During the Iraq war, I collided with some of my American students over its raison d’etre. Nationalist fervour trumped common sense among them when I contended that President George W. Bush and his cabinet had not shown Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Some loathed me; I toasted the facts. They joined the mass fury of the public and lapped like cat the tendentious milk of White House’s propaganda.

One of my students vacated the class to Baghdad’s smoky streets. A year later, quite a few of them accosted me to tender their apologies for tarring me as a hater of their country. The fog may have cleared, but the dead could not knock their way out of their caskets. Day after day, the tv screen treated a sad country to picture after picture of boys who had petered out over the apocrypha of their leaders.  The surreal apparition tanked Bush’s rating, but the man remained defiant and impregnable. Few remember the boys today. I don’t know if my student, a ruddy and eager youth, survived the inferno. In the words of the poet, W.H. Auden, “Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course.”

I contemplate that as I view footages of Ukraine streets. Whole buildings tarred black by mortar, whole families in peril, whole families perished, whole day treks in snow and fear, mothers and daughters on the run, the aged lumber along like a minute old calf, a nuclear plant bonfire, a scenic street tranquilised by an armoured tank, a baby asleep as rockets whistle past.

The story comes home. Nigerians run against death, and also against prejudice. Some have arrived home, leaving a wreck behind, their surviving self being the remnant wreck. They have their pieces to repair. All of this because of a geo-political game gone awry. Vladimir Putin, the villain of the century so far pitted against Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the hero of the century so far.

Even if Putin is wronged, he has no excuse to wrong the nationals, humans who hold no guns or grudges.

Some Nigerians project lies. One, that NATO had an agreement not to expand. Two, so he had a right to invade. I would like anyone to tender that agreement signed by NATO. When the Soviet Union was about to crumble, Russian Mikhail Gorbachev, signed no deal to forbid NATO to expand. In 2014, here was Gorbachev’s words: “Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either.”

At the Visegrad Declaration, Poland, Hungary and then Czechoslovakia, sought guarantee to join the European security system. In 1993, President Boris Yeltsin wrote President Bill Clinton that, “Any possible integration of east European countries into NATO will not automatically lead to the alliance turning against Russia.”

A certain entente knitted US and Russia. The US inspected their nuclear weapons and signed a deal with Russia that Ukraine got rid of its nuclear weapons so long as Russia guaranteed its independence and sovereignty. If Ukraine had those weapons, Putin would not be flexing its muscles.

Just as U.S. was an imperial bully in Iraq, so is Putin. He is revising history as a pretext to pulverise Ukraine. America will not satisfy Putin’s sanguinary thirst. They are sacrificing Ukraine to make it the graveyard of Russia’s economy.

NATO can be blamed for expanding. But blame Russia first who cannot endear itself to its old subjects. All NATO members are by choice. Putin is trying to force another nation to love him. Love does not come by fiat. If not, he would not want need all that weapons and get all that resistance. Not Crimea, or Estonia, nor Moldovia, or Georgia want Russia. Putin sees them as pigmy nations. He may conquer the land, but not the soul. American learned that in Iraq. As novelist George Elliot noted, “Power finds it place in lack of power.” The former Soviet bloc countries sought embrace with NATO. Russia is the jilted bully.

If America has gone so far with NATO, Russia cannot roll back the clock. It is called Realpolitik, a term enunciated by German writer Ludwig von Rochau and popularised by such men as Bismarck, Kissinger, Kennan and Lee Kwan Yew.

Rather than think of clever ways to undo the NATO swagger, he is hectoring the innocent. Putin sulks in his saturnine throne. He distorts power like his forbears: Stalin, Brezhnev. Charles de Gaulle, himself a lover of coercive powers, says this of Stalin: “This is not the domination of a party, nor of a class, but that of a single man. It is not a regime of the people. It is against the nature of man. We will have them on our hands for a hundred years.” How prophetic of the stiff-necked general.

But the man of the hour is Zelenskyy. There have been fewer men like him in history. Not de Gaulle, who had to plant himself in London to growl over the airwaves, or Churchill who had America over his shoulders. Not Mandela ensconced in a jail. He is not seeking shelter. He is fighting for the soul of his country. Not a warmonger, he forbids “a legend of 300 Spartans. I want peace.” He tells America, “I want ammunition; not a ride.” Like the great French play, Le Cid by Pierre Corneille, that decries the shame of dying without having fought.

He is that sort of leader we want in Nigeria. Not one who has not seen struggle, who has not faced the loom and danger of a tyrant’s whip. Not one who has not abandoned family and friends to lay down his life for freedom and democracy. We want a man with sacrifice and spirit of Zelenskyy in 2023. Not those who have only known air-conditioners and fried rice and private jets.

Zelenskyy also united his people. More than economic revival, the first task of Nigeria’s leader in 2023 is to unite us. To play down tribal fealty or fanatical faith, and clasp everyone to one bosom. That is why Zelenskyy is the hero of our times, a direct opposite of Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov’s novel of an anti-hero.

 

It’s the Lord’s doing

As the Bible shows, patience is a long virtue. The God’s Kingdom Society hit the news on a Salem note in the investiture of Brother Felix Ekundayo Adedokun as its president, the first since the fraught era of Emmanuel Aighalua and, before then, the Trojan of the word E.T. Otomewo.

Adedokun is an exponent of the word, sober, self-possessed with flair and intellectual aura, a dynamo behind the microphone. He comes in to cement a time of peace in the church that once tumbled through high tides of ego and clique. He crested his own stormy waters when some thought he was sandwiched between two factions because his wife was daughter of the suave Benjamin Tietie who led a breakaway. He maintained a sangfroid, staying in the church with his wife and children. His focus was on God, not man. He might have followed Christ’s words, “By your patience possess you your soul.” Today, he is president. I can only say, it is the Lord’s doing. The vice president, Tariola Ekisowei, another stalwart, was my senior by three classes in Government College, Ughelli. But I never knew him in that light until we were out of school. I knew him as the quiet senior unstirred by others who bullied their juniors. He only bullied on the football field as a sleek defender whose two loping legs cautioned any feisty dribbler. Benedict Hart, the secretary general, I knew as a reporter in The Guardian and I never knew, too, that he could view the vineyard from the newsroom window. The treasurer, Olufemi Akinwale, we grew up in our late teens together in Lagos. A calm, well-adjusted person who loved IICC Shooting Stars, but I also never envisioned him in the ministry. What a delight to watch him preach with knowledge and presence as he expounds a Bible text after another. Theophilus Iwoh, of course, was on course, following his father’s footstep. Iwoh is a controlled preacher with a depth of articulation. The choirmaster general, Timothy Esimagbele, continues to amaze me with his fluid fingers on the piano.

The investiture was conducted by Brother Joel Solupeju, a spry old man who is now the chairman of the Assembly of the Lord’s Ministry Elders – a mouthful. Known before as Olusola, he was my spiritual father for all of my youth in Ibadan, up till my undergraduate years in Ife. He broke down texts and clarified queries for me, especially when I had private storms and existential anxieties about the authenticity of the faith. So grateful he still kicks as a soldier of Christ, a term I first heard from him. I should note that Adedokun, Iwoh, Akinwale and Esimagbele are chips off the old block. They follow their father’s haloes. E.A. Adedokun, an executive minister, cast an avuncular shadow on the church with his humour and institutional memory. M. O. Iwoh headed the executive board. Michael Akinwale joined over a decade after he thought his application had been forgotten. He and his son are a type of Joseph and Jesus, the carpenter birthing a preacher. Jonathan Esimagbele, the publicity secretary and one-time choirmaster general, was my father’s best friend.

With Adedokun in the saddle, I believe the church can now pursue its purpose with greater vigour. He that believes shall not make haste.

 

Rarely does this essayist patronise any rejoinder with his precious prose. But sometimes when a rabbit plays braggart around a big cat, like a white lion, it has itself to blame for being a quick and easy snack.

So, when I wrote a piece, Here we go, last week, it was just to let the CBN governor understand that eyes are on him. He should quickly rebuke the interlopers of our public space with his posters. Or, if he supports them, he should withdraw his tail, resign his office and leave the nation’s Naira and kobo enterprise to those who are not paying visits to printing presses. we don’t want to see his faces on walls and electric poles. He is a CBN governor, not a model. He is not even a model of a CBN governor. To that later.

But rather than follow the path of honour, the CBN’s shadow men were sent on another errand.

They came in the name of the Coalition of Civil Society Groups. In their first outing, they named no names. They hid under Emefiele’s friends. I might have thought they would say, Mefi’s friends, because that is what his coterie of wasps who call themselves his friends call him in intimate moments, especially when they are in the “contractual” mood and gusto. Well, I called them amorphous, so they took the bait and announced themselves under a series of names. These so-called groups are also names without recognition. I would want to see pictures behind those names and a track record of the so-called groups and whether they can boast any profile of benefits to even their neighbours. I teased them out last week. They took the bait. They are exposed, if not completely.

There are of course names behind those names. They should be bold enough to lift their veils. Or else we can as well call them the Game Boys of the media, the media equivalent of the Yahoo Plus. They are the ones pushing him around newspaper and television, and evangelising his glories as the Nigerian genius of money.

All of this we will put to rest if Mefi can allow his dumb profile to expire, and talk. Mefi is too shy. Mefi is afraid. Mefi allows others to talk for him.  Mefi is waiting for God. Mefi is communing with the Holy Spirit. Or Mefi is pining for Buhari after his Jumaat prayers. Mefi must be messy.

In their rejoinder, the so-called coalition wrote that Mefi ‘knows nothing about the posters.” Mefi must be in a different country. It’s at the airport and his work routes in Lagos and Abuja. Are they implying that the good old boss who oversees our money suddenly turned blind? He does not read? Now that he read my column, has he still remained blind? They contradict that by saying he is too busy to “throw stones at every dog that barks at him.” Or maybe they are saying he is blind, but he hears those who bark. Thank God for ears! Even at that, he knows, if not from his eyes but his ears.

They accuse me of “malevolent intention,” of being “preposterous,” of malice, of lacking good faith and good conscience. To borrow the words of the French novelist Flaubert, they lack sentimental education. They need a few lessons in emotional intelligence. There is a book of that name. It is called Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. From the way they write, they don’t seem to read much. But I can afford them a copy if they seek enlightenment. I will ignore their canine metaphor or what literary critics call intentional fallacy. They are also guilty of affective fallacy. Not today for such theories.

The real malevolence issues from them because all I ask for decency. The lack of decency of a CBN governor simultaneously running for president and enjoying the epaulettes of office is the same lack of decency in the expletives in  their advertorial diatribes. They are entitled to their own adjectives and nouns. So am I.

But who is this Godwin Emefiele? Who is this man who has rented a bandwagon, and whose orchestra ministers no grace to the ears nor is it a beauty to behold?

He is the CBN governor who they are hoodwinking into a messiah. A man who became CBN chief under Ebele Jonathan. He was in charge of the CBN after the colourful Sanusi left to become a Kano monarch in a major career fiasco. Mefi is the one whose central bank enabled Jonathan and his men to compromise our vaults, where hauls and hauls of Naira were moved around, especially in the Otuoke chieftain’s attempt to come back to power. It was on his watch that all the loot for which Buhari’s EFFC got angry fell, and it pursued the femme fatale and oil minister Diezani Allison- Madueke, when Sambo Dasuki went berserk with billions distributed not only among party mavens but also to game boys.

Was it not the same Emefiele, who bowed to the kabiyesis of power with file in hand like a school boy of JSS one? But before then, after the Jonathan misadventure, was he not lobbying not to be fired? He became a good boy after they retained him in his cosy apex office rather than to nest and rest in his Agbor redoubt in retirement. With such relief, can you blame him for bowing obsequiously to any oligarch in sight?

Then he took over, and the first victim was the first child he should chaperon: the naira. Only last week, the IMF wrote that the Nigerian currency drops by 10.6 percent annually. He has also become what economists call an activist CBN governor. His hand is in every pie, agriculture, education, aviation, textiles, power, health, entertainment. He wants to be like Leonardo Dan Vinci, but he is jack of all trade and master of none.

He is said to have overstretched the borrowing limit of the bank, but economists can always justify that for political reasons. But let’s see what he has done with all his interventions. The naira is limping like a dog. That is the dog he should pay attention to. In agriculture, we saw an exhibition of a rice pyramid. It was a mockery of Nigerian hunger. While glorifying rice, the cost of the same commodity has doubled since he became CBN chief. The pyramid is as high as the cost for anyone. Again, he claims we do not import rice. Officially yes. But he should go to the borders in the night, and witness trailers after trailers of rice streaming through. Go to the mama puts and dinner tables, and you will know that Nigerians don’t import rice but eat imported rice. What a paradox. What meretricious glory. His Anchor Borrower programme has no anchor with the people, and it is yielding nothing, so we are just borrowing from the future. He puts his hand in power, we grope in the dark; in textile, we clothe in pain, where are the textile booms of old? In farming, we famish; In education, where is the fruit in schools? In entertainment, no one is dancing.

Some economists have cavilled at activist CBN governors. It is a new war between what they call New Keynesians and New Classicists, the former being in Mefi’s camp. But Keynesians want to lead the economy by the nose. No problem for me, but lead right. The Classicists descend from Adam Smith and Ricardo. But our Mefi has not done right by Maynard Keynes. Look at CACOVID and the mess – that word again – he made of it. Billions that I want the CBN to account for. The people turned poorer for it rather than turn that money into profitable use, it became a sort of contractor’s delight. His men are hiding under the camaraderie of cowardice because the real men goading him cannot reveal themselves. This man is a victim of a racket but does not know yet until his eyes of understanding will be open. Too late then. He should also deny reports of three private jets making the rounds.

In spite of these failings, Mefi can run for president. But he cannot have his cake and take it. Even the new electoral law signed by Buhari forbids appointees from running while in office. He just should follow the honour path, resign and let’s tackle his messy legacy. Or he should remain and we, as Nigerians say, “will manage him like that” until his tour is over.

 

Wrong, Isa, wrong!

Who on God’s earth does Isa Bayero think he is? In what century does he think we are living in? Maybe he thinks this is the age of Uthman Dan Fodio, a feudal epoch where a prince can ride roughshod on any mortal. He says he is a pilot and flew a few presidents. Congratulations. But the age of pilots, he should know, came after the age of the divine rights of kings. He is here but living in the age of caves. Not in the 21st century. Otherwise he won’t insist that an airline about to taxi should stop for about an hour because a person wants to fly. It is not an emirate airline with a small e. It is not Feudal Air or Royal Skies. It is Airpeace and those on board were not royalists but republicans. I don’t know what presidents he flew, but I guess they were not democrats.

Bayero said Airpeace Chairman Allen Onyema should apologise? What royal impunity? The Kano throne has a history of better dignity than that. I am sure Onyema will not apologise or travel to Kano to bow for an offence committed against him. It is Isa, who should wrap his tail around him. We abide in a democracy and not in a kingdom.

In those days as a child, I was enamoured of The Jeffersons, an upbeat sitcom to upend the narrative of the black as a race of the poor. George Jefferson, as the family patriarch, was a superfly and boastful man in well-cut suits and exaggerated gait. He never let anyone forget he was swathed in riches. He carried his braggadocio to the extent of propagating his peccadilloes as a gift. In an episode, he played down his ulcer until a friend spoke of it as familiar pride of the rich. Then he held up his head and quipped, “I get my ulcer all the time.”

Sometimes it is the pathology of some humans to toast their own illnesses, to boast their frailties into graces. Nations have honoured their own collective coughs and sneezes. Nazi Germans saw Jew hatred and slaughter as acts of worship. In his novel of Nazi Germany called Tin Drum, Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass paints his character Oskar with his drums of hysteria like a fanatic of worship.

Or northern Nigeria in the 1960’s when Igbos and other minorities became mincemeat of irate bands, the chants and pursuits became like a force of Heaven. This also goes for political parties. In Europe, we have seen political parties rally like a tenet of faith behind xenophobia and against Islam. In Trump America, many whites turned against minorities, crowds exhaling with catharsis. Mass apoplexy was like a revolution. So, sickness can be bad, but it is worse when the sick does not know it. Sickness within sickness.

That is APC’s diagnosis. I don’t think I have heard anyone call the party sick. Its kind of sickness is family dysfunction.

The party acted without a convention. It is like holding a birthday party without a venue, date or celebrant. It did not see its rot until it hit a rut. When it was clear it could not do without a convention, it decided to adopt IBB’s Maradona style. It said it would hold a convention in late last year and reneged. Then it picked a month, this one. It picked no date and venue, but notified INEC. It was like an invitation card to an in-law to a wedding without a date or venue or even the bride and groom. When it decided to fix a date, it did not state a venue. When it decided on it, it was then it dawned on the caretaker committee, it should have procedures and processes. It is like the Harold Pinter play, The Birthday Party that critics have described as a “comedy of menace.” In the play, nothing is certain, not time, not place, not identity, not even language. That is what we are seeing with the sick party of Nigeria.

They fixed a day for the party, which is February 26th. News have it that it tried to persuade the president to change the date. Even before that, it called for aspirants to buy nomination forms. But as a party chieftain and Ondo State Governor, Rotimi Akeredolu, explained to my TV show, it was an invitation to chaos. How do you call for nomination without zoning the offices? So, if the party chairmanship is zoned to the North central eventually what happens to those who buy forms from the Southeast or Northwest or Southwest? It is hugging anarchy.

A new controversy is swirling with the caretaker committee, whose name reads like a Chinese company, that lawmakers should be disenfranchised in the convention. What is its reason? It would not say? It is a ploy to cancel some voters, to wage war against a section of the party. It does not believe in democracy. It believes in internecine conflicts. It wants brothers to fight against brothers. It is an extension of the battle between some governors and lawmakers. It wants to make governors the monarchs of the party politics. It is a monarchisation of the APC. To legalise anything, they first regalise it. The governors are the royals, and they must control things by first aggregating their interests. Even at that, they are one or not, and they are not sure that they have control. So, they are looking for the party chairmen to conspire to postpone the convention. As I suggested to Governor Akeredolu, it seems Governor Buni and his cohorts want to railroad the party into postponing. They want not to be ready, so they would be forced to put off the convention. Buni wants to provide the president and others with a fait accompli.

Buni and his cohorts are not explaining to anyone why they cannot decide to hold a convention. They want to act like the Nigerian Judicial Commission. They want to be the judge in their own cause. Their first instinct is to sit tight and preside over the convention and elections. This way they would choreograph the proceedings and hand-pick their men. Their intention is to turn the presidential primaries into a fait accompli. They want a consensus. They are unhappy that the lawmakers did not play plaint. The electoral bill does not want consensus. Buhari seems reluctant to sign because Buni and his men are trying with Malami to twist the old man’s head.

With a flourish of a smile, the president told Channels Television that his successor is not his business. That is an ostentation of indifference. Malami and company, which includes Buni, are funnelling their subversive thoughts to the president’s medulla oblongata. Buhari knows that if Buni fails, it will be largely a presidential disaster because he put Buni there and Buhari, not Buni, is the head of the APC.

The president ought to ask the head of the China-sounding committee and his attorney-general what they are afraid of. Or is it who they are afraid of? Why can’t the party act as a democracy instead of cabal of intrigues. This is the first time that holding a party convention has become a quagmire, an act of desperation. When it is not a quagmire, it is a rigmarole, when not a rigmarole, it is in a standstill, when it is a standstill it is in danger of being like Lot’s wife: a pillar of salt. May hot rain not swoop on it.

Buni has been AWOL from his state as governor. When he goes there, he could be called, “His Excellency, the visiting governor.” He is domiciled in Abuja. Yet, he has succeeded neither in reconciling the party nor doing his first task of setting the stage for a convention. It is what, in soccer terms, is described as losing both home and away matches. This scenario is making the family dysfunction a peculiar APC disease. As novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote, “All families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” in the opening of his novel, Anna Karenina.

Buni and his cohorts may not be familiar with the words of Ernst Junger, one of the top German thinkers of the 20th century, “Health is good. The disease can sometimes be even better. Illnesses are questions, they are also tasks, even honours. It all depends on how one notes them.” In the top miracle of the Old testament, a man resurrects after his body touches Elisha’s corpse. He became a celebrity dead. What does APC want, a final death or a resurrection or illness as an epaulette, a badge of honour?

 

Here we go

An abuse of office is going on with Godwin Emefiele. His so-called committee of friends failed to protect the CBN governor. Rallies are around town. Posters are everywhere. He is still mum. If he wants to run for president, he should resign his office. He should not hide under pieties about God or Muhammadu Buhari.

He wants to have his dollar and pounds in one transaction. He should either run and resign, or stop an amorphous group from trumpeting an ambition for a man whose only image outside of banking is a kneeling posture to some oligarchs.

It is an abuse of office to enable a shadowy crowd of friends fretting in public over questions of the CBN chief who is stumbling to segue from a technocrat to a democrat. The so-called committee of friends was a shadow show.

It was a limp exhibition, whose prose called for better editing. Emefiele has a spokesman officially. That is the only voice that counts, not a camaraderie of cowardice hiding under a coterie of friends.

Few Nigerians, especially the Yoruba, know that there is a potent as well as parabolic dynamic between Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola and the great Hubert Ogunde. It is not only where art hugs life, but where politics gleans nutrients from the past. It is the intersection of history and histrionics.

The stories of the fall of the First Republic, the maelstrom of the Western Region, the nation’s collapse under the soldier’s boot and the sanguinary flow of fratricide in the civil war energise the 1960’s. But they are no more instructive than how the political biography of the premier of the Western Region weds the great bard of the west. But the bed is defiled.

The episode connecting them is not only that life confronts art, but drama plays out within drama.

Ignorance about what this essayist is about to relate reflects two things. One, we have left our study of history behind but it haunts us nonetheless. Two, our reading habits have taken an almost fatal beating. Other than tick tock, Instagram, Facebook and twitter, we are a largely illiterate breed. One author records this story more than others, and she is Professor Ebun Clark, in her book, Hubert Ogunde: The Making of the Nigerian Theatre, published in the 1970’s. She is a warrior of the arts, pioneer professor of theatre in Nigeria and wife of legendary poet and playwright J.P. Clark.

Akintola was a colourful man, beginning from his face of many marks. His tongue emitted acerbic, subversive, if inventive wit. He became premier and turned his back on his mentor and leader Awolowo. He opened a wilderness of gnomes, mongrels and beasts in Yoruba body politic. He turned against Awo’s rich and verdant field of dreams of greens and ark of robust tree barks. He invoked Mr. Quisling in Northern Europe and Vichy’s Petain in France. He pissed in the common pond when he broke away from the Action Group and set up his own party, the Nigerian National Democratic Party. The party entered into a wedding with the northern NPC. As a counterpunch to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa from which the AG sprouted, he founded a mimic wraith called the Egbe Omo Olofin. To help launch it, his party invited the Ogunde Theatre Party to dramatise a folksong, Yoruba Ronu, which incidentally was the watchword of Akintola’s new party. Clark reprints the letter inviting him inspired by Chief H.O. Davies, one of the fellow defectors with Akintola.

Ogunde obliged, and dramatised the song by relating the story of a king, Fiwajoye betrayed by his deputy Yeye-Iloba, who imprisoned him with two of his senior chiefs. The usurper tyrannised over his people who eventually killed him. Fiwajoye was released from prison and restored to the throne. The kingdom returned to its tranquil plenty.

Ogunde’s was an invocation of the Yoruba crisis of the 19th century. Field marshal Afonja had colluded with a Fulani known as Alimi, and that Fulani exploited the division among the Yoruba to launch a jihad in the west. In Ogunde’s contemporary rendition, Fiwajoye was Awolowo, who was then in prison, and Yeye-Iloba was Akintola. It prophesied Akintola’s end. Artists can be seers, just like Achebe’s A Man of The People predicted the end of the republic.

The play did not find humour with the premier. He rose in the middle of the performance with some of his associates and left. But the majority of the audience remained and thrilled to its nuances, innuendoes and projectiles. It reflected the perfidy of Akintola, and how out of sync he was with the Yoruba street.

Yoruba Ronu means Yoruba think. While Akintola meant to appropriate that phrase to rally the tribe against Awo, Ogunde launched it as a theatrical missile. It landed straight in Akintola’s traitorous heart. It was a supreme paradox.  What he designed as a hook became his noose.

Still out of humour, Akintola’s government banned Ogunde’s theatre from performing in all of the Western Region. In fact, he was about to perform in Ilesa when the police stanched the effort, igniting a riot in the city. The government described Ogunde as “dangerous to the good government of Western Nigeria.” The order was signed by G.O. Ejiwunmi, secretary to the Premier and Executive Council. It urged the federal government to do same. Zik, the president, ignored him. Zik, for good measure, had collaborated immensely with Ogunde to cauterise colonial laws and thraldom. Few count Ogunde as a major nationalist, but it is another lapse of our historiography.

The media rallied to Ogunde’s cause. The Daily Times condemned it. And Zik’s West African Pilot unleashed a fiery editorial that took apart Akintola government as a byword for authoritarian impulses – my phrasing. This diatribe at Akintola’s act against his tribesman gained traction in the country. The Pilot mocked him by imagining the British government banning the rollicking rock icon of the 1960’s, The Beatles. The paper predicted: “The road to ruin is often smooth. Those who travel it pay the fare. The people at Ibadan may feel on top of the world. Let us allow ourselves the role of soothsayers. We tell them to beware and fear tomorrow! They should fear the people’s ire.”

Like Pharaoh, it hardened Akintola’s heart. He extended the ban to his music, dance, records, and he forbade them to be heard in public places as well as on radio and television. Only in Lagos could he perform. His collaborators in the centre did not stop the song. Akintola was afflicted by what I call the Okonkwo syndrome based on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The literary critique Killam described it as insistent fatality, just like King Oedipus, who saw death and strode defiantly on the path of perdition. Hitler gave speeches about the past of wars as meaningless savagery but he ignited a world war that lighted him up in flames.

Ogunde’s fellow artistes backed him, including Kola Ogunmola and Duro Ladipo. It disembowelled his pocket and tested his integrity as an artist. But he did not falter. Rather, he dug in. He swiped back with the play, Otiti koro, which means truth is bitter. He began the play with the lines: We do not kill a dog because it barks/ And we do not kill a ram because it butts…

For about two years, Ogunde cooed in the cooler. In 1966, however, the army kicked and Akintola fell. The new governor, Lt. Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, within nine days of receiving Ogunde’s plea, lifted the ban. In July 1966, he performed Yoruba Ronu at the British Council Hall in Ibadan to all and personages, one of them Chief Obafemi Awolowo. It was art as revenge. Another irony. Ogunde was in prison professionally, Awo was physically and politically gaoled. That day, in songs and dances and rhetoric and acts for the theatre, both had their victory lap. They put to the grave a chapter of infamy. A new curtain had opened in the West.

 

Holy whore

 

It was a parable in finance when the Trojan of works, Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) unveiled a cheque of N210 billion from the Sukuk funds. This is the third of the tranches. It is naira, not Islam. It might have come from a Muslim ideology about money.  But we are spending islam. We are enjoying it. Sometimes we forget that the idea of Sukuk forbids exorbitant exploitation. Modern funding is shylocky. We also forget that the Bible chides those who give their money away in usury. In this light, the protestant ethic has overshadowed the tenets of both holy books. Can I hear Max Weber squirming in his German grave?

If you go across the country, you will see roads Sukuk funded. I don’t see any order banning non-Muslims from plying. In some parts of the country, Christians apply their tyres predominantly on such sukuk-funded asphalt. This is the country the Naira proselytises for us. It recognises nor faith nor tribe nor place. It abhors none. It is a sublime harlot, a holy whore. In an age when some would enact a holy war, victory belongs to this holy whore of filthy lucre. You are all welcome whether you say amen or amin, or you foreswear Allah or Jehovah, and pride man over divinity, or spirits over flesh and blood.

I wonder how much we can get out of Sukuk and do away with the vampiric loans from China. They come with headaches and fear and a false sense of luxury. But I am not learned enough in international finance to make judgement yet as to whether we can thrive if we can forgo China shylocks for Sukuk. I am going to research. But, meanwhile, over to the Trojan and the work that N210 billion will do. A lot is being done, and a lot of roads left to do. Optimists see the cup half full, pessimists half empty. As the poet Lord Tennyson writes, “Though much is taken, much abides.” Nigeria is a vast swath, we can take it one kilometre at a time. That is what the Trojan is doing…