Act one. The theatre of Magodo is Karl Marx capsized. A set of stragglers took over a piece of land. They neither paid for it nor inherited it from their fathers. They built there, ate, coquetted and conquered, married and gave in marriages, flexed and feigned flamboyance.

When the day of reckoning came, they begged the soldiers to forgive and make them owners. The soldiers had pity in their eyes and naivety in their souls. They translated surrogates into sovereigns. They documented the penitent into proprietors. From being lawless, they took the rights from their unwitting benefactors. Innocence waxed into impunity.

The commoner overthrew the land. The people, it seemed, had defeated the state. But Marx did not win. Who won were philosophers like Rousseau, Hegel and J.S. Mill, who warned that the people who overthrew the upper class also took on the airs and tyrannies of their former oppressors just like in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Before that, they might have echoed Shakespeare’s line, “That distribution undo excess and each man have enough.” After distribution, they flaunted their excesses.

Go to another place that sounds like Magodo and we have our Act two. It was Maroko, where we call Lekki today. But Maroko had no light, not water, hardly a tarred road. The people occupied it without documents just like Magodo of the 1960’s. They acted as landlords, ate, partied -yours truly attended a party there – bought and sold, married, became fathers and mothers. But this time, the soldiers, including one who loved the word gada as English for culvert, had neither pity nor smile for the stragglers. They were given ultimatum, and the bulldozers came, razed down the properties as settlers raced for their dear lives. None of them can rise up today and ask a court for their right. In the words of the P rophet Nehemiah, they had “no portion, nor right or memorial” in the land.

The peacock class inhabits that place today, and no one calls it Maroko. There is no place called Maroko on the map of Lagos today. Except another rhyme in a maritime place called Makoko where settlers are trying to turn proprietary blackmail into rights.

The two acts and territories evoke the absurdity of the military era. In the first act, they bent the rule of law in favour of the illegal. In the second, they appropriated the rule of law for their friends.

They tell us how fragile the border between law and impunity, between nice and naivety, that there is no such thing as innocent poor, that an error in one time can cost a catastrophe in another, that the rule of law is not always on the side of right, that the constitution can vindicate the unjust, that legal justice does not always confer social justice, that history always haunts us even when we think we have buried it in amnesia.

The Magodo stragglers act recalls the age of colonial scramble where the west conjured the term “effective occupation” to show that any European country that had occupied a territory after a certain period “effectively” owned that land. That was how many territories, including Nigeria, fell under British thraldom.

We saw the impunity when attorney-general Abubakar Malami and his fellow traveller the inspector general of police Alkali Usman, in the guise of executing a court judgment, turned Magodo Shangisha into a blaze, a place to bulldoze, wield spray paints and padlock. They became the Covid-19 version of a lockdown.

In this case, it is the civilian government under a so-called democratic aegis that is enabling it. It was an embarrassment. The Supreme Court ruled based on document, not on history. It ruled for legal propriety, not for true ownership of the property. But the law, as Thoreau says, never made anyone a whit more just. In executing a court judgment, the police looked away while the judgment creditors unleashed mayhem. Malami is one of the migraines of this democracy. He is supposed to be the blank of the president’s eye. But he is making his boss blind. He is not giving the right advice. It appears we have a charge and bail lawyer as our chief law officer.

When the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu visited the place, he met a recalcitrant police officer who would not heed the chief law officer of the state. It was because he had the confidences of Usman and Malami. Malami issued a statement that he was heeding the Supreme Court. He did not answer the question raised by the Lagos State governor that he had called him and he said he had nothing to do with it. Rather he merely dismissed the governor’s charge. That is the stuff incompetent attorney generals are made of. We have been cursed with such breed. In this republic, except perhaps for Bola Ige, attorney generals have been handmaidens of impunity and superficial distortion of justice.

The IGP has not said anything of worth, if he has said anything at all. His force has benefited the most from Lagos State since 1999. They never account for their budget, and their barracks around the country are an eyesore. Yet a state has devoted tremendous resources for them and they pay back with a gangster logic.

Why was Malami in such zealotry to execute judgment in Lagos when quite a few have been left in the lurch? We did not see such zeal with the El Zakzaky case, or the Dasuki one in spite of the ECOWAS court verdict or the Odili matter.

Some have cavilled at the gentlemanly conduct of the BOS of Lagos. Few know that the deployment of police was an act of impunity to tempt a revenge of impunity. But the Lagos governor did not blink. He showed himself a man of peace and honour. He did not need to do more than expose the big hole in our law and reckless show of power of a few men in the centre who know no difference between rule of law and highhandedness. Some chief executives who are wont to use violence might have turned the story into another chapter of bloodshed. Lagos is too urbane for that. Lagos has always saved the Nigerian state from a reign of violence. It has served as the high tower in this democracy when most of the country, especially the north, wreathes in blood. A Malami or Usman cannot tempt the city into a tempest of bad temper.

And men like Malami would have yelled that the chief law officer of the state had unleashed lawlessness if the governor had exercised power instead of authority. Ondo State Governor also waded in with wisdom, noting that the constitution was making state governors into mere “prefects.” It is so because we don’t have governors who want to pay the centre in its barbarian coin. In Imo State, we saw the police wrest a man from the house of God.

But what the Lagos State governor exposed was our constitutional inadequacy. This was happening when the president rejected, in a television interview, the idea of state police. He has said, and he has been echoed many times by the vice president, that Nigeria as it is presently constituted does not need to be restructured. That is the tragedy that has made the official impunity in Magodo possible.

Rather than follow the path of the gorilla from Malami and Usman, the BOS of Lagos has sat the parties down and they are amicably working out a solution. That is where decency overthrows impunity. If the Supreme Court gave a verdict without memory and justified subterfuge, the BOS has shown that Lagos can still be a refuge of common sense.

AB at 60

Those who know him call him simply as AB. My friend turned 60 a few days ago, and it is 60 cheers to a fellow I have known since our days in Ife when we were in the trenches for a mutual friend of ours who ran for the presidency of the inimitable Student’s Union. Always ebullient and brilliant, Asisana Okauru has been an engaging person since we met decades ago. Even in the United States, he was no less. He has always combined an intellectual’s rigour and restless quest with a philanthropic heart always ready to offer a help or a piece of advice and go the extra mile for a neighbour’s comfort. He is an economist, lawyer, information systems analyst, and of course a great and witty conversationalist. He is the director general of the Nigerian Governors Forum. He has also served as pioneer director of the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit. I remember the day he called me in Denver that he had joined IBM as a manager after his scholarship in North Carolina university. With two masters, two other degrees, it is not hard to see why AB is one of the most gifted minds in our country today or anywhere. Happy birthday.

It’s a theatre of the oldies. On one side is a man with a paunchy stature and grey hair and fierce tongue. On the other side is a man with a paunchy stature but without hair but a shifty tongue. One has proclaimed his residency in a departure lounge. On the other side is the fellow who sneers at such a journey because he does not depart from trouble. One is Edwin Clark, the other of course is Olusegun Obasanjo.

The first, Chief E.K Clark, is a nonagenarian with a rebel in his blood while OBJ is, as he claims, an octogenarian with mischief in his eyes. These men fought over oil. But OBJ is the culprit here, trying to play mischief with Niger Delta resources.

The thing with OBJ is that he can say the truth without being truthful. If the constitution says the oil belongs to Nigeria, he forgets to say that if that is true it is because the oil belongs to Niger delta before it belongs to Nigeria. That is the spirit of a republican society, especially one that thrives in a federal state.

But what strikes the essayist is not the debate on hand, which is straightforward. It is the Owu chief’s penchant for war. He is a retired general but he always acts as though he is ducking shrapnel in battlefield trenches. I stated at The Nation’s editorial board last week, even before the Clark battle, that the man has a chip on his shoulders. He did not do well during the civil war, so he is fighting to compensate for his failures and stumbles as a war commander. My comment raised not a few highbrows at the meeting.

He is therefore afflicted with what I call a post-Biafran syndrome. Some say the man led the Third Marine Commando, and he received the surrender note from Biafra. That exactly is why the man feels a sort of whoozy feeling of incompetence. He did not know the war was over. The victor was not aware of his victory. He was away, far away from the conduit of action when men like Alani Akinrinade had browbeaten the rebels to paralysis, when Ojukwu had fled and his assistants were now mouse to the federal forces.

The brew was ready. OBJ was summed to his victory party. As the leader, he snatched the hour of glory. The real blaze and fury of the war was narrated by eye-witness accounts as well as the best book on the war so far, Alabi Isama’s The Tragedy of Victory. They show that the war had been fought and won, the big bear of Biafra had staggered and was falling under Black Scorpion Colonel Benjamin Adekunle. OBJ came to hear its thud and final fall. He did not even see the humpty go down.

Maybe that is why he obliterated the study of history. That is only one of his battles. What is going on in his psyche is a post-Biafran war.

Obj war will not end until he joins Clark in the departure lounge and catches that flight. He is not going to receive another formal surrender. So, he keeps shooting and blazing with rage. Since the real war ended, his has launched a series of ambushes. The main weapon in his arsenal is cunning. The great journalist and essayist, Stanley Macebuh, who was his adviser, described him as “crafty, very crafty.” If the war theorist Carl Von Clausewitz announced that “war is a continuation of politics by other means,” ObJ has the genius of turning it around. Politics, for him, is the continuation of war by other means.

But we have seen this since he returned from Biafra. Did he not do it to general Olutoye? The man had confided in OBJ about ethnic injustice in the army. He exposed him to his northern fellows. It was swansong for Olutoye as a soldier. OBJ defeated him. OBJ has been in this fight against those who hold no gun. Sometimes when he did it with gun-handed fellows like IBB, it was with cunning. He spoke of SAP without human face. Aikhomu paid him back in his sardonic coin, by saying they would have SAP with human leg and hand, etc. He did same to Buhari before IBB swept him out. That was when he was tarred with PHD, pull him down syndrome.

In this Republic, we have a long list of his acts. Simon Kolawole last week became a diarist of his iniquities and inequities. Some of them, though, you cannot hold him legally culpable. That is the enigma of the Teflon man. But was he not the fellow who ate with Okadigbo and danced with his wife and the next day the man was no longer the head of his legislative chamber? Did he not do same to Audu Ogbe as the leader of his party?

When he was president and got rejected by his Yoruba kinsmen at the polls, did he not play the same game of cunning? He is not too proud to stoop, so long as he conquers. He has turned upside down the words of novelist Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace: “It is always better to bow too low than not low enough.” Bisi Akande has demonstrated in this in his book, My Participations, and no one has countered him. Forget the nonagenarian bluster and empty fury of Ayo Adebanjo. Akande narrated how the man begged the Southwest governors not to perform local government polls and also not to endanger his second-term nomination. He stooped to Papa Adesanya, and had Adebanjo with him in his subterfuge. The governors tagged along. When he was done, the governors as well as Adesanya had an appointment with him. He stood them up for hours. When he materialised, it was to mock them. He played his earthy character, sat on the floor in his short, and started to mock. He conned them first, then swept them out of office, except Tinubu in Lagos.

We cannot forget when he was leaving office as president. He gave the country a president and vice president. One was weak in body, the other weak in mind. He wanted to be the only strong man. He was, however, defeated. He never controlled the so-called weak men. He started panting and ranting in his Ota farm until he made a bonfire of his party card.

The Odi and Zaku Biam massacres were evidence of the soldier triumphing over people without arms.

When Jesus met a soldier and told him, “Do violence to no man,” he did not refer to the battlefield. He meant civilians, unarmed persons like the Odi and Zaku Biam residents. Jesus himself said, “The kingdom of God suffers violence…” Old testament bleeds with battles and, of course, Armageddon looms. It is army versus army. OBJ has been doing violence to the vulnerable. He did not have a war story, except the fictions in his My Command, whose RIP was enacted in Isama’s book, a man he orchestrated with a court martial without a gazette.

OBJ still fights. He is unaware that he is scratching the air, has no electoral value today, but huffs about like a statesman. Only a history that lacks psychic perspective can afford him that perch.

BOS on his knees

Perhaps, it was the most star-studded new year prayer in Lagos history. In attendance were two former governors and, of course, the host, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the BOS of Lagos. Enter the Jagaban, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the man who started it all 20 years ago, a Muslim who unfurled a Christian tradition. Enter the white-haired Trojan of works, Babatunde Raji Fashola and his wife. Enter Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila. Former deputy governors like Femi Pedro joined the incumbent deputy, Femi Hamzat. Also present was some of the episcopal elite, with Pastor E.A. Adeboye ministering.

Gov. Sanwo-Olu morphed into a pastor governor, crooning holy melodies on his knees in his flowing white agbada. It was a time to showcase some gospel singers like Ayan Jesu and Efe Nathan. We saw some read portions of scripture, although it was clear one of them was not familiar with his Bible of miracles. Few states witness this sort of coming to terms of the past with the present, and it is also a testimony to the temperament of the BOS of Lagos.

He also looked to the new year, a consequential year to deliver on promises, and start a pivotal one: Fourth Mainland bridge. The rail lines are soon to hoot, and a big rice meal is coming with a big rice mill to dwarf all in the west coast of Africa.

Very few who are familiar with Abubakar Malami will doubt that he is a cocky man. He is a sort ofTunde  Idiagbon, a shadow of Muhammadu Buhari. He hardly smiles in public. He has a stern mien, and speaks in even tones. His eyes sometimes peep into a soulless heart. He detonates but does not emote. Unlike Idiagbon, he wears no uniforms. However, his web of power is a subtle cult. It is like a spider’s malignant design. More powerful than the Ilorin-born soldier. Malami is an attorney-general, Idiagbon a general. But the soldier had no attorney. He was a one-faced warrior. Malami is both attorney and a predator of justice. That is fatal. He speaks to the president. The president agrees. He does not need to be right. He has to bring his sophistry as an artist of persuasion. The shadow is more powerful than the man.

In a sense, he is the chief mocker of the commander-in-chief. He probably laughs to himself, “once I tell him in a certain way, and project both sides of the issue and pretend I don’t belong in either, he will fall to the side I gently nudge him to.” He tries it. It works. It happens again and again. He has done it quite a few times. Whether it is about herdsmen, or NDDC, or the debt fight with governors. He skews the law and the president acquiesces. So, why not with the electoral law? Hence, they go to him who want to win, and he calculates where to pitch his tent.

Malami, whether we admit it or not, is Nigeria’s most powerful man. He is the giant in Aso Rock, not the president. Russian writer Anton Chekhov said a giant should not use his power like a giant. The shadow is scarier than the man. Malami does not use the giant status for good. He knows how to flatter the man’s secret hopes.

It is just like English man Thomas Cromwell who made his king Henry VIII into a marionette, and he became the throne beside the throne, a skein recreated to its psychological detail in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

Even those on Malami’s side who admire him do not like him. The governors, for example. They exchanged barbs barely a month ago over debts and deals. Now, the same governors have hidden under his many-layered skirt-like Anna Bronski, the wife of an arsonist who loved the skirts and grandmother of the anarchist Okar in what some critics believe is the best novel of the 20th century, the tragi-comic tale The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass.

So, the firestorm over direct primaries became a joy of foes. It reflects the drifts and quicksand of our political class. They embrace and race away, they hug and huff, and loyalties are as constant as the weather. The governors wanted indirect primaries. It was not a philosophical quest for them. It was a gladiatorial contest. They are desperadoes of survival. They want to pick their successors. The want to go to the senate. They want to remain puppeteers. They want to continue as monarchs of democracy. The system, though called a democracy, must continue as a ruse on their own account.

This is not the place to quibble over patches of the president’s infelicitous prose like the phrase “implications on.” But to say that the argument was specious, and insincere. The notion that direct primaries contradict freedom of choice is elitist. Who is making the choice? The party members, or the governors and a few wheel horses?

I recall the story of a former governor, now a minister, who did not like an unconscious quip by a house of representative member. He decided he would not return to the house. The fellow has not up till today. It was the whim of a man to decide who will represent a whole people. The fellow wanted a chance to beg. It never happened.

Those who say we should not go the direct route because it is too expensive are mere hypocrites. Where don’t we spend money? The general elections are vast, and they still spend money. I would rather we spend and get the right people than turn this democracy into a cult of a few men. We also forget that the Nigerian voter is getting wiser. They are learning to collect without being collected. They take your money and vote elsewhere. We are seeing it in the major polls already. The Anambra Governor poll reflected how many, especially in the APC and PDP, wanted money badly but wanted their Chukwuma Soludo more badly. We remember the iconic woman who turned down an offer. That is how democracy is brewed. Soludo won, in spite of money. We have to dare, and risk the democratic enterprise with the people rather than stay safe with governors. The president voted safety over venture. It is the coy option.

Ekiti Governor Kayode Fayemi did not speak truth to his hut when he said the governors are not afraid of direct primaries. We know the options are not that open. The other position that the people do not decide but they are influenced is correct. Democracy is a game of influences. Each side must make its case. Democracy absorbs influences in pockets around a constituency. Whoever wants to be nominated as governor must work hard across the board. He must meet the power centres who have great influence in their communities. The power centres are often trusted. They feel the pulse and project their demands and interests through these big men. That is what, for want of a better word, we call structure. Democracy is egalitarian when big men channel the fears and hopes of the common folks. It is not always perfect. The big men are not always good men. But they are the best we have and they are not always in charge. They also have to win or be defeated. The power to represent is one of the cardinal uncertainties of democracy. The fear is how do we define popular? Who is popular? How does the powerful man in a democracy become an autocrat?

That is what many theorists are debating in the wake of the rise of despots like Trump and Erdogan. Hitler was a product of democracy. It is not perfect, but it is the best means of popular persuasion known to man. So, ideas like direct primary are its own way of refining it for the people.

Is it an irony that a man who rose on the waves of Talakawas decided to pen his approval against the spirit of the Talakawa? The feudal lords who did not like Buhari’s rising will now benefit from his anti-talakawa signature. If it was so right to avoid corruption and expense, why not propose the general elections to be a platform of choices that could also occlude mass elections? After all, democracy started that way. In the United States, it started as a system of rich white men. Men like John Adams believed that majority should not vote. They are too foolish. Philosopher J.S. Mill described the majority as foolish. Former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli wanted votes to be weighed like fish in the market. Some people’s votes are bigger than a thousand men. That negates the American creed that “all men are created equal.”

The president through his Malami has cancelled for a generation a chance for the people to take back their democracy. It is a stab at equality. If the president were running for another term, I doubt if he would have taken that route.

This is no system by the people. Jefferson lamented that democracy only worked on election day. Not even so yet in Nigeria. Revolutions started because the people wanted to overthrow a greedy elite. In the collapse of the French Revolution, some Bonapartists, including Abbey Sieyes, coined the phrase: “Power from above, confidence from below.” It is what some have phrased in latin, “Pars imperans, Pars subdita” (some to rule, some to obey). This is in contrast with the revolutionary in the days of the 20th century Russian ferment who proclaimed, “if the system does not change from the top to the bottom, then it must change from the bottom to the top.”

This rather is a democracy of obedience.

I regard it a gift to swamp oneself in an old man’s autobiography. Also any book from a person in his twilight years. A lifetime’s insight comes in bold relief. Just like former United States secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who at 98 just co-wrote a work of prophetic fear, The Age of AI. The man had nudged us with a polemical earthquake titled: World Order.

“When I was young, I didn’t have the experience,” goes the Chinese proverb. “But when I was old, I didn’t have the strength.” Yet Bisi Akande has dispensed a memoir of pain and paean. Though old, his work is a tribute to memory. At age 82, when recall falters, Akande has launched a pageant of names and episodes.

In his memoir, Far Away and Long Ago, W.H. Hudson writes about scenes that “are painted by memory in bright, unfading colours.” One can pick out Soyinka’s Ake and recently Anietie Usen’s Village Boy – though a piece of auto-fiction – as examples of bringing memory to the service of a tale.

But political memoirs are a mnemonic idiosyncrasy. They unmask the flashes and foibles of a generation and the evolving colours of the human landscape. They are nothing if not gossipy, an eavesdropper’s delight – amebo in a grand scale. They also are a rumination of the human condition.

No surprise then that My Participations should excite a flap. Not worries too that Ayo Adebanjo should rage and play real estate manager in his 90’s. He only concentrates on the charge that Asiwaju Bola Tinubu “helped build” a house for him, according to Akande. To help build implied he probably used something of his resources, too. But he didn’t need all that public accounting. That goes into the territory that literary critics and philosophers call the absurd.

But since he did, he should have gone the whole hog to hug fact with fact, block to block, naira for Naira, with receipts. How much did it cost him to sell the houses? And match that with how much it cost him to build His Lekki mansion.  You can sell five houses and they might fall short of the cost of a new home in a highbrow area. In this age of unreceipted gifts, it is easy to deny who gave and who received.

No word yet on the CofO. If not, he should say thank you. Or where are the receipt and bank draft to testify he paid. Did he build the mansion on nothing?

Also angry is his governor successor Olagunsoye Oyinlola. He charged Akande with corruption because Akande accused him. He did not address the N377 million padding he allegedly signed, and he did not say how much of the N800 million he deployed to renovate a presidential lodge into a government house. Could Alani Akinrinade clear the air? Oyinlola asserted that Olusegun Obasanjo loved Akande, so why did he oust him in 2003. Or was it love as guilt?

Add the pact between Tinubu and Candidate Buhari. Akande wrote: “In April 2014, I was in Abuja when Buhari called me and asked me to persuade Bola to run with him. Governor Masari was the one who came to call me. When I followed him into Buhari’s private lobby, Bola Tinubu was already seated there. So, when Buhari tabled the matter, I cautioned them that this must not get beyond the four of us. ‘How could we be talking of a running mate when he had not secured the ticket.’” If nobody can deny that episode, the story is sealed.

It is a biography of a man who trudged his way up life’s arduous ladder with resigned cheer. He virtually never wanted anything in life that came his way. All he did was work hard. He wanted to be a mechanic but he finished his primary education. He became teacher. He never wanted to work in oil and gas, he landed a job at British Petroleum and rose to senior executive. Against his wishes, he became Bola Ige’s secretary to government, earning less than a third of BP emoluments. He recommended someone else to be deputy governor. He was basking in a chieftaincy title ceremony when the state House of Assembly announced his elevation, an honour within an honour in one day. A royal and democrat in one day. He was frogmarched to get governor nomination that Adebanjo was plotting to upturn. He chaired national parties four times without seeking any.

Yet two events stand out for this essayist. One was his years in Buhari’s gulag. Politicians’ savage treatment. Soldiers wanted confession before evidence. He reeled out a roll call of big names humiliated. Former vice president, Alex Ekwueme “wept bitterly.” He called how the military wanted him to confess and failed to coerce others to nail him. It was like a script out of kafka.

His experience draws an eerie parallel with his younger days.  A kangaroo court by some thieving politicians ambushed him to confess guilt for saying some councillors were on the take. A strapping fellow suddenly emerged after they pronounced him guilty. They had almost unleashed a poisoned whip on him. The fellow held Akande’s hand and walked him out daring anyone to touch him. The military, another kangaroo, did same against him. In both instances, a big man erupted. IBB’s coup set the stage for his release after about three years. But Akande curiously barely mentioned Buhari’s name. The culprit was Idiagbon.

Bola Ige accused the same Adebanjo in Awo’s house as traitor, with his friend Olaniwun Ajayi, his fellow traveller, for conspiring with the soldiers against him. The same Olaniwun Ajayi,  who, in Akande’s telling, walked the author aside from an Ibadan event and said, “That Tinubu is a bad boy. He gave Ayo Adebanjo C of O, and he didn’t give me.” But the former Lagos governor handed him one, an old one showing he had had one but didn’t know.

The other episode was how Obj conned the Southwest governors. Akande paints a feline Obj, playing a baby in distress seeking his kinsmen’s rescue. The same Obj who had insisted on standing to beg the folks, including Pa Adesanya, did the opposite when he had outfoxed them. In Otta, he kept them waiting for hours and arrived in the contempt of a pair of shots and flimsy shirt. Instead of standing, he sat on the floor and railed abuses. Adebanjo had earlier been beside Pa Adesanya serenading Obj. But when Obj swept the elections, except Lagos, Adebanjo accused the governors of working for Obj. The Owu chief, according to Akande, withdrew N1.4 billion to browbeat southwest governors. He spent N400 million in Osun State plus a detachment of 150 anti-riot police men. But Akande added that the Afenifere leadership was also divided.

He accused Adebanjo of negating the party members when they agreed for Ige to accept Obj’s cabinet offer, yet he accepted Obj’s job without consulting the party leaders. He also objected to Segun Osoba accepting Daily Times M.D. job, yet he asked Aremo to use that platform to campaign for a road for Bisi Onabanjo. These are more far-reaching issues Adebanjo should address. I laughed at the irony that Omisore gave him Richard Nixon’s book on impeachment. Later, the lawmakers preferred an uncompromising Akande to an Omisore, who could hound them if he succeeded the author. He was the one impeached.

Ooni Sijuade came in for a beating as contract monger. He said he would save Akande from impeachment if he acceded to a deal. Akande saved $295 million because he resisted the monarch’s overtures. The telling thing about Ige murder was how Obj retired every police officers investigating it.

Akande paid attention to details but the book lacks close-eyed editing, and words like “vaunting ambition” should have been spotted. The use of ‘begat’ is somewhat amusing for its quaintness. Some repetitions engendered structural muddle. Yet his immersion in Yoruba history edifies. My Participations is more than a book. It is a document, especially from a Southwest perspective and moments of national illumination.

Lagos chef

To make a good meal, you have to be a good chef. The BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu demonstrated the culinary side of governance at the maiden Lagos State Food Festival at Victoria Island. Clad in black Apron, he tackled Stir fried rice, his hand on the ladle turning onions, smoked fish, mixed granules of bonga fish and crayfish, pepper and sundry seasonings. Ingredients wailed into delicacies under a blue-flamed stove. It was outdoor cooking, showing transparency. Those who ate testified that the chef did a chiefly job with Big Brother’s White Money who was beside him as the pot sizzled. He showed his salivating guests that it takes many ingredients for good governance just like roads, healthcare, good schools and food on the table.