap on the wrist, barred three judges from ever being elevated to the Court of Appeal under you and above you at the Supreme Court. It is a slap on the wrist, hence the courts defied your authority and that of the NJC by doing the same in the case of Governor Umahi. Given the verdict in the Appeal Court to throw it out, it is still around to do the merry-go-round in a few days in the case concerning Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River and legislators. The matter has already been adjudicated and resolved in a higher court. So, why is the nation going through the dark comedy of waiting for a judge to sit and decide when a higher court has told us what the matter is. That is why I call it a merry-go-round. It is like the masquerade in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart who has danced himself lame before the main dance. He cannot dance again. The concert is over. Should anyone buy tickets, invite loved ones to the party or buy that new dress and drape the neck with the choice perfume? Only to learn later that the dancer is nowhere?

Your Appeal Court ruled that the power to remove governors should not be subjected to the whim of court verdicts. They are officers of state. We have seen for too long where courts decide on behalf of millions of the electorate. Many observers have seen this as another form of oligarchy, a system sponsored by well-feathered politicians and anointed by justices. It’s called courtocracy. Justices are now under scrutiny because of this.

It is now common knowledge that judges are believed to be on the take. We have justice, we have purchases. It is the oligarchy of politicians and judges. It obliterates the people. It makes votes null and void, and consecrates the principle of a few strong men over the egalitarian ethos of democracy.

“Defection of elected executives is not novel in our political system but their removal must be in accordance with the constitution. The defection might appear immoral but they have freedom of association,” said Justice J.O.K. Oyewole.

Those who sued did not win an election, and they want to reap where they did not sow. Not only in Ebonyi but also in Cross River. Let the people, not the courts, decide. That is how to deepen democracy.

We have seen a few cases where the popular choice is overthrown over technicalities. As the philosopher Blaise Paschal noted, “Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful must be just.” The cases against Umahi and Ayade have sought to conflate power with justice.

The issue of defection is a fraught affair in Nigerian politics. It could never happen in the United States or even in France. Such systems have political parties borne out of ideas, not men. Ours is the opposite. If a Joe Biden wants to join the Republican Party, he will not even be welcome unless he recants his convictions in public. He may have to renounce big taxes, abortion rights and gun prohibition. We have no such canons in our politics. Anyone can defect and waltzed into the open arms of the other. Hence, there is no difference between the political parties.

Let our politics develop its political doctrines, and that will put paid to bickering and quibbles over whether there is a right condition or not for defection. Anyone can concoct a crisis, and one man’s peace maybe another man’s turmoil.

Hence the politicians have turned the courts into Shoprite, and shop for the right judges and judgments.  Verdicts are now goods and services, like the big round orange on the left counter. We are commodifying justice.

When two judges give two verdicts, we recall the mockery of Solomonic justice of splitting the baby. But when the baby, like verdicts, are two, the baby dies. No justice comes. Neither parent, nor judge is happy. It is a funeral instead of a naming ceremony.

I hope you will respond appropriately.

Sincerely.

 

Kill-joy on Abuja-Kaduna Express

I still don’t understand the debate going on over the approval of transport minister’s proposal for a surveillance system? What is wrong if the company has only eight naira and not over N80 million  as turnover? Is that a reason to reject it? What was the position of the Bureau of Public Enterprises, which was supposed to approve it before FEC? How much did Steve Jobs have or Bill Gates before they launched world-historic technologies. Gates a school dropout, Jobs a garage habitue. Did they prove that the technology was half-baked? Or is it because it is Nigerian? If the minister’s idea was half-baked, so is that enough reason to leave the matter in abeyance and wait like helpless kittens for the coming of the devourer? Why not set a deadline for it. Rotimi Amaechi said the FEC meeting took place when the Naira was about N400 to a dollar. So, it did not happen last week. What was the FEC doing about fast-tracking the matter? If Amaechi brought the wrong firm, is security in his hands alone? It is a collective failure of government, because we had enough signs that they were going to attack. They did and we, including the military, were caught napping. The issue of train security is not about surveillance alone.

It shows a lack of instinct for decision making, a massive failure not only of our intelligence but of planning. We set up the trains, but no security guarantees before launching. We don’t have security men, fully armed and ready to squelch any attack. General Alabi Isama says in his memoirs, Tragedy of Victory, that in the 1960’s he earned accolades in the Congo when he installed soldiers in the first coach and last coach of the train and put on ice the repeated attacks on the trains. We have aircraft faraway, not nimble enough for the criminals.The hoodlums on motorcycle escaped in a time of fuel scarcity. How long can fuel sustain a motorcycle? And yet we could not capture them? Was it not time to have helicopter gunships stations in strategic points along the corridor? The train tragedy on Abuja-Kaduna railway was a poison-fly on the nation’s ointment. See the story of the doctor about to flee? Look at what might have happened to the Obi of Onitsha? What embarrassment!

We can’t erase security threat by replacing a highway with another, a Kaduna-Abuja road with a train. We have a highway and another way, both are not the ways of holiness but death.

Hence Asiwaju Tinubu reflected the instinct of a statesman and leader by cancelling his 70th birthday. To continue would lack empathy and would be peeing on the grave of compatriots.

It shows what a killjoy bad governance can be.