The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

  • Behold the 61-year-old

    Behold the 61-year-old

    By Sam Omatseye

    He is a pot belly as vision, a slob at dinner, a bedwetter at night, a sluggard in sunshine. In spite of his unwieldy gait, he mistakes his shuffle for a flight. He frightens the young, despairs the middle-aged and is a ghastly comic to the old. Snores while lying down, burps on his couch, farts on his feet.

    The young see him as geriatric, the worker bestows on him the status of a premature retiree, the retired shut their door when they sniff his scent.

    The irony is that the 61-year-old is not a lost cause to the doctor. He puffs to defy his age. He packs a punch between his wrist and shoulder. He is virile enough to contend with a nubile. He does not eat but wolfs and belches afterward with a noise loud enough to startle a poultry. Whether you like it or not, he has a winsome face, dresses as superior to a fop, is proud in a soundless limousine and clucks over his mansion’s window to an ornate neighbourhood.

    That cannot be Nigeria? You bet it is. It is a nation that cannot reconcile itself, a nation with a gift and curse simultaneously, where limousines ride over potholes, the cleric’s wit upends the holy writ. Its doctors are some of the best in the world, but they don’t treat Nigerians except the wealthy ones and outside its shores. It has great students who win laurels in big western universities in Canada, United States and Britain. Its best professors pour out local wisdoms to foreign audiences while locals grope for droplets.

    They have great athletes that its citizens applaud only on television when they score on turfs they don’t have here at home.

    They have great store of crude oil but they are too crude to refine.

    Read Also: Nigeria @ 61: Pastor Adeboye and the parody of a nation

    So, as Nigeria marks its birthday, this essayist can only muse on this absurd profile. If you take any topic of our national life, you will behold how a nation is blessed because it is cursed.

    As the nation verged on its anniversary, the issue on the top burner was whether the president should come from the north or south. We have never pondered as a nation whether the locale of the president has corralled favour for the regions they come from except their skewed and peculiar appointees and their skewed and peculiar contractors. It never favoured the Yoruba people when the Owu chief was president, neither was Nigeria generally better off for it. When Yar’Adua was president, his tenure was too short for the north to preen. But Jonathan became president, and the beneficiaries were the political and economic royalties from the south-south and southeast. Few major landmarks will celebrate that tenure. Now that Buhari is there, the tribe of talakawa who still swear and drown in his name are just happy he is there. The al-majiri problem still wallows in beggarly bowls and temptations to violence, while the education standard has gone down a few more rungs. But we talk of a fierce and shadowy cabal building a monster sanctuary around their queen bee. So, the battle for zoning has been hijacked by democratic imbeciles.

    It is a noble idea corrupted by idols of tribe and belief. Zoning has been for the elite, by the elites in the name of the people. It ought to be for a sense of cooperative peace and trust, until we are able to knit out tents together under a common sky.

    When the southern governors came up with the idea that the next president should be a southerner, it was as a matter of course. A routine endorsement. Uncontroversial. Prudent.

    But true to the Nigerian spirit, the Northern counterpart fouled it with a no, or what the Soviets called nyet. The ostensible explanation was that it ran counter to the constitution. But let us go down memory lane.

    The idea that the presidency should go to the south, especially the southwest, was viewed in 1999 as a sop, or as penance, an atonement for the wrongs of June 12. The democratic moment did not want to stir the indignant pot of soldiers. Even the north bore the torch as messengers of a moral might in their land.

    Later, it naturally went north, and Obj became an anointing priest of transition. Tragically, Yar’adua could not conquer his body, so the body politic ticked Jonathan as a doctrine of necessity. It was after Jonathan wanted to run for another term that many said trouble had brewed in the house of consensus. They said, let Yar’adua’s cousins complete what he started. This essayist on this page urged Jonathan to play gentleman and not run, so the north would complete it. But the people voted him, and this column congratulated him in the democratic spirit while expressing my reservation about his competence.

    After his first term, he fell to Buhari, and Jonathan played the statesman and left without a whiff of protest. Many hailed him as a statesman. Now that Buhari has done his first term and is wheeling to the lame duck’s hour, why is it a debate as to whether it should go north or south. Those who allowed Buhari to win in the south did not invoke the constitution. They knew the constitution called for anyone to run. It is a paean to equality. That is the main issue with the northern governors’ pharisaic cry. The mouthpiece of the Northern Elders Forum, the leaky and bigoted Hakeem Baba-Ahmed warned the south that if the north gave us a president, then those who didn’t want it should go elsewhere. It means we have irresponsible people speaking for a region. A few other voices, including the upstart El-Rufai, had said it was the south’s turn.

    But he raised the decibel of division when he said the north executives gave that warning against southern president because of the offending word “MUST.” The wanted MUST to go. Did they want them to beg for their rights?

    I thought it was infantile for a governor or even a group to say they could risk a lofty idea because the other group hurt them with an anaemic word like Must. It is like a little boy saying to his father that he slapped his classmate because he touched him on the shoulder without a permission. Some say it is a warfare against VAT by other means.

    The southern governors should go and negotiate over it? Did they have to make a statement in order to ask the southern governors to commune at a table? They have the Governors Forum. Many of them have joined hands, glad-handed, are a phone call apart, party and laugh at and with each other in Abuja. Did they have to make a brinkman’s pettifogging over a matter they could have resolved in an informal manner? Was it not in this country that a northern governor – Ganduje of Kano- married off his daughter to the son of a southwest governor – the late Ajimobi of blessed memory?

    What they did by that statement was to ratchet up the tension between the regions. It was puerile and uncalled for, especially when some elements of the NGF had said they wanted a northern party chairman in APC after Adams’ exit.

    Now, a new matter has erupted in the PDP. The Ngwuanyi-led zoning committee has assigned party chair up north. Some have said it means the presidential ticket will go down south.  But there are hints that some persons like Atiku want it so bad in the north that they want to capsize convention for private ambition. We face the prospect of chair and president candidate coming from up north.

    This is not even the time for such misadventures. In an age when IPOB has paralysed the east and Yoruba Nation is rising in profile, such a move by either party will reinforce suspicions of a master-servant dynamic. Nigeria is too fragile for such hubris and hegemonic fantasies.

    Constitutions thrive at the mercies of conventions. They are the invisible hands that hold the law together. It is like gravity keeping the planets in place. We are at a time that we need a cooperative nation, not the notion the lord of lords. Laws cannot even hold America together if its values fail. Laws almost undid it and it hung on one man and one moment when Vice President Mike Pence rose in Congress to endorse Joe Biden as president. If he did otherwise, maybe the greatest country in the world would be in ruins today. And John Adams would have squirmed in his grave over his assertion that “this is a nation of laws and not of men.” It was the tiumph of Edmund Burke’s good men over evil. He ought to read Jesus who noted that the sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath.

    That is how fragile laws are.

    The French revolutionaries spoke of equalite and liberte. But none of these would make sense without fraternite. If we don’t see ourselves as siblings, the law alone cannot do it for us. Laws enforce, conventions embrace. Laws kill, conventions heal. The letters of the law cannot give life. Conventions are unwritten rules that undergird the law. You cannot get such justice in the court of law, but in the hearts of the people. That was what Apostle Paul meant when he said, Love works no ill against his neighbour, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. Not judges, not lawyers. Charity is not in documents. It is in circumcising the foreskins of the people’s hearts. That’s fraternite. That’s brotherhood. “Charity never fails.” We should not, in the words of the Psalmist in the Bible, slander our own mother’s sons.

    When the U.S. founding fathers finished their convention, reporters asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government they agreed on. “A republic,” he bellowed, “if you can keep it.” But let it be that after the hullaballoo over zoning, we can echo Benjamin Rush after the American convention. He belched out, “It’s done. We have become a nation.” Have we? Or can’t we?

     

  • Adebayo Williams at 70: Intellectual superman

    By Femi Macaulay

    When a celebrity who doesn’t celebrate his birthday is celebrated on his milestone birthday, it is a celebration worth celebrating.  It was not a private matter when Prof. Adebayo Williams turned 70 on September 9.  The luminary couldn’t hide his light. He attracted glowing tributes because he is aglow. The celebration of the celebrator underlined his celebrity.

    His story celebrates the mind and mental possibilities. He was my teacher when our paths first crossed in the first half of the 1980s. He is still my teacher almost 40 years later. He does not know, and cannot know, how much I learnt from him as a student at the former University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State. He does not know, and cannot know, how much I have learnt from him as a co-member of The Nation’s editorial board.

    There are moments I wonder if it is all a dream, sitting with him and other editorialists in the newspaper’s board room to discuss editorial topics. The context seemed even more unreal because of the presence of another teacher who taught me at the same university, Prof. Ropo Sekoni, who recently retired from the editorial board.  It was flattering to share the same space with two of those who shaped my writing life at editorial meetings week after week.

    I was first drawn to Williams at Ife by his mental magnetism. Certainly, I wasn’t the only student who experienced his electrifying presence in the lecture theatre and his stimulating lectures. Of course, he was decades younger then, but the promise of greatness was unmistakable. I went to his office often just to enjoy the riches of his mind. He accommodated me. We soon became mentor and mentee, not in any formal sense, but essentially. We would engage in fencing for long periods, and I always left his office more educated than I was when I entered the place.

    After I left Ife, we met again at African Concord in Lagos where I worked in the early 1990s. By this time, Williams was established as an outstanding columnist, although he still worked as a university lecturer at Ife. We met yet again at Africa Today in the early 2000s. The magazine was published in London, and Williams, based in the US at the time, was its star columnist.

    In his years as a columnist for Lagos-based Newswatch magazine, 1985-1990, he demonstrated patriotism and progressivism through his stylistically sophisticated columns.  He also wrote memorable columns in Tempo/The News magazines, 1993-1995, and was a major participant in their journalistic crusade against military rule in Nigeria.

    It is significant that his involvement in journalism did not weaken his involvement in academia.  Interestingly, he was a journalist before he became an academic. He had worked as a sub-editor at Nigerian Tribune in Ibadan before going to the university in 1971.

    The national turbulence that followed the annulment of the country’s historic 1993 presidential election won by Chief M.K.O. Abiola brought out the political fighter in Williams. During the intense pro-democracy struggle to reverse the annulment of the election by Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, Williams fought on the side of the people. Babangida’s successor, Gen. Sani Abacha, who supported the annulment, made the country unlivable for many political activists, which was compounded by difficult socio-economic conditions.  It was perhaps predictable that Williams joined the exodus of the oppressed.

    He became the Director General of Africa Policy Group, a London-based think-tank focused on governance issues in 1995. His deep interest in governance and democratisation in Africa can be observed in his profound essays in various newspapers and magazines over the years. In 1997, he returned to the Centre of African Studies, University of Birmingham, England, where he had an earlier stint as Leverhulme Fellow from 1988 to 1990, as Visiting Lecturer and Honorary Research Fellow, a position he held till 2006.

    In 1998, he became a fellow of African Studies Centre, University of Leiden, Holland and Professor of Liberal Arts, Savannah College of Art and Design in the US.  In 2004, he joined University of The Incarnate Word, San Antonio, Texas USA, as Amy Freeman Lee Distinguished Chair of Humanities and Fine Arts.

    His brilliant academic career and accomplishments are worth celebrating particularly because he is a homegrown intellectual.  He was produced by University of Ife, where he earned his first degree in English Studies, and master’s degree and doctorate in Literature, and rose to the position of Senior Lecturer in the Department of Literature in English at the university in 1986.  The giant from Gbongan, in present-day Osun State, rose above this background to become a man of the world.

    It is a testimony to his brilliance that his scholarship transcends the literary sphere. He is internationally recognised as a multidisciplinary and multidimensional intellectual and respected for his contributions to literary theory, political theory, post-colonial theory, cultural production and creative writing.

    He has occupied positions that highlight his political value. He was Chairman, Lagos State Electoral Reform Panel, 2008-2010. Also, he was Chairman, Lagos State Gubernatorial Advisory Committee, 2010-2018, under Governors Babatunde Fashola and Akinwunmi Ambode. He is a member of the Board of Trustees, Obafemi Awolowo Institute for Governance and Public Policy.

    Williams has made a name for himself as an arresting and inimitable prose stylist.  His essayistic potency is widely celebrated. His essays, thoughtful and thought-provoking, and presented with linguistic grandeur, are the signature of his creative soul. He won the Odunewu Prize for Informed Commentary in 1993 and 2000. His essays usually offer multiple quotable quotes. For instance, writing about the role of journalists, he said: “It is our business to make sense of senselessness.”  He writes consistently about the country’s underdevelopment and why underdeveloped leaders cannot bring about development.

    Apart from his numerous scholarly articles, and essays in newspapers and magazines, he has published three novels, The Year of the Locusts and The Remains of the Last Emperor, which won the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) Prize in 1988 and 1995, and Bulletin from the Land of Living Ghosts.

    We reconnected at The Nation, where he is a big fish and writes a compelling column under a pen name. In his office, we explore word behaviour and semantic possibilities under the influence of unseen creative powers.

    There are men and supermen.  Prof. Adebayo Williams is both man and superman.  I wish him many happy returns and God’s blessings as he enters his septuagenarian years.

  • Masari’s candor

    By Emeka Omeihe

    It is not too often that we get forthright leaders in this clime; leaders that say things as they are, devoid of sectional or other biases especially on vexatious issues of our federal organization. Rather, much of the complications in constructing a workable federal order had revolved around the quick resort by leaders to denials or obfuscation of subsisting issues affecting the lives of the people.

    Faced with this curious reluctance or refusal to admit reality, finding solutions to emerging challenges have, over time, proved very daunting. This should not be surprising given the medical aphorism that the diagnosis of an ailment is half way to its cure. The inability of leaders to admit reality for whatever reasons, has largely accounted for the plethora of nagging challenges that are increasingly tilting the county to the precipice. And this is really unfortunate.

    When therefore Governor Aminu Masari of Katsina State spoke with candor on the real identity of the bandits, it struck as a pleasant deviation from the ruinous culture of leaders living in denial of extant realties. Masari spoke as a good leader determined to locate issues central to banditry so that lasting solutions to them can be found. He spoke with uncommon honesty despite the fact that those who revel in papering serious national challenges may not find his courage funny.

    Asked about the identity of bandits terrorizing the Northwest in a television interview, the governor said: “They are the same people like me, who speak the same language like me, who profess the same religious belief like me. Majority of those involved in this banditry are Fulani whether it is palatable or not palatable but that is the truth”.

    He also disclosed that bandits are not aliens: ‘They are people we know, they are people that have been living with us for 100 of years, and these are people who live in the forest and their main occupation is rearing of cattle’. Though he admitted some infiltrations from West and North African countries, he was quick to add those infiltrators are also of the Fulani extraction.

    These disclosures have removed the veil on the profile of the bandits that have levied terror in that part of the country. Before now, their identity had been a subject of intense controversy as varying interpretation was given to it. In the absence of the government coming clear on who the bandits really are, opinions had been divided with some tagging them an extension of the Boko Haram insurgents while for some others, they are the militant wing of the herdsmen.

    In this seeming lack of clarity on the real identity of the bandits, I had in this column under the title – “Bandits or herdsmen” interrogated the link between bandits and herdsmen in the raging insecurity across the country. At issue in that inquisition were the close similarities in the occupation, culture, language, mode of habitation and operation of the bandits and the herdsmen

    The article was prompted by events from the interface of Islamic cleric, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi with bandits in Zamfara forests and elsewhere and matters arising from those visits. In his brief to Governor Bello Matawalle of Zamfara State after the visit, Gumi had said: “In most of the bandits and Fulani camps we have visited in Zamfara, I came to understand that what is happening in the state is nothing but an Insurgency”.

    Buoyed by this, Gumi had asked the federal government to enter into negotiations with the bandits and the Fulani to reintegrate them the same way the Niger Delta militants were handled. What emerged from this brief was absence of a dividing line between the bandits and the Fulani. Gumi visited the camps of the bandits and the Fulani in the forests and found they are all involved in insurgency. That says a lot on the strong affinity both groups share in the forests. He did not make any difference between both insurgents.

    The attestations of some of the commanders of the bandits interviewed, further underscored the fact that the bandits and the Fulani that Gumi met in the forests represent two sides of the same coin. One of the commanders was reported to have said there would be no peace until the authorities stopped hunting the Fulani and that the Fulani were tired of living in the forest.  Another leader of the bandits identified as Kachalla Turgi said only reconciliation can stop the killings even as he accused the people of Zamfara of selectively impoverishing and beating the Fulani on the road. Yet, another commander called for the halting of the “killing of our loved ones by security agents…as well as cattle rustling that denied most of us of our legitimate means of livelihood”.

    Read Also: Miyetti Allah disowns national scribe’s attack on Katsina governor

    As I argued in the earlier article, there are recurring issues from the reports credited to Gumi and bandits’ commanders. Central to them all are the fate of the Fulani in the forests; cattle rustling, alleged beating of the Fulani on the roads by Zamfara people and the convergence of grievances of the bandits and the Fulani. From all indications, they are the same people with cattle rearing as their main occupation.

    It may well be there are Fulani herdsmen in the forests not involved in banditry. That is quite a possibility. But the snag is on how to differentiate the innocent ones from the criminal elements involved in armed insurgency. That is however, beside the point.

    The identity of the bandits is nothing new even as our leaders have been living in denial of it. Those who read between the lines after Gumi’s interface with the bandits had since come to terms with the reality that there are no differences between the bandits and the herdsmen.  Global terrorism index had long rated Fulani herdsmen as the fourth deadliest terrorist organization in the world despite the duplicity of the leadership of this country in accepting that reality.

    It is this curious deceit in calling a spade its rightful name that Masari apparently referred to when he alluded to the fact that his disclosures, though factual, may not be palatable to some people. His fears are quite understood and in them can be located the reasons for the festering insecurity in the country. Why some people will not find facts palatable is the bane of the debilitating insecurity and myriad of national challenges that had stunted the growth and development of this country in spite of its huge human and natural capacities.

    Not unexpectedly, Masari’s views have drawn the ire of Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore. Its national secretary Saleh Alhassan launched a smear campaign against the governor for disclosing the identity of the bandits. His grouse is that identifying the Fulani that way, would expose innocent ones to attacks. But that is the reality the situation presents and there can be no other ways of presenting it. Facts are sacred but comments free. He wears the shoes and knows where they pinch most.

    The governor had as a solution to banditry in his state, entered into an amnesty program with the bandits and made offers he thought would halt the scourge. But that offer changed nothing. In retrospect, he regrets entering into that peace pact with the bandits apparently on account of their incorrigibility. Masari is speaking from his heart of hearts hoping that enduring solutions can be found to the cascading anarchy in his state; a state where the president of the country comes from.

    Masari’s disclosures expose the contradiction in the attitude of the Buhari government to the nagging security challenges posed by bandits and herdsmen.  Katsina State intends to enact a law banning the roaming of cattle. But before that law, provisions would be made for where to keep the animals apparently by way of ranching.

    “Herdsmen should stay in one place. Roaming about should not be encouraged. In fact, for us, it is un-Islamic” he said. Masari queried why people should have animals they cannot feed and have to stray to other peoples’ lands and farms. He does not consider that right. I hope some people are listening.

    If what the governor said is correct, it remains very surprising the indecent desperation by the Buhari regime to force all manner of contraptions as solutions to the herders’ challenge on other parts of the country. Katsina State is on the right track to addressing the challenge of the herdsmen and the bandits. Masari’s ideas should form the fulcrum for permanently addressing the herders’ challenge.

  • Beer summit

    Beer summit

    By sam omatseye

    It is a conference of an original flavour. Tongues may differ but the taste is the same. It is sour to some, haram to some others, but sweet-sour to many. It is where alcohol meets democracy.

    It froths but no bottle is uncorked. It is about liquor but no liquid fills a glass. The conferees disagree with fury but no alcoholic is in sight. No drunken stagger, no supercilious swagger, no drooling lips, no slobbering cadences, no inverted sentences.

    Yet, there seems to be woe, contentions and redness of eyes, apologies to Solomon in the Holy Bible. It is a beer summit.

    The event is not bottled in a roadside bukka, or beer parlour, or an adobe tavern in the entrails of Kano or Katsina. Big-name makers like Guinness or Nigerian Breweries are not organising it and neither are they invited.

    They are fighting like battering rams. They weaponise pens and documents. They spar over law, split airs over technicalities, and spleens suffer. But it is an unlikely venue for an alcoholic brawl: the courts.

    So this is a new version of the national conference. They say no to the big halls of the day. No rent for the marquee hotels or conferences centres, especially for the shylocks of Abuja. The rent is paid to lawyers. Judges preside but not the retired old men of magistracy whose hairs have either disappeared or are streaked with grey.

    We saw the first chapter. Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike chided a nation where those who give get less than those who drone. Why should his state give tens of billions a month and get in return a paltry N4.7 billion, while Kano gives what it gets? He asked. He goes to court to fight. It is about alcohol but it is about others. But alcohol is the touchstone product of contention, a hint of what is now the hypocrisy of the north. The northern states are comfortable with sin money. They punish alcohol, jail alcoholics but embrace drunken money and smile to the bank and from FAAC.

    Have we not seen the righteous spectacle of crushed beer bottles? In Kano, in Katsina and others, no one is allowed to sell drinks or market it. It is haram, but the money is hailed. It is hallelujah.

    Just as Wike was winning in the Port Harcourt court, the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, was engineering a similar drama as he signed VAT law. Now Lagos and Port Harcourt have brought VAT into the front burner of the fight for fiscal federalism. It is the fight that the parts have to undertake to prune the centre of its bloated belly of entitlement. Lagos has been the beachhead of fiscal federalism and has won quite a few battles as Barrister Femi Falana (SAN) has highlighted. Though Wike began the VAT affair, Lagos will eventually be its Gatling gun.

    Ordinarily, one would have dismissed the necessity of such a fight. After all, this is supposed to be a nation of cooperative parts, where the weak leans on the strong, the poor on the rich, and a republic of love upends a temperament of tribalism. This essayist supported sukuk loan against those who wailed over Islamisation. But VAT is different.

    That accounted for why the Niger Delta for many years accepted to feed the national palate and glamour with its crude oil. But that republic of love is an illusion so far. It is not following Shakespeare’s appeal in the play King Lear, that says, “So distribution undo excess and each man have enough.” Some preen while others are prey. The Niger Delta, for instance, is not having near enough. World class physicist and old boy of Government College Ughelli, Professor Omagbemi Omatete, visited his home village in Ugborodo a few years ago, and he saw the whole area reduced to a shell of human settlement, no schools, no hospitals, etc., a ghost of its past prosperity, what novelist Joseph Conrad calls “a distorted echo of its past elegancies.”

    Read Also: Wike inaugurates Tax Appeal Commission

    The restiveness of the Niger Delta may have diminished but not the suffering. Many cannot go to school. The late Chief Hope Harriman told me that in his young days, crayfish was so abundant that in the area that women ploughed river’s edge with basket and filled them. They sold them to the eastern region. Now there is no crayfish. Former Governor Uduaghan of Delta State once said when he was growing up his grandmother would ask him to go pick fish in the river. All he did was dip his fingers and fish or fishes of his choice were dancing in his hands and soup was ready.

    Lagos makes a lot of money and gives over N50 billion to the national pool each month and gets a pittance and competes with states that give next to nothing. Lagos is the quietest state in the federation because it has saved the centre with good governance. Everyone comes here. It is the counterfoil to national inefficiency.

    All of this will be fine, if there is a sense of justice in the land. But when a state gives and it sees that the benefits of justice belongs to one section, it has to ask questions about what happened to the value of equity. Those who are coming to equity have blood on their hands. A few years ago, I attended the NIMASA award ceremony for longstanding employees. NIMASA is about marine wealth and security. But over an overwhelming 80 percent of the awardees were not from maritime areas. Is that a nation of cooperative living, or parasitism? Or even cynicism? That would be fine if those in maritime areas are even able to enjoy their environment now keeled over with pollution where farmer cannot see his farm but crude oil and the fisherman sees fish bobbing dead-eyed on water surface.

    When Charles Dickens writes his A tale of Two Cities, he dramatises a scene where everyone leaves their trade and drinks to stupor from a broken wine cask from a wine shop. Someone spells blood on a wall with his wine. It is a forestate of the French Revolution. The owner of the wine shop looks on as his possession is taken over while he and his wife do nothing.

    The VAT is an example of the monkey not wanting to play spectator as the baboons fatten on their wealth.

    It is within the FIRS to appeal. While the courts are the venues of the fight over what fiscal federalism entails, we should not forget that the rage is on the streets, real beer parlours and homes, where a man who knows he works sees another take what belongs to him.

    Until we have a nation where suspicion collapses for equality, and people are glad to call themselves Nigerians rather than Ibibio or Ijaw, we kid ourselves that we are running a federalism.

    Justice and fairness are the ever-flowing springs of a federal system.

    The first beer summit took place in the United States when President Barrack Obama invited a well-known black Professor Louis Gates Jnr, and a white police officer to the White House to resolve a racial incident over beer. The media called it “the beer summit.”

    I hope our beer summit ends without Charles Dickens’ inebriates.

    The musical Awo

    I watched the musical that ended on Sunday on the greatest Nigerian ever, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. The musical titled: AWO was organised by the Duke of Shomolu, Joseph Edgar. It was a brilliant spectacle of dances and rhetoric.  The costume played to the senses in its recall of a time and place in the country, and we could not miss the Awo cap and Okotie-Eboh extravagant “tail cloth,” with its evocation of servile followers. It focused on the Awo of the 1960s and the Western Region crisis. It posted the rivalry between him and Akintola, and the schism in the Action Group Party, the imprisonment of Awo, and the coups that unseated democracy. Telling was an Awo the romantic, a part of his biography we never knew, but the writers of Awo interposed it to humanise his aloof persona. A kissing Awo? That was improbable. His generation of lovers never kissed, and even if he called his wife, Hannah, a jewel of inestimable value, it did not necessarily bring Awo to a kiss. Awo was too sober to slobber. I understand Edgar’s need to bring a moment of gentle excitation to a man who lashed out at men who drank and spent time with women of easy virtue while he burnt his midnight oil.

    But what came out of this Awo tale was its one-dimension. He was a straitjacket of principles. He had no flaw, no chink in his moral armour. By appropriating Awo to approbate him, they sainted him so much the audience saw few human scents. He had to be one of us before he retired to sage-hood. It is like those who saw Awo in the skies after he died.

     

  • Akume’s emergency state of Benue

    Akume’s emergency state of Benue

    The call for a state of emergency in Benue State by Minister of Special Duties and Inter-Governmental Affairs, George Akume came with a very wrong reason. Akume who spoke on behalf of stakeholders of the All Progressives Congress APC in the state, rationalized the call on outcries by Governor Samuel Ortom that the security situation in the state had degenerated.

    Hear him, “Since Governor Ortom has consistently alleged that the security situation in Benue state has deteriorated in such a manner that lives of Benue people are not secure, we call on Mr. President as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces , to declare a state of emergency in Benue state to bring the security situation in the state under control” The stakeholders were also angry with what they described as the lonesome bitter and sustained campaign of calumny mounted by Ortom against President Buhari.

    The case of the stakeholders is fraught with grave contradictions. For one, they do not seem to believe in the reality of deteriorating security of lives of the people of Benue state. If that is so, then it is difficult to fathom how a state of emergency could be solution to imagined security infractions.  You cannot cure an ailment that does not exist.

    Impliedly also, is the tenuous assumption that if there is serious threat to security of lives and property of the Benue people, Ortom has to be held responsible. That is their basis for calling for a state of emergency so that the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces can take responsibility and direct charge of the situation.

    Should the president await the outcries of a state governor before rising to his duties of securing lives and property? The blame for whatever level of insecurity prevailing in that state should rest squarely on the shoulders of the president and he cannot disrupt the democratic structures for failing in his duties.

    Again, the call is guilty of reductionism for singling out Benue for challenges that currently ravage the entire Nigerian landscape; challenges that have constantly put the authority of the federal government to serious question. Akume’s grouse is that Ortom constantly draws attention to or exaggerates the security situation in the state. And we ask, what is wrong with that? Or should he keep silent when lives are regularly being snuffed out of his people with the leadership of the country seeming helpless in stemming the tide? And who is to blame for the insecurity across the country that is increasingly sliding toward a failed state? What of the Boko Haram insurgency in the north east, the insurgency of the bandits and herdsmen both in the north-west and north central? And what accounts for the mad rush in the south for the promulgation of anti-open grazing laws?

    These questions are raised to underscore the incongruity of the call for a state of emergency in Benue just because the governor constantly draws attention to the situation on ground. It would have made better sense if Akume and his group had come out to contradict Ortom’s claims instead of this cheap resort to questionable state of emergency. And who should be held liable for the festering insecurity either in Benue or across the country- the governors or president Buhari?

    Though governors are the chief security officers of the states, they depend on appointees of the president in the execution of that mandate. They do not have control of any of the arms of the security agencies even as their agitations for state police have consistently met deaf ears. So it makes no sense seeking to strip a governor of his constitutional powers because of security challenges the president is unable to handle.

    It would have still made better sense for the stakeholders to have called on President Buhari to ignore Ortom if there are no security threats to the lives of the Benue people. They could not have possibly done so without incurring the wrath of the Benue people that have borne the brunt of herdsmen insurgency for years running.

    Benue no doubt, is contending with daunting security challenges in the face of suspicions of complicity by the leadership of this country. And the state is not alone in it. We shall return to this shortly. If Ortom is overdramatizing the matter, so be it. The matter borders on existentialism and no effort to avert the constant spilling of innocent blood in that state should be considered too much.

    The question is what the federal government has done to stem the killings and despoliation of ancestral homes that have left many residents inmates of camps for Internally Displaced Persons IDPs. Why single out Benue for the festering insecurity that has left the country a ghost of its former self; pervasive insecurity that has demeaned the worth of life and continues to cast serious doubt in the capacity of Buhari regime to maintain law and order.

    It is obvious the call was propelled by reasons other than the one given by Akume; to get through the back door what they failed to get through the ballot process. They may have been goaded by the belief that a state of emergency will come with the dismantling of democratic structures to enable the president appoint an administrator to do their bidding especially with the fast approaching 2023 elections

    Ironically, when a state of emergency was declared by the Jonathan regime in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states in 2013, democratic institutions were left intact. And when Jonathan sought an extension, senators from the three states namely, Ahmed Lawan, Ali Ndume and Bindowu Jubrilla mounted strident opposition against the extension describing the state of emergency as a colossal failure. If emergency rule could not stem insecurity in the three states, it is left to be conjectured what purpose it will serve in the instant case.

    Governor Bello Matawalle of Zamfara state succinctly captured the complexity of the security situation in the country when he called on President Buhari to “declare a state of emergency on security as the only available avenue of ending the security challenge at hand” This contrasts sharply with the views of Akume and his group because of its macro perspective. Implicit in Matawalle’s call is recognition that insecurity is a grave national challenge that requires a holistic solution. Its corollary is that the blame for the degenerating insecurity should be squarely placed at the doorsteps of the president.

    Even then, Governor Aminu Masari of Katsina state (the home state of the president) had during a condolence visit to Jibia admonished people in bandit- prone areas to arm and defend themselves against the bandits. Yet, there has been no call for a state of emergency in that state that had seen hundreds of school children taken into captivity by heartless and blood thirsty bandits.  Before then, the Minister of Defense, Bashir Magashi had while addressing journalists at the national assembly complex urged Nigerians to defend themselves in the face of the growing banditry in parts of the country.

    A similar call also came from Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore to its members to defend themselves against attacks by ethnic militia in southern Nigeria. The list of groups and individuals that have made similar calls is endless. And they underscore the pervasiveness and hopelessness of the insecurity ravaging the country. So the issue of a governor blackmailing the president or overdramatizing the matter is nothing but self-serving propaganda.

    The folly in singling out Akume is further illustrated by events in neighboring Plateau state where the state House of Assembly issued a two-week ultimatum to Governor Simon Lalong to address the rising killings in the state. The assembly called on people of the state to “practically stand up and defend themselves and their communities, as the conventional security design is no longer guaranteeing our safety as a people” That, says it all.

    The ultimatum has led to the sealing of the assembly complex by security agencies allegedly on the orders of Lalong for fear of impeachment. Its lesson for those exercising authority on behalf of their people should be very instructive. Matawalle aptly captured the complexity of the situation when he called for a national state of emergency on security. That is the right perspective to obvious slide to anarchy in the country.

  • NDDC and underdevelopment

    NDDC and underdevelopment

    It is ironic that the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), which is supposed to be a development agency, is a major agent of underdevelopment in the oil-rich region.  Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami,  who received the NDDC forensic audit report from Minister of Niger Delta Affairs Godswill Akpabio, in Abuja, on September 2, lamented the “uncompleted and unverified development projects” in the region “in spite of the huge resources made available to uplift the living standards of the citizens.”

    Malami, who represented President Muhammadu Buhari, said there were “over 13,777 projects, the execution of which is substantially compromised,” even though the commission got “approximately N6tn” from “budgetary allocation” and “income from statutory and non-statutory sources,” from 2001 to 2019.

    There is no doubt that the NDDC, established in 2000 by the President Olusegun Obasanjo administration, has failed to develop the Niger Delta as expected.   The first commercial oil discovery in the country happened in Oloibiri in present-day Bayelsa State, in 1956; and the first oil field began production in 1958. More than six decades later, the story of underdevelopment in the Niger Delta is a continuing story.  Nigeria is a major oil-producing country. Nine oil-producing states make up the Niger Delta. They are: Akwa Ibom, Delta, Rivers, Bayelsa, Cross River, Ondo, Edo, Imo and Abia.

    It is condemnable that many communities in the region that produces the country’s oil wealth reflect not only a lack of prosperity but also perplexing poverty. It is noteworthy that, in October 2019, President Buhari, who was represented by his Special Adviser on Niger Delta Affairs, Senator Ita Enang, apologised for the region’s underdevelopment   during the reopening of Oil Mining Lease (OML)-25 facility in coastal Belema in Kula Kingdom, Akuku-Toru Local Government Area of Rivers State.

    Buhari said: “We have been to the communities (in Kula Kingdom). I felt touched that the people were asking for schools, hospitals and potable water in 2019, after 40 years of oil and gas being taken from their soils. I scooped water from the pond that the people drink. It was smeared with crude oil.

    “On behalf of the nation, I apologise to you. We will change for the better. We will not only build schools, hospitals and provide potable water for you; we will provide complete communities for you. We will work with the Rivers State government, Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), amnesty office and the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs.”

    In the same month, he ordered a forensic audit of the agency’s operations from 2001 to 2019, which suggested that his administration’s anti-corruption campaign had finally reached the NDDC.

    He had approved a new 16-man NDDC board in August of the same year.  Subject to Senate confirmation, he had approved Dr Pius Odubu from Edo State as chairman, Bernard Okumagba from Delta State as managing director, and Otobong Ndem from Akwa Ibom as executive director, projects.   Then there were twists and turns encouraged by the President himself.

    President Buhari had ordered the audit after approving a new governing board for the agency, subject to Senate confirmation, without waiting for the Senate to confirm the board. Perhaps it would have been more logical if he had waited for Senate confirmation of the board, and then ordered the audit under the new board.

    By the time the Senate eventually confirmed the new governing board, Akpabio had set up an interim management team to oversee a forensic audit of the agency.

    Curiously, after the Senate confirmation, rather than inaugurate the board he had initially approved, President Buhari did a somersault.  In December 2019, his spokesman said he had approved that the NNDC board ”be recomposed and inaugurated after the forensic audit of the organisation.”  He also directed that the agency’s interim management team “shall be in place till the forensic audit is completed.”

    In December 2020, President Buhari had appointed an interim administrator to run the agency. Effiong Akwa, who had been the agency’s acting executive director, finance and administration, was “to assume headship till completion of the forensic audit,” according to the government.

    The commission’s acting managing director, Prof. Daniel Pondei, was removed, the government explained, as “a result of a plethora of litigation and a restraining order issued… against the Interim Management Committee of the NDDC by a Federal High Court in Abuja.”

    President Buhari had earlier “extended the tenure of the Professor Keme Pondei-led Interim Management Committee… from May 1 to December 31, 2020,” according to a statement by his spokesman, adding, “The extension is to cover the period of the forensic audit of the NDDC.” The audit went beyond the date.

    The audit was reported to have started in April 2020.  The Federal Executive Council (FEC) approved a contract of N318 million for the engagement of a lead consultant for the audit.  Allegations of continued corruption at the agency mean that the interim administrator and the supervising Minister of Niger Delta Affairs face credibility challenges.

    It is abnormal that the NDDC is still run by an interim administrator. This arrangement is not the same as having a lawfully appointed and approved board for the commission, with the implications for transparency and accountability.

    Now that the forensic audit report has been submitted to the Federal Government, the implementation of the recommendations is another matter.  Among the recommendations, presented by the Lead Forensic Auditor, Tabir Ahmed,  is that the NDDC should be made to operate within the limits of its annual budget and ensure that only projects budgeted for are awarded each fiscal year.  The report also recommended that mobilisation payment be abolished, and the agency should employ project consultants to ensure accurate supervision and valuation of projects. Additionally, it was recommended that the agency should adopt a standard for costing contracts with appropriate profit margins.

    According to the President, the Federal Government will “apply the law to remedy the deficiencies outlined in the audit report as appropriate.”  ”This will include but not be limited to the initiation of criminal investigations, prosecution, recovery of funds not properly utilized for the public purposes for which they were meant for amongst others,” he said. The goal is to improve the standard of living of the people of the Niger Delta “through the provision of adequate infrastructural and socio-economic development,” the government said.

    Those implicated in the underdevelopment of the Niger Delta will try to prevent the implementation of the forensic audit report. The government needs to demonstrate that it is against the underdevelopment of the region by implementing the report.

  • Lagos new superhighway

    Lagos new superhighway

    Her name is Adunni, a feisty teen with an upstart tongue and ambition, and all she ever wanted was a way up the rungs of society. Born in a fictional village in the southwest, her dreams choked on the greed of a father who wanted her to marry rather than be happy.

    His patriarchal failures and Adunni’s unlikely triumph in escaping to Lagos and turning a life of a modern fief to freedom through education is the breath-taking tale of Abi Dare’s best-selling novel, A girl with a Louding voice. It is the futility of a paternal bargain and the collapse of the hubris of a male-dominated clan.

    We cannot but draw parallels between Adunni’s quest and biography with the effort of Lagos State government to target the low-born of public schools with a new educational initiative known as Lagosdigitals.com.

    And it does not draw attention only to the poor in Nigeria’s big city. It is a parable of the journey to arrest youth adrift, to give the political elite an opportunity for redemption, and to give the young and restless a platform for personal fulfilment.

    It is a news story that has not garnered much play or buzz as yet in the society. It does not hoist a piece of cake or bottle of coke, or throw an owambe party. Such stories are boring because they do not spill blood in an era of bandits in Nigeria. They do not spray money, a la Obi Cubana, Buhari’s son’s wedding or the latest being Tiwa Savage’s farewell gig to her father. The news does not eavesdrop on a celebrity’s bedroom or a salacious night in Big Brother Naija.

    It is what news directors describe as development news, but the sort that will make a poor rise, a sick into a full and ruddy being, a city part with its rubbles and peer into a rosy light, its reborn self in the horizon.

    The programme will enable teachers to fight distance and distractions, to maul illiteracy through the world wide web. They can plan classes with content and context, set exams, examine the students, interact, rebuke or praise, pay special attention to the needy, mentor the promising, encourage the laggard, monitor the classes.

    It is a blessing that the pandemic has gifted us. Covid came to us with death in its wings, and it has won with its many sick and many dead, and its long list of graveyards that best the world wars and even some of the brutal pains of natural disasters. But it has woken in many the desire to redefine space and time, to conquer ignorance without human touch. No tactile doom beset a student and their device. We have seen initiatives to help students learn without tears.

    But what the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu is starting is to reach the conventional schools, the ones the rich have abandoned, the ones their house helps and gardeners and drivers send their kids and wards. These are the schools the elite wink at, and send their children to the high and lofty ones, like one in Ikoyi where the cars that pick up their kids after school sessions stop traffic with their Benz, SUVs like Toyota Land cruisers, Lexus. It is decibel honks and line of shiny automobile vanity. They cut off the world of traffic and appropriate the street. If you did not know, you would think the vehicles were there to pick a governor or a high-flying celebrity. This happens every day, Monday to Friday. But they are already celebrities, being children. Celebrities by birth. Anonymity of birth. They have seen salvation before they were baptised into the life. It is obvious the parents compete against each other on whose vehicle is newest and poshest. You just have to pass through Bourdillon in Ikoyi on schooldays at lunch hour.

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    The BOS initiative is a programme still in its infancy and it is working with a few corporate partners like Chronicles Software Development Company. Already MTN is powering a pilot wireless scheme with 100 schools.  But its forays into rural Lagos is a capital part.

    Education often is seen as an expensive project, and it has been so because the elite want to manipulate knowledge and pass wealth from child to grandchild. But the internet will turn those granddads to ‘grandduds’ as programmes such as Lagosdigitals,com are meant to equalise the rich and poor and cancel the digital divide. They bring girls like the fictional Adunni’s into the limelight. Recently we all looked helpless as a young man who did not attend any highflying school developed a drone. Ignatius Asabor was a lonely genius online, marketing himself, displaying his prowess and waiting in vain for his country to help.

    Help came from an unlikely quarter, in northern Europe. A company CEO spotted him, and decided to train him, not physically but online. The same sort of idea that Lagosdigitals.com propagates. But power failure and wimpy internet connection trammelled the sessions yet the Fin and the Nigerian kept faith with each other until they clutched him from here and now he announced his berth in his land of dreams. What a pity for a nation spending billions of niara to import drones to fight terror.

    That explains why the programme must be encourage to succeed. We saw that similar programmes with Opon Imon began in Osun State under former governor Rauf Aregbesola. But it ran into a storm. It is the peril of pioneers. The Lagos initative builds on the ardour of nonprifts like Otto Orandoom with his Slum to School zest and CNN hero’s winner Abisoye Ajayi-Akinfolarin incandescence on stilts in Makoko.

    But the Lagos one does not seem to take any assumptions, but is devoting resources and care to ensure that Lagos students benefit from it. This is the sort of plan that snags the youth from forest into classroom, and downs guns by empowering their fingers for clicks. Rather than flick their fingers for triggers, they can click their way to respect just on a button on a cell phone.

    They will not have to be so idle that they think about whether Fulani needs to graze or a tribe on the plateau whirs with a strange accent. Governor Masari of Katsina State will not have to shut markets and paralyse highways and stop money from changing hands into the wealth of the people.

    In the Bible, Daniel prophesied that he read about what was happening in the future, but he did not understand. God told him knowledge shall improve and people shall move to and fro. Overtime, it has been interpreted to mean improvement in horse-drawn carriages, trains, cars, aircraft. Now, it is what Al Gore called the superhighway. That is what will cancel Masari’s highway.

    It is what the BOS of Lagos in setting in motion. Technology has given us violence. Its best counterforce, as philosopher Karl Popper propounds, is technology.

    This is the way for the youth. They have to read, and learn but it has to be made ready and affordable. “Whoso neglects learning in his youth,” wrote Greek playwright Euripides, “loses the past and is dead forever.”

     

    Malami and NDDC math

    Something strange happened last week when I read the headlines that quoted the minister of justice Abubakar Malami as saying that the NDDC received 6 trillion Naira between 2001 and 2019. This was when the audit report was submitted to the federal government. But looking into the figures, the actual fact was more than a little different. In the period under review, the agency received N2.4 trillion while its budgetary estimates amounted 3.3 trillion.

    How did our beloved attorney general arrive at N6 trillion? Was he adding 2.4 and 3.3? Even at that, they amounted to N5.7 trillion. But we know that an amount spent and an amount estimated cannot be added together. Rather you would have to subtract.

    I don’t believe that the AG had mischief of figures in his brain. He must have fallen into quicksand of numbers. After all, law does not always work with math.

    Maybe because he was so angry at the splurge of resources in that agency, he decided to exaggerate. But we are in the business of facts, not permutations.

    If we want to discuss wastage in the agency, that is another matter entirely.

     

  • NDA security breach

    NDA security breach

    Under the title, ‘A bandits’ Republic’, I had in this column in March expressed fears on the foreboding prospect of Nigeria sliding to a verity of the sovereignty of the bandits. In the introductory sentences, I wrote inter alia, “Call them by whatever name, the reign of the bandits or herdsmen especially in the north, is fast conveying the miserable impression that there exists a bandits’ republic within the federal republic of Nigeria”

    The bandits’ republic was characterized not in the mould of a classic republic where the rule of law prevails but one that shares common affinity with the Hobbesian state of nature where life has at once become nasty, short and brutish. But adjoining this jungle republic is a modern and legitimate republic which the bandits rebel against and invade at will with the leadership of the latter seemingly helpless.

    In the concluding sentences, the risk of spread of the bandits’ republic to the southern part of the country in the same fashion it thrives in the north was viewed as an emerging reality that must be avoided like a plague if this country is not to be overrun by an assortment of non state actors. The fears encapsulated in that article have been borne out by events in the last couple of months especially within the military circles.

    That is not to say that the reign of the bandits has not continued to leave in its trail, sorrow and awe in parts of the country as evidenced by the constant spilling of human blood in the plateau and elsewhere. But more than anything else, last week’s attack on Nigeria’s elite defense institution, the Nigerian Defense Academy NDA in Kaduna state touched at the very heart of those fears.

    Before the NDA onslaught, bandits operating within the Zamfara and Kaduna state axis had shut down a Nigerian Air Force alpha jet returning from a successful interdiction mission. The pilot, Ft. Lt. Abayomi Dairo escaped miraculously after hot pursuit by the bandits bent on capturing him alive. Elsewhere, it has been a tale of regular kidnapping and murder of school children whose parents were unable to pay ransom to the bandits. This has compelled the shutdown of some schools in the north. The situation is helpless and hopeless as bandits compete with the government for spheres of influence and authority.

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    The gunmen who invaded the NDA in their numbers adorning military uniforms were said to have made their way into the institution by breaking the perimeter fence after which they headed in different directions apparently taking the authorities unawares. They attacked five flats in the residential area, completed their devious assignments with quick precision and left before the people on guard could be of any help. The ensuing attack left two officers dead another abducted with yet another seriously injured.

    In its initial reaction, the Academy through its Public Relations Officer, Major Bashir Muhd Jajira confirmed the security architecture of the institution was compromised by unknown gunmen. He reassured the public that in collaboration with sister security agencies, the Academy had commenced pursuit of the unknown gunmen to track them down and rescue the abducted personnel.

    Many Nigerians and groups are in shock that a highly fortified elite military facility as the NDA could easily be assailed by the so-called unknown gunmen resulting in serious fatalities without any challenge or even being apprehended. If the NDA could succumb to such attack, it could then be imagined the perilous situation the citizenry face in the hands of the all powerful bandits, terrorists and sundry criminals who have become law unto themselves. All these invoke the prospects of a bandits’ republic in real terms.

    The successful execution of the NDA attack as disgraceful and worrisome as it is, has given rise to all manner of speculations. There is the theory that the attack would not have been successful without insider collaboration. Those of this view find it hard to come to terms with the reality that such a well fortified and impregnable institution would have easily succumbed to the attack without some people either compromising or failing in their duties.

    There have also been suggestions that the attack could be the handiwork of moles within the military propelled by some devious agenda. This school suspects some extremists within the military intent on proving some point. Claims that some repentant terrorists are being enlisted into the military; though denied by the authorities, come in very handy here. Events in Afghanistan where repentant Taliban commanders are now playing leading roles in that government are also being referenced upon to question the current policy of the government on de-radicalization and rehabilitation of surrendering or captured terrorists.

    One group that fears the attack is a rehearsal of an impending plot by extremist to capture power in this country is the Southern Kaduna Peoples Union SOKAPU. Its spokesman Luka Binniyat claimed in an interview that the attack denoted a plot by the president Buhari government to turn Nigeria into another Afghanistan. SOKAPU is not alone in this suspicion as many have drawn parallels between the   activities of the Taliban in that country and those of religious extremists in this country raising fears that we may be treading a perilous path.

    There is also a dimension intent on sniffing out possible correlation between the pattern of attacks, those killed, abducted and injured. Was the attack motivated by an agenda to eliminate some people or settle scores of a parochial hue? Though the Defense Headquarters DHQ claimed the officers were killed for resisting abduction, the identity of those killed, abducted and wounded suggests there is more to it than ordinarily meet the eyes. Why was it that only in the flats of those officers resistance came from? And why were they the only ones targeted for abduction since there are no records of other fatalities or abduction?

    All these posers need to be resolved. Good a thing, the DHQ has set up a board of inquiry to ascertain the circumstances that led to the security breach. The inquisition should unravel why the gunmen were able to penetrate the academy, carry out their devilish assignment and escape with relative ease. That could have been neigh impossible without the attackers having expert knowledge of the environment. This reality further suggests that the attackers knew their targets and went straight to their residences to confront them.

    The investigation should properly profile the victims, the positions they occupy in the institution, their career prospects and overall views on national issues to ascertain whether anybody was after them based on their personal achievements, belief or whether the attacks were propelled by ancillary mundane considerations. These are veritable leads that should aid investigations.

    Beyond these however, the attack on the NDA again, brings to the fore the sad reality of the festering insecurity that has reduced the worth of human life in this country. Ironically, the NDA assault is coming at the heels of claims by the federal government that it is winning the war against terrorism. Though we have been accustomed to such bogus claims, the Nigerian Army sought to justify them when it disclosed that 1000 terrorists and their families recently laid down arms and surrendered to them.

    That could as well be. But if Boko Haram insurgency is really waning, the assault on the NDA has opened our eyes to a new dimension to the complicated security challenges ahead. The message is getting clearer that we have been underestimating the complexity of the insecurity the country is caught up with. That is the exact message from Commodore Kunle Olawumi rtd who shocked the country when he disclosed that Boko Haram terrorists during interrogation gave out the names of some current governors, senators and Aso Rock officials as their sponsors.

    He said these facts are available to security agencies but the government has not been able to prosecute those fingered because of partisan considerations. Sheikh Ahmad Gumi made similar claims when he said security agencies know where the bandits are after he was accused of complicity for interfacing with them in the forests. That is where this country has unfortunately found itself. Is anybody still surprised about the fast decent to anarchy?

  • Guitar Boy

    Guitar Boy

    The first time I saw Victor Uwaifo perform in the flesh was at the State House in Lagos a few years ago. He did not have the vim and zest of youth. But the talent remained like palm wine in ferment or like slow-burning flame. His tongue unrolled some of his vintage familiars like Joromi and Guitar Boy. And the crowd, ever highbrow and starchy, abandoned its patrician airs and ploughed back to the old days of their youth and loosed themselves like boys and girls in ecstasy. They belted out soulful choruses with the master. But gloom fell as the man departed the microphone.

    I was to meet him in person not long after when I addressed the convocation of the Igbinedion University in Okada, and was a guest of former governor Lucky Igbinedion for lunch. Uwaifo had his meal not far from me, and we spoke about his songs, and I contrived the melody of his songs the same way a mechanic worked the threads of a suit. His face always had the light of a boy, the entertainer’s eternal playfulness. He was about 78, and he did not bear any of the crimps of age, not in his steps or voice or even mind. He enjoyed the brio of a 70-year-old, and he seemed in all-round fine fettle.

    I told him I wanted to come over to Benin before long to interview him, and he said I should call him, and he would give me a tour of his museum. The project was one of those you cherish and postpone, and you keep postponing because you cherish, and the hope of its spectacle of fulfilment is like a treasure you preserve in a special case in the recesses of your room. The expectation of use never happens but never wanes. But you rejoice in the hope. One day you find out it is no longer there, and it has been purloined by some itchy finger, and you regret that you should have enjoyed your boon while it was around. What seemed solid was, after all, like a soap bubble. When he entered his car and was driven away, I waved. But unbeknownst to me, it was a goodbye more permanent than a wave of the hand.

    So death snatched away the icon, death always the sneaky conman.  His death reminds me of the last words of Philosopher Socrates. “I owe a cock to asclepius. Do not forget to pay it.” In my case, it is in reverse. I owed Uwaifo. But I shall never be able to pay him.

    Victor Uwaifo was a constant fixture of my boyhood, on television. I looked forward to his show on television because of his guitar. I marvelled at the double-neck instrument, and the way he wielded it on stage. When he performed at the Lagos State House, he did not hold a guitar and he was over 70. But when I first knew the man, he was a boy in his twenties. He held the guitar like a toy, flipped it, tossed it, placed it under his knee, under his shoulders, at the back of his head, he leapt, he sat, he stooped, he bowed. He did all forms of acrobatics while he strummed. I knew that as the melody before I enjoyed the melody. Up till today, I don’t know of any musician, living or dead, who did what he did on stage other than Michael Jackson’s human pyrotechnics.

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    I recall the interview he had after his 80th birthday with Channels TV’s Manu Onumonu, and how he related the story of mammy water, the mermaid. His song Guitar Boy derived from an encounter with a mermaid at the Lagos Bar Beach. Among other things, he described the vision of the water spirit as “blinding.” That adjective may allow some to interpret it as a moment of creative illusion, what some pyschologists or literary critics would define as phantasmagoria. But to the artist, it was a rich and unassailable experience. He described the waves in their obstinate surges and his retreat, and before he knew it, the vision was before him.

    The music piece, Guitar Boy, was a testimony of his survival of the woman of the sea. “If you see mammy water O/ never, never you run away…” Rather he sang melodies because he snagged the mystic maid.

    He was immersed in culture, especially Bini culture, and he was probably the first modern ambassador of the genius of the Edo culture. His song Joromi, which earned him accolades all over the world and gave him his first of many gold disc awards, was rooted in the narrative of a wrestler in this world and in the spirit realm, a sort of Edo rendition of a Jacob trading biceps with his God. The song, full of syncopating rhythms and onomatopoeia, will tell us that before rap, there was Uwaifo.

    But what is not told enough is that Uwaifo was a renaissance man. My history teacher at Ife, Professor Femi Omosini, described Leonardo Dan Vinci, as “a veritable jack of all trade and master of many.” So it was with Uwaifo. We forget that he made his car from fibre glass and even drove it to Abuja. His recollection of how he made his first guitar has some of the trappings of the beginning of broadcasting with ropes transformed into instruments of communication. He was a sculptor, or professor of art. He was gloriously welcomed into the Nigerian Academy of Letters

    He spoke to those who didn’t understand his language. He introduced the Akwete among others into genres of high life music.

    We have great musicians in the country who have left us. We have had the inimitable Rex Lawson, the Abami eda Fela Anikulapo Kuti. We have had I.K Dairo with his paternal shadow over highlife. We had the soothing voice of Comfort Omoge, and the choruses of Christy Essien Igbokwe.  We had the unique charisma of Oliver de Coque. We have had the feisty Bobby Benson. The ringing presences of the griot Dan Maraya Jos. And few more. We have a few elders of throaty grandeur still around. Let us cherish them and clasp them to our bosom and give them all the encomiums they deserve while they are still here to hear. Uwaifo’s life was a melody, but we cannot but feel threnody as he departs us.

    Uwaifo has a special place in the pantheon and in our hearts. He now, as a poet once wrote, belongs to the ages.

     

    Making bloodshed a prize

    Today’s Jos is not a time for politics but for peace. The recent stories of killings and reprisal do not resolve into harmony with accusations and recriminations. First, we had the story of the deaths of many by slaughter of the Irigwe people. Then they were going to bury their dead. Tension ricocheted into tension when some Fulani were travelling through Jos and met the bloody ire of the mourners. Rather than make peace, some clerics called for reprisals from the Fulani. When the revenge attack happened, the victims were a tribe known as the Anaguta in Jos North. The Anaguta are known to be a hospitable people who have accommodated all, including the Fulani and migrant settlers from the Niger Delta, Southwest and Southeast for decades.  The choice of the bandits to strike that region informs us of the poison that is banditry and the wicked zealots using tribe and religion to shred this nation and the Plateau. There was dispute of a burial ground in the Anaguta area and it was not a Fulani-Anaguta spite but Hausa and Anaguta. The Anaguta said the Hausa had to pay if they extended their apportioned burial site. It led to dispute and clash, and the land was around the University of Jos. The state government helped resolve the disputes and they signed agreement to that effect. The Fulani now attacked as reprisal for the travelling Fulani killed on their way to Ondo State. They wanted to dig a wedge between the Hausa and the Anaguta living in harmony. They saw it as a place to launch reprisal attacks. Thirty-three people have so been confirmed dead. Some believe the killers came from outside the state, possibly from the Bauchi forest. Over to you, DSS.

    Some politicians are now pushing bad narrative by linking the violence to the elevation of the Ujah of Anaguta to a first-class chief. That decision was in compliance with a Supreme Court judgment. The verdict came in the years of Jonah Jang as governor but he refused to implement it because he considered it as chipping away at the power and glory of Gbong Gwom Jos. Jang shied away into impunity because Gwom is a fellow Berom tribesman. What Governor Simon Lalong has done is to implement the court order. If the Berom resented it, the law affirmed it, and the Hausa and the Anaguta who live there welcomed it.

    Rather than focus on who the killers are, we should not allow ego and tribal entitlement to dwarf common sense and a pursuit of justice.

    The governor had set a template for peace that worked for a long time. Now it is believed that the problem between the Fulani and others is being fuelled partly by politicians who would rather play spoiler than push the spoils of peace.

    There are too many people taking advantage of the law to stall peace. For instance, as Governor Lalong once said, some arrested suspects are bailed who later maim and murder. The people should work with the governor and not make bloodshed a price.

  • Et tu IBB

    Et tu IBB

    An Abiola aide and then political editor of Concord Press Tunji Bello, who was beside him in Jos when he won the nomination to run for president on the ticket of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), told me this story, and I concluded that IBB was not going to hand over power to his long-time friend. The betrayal of the heart had occurred. The world awaited the epic episode to expose it.

    MKO Abiola wanted to share his victory news with his friend. But the call did not go through. The man knew it was unusual, and he stayed all night trying to reach him. It was not the line of communication that broke down, I remarked to Bello. They had lost a friendship. IBB knew it. Abiola didn’t. His heartbreak was in the offing. MKO, the billionaire publisher, raconteur, philanthropist whose motto was “make a friend a day,” had a nomination and a promise but he had lost an ambition.

    I was going to work for him, write for him, and hope against hope for him as a journalist in Concord. But like the protagonist in Samuel Beckett’s play of the absurd, we knew we were Waiting for Godot.

    From what he witnessed that night, Bello, who now heads the environment ministry in Lagos State, told me he suspected IBB was not sincere about the transition. And events have now borne us out.

    I had written many articles in the newspaper during his transition programmes, and had seen it as what Awolowo described very early as a “fruitless search.”

    I was a sort of pariah among the editors in the newspaper before MKO stepped in the ring while I kept railing at the hypocrisy of IBB’s rigmarole. I was writing apostacy. Bello was one person who shared my suspicion. At the end, when it became clear, editor-in-chief Dr. Doyin Abiola said at one editors’ meeting that I was right after all for my consistency.

    When the annulment was announced, I had been posted to Abuja to beef up the bureau as managing editor, and Olu Akerele, MKO’s confidante and my predecessor, was working full time with the chief. That morning, Concord State House correspondent, Mohammed Adamu reported to the office early with a sheet of paper. “It is a press release from the Villa,” he announced. I read it. I was shocked, even if I was not surprised. As Samuel Coleridge wrote, “Anticipation is more potent than surprise.” It bore no letterhead and was unsigned. But no press release bore so potent a message in our history as that anonymous poison. My first instinct was to call the editor, the ebullient Nsikak Essien. He knew its import and asked me to call the editor-in-chief. I read the full text to her. Her fury struggled with her calm. She almost blamed the messenger. I understood. She had worked day and night, mind and body for a goal that did not have a soul.

    My first impulse was to tell myself even as protests erupted in cities in the south, especially in Lagos, that I saw this coming. IBB was taking advantage of a man he thought he could wrap around his fingers.

    IBB had earlier asked Abiola to head a transition committee to oversee the political process. To facilitate its coverage, MKO had asked Dr. Abiola to relocate a special team to Abuja, led by Bello and I was to be his deputy. Suddenly, IBB snapped the idea. Not long after that he collapsed the transition as he had done a few times earlier.

    Not long after, a new transition programme flagged off. Abiola secured assurances from IBB of his sincerity, before he threw himself in the ring.

    What he did to MKO must quietly gnaw at IBB’s soul. He does not have to admit it. MKO had a hand in the coup that gave him power as military president. So invested was he in the IBB project that in the febrile dawn of the Orkar coup that MKO was monitoring the proceedings on Concord premises and getting ready to flee the country. Once the coup failed, he gathered his family and the nation saw them on NTA as they expressed solidarity with him. But IBB was, in the words of Lord Beaverbrook, another publisher and bosom friend of Winston Churchill, not sentimental about friendship when power was involved. “A man with a will to power,” noted Beaverbrook, “can’t make friends.” Former U.S President Harry Truman said if you want to make a friend in Washington, “buy a dog.”

    One time I was in Dr. Abiola’s apartment in the sprawling MKO abode and MKO materialised. We were engaged in political conversation. I was struck with two things. He had a mysterious self-assurance that he would triumph. From what he said about IBB, I recalled the famous Shakespeare quote in Macbeth: “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. He was a man on whom I built an absolute trust.”

    In the Arise interview, he said he never said he was “the evil genius.” It was the cover of Tell magazine, and as Onome Osifo-Whiskey, one of the editors, told me, he was pointing his two hands at his chest when he uttered that quote. That picture was on the cover. He is 80. Maybe he forgot.

    But it is no contradiction. Genius is a neutral quality. The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines it as “A person who influences another for good or bad.” Pol pot, Franco, Churchill, Lincoln, Pericles, Caligula were geniuses. And it was Chief Bisi Onabanjo, alias Aiyekoto and former Ogun State governor, who named him Maradona, not the media.

    IBB thought he could ride over MKO. He thought the man would just play dead. Some of the easy preys turn out the hunter’s undoing. Before June 12, MKO was a philanthropist, but many saw him as a cynical giver. He spoke about justice, but few believed a contractor who fattened on government contracts. He called himself a democrat, but he dined with military autocrats. Many invested him with an air of a peacock even when he told the story of how he danced for balls of eba to feed his family. Students booed him at Ife. Fela mocked him over ITT. Civil rights activists recoiled from his company. Yet, when it was time to fight the class, he stood as the avenging angel, a traitor to his class. IBB became the bad traitor to the good traitor. That is one irony of June 12.

    He said there might be a coup, and an abattoir of bloodshed might have resulted from handing over to MKO.  Some soldiers, like David Mark, who would later head a law chamber, might truncate the process. There were two types of loyal soldiers. We had Colonel Umar, who had said he would die for IBB but on principle. And David Mark, who would do same but in spite of principle. It is the duty of a leader to take decisions, not excuses. History does not glorify excuses. It was his duty to decide whether it was the right thing to do. Nixon wrote in his memoirs that the mark of a leader is to “take tough decisions and carry his associates with him along those decisions”.

    Their friendship turned out not the one between Jonathan and David; one sacrificed his life for the other. But more like Campaore on whom Thomas Sankara built his absolute trust. He even confessed that if Campaore plotted against him, he would have no defence. Was it a prophesy or an encouragement? But like MKO, he must have invoked, in his dying moments, Shakespeare’s most popular Latin quote, Et tu Brute.

     

    All hail the Ogiame!

    Atuwatse III
    Atuwatse III

    I am no royalist. By upbringing and impulse, I am a republican. But watching the majesty of the Itsekiri tradition as the new Olu of Warri mounted the throne, I could not overstate the magnificence of heritage. Tsola Emiko, son of former king, Atunwase II, is now Atunwase III, in a ceremony of solemn hues and sound. We saw the motif of red, gold and white, and, for irony, the Ooni of Ife, described it as a “red-letter day.”

    We also saw a syncretic integrity of Christian and traditional rites, the Olu bursting into melodies of faith. With the Laz Ekwueme Orchestra and Warri Royal choir, and his speech, it was part church, part the past, in which spirit he lifted an age-old curse on the land.

    With a Yoruba mother, and a Bini wife, he encases the Itsekiri paragon with its binary roots: its culture from Bini past, language from Yoruba, while in temperament, a delicate balancing of Yoruba diplomacy and the Bini warrior soul.  I could not miss the presence of Deputy Senate President. Ovie Omo-Agege, whose grandmother’s remains lie in the palace earth, was the grandchild of Nana Olomu, the intrepid warrior who fought the British to a standstill, and the only ruler in the age of British resistance who lived to tell the story by returning to the throne. If anyone had a doubt as to where Omo-Agege’s fighting gears emanated, they need a seance to his grandmother. Grandmothers are powerful.