One was a tycoon, the other a titan of an octopus. One was a friend of soldiers who stung back like a nemesis. The other was a lackey who ended up a tool. One was an extrovert who stuttered with bonhomie and humour. He laughed often, backslapped often, goofed lovably. The other, slow of manner, was never wedded to public cheer. The one had a big heart that channelled a large philanthropic purse. One wanted to be president. The other consecrated his betrayal. His only quote to memory was uttered with morose dignity on television. It was to the effect that he did not want to spoil anyone’s fun. Such a cavalier putdown.

For paradox, Chief Moshood Abiola and Chief Ernest Shonekan were kinsmen, but they were not keen on each other. Shonekan, lauded in the past few weeks by many after his recent passing, was a Yoruba man who became a puppeteer to pop the dream of his fellow Egba man. The consequence was that, if he did not want to spoil anyone’s fun, the spoils went to another Egba man who was regarded as a spoiled former soldier and opportunist, rejected by his own people. The Owu chief, too, as a soldier had anointed a mathematical thieving of a presidency in the 1970’s. The former was twelve two-third. The latter was June 12. They were both 12 nights, a la Shakespeare.

The narrative of the duo, Abiola and Shonekan, should be a cautionary story for the Yoruba in this season. It was the fight for the presidency of 1993. Abiola, not a flawless hero, but human enough to be loved, won a presidential race. A soldier annulled it. Many regarded him as an imperialist front-liner and a dispenser of cynical cash. But heroes are no saints. As Bertolt Brecht wrote, “No one’s virtue is complete/ the great Galileo loved to eat.” Christ made Paul, the murderer who wasted his church, an apostle and hero. The Old Testament sanctified David, who cuckolded his fighting man. Churchill never abandoned his alcohol. Jefferson, who immortalised the line “all men are created equal” spirited away with a slave girl. Shaka the Zulu loved Noliwe to death.

The story of Shonekan is not just a biography of an ethnic weakling, but one who could not see he was mobilised to puncture his people’s ego. When he was appointed to head the interim government by IBB, he thought he had a big job. But it made his people look small. His people, however, would not go down. First they mocked him and called him head of Ijoba fidi he. They kept a dry powder and fiery spirit. The fight for Abiola’s legitimacy was an onslaught for the Southwest, if a legitimate campaign for fairness and democracy in the country. The wheel horses in the dust and duel were his kinsmen. Many died. Some fled abroad. There were others from the East, the North, and the South-south. Outside the West were men like Ebitu Ukiwe, and of course, the martyr Alfred Rewane, who volunteered his means against the mean soldiers.

Shonekan was drafted to pacify his people. He accepted against the grain of a republican verve and nerve in the land. What we know today as NADECO rose from the moral failure of men like him. They picked him to delegitimise the right of his own people. That is his legacy, not his towering image as the head of UAC, or the perennial bard of military budgets.

He was like General Petain, who led the infamous Vichy government that signed away the French ego in an armistice with Nazi Germany. Those who did not cohabit with the army and Shonekan were like Charles de Gaulle, another general, also flawed. But he left Paris to England to fight to restore the dignity of France, or what he called “a certain idea of France.” Those who rejected Shonekan wanted a certain idea of Nigeria, but beginning with a certain idea of Yorubaland. Such a fight did not start with June 12. History embedded it at the Battle of Osogbo in the 19th century. But even that battle was not without its quislings and moral failures. The race triumphed at a cost.

There was no platform to serenade a traitor as head of Yorubaland. Again, the battlefield was too ill-defined as well as the race. It was not even named then as Yoruba as we know them today.

The 20th century is a different ball game. We saw that with Awolowo, perhaps the greatest Yoruba man since Oduduwa, the Churchill of Agodi When unproven charges led him to court, and even to gaol, it was the goal of his persecutors to invent Shonekan’s ancestor. That time it was not business man. History is never so open and shut. It was a jurist, the man Sodeinde Sowemimo. In his verdict, he confessed “my hands are tied.” Awo delivered an allocutus without circumlocution, a statement for posterity.

It was clear in both cases. Someone inside was a tool to cow his own people. There is a familiar proverb that the ant that eats up the herb resides inside. That is also the story of empires that decay. The rot starts within. Even in wars, it is never easy to conquer even a small army with cohesion and vigour. It is hard to say, as Bisi Akande posits in his My Participations, if and when Yorubaland could have fallen had they united against the British. Akande’s view may be a fancy of patriotism, but he is on to something. The intrepid Nana of Itsekiriland stunned British to a standstill with a cohesive force. The white men had to return to the island for a special force because they could not break the blockade.

When Abraham Lincoln answered questions about the longevity of the American system, he did not fear the outside force. He warned against division with the political elite. American democracy palpitates daily with Lincoln’s prophetic fears.

While many praise Shonekan today, they should not forget that his doings happened a generation after the treachery against Awo and the tribe. And about a decade after Obj brooked Akinjide and another Southwest justice, Atanda Fatai Williams, to certify a fraud. Both Sowemimo and Shonekan, both Egba men, both with great intellectual mind, opened their hearts and minds while the race’s torchbearers fell into a dark night. So was Williams, a Lagosian. They did not remember Chinua Achebe’s proverb, “A kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed; anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone.”

As we enter a third generation, and 2023, we from outside the Southwest watch again, and hope that the tribe does not collapse for the third time under the undercurrent of forces of oedipal rebellion. We hope anger against a brother this time will not go deep into the marrow.

By Rail for Onosode

I was invited to speak in Ibadan to a modest audience on a seminar on a new book on Gamaliel Onosode, the technocrat nonpareil titled: Classicus. It was penned by famous playwright, poet and essayist Femi Osofisan.  The venue was The Booksellers. But I decided to travel by rail, to experience the new infrastructure. It was indeed a jolly ride. The train chugged through the entrails and underbelly of the city of Lagos, and through the rural and urban sights, the drowsy beauty of heaths and open land, the lone huts as well as the benevolent skylines. The journey took about two and half hours, with stops in Agege, Abeokuta, et al. Not a bullet train, but its pleasure and joy surmount any hurry. Many youngsters are patronising, in spite of little publicity. The snag though was that on arriving at Ibadan, one had to walk into dirt roads, my shoes bathed in dust because the road was untarred between the terminus and carpark. I confronted the minister, Rotimi Amaechi on this, but he said it was out his hands. He said he had asked the Oyo State governor twice to make the land available to construct a road to link the express. But Makinde is yet to oblige. Even those who would not give Buhari that credit should try it. It is an immense legacy.

Just as the book I went to speak on. The moderator was Olakunbi Olasope, a classics professor at the University of Ibadan. The other speaker was the University of Ibadan former registrar, Tayo Ikotun. Onosode’s life, tracked from his childhood and schools in Government College Ughelli and University of Ibadan, gives enchanting insights into the times of the man, his father and their unique marriage, his faith and miracles, and why he is known as Mister Incorruptible, a man that was straight-laced and found, to his hurt, he was not cut out for the politics of cunning and subterfuge. More compelling was that the man, often known in his western suits and for his stern exterior, was a joy of warmth in his private life, who burst to tears when, as pro-chancellor of U.I., he visited Mrs. Tayo Ikotun, who was bed-ridden.

‘To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved,” George MacDonald.’

Some commentaries in the past two weeks about why some Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s associates are looking the other way have reminded me of childhood. As a little boy, my father Moses was lost in the ecstasy of My Early life, Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s autobiography. Every evening while he clutched and read that cannon of book, he belched out his praises like a soulful incantation, like a man in a rally of one. “Awo,” he would say in reverie in his white singlet presiding over his Niger Delta wrapper presiding over his bare, light-skinned feet.

In the twilit veranda of our Ibadan flat at Oke-Ado, he would tell me, for lack of a mature audience, that Awo was a man without fear and of principle. The other thing that fascinated him was Awo’s single-minded resolve to scale any odd on his way to enlightenment and formal education. Awo’s main virtue, in my father’s closeted eulogy, was courage. My father, who would rather fall than faint in his belief, saw himself in Awo.

As Parents do, Moses Omatseye planted a seed in his son without knowing it. Decades later as a history student at Ife, his name rose to reckoning in our forays into Nigerian history. It was there I learned he was a besieged genius and methodical mind with a deeper glue to history and philosophy and he unrolled a template for Nigerian development that has haunted his nation like Banquo’s ghost even decades after his passing.

The snag for me was that he lived among judases, and I wanted to know why. I wanted to know why some wanted to march him to Golgotha when he cleared a path to light. So, in my final essay, I decided to write on the western region crisis. In a long holiday, I secured access to the Daily Times library. I travelled in time on the pages of the paper, day after day, as the western region descended from worry into war, how associates were parting ways with the man who had already tenanted his genius in the west.

Political scientists like Dudley, Kenpost and Sklar, wrote lucidly about the Awo years. I still believe his life, especially the brio and quicksand of his engagements, is still underwritten. He did not write enough of his life and political times. Poet Odia Ofeimun has tantalised us for years about an opus. Just as Ojukwu teased us in vain.

What still remains to be written, I think, is the ideological and psycho-history of those years. It will also be good to see a novel or play or epic poem of his years. Then we shall understand that Awo’s life mirrored the eternal treachery of Nigerian politics. Many left him, and they are big names in our history even today. The list is almost endless. Not just Akintola with his theatrical wife Faderera. Not just Ayo Rosiji, ines. We knew names like Adisa Akinloye, Gabriel Akin-Deko, Remi Fani-Kayode, Sikiru Shitta-Bey, Lamidi Adedibu, Busari Adelakun, S.G. Ikoku, Philip Umeadi, Anthony Enahoro, Arthur Prest, Oduola Osuntokun, to mention a few.

I wanted to know if it was because Awo veered from his principle. I saw no such evidence. When the Action Group was formed, he enunciated the ideology. It was democratic socialism, and he engrained them in programmes that we know today. All those who left him said they left him based on principle. That, I have found out, is the most bastardised word in Nigerian political history. All those men, including F.R.A. Williams, who played reconciler in the heady days of the 1962 crisis, also left. Some left when they thought the path no longer led to nirvana. Some left much later. All of them said they left because of principle. But we know that Awo never changed his skin. He was the leopard of ideas. They were the amoeba. They changed by conjuring the word principle, and they glowed under its false light. That shows two things about Tinubu and politics. One, defection does not make the defected guilty. Two, the defector has to show that he or she is acting on principle. The principle is not the choice to leave, but the clarity of why. Principle becomes a platform for phonies. That was not Awo’s headache. It is not Tinubu’s headache. Neither Awo nor Tinubu changed. If they claim he did, they owe the public an essay on the reasons based on facts. When Judas left Jesus, he did not say Jesus compromised. He wanted his 30 pieces of silver.

Winston Churchill was in Liberal and Conservatives parties at different times. That was because he was a liberal who had imperialist fantasies. He articulated his contradictions. Life abides it. But it must be known. Hence, he said, “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.” Awo quoted that line during the carpet crossing in the west. We need to see an ingenious explanation for cutting and running. The alternative is to keep silence.

It is clear from Awo’s defectors that they never believed in the ideology in the first place. They may have acted with sanctimony in their own sanctuary then, or holy in their own folly. But we know it was because of ego in English and what the Igbo call ego. Both ‘egos’ conjoined in the guise of principle. Stomach infrastructure is not only for the poor. There are different levels: infrastructure for the rich and the poor.

No one should mistake service for servitude, or vice versa. Neither should anyone see sacrifice as sacrilege because service comes with some sort of sacrifice. At certain points in our lives we must serve but we should not become traitors in order to get along. The Latin phrase Et tu, means “you too” in the famous Shakespearean play, Julius Caesar. Brutus canonised ambition over loyalty. In Yoruba, the word etutu means sacrifice. Etutu should never get to sacrilege or servitude, but it should not lead to Shakespearean Et tu. In his play, Death and the King’s Horseman, Soyinka’s horseman would not forgo sensual bliss to die with his master, even though that was the agreement. When Etutu fails, it becomes et tu. Devotion waxes into betrayal. I recommend Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son, where the most trusted James Carker ends in tatters after a lifetime of trust and devotion.

We saw the same thing in the M.K.O. Abiola saga. Some who thought Abiola could not stand up to Abacha were disappointed. Some played Judas and decided to stay with Abacha and they were demystified, including the late Lateef Jakande, Ebenezer Babatope, Olu Onagoruwa and Iyorchia Ayu. Ayu is the one who has gotten a new life, a man fired twice as cabinet minister, once under the soldiers and then after under a soldier masquerading himself as a democrat.

They were worse than Judas. They were like the 30 pieces of silver, which neither the taker nor the giver wanted. But they have been hanged, like Judas.

The casualty is often the facts. It is important, as we enter a political season, that we trade on facts. We should hang nobody on a lie. A big lie was exploded at the weekend by Segun Ayobolu, so we should not turn fiction into a vehicle for hate.

It is clear many do not understand Nigerian history, not just the history of a century ago. I mean history of just 10 years ago. Hence, I wrote my piece last week titled: A Lagos original, about what happened under our very eyes and many people across the country and the world responded with genuine surprise at the facts.

When persons rise under the shadow of one man and turn against him, they mouth principle, but they forget they had principle when he fed and clothed them and made them shine to the neighbours. Now that they have grown, they remember he had mouth odour, his shoes are dirty and does not know how to dance.

From those who left Awo, we know they did not belong. They were wayfarers. None of them propagated the AG idea till they died. A man like Enahoro stunned many. But in his twilight, he had an ideological epiphany. He abandoned those he left Awo for. If Awo were alive in the democracy ferment of the 1990’s, they might have worked together under the sultry roof of the progressives. The same way, some who left Tinubu have returned with the glory of prodigal sons.

Some of them who worked for Nigeria’s democracy must remember those who fought and who didn’t. Tinubu, for instance, never forgets. Few know that, on his initiative and arrangement, Abiola’s wives are taken care of up till today since the husband died, even if one of the children can raise hairs on the airwaves as though the former Lagos State governor was a pariah to the family. Few know that when Abiola’s Concord Newspapers ran into financial peril, the company wanted to sell its generator to keep afloat. Tinubu, as governor, offered to buy the generator for the state’s water corporation for over N30 million then. Some of the family members balked and stamped caveat emptor on the property. Lagos State Environment Commissioner Tunji Bello, then the newspaper’s editor, can testify to this. A newspaper with an equivalent of that sum today may be hoisting hundreds of millions in a grateful purse.

Awo said he did not compromise, if Jesus or Mohammed compromised, they would not have the following around the world. The buzz word should be compromise. So people who evangelise principle should not conflate liberty for personal licence.