The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

  • Like a drowning man

    Like a drowning man

    By Femi Macaulay

    A drowning man is desperate for survival, and acts desperately. This is the lesson of the developing political drama in Edo State, with Governor Godwin Obaseki as the central character.

    Obaseki had convinced eight other All Progressives Congress (APC) governors to go with him to a meeting with an influential leader of the party and former governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, at the State House, Marina, Lagos, on May 31.

    According to a report, “Specifically, the governors wanted Tinubu to prevail on the party leadership to give Obaseki the right of first refusal.”  The move was designed to counter the decision of their party’s National Working Committee (NWC) that the party’s candidate in the September governorship election in the state will be chosen through a direct primary election.

    “However,” said the report, “Tinubu went to the meeting with the position that it is better, more democratic, constitutionally right and politically defensible that all aspirants should go for primaries to test their popularity, adding that, through that free and fair selection process, the ruling party will successfully build a strong democratic culture.”

    After the first failure, the next day, a group of APC governors, this time without Obaseki, met with their party’s National Chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, at the APC national secretariat in Abuja.  The question of the type of primary election for Edo State was on the front burner.

    Oshiomhole told journalists after the meeting: “We have since published our time table because under the law, we are required to give INEC at least 21 days’ notice to monitor our primaries and to state the mode of our primaries and of course NWC had approved direct primaries for Edo. That of Ondo has not been discussed because that will come much later. Edo will come about three weeks before Ondo.”  It was another failure. The governorship primary election in Edo State is scheduled for June 22.

    On the same day, Obaseki visited President Muhammadu Buhari concerning his interest in re-election on the platform of APC, the federal ruling party.  After the meeting, the governor told journalists: “I came to see Mr President to formally inform him of my desire and intention to seek re-election as governor of Edo State on the platform of the APC in the forthcoming gubernatorial election.

    “As a father of the country, as our president I should not just assume or take things for granted – I have to come to inform him and solicit his support in my gubernatorial bid, and the president was quite warm and quite welcoming.

    “When I showed him my Expression of Interest form, he looked through it and teased me that he would not have to go through this again and wished me good luck and assured me of his support.’’

    Obaseki wants an indirect primary election, and he wants a second term. His actions suggest that he does not think he can win a direct primary election in the prevailing circumstances.   ”The relationship is still frosty but I am doing all I can to try and make it warm… whatever I can do that is constitutional, I will do,’’ he said about his strained relationship with Oshiomhole, who is also a former two-term governor of the state and his political benefactor before things went awry between them.

    His next move further showed his desperation.  He chose Governors Babajide Sanwo-Olu (Lagos), Simon Lalong (Plateau) and Senator Ehigie Uzamere to work out a peace deal with 14 elected state lawmakers who had been excluded from the activities of the House of Assembly since January. Only 10 members of the 24-member legislature, loyal to Obaseki, were inaugurated in June last year; and the others had been sidelined.

    According to a report, “The three-man panel has a mandate to reconcile the Executive with members-elect.

    “The exclusion of the 14 members-elect is one of the issues behind the virtually intractable crisis rocking the All Progressives Congress (APC).

    “In a statement, the governor said the constitution of the reconciliation committee is part of moves to restore harmony and peace in the state chapter of the APC.”

    Why did Obaseki wait till the approach of the primary election, and the decision to conduct a direct primary election, which he is opposed to, before trying to normalise the situation in the state legislature?

    As the drama developed, another related development caught the attention of the attentive public.  A June 2 report said:  ”A Federal High Court sitting in Abuja has restrained the Edo Government and Gov Godwin Obaseki from arresting and prosecuting the Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Mr Adams Oshiomhole.” According to the report, “a panel of inquiry set up by the state government headed by Justice J.U Oyomire, had in a white paper indicted Oshiomhole and recommended that criminal proceedings be commenced against him.” The court adjourned the matter until June 17.

    Obaseki’s camp believes that Oshiomhole’s camp will use a direct primary election to foil his re-election ambition. Deputy Governor Philip Shaibu said in a statement: “Despite this confidence and assurance that the victory of Governor Obaseki is not in doubt, we are not ready to go the way of the direct primary… The APC national chairman is insisting on direct primary because the result of the yet to be conducted direct primary election is already written by him, just waiting to be announced.” This shows fear, not confidence.

    Interestingly, Shaibu brought the coronavirus pandemic into the matter. “Our preference for indirect primary is because we don’t want to secure victory at the expense of the health of those we are seeking to lead,” he said, adding that Obaseki did not want a situation that could expose the people to COVID-19 and other situations that could endanger their lives.  ”That doesn’t amount to fear of failure in facing any election but rather putting the interest of the public above desperation to win an election,” he stressed. His argument is specious.  It is expected that party and electoral authorities will take steps to minimise possible risks.

    Direct voting by party members, rather than indirect voting by delegates, should not be feared. Obaseki’s actions show desperation. He is acting like a drowning man desperate for survival.

  • #93…

    #93…

    By Sam Omatseye

    Pictures are about time. And it is about time to reflect on a picture – or pictures – of the BOS of Lagos in his first flush as first steward. He was noted for a pose, his hand raised with a flourish and pointing at something in the distance. He was on inspection tours around the state, standing on platforms or climbing up some stairs, viewing projects in motion and areas of need. He needed to point to say a thing about what he wanted to do or inquire about.

    But a cynical mob mocked. They saw it as an extravagance of a finger. A showy and inept dreamer. Photo ops but not upstanding.  They pointed to a city of potholes, and suffocated traffic. He pleaded for time. The sky was sully and downpours plagued the streets. The social media raged, the tribe tagged by Soyinka as millipedes. He maintained a stoic retreat from the trills and ululations. He bided his time. “The most powerful warriors are patience and time,” wrote Tolstoy in his War and Peace. “Time,” noted President Richard Nixon in his memoirs, “is a great healer.”

    The sky returned to its benign blue, and earth thirsted for the machines of infrastructure. Road after road roared with work. Complaints changed from paralysis to a city bustling with road repairs and restoration. It was like the Jews who sought freedom and, when they breathed free air, envied their past bondage. In times of freedom, men seek bondage, wrote poet Unamuno. In times of bondage, men seek liberty.

    Within months, a mockery turned into an accolade. One of those pictures featured in a photo gallery to mark Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s first term in office.

    No one can say today, even among the cynic, that he pointed in vain. It is like the words of author Zig Ziglar, “Don’t judge me by my past. I don’t live there anymore.” The BOS was saying by that picture that he wanted to live there in the past. He was proud of pointing, or dreaming. He is happy that desire has now transformed into performance. He was not just pointing, he was pointing the state forward. He pointed from dream, to do. It was a moment as granary.

    Today with that picture, and others in the gallery of 93 pictures, he can invoke the words of Prophet Isaiah that “for your shame, you shall have double.” That was what the photo gallery, under a white tent on a blazing day of sunshine manifested to the world.

    The Governor and his deputy, the articulate Obafemi Hamzat, performed the tour guide, Hamzat doing the talking as the governor stood apart with a few interjections and elucidations. It was obvious the duo were in sync with the work of governance and his deputy was steeped in vision and direction of the government. The photos were encyclopaedic, covering education, infrastructure, health, water work, etc.

    The pictures came in different incarnations and points of view. Some of them came from aerial shots. The photo of the work in progress on the 10-lane Lagos-Badagry Express way gave the look of machines whirring, and there were vistas of disheveled glory of patchwork, smooth roads, piles of mud, et al, indicating furious bees of activities. We also saw from the air the bright sight of silos, highlighting the agricultural work, as well as sites of training buildings. A particularly telling view was of the ruins of Abule-Ado, the aftermath of a fire disaster that upended a community, ruined homes, lives, livelihoods with searing tales of human tragedies. That was the man-made horror before nature spelt COVID-19. The picture, of dark, scalding debris of blocks and wood, looked like mural, more like a painting than a picture, a testament to the realism of the photographer. The picture also showed the government was not going to say it was all rosy in the year. Also from the top was the picture of the inauguration day. Not of the governor but the carpet. It poured on May 29, 2019, and the carpet recorded it in amazing colours like a rainbow: red, blue, yellow, green. Rain drew whimsical lines on the colours like embroidery.

    A few others were from the sides. Unforgettable was the foundation work going on the rail project, telling in detail how a bridge withstands the coming and going of heavy duty cargo. I told myself, it was a weight of glory. Another side picture was a moment of boyish rapture when The BOS exchanged a handshake with a boy as, the Governor relates, the boy yelled his name from a distance while the governor was undertaking an inspection. The governor broke out of protocol to meet the ecstatic kid. He abided by the mantra of Spanish philosopher Spinoza, “to do good cheerfully.”

    Many shots were direct. One was at the beginning, when the duo received their certificate of return and had a photo-op with the Jagaban. Next was a picture on inauguration day, where the governor was flanked by his family, six in all, with the first lady’s hand in the air. “They are my bodyguards,” quipped Gov. Sanwo-Olu, referring to his family. My favorite picture was of the governor in a joyous moment with some pupils. The picture, probably snapped in colour, comes across in black and white, with a classic clarity of a legacy photo. The direct shot was of the vehicle successive governors have ridden on inauguration day. It is 42 years old, its engine revving healthy and body gleaming. It is a classic. A testimony of how things can endure, like institutions and property of state.  The vision of the “men on the moon,” the COVID-19 workers dressed in protective gear to sort out the refuse from one of the isolation centres.

    Technology showed up, like the virtual commissioning of Oyingbo Terminal.  In photo exhibitions of this sort, we expect some accompanying write-ups to indicate contexts and caveats, even when there is a tour guide. Photo works such as the Nazi Museum in Berlin or the Newseum in Washington are examples.

    Music maestro Tuface, one of the guests, ended the day with humour when we looked at a picture shot from under. A crowd huddled together on a bridge was looking down at the BOS commissioning a project. “That was a crowd of 2019 BC, Before Covid.”

    The 93rd picture will segue into the first of the second. The first picture of the second year, that is. Like Oscar Wilde’s character in his novel, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, the events of the next year will also go on record. By reporting himself in a photo gallery, he is also challenging himself.

  • Lopsided appointments

    Lopsided appointments

    By Emeka Omeihe

    Dismissive response by senate spokesperson, Ajibola Basiru to genuine complaints on the confirmation of President Buhari’s nominee for the chairmanship of the Federal Character Commission, FCC, is bound to ruffle feathers.

    In his defense of last week’s senate confirmation of Dr. Muheeba Dankaka as chairman of the FCC, Basiru had described criticisms on the appointment’s disregard of the federal character principle as “beer parlour talks”. He was apparently reacting to criticisms by senate minority leader, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe against the emerging scenario where Nigerians from the same part of country would occupy both the office of the chairman and secretary of the FCC.

    Abaribe had observed when the matter came up that in keeping with section 14(3) of the 1999 constitution as amended, the two positions have always been occupied on the basis of the north and south divide. He queried the rationale in flouting that constitutional principle which the confirmation of the new chairman would entail since the secretary is already from the same north.

    But the senate spokesman while addressing newsmen rebuffed the observations by Abaribe. He would rather have Nigerians assess Buhari’s appointments from the prism of the six geo-political zones rather than the north and south divide. For him, since both appointees are from two different geo-political zones in the north, the federal character principle has been satisfied. This is as misleading as it is ridiculous.

    Going by that skewed argument, spreading all of Buhari’s appointments in the three geopolitical zones of the north would certainly make for balance, fairness and equity. Very strange argument indeed! The folly of that line of argument is further underscored by the letters of section 14(3).

    It states “the composition of the government of the federation or any of its agencies and the conduct of its affairs shall be carried out in such a manner as to reflect the federal character of Nigeria and the need to promote national unity, and also to command national loyalty, thereby ensuring that there shall be no predominance of persons from a few state or from a few ethnic or other sectional groups in that government or in any of its agencies”.

    It is difficult to conjecture how that appointment satisfies the imperative to spread offices along the lines of the nation’s major geo-political divisions – the north and south. Power has always been shared between the north and the south. That is the model of federal character principle that promotes national unity, loyalty and guards against the domination of a few ethnic or sectional groups.

    The idea of the six zones which at any rate, is a recent development is to further deepen and reflect the heterogeneity and plurality of the north and south divide in appointments. It is even very strange that such convoluted and self-serving argument is being put forward to defend an obvious constitutional infraction.

    And if we can demonstrate brazen disregard to balance in the appointment of the leadership of the FCC-a body that primarily exists to ensure compliance with the federal character principle, what else do we expect of the body? What function has it got to perform when the basis for its existence has been compromised and contradicted by its very composition? That is the question to contend with and the monster that will soon turn around to haunt us.

    Sadly, the senate which should be in the vanguard of ensuring that appointments by the president are in line with our laws is complicit in defending such infractions. That was exactly what happened when the senate confirmed two persons from the north to head an agency that exists primarily to checkmate domination by any of the constituents. The complicity of the senate is also evident from the position of the deputy senate president, Ovie Omo-Agege that Abaribe’s submissions were targeted at the powers of President Buhari on nomination and appointment of competent Nigerians into public offices. That is not a true reflection of Abaribe’s submissions. He was drawing attention to the reality that, in the exercise of the powers of the president to appoint people into offices, that power must be exercised in line with our laws. In this case, his argument was that the confirmation of the FCC chairman would amount to a subversion of the constitution since a northerner was already its secretary. You cannot contradict that submission. Why Omo-Agege wanted to twist issues is at the heart of the suspicion that he was doing his master’s bidding irrespective of its harm to the corporate existence of the country.

    The duplicity in Omo-Agege’s argument was further exposed by the surprising equivocation into which he was soon ensnared as he later admitted that there is merit in the issue raised by Abaribe. But he had an answer to it. According to him, the ‘perceived anomalies’ would be corrected in a few months time as the secretary’s tenure will expires in February next year. He must be speaking on authority since the powers to make such appointments do not reside with him. So we have to wait till next year before the right thing is done. What a country!

    But then, is there anything sacrosanct about that position that a southerner should not have been appointed chairman with a northerner already at the saddle as secretary? Assuming we buy the position of Omo-Agege that change will be made next year, what of the harm the appointment has already inflicted into the psyche of our people? Why must we do things the wrong way if the appointment is not intended to pander to ethnic and sectional lure?

    More seriously, this case is symptomatic of the large scale sectional and lopsided appointments that have characterized Buhari’s tenure since inception. It is nothing new. Neither is the pattern hidden. What appears disconcerting is the unholy acquiescence of the arms of the government that should put such abuse of powers at check.

    It makes little difference chronicling the concentration of appointments into the commanding heights of the military and paramilitary institutions in the north. Neither is it new that the executive, legislature and judiciary are currently headed by northerners and Muslims for that matter. Or should we still complain about the selective alienation, marginalization and skewing out of one of the tripod on which this unity in diversity was erected? Infractions on key ingredients of federalism- ingredients without which federalism will lose relevance may not be entirely new.

    But the reckless manner they have been abused in recent years has raised fears as to the direction this country is actually heading. Not unexpectedly, this has engendered feelings of mistrust and allegations that there is an agenda to dominate other sections of the country by the government in power. It is not for nothing that all the fault lines of our federal order have since been vigorously activated with Nigeria more divided than ever in its history.

    What is even more disconcerting is the persisting conspiracy of silence even as an ominous cloud pervades the landscape. The more we complain, the more those wielding powers repeat the same mistakes. The impression now gaining ground is that any person or group of persons that get elected to the highest political office in the land can freely assault the federal character principle and get away with it.

    But that is where the danger lies. Those who took oath of office to abide by our federal constitution must be made to obey such rules. It is a failure of the principles of separation of powers, checks and balances that such impunity repeat and there does not seem a remedy.

    Former governor of Kaduna State, Abubakar Dangiwa Umar captured the looming danger succinctly in his recent open letter to President Buhari. Hear him: “all those who wish you and your country well will not mince word in warning you that Nigeria has dangerously polarized and risks sliding into crisis on account of your administration’s lopsided appointments which continues to give undue preference to some sections over the other”. There is nothing more to add.

  • Majek: A Nigerian original

    Majek: A Nigerian original

     Sam Omatseye

    The carrion bird came with its slow-flapping wingspan. The evil buzzard took away our bard, Majek Fashek. The bird of death did not send down the rain to soothe us, but a storm. Our eyes, not the sky, are misty and cloudy. He does not have a lot of work to do today. He now lies song-less but not less of a song. He gave us a rhythm and rhyme while he was here.

    He toiled from youth, and he knew talent and he knew conscience and he knew travel and knew success and plenty of failure. But like all who toil hard and are true to the integrity of their gifting, Majek Fashek is an eternal legacy. He rewrote reggae and pricked our conscience. When he came unknown and unsung, his work sang for him. I recall when he released his debut album, and he came to see me as the society reporter at the then topnotch magazine of the day, Newswatch. He came with his peculiar hairdo and a guitar. Handsome, cheerful and even charmingly naïve, he waited for me downstairs and I joined him. All smiles, he told his story and meaning of his album. He was articulate. He was conscientious, and even revolutionary. He was humble, above all. He was unknown then.

    He would retain what the Yoruba call omoluabi spirit later when we would meet, even when his fame had reached the bright skies. Many may say he blew his chances, or he had family travails, or he should not have gone to the USA, or he succumbed to what President Lincoln called ‘tyrants of spirits,” with drug use. Majek’s story was his, unique, with the flavour of a Nigerian original. I recall years ago in Denver, Colorado, at a Red Lobsters, a restaurant chain in North America, I was having dinner with some Americans and his Send Down the Rain wafted through the hall. Majek made me proud as a Nigerian.  As he goes into silence, we all are proud of him.

  • A minister and a minstrel

    A minister and a minstrel

    It is a collision between political power and poetic power. The poet seeks to speak truth to power; and the politician seeks to silence the voice of truth.

    This is the picture, more than three weeks after the police arrested Rotimi Jolayemi, a journalist and oral poet, also known as Oba Akewi, on May 5, and detained him in Abuja

    Minister of Information and Culture Alhaji Lai Mohammed should feel embarrassed that his name has been linked with the absurd arrest and detention of Jolayemi.

    Mohammed should also feel embarrassed that the police had arrested and detained Jolayemi’s wife and siblings in order to force the journalist to give himself up.

    “His wife, Dorcas,  and his brothers – John Jolayemi and Joseph Jolayemi – were all detained in Kwara State,”  and “were kept in detention for eight days, nine days and two days respectively as hostages, while the journalist was being sought,” according to a statement by the Committee for the Defence of Human Rights (CDHR).

    According to Jolayemi’s wife, “They said they wanted to arrest my husband and he fled to Maro in Kwara State. They said I was the one who advised him to run away and switch off his phone. They played a recording of my phone conversation with my husband.

    “Apparently, they had bugged my phone and that of my husband. I admitted that, indeed, I told my husband to run away, but it wasn’t a crime because I didn’t harbour him. I only asked him not to come home, which is what a typical wife would do.

    I heard the police wanted to arrest him and I didn’t know the reason why they wanted to arrest him. I told him to run away because I wanted him to be safe. They said for that, I would pay for it. I was brought before their boss and the man insulted me, calling me a stupid woman.

    He said I shouldn’t have advised my husband to run away. The man said I would pay for it and they took my statement. I was there from April 29 to May 6.”

    She added: “While I was in detention, they played a recording of the poem that was recited by my husband. They asked if I could confirm if the voice belonged to my husband and I said it was his voice.

    They said how could my husband be insulting Lai Mohammed, a minister. They said it was Lai Mohammed that ordered them to arrest him.”

    After Jolayemi surrendered to the police in Ilorin, Kwara State, it took the police more than two weeks to come up with a charge against him. The charge read: “That you, Jolayemi Oba Akewi, male, aged 43,  on or about the 14th day of April 2020 at Osolo Compound Ekan Nla, Kwara State, within the jurisdiction of this honourable court did send audio message through your Android phone device to a group WhatsApp platform known as ‘Ekan Sons and Daughters’ and which went viral immediately after it was posted for the purpose of causing annoyance, insult, hatred and ill will toward the current Minister of Information and Culture, Federal Republic of Nigeria, Alhaji Lai Mohammed,  and thereby committed an offence contrary to Section 24(1)(b) of the Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention etc) Act 2015.”

    The “audio message” in question was critical oral poetry by Jolayemi, who is also Vice-Chairman, Freelance and Independent Broadcasters Association of Nigeria, Osun State chapter. So, Jolayemi will face trial for his poetic criticism.  It is not clear if he is also being accused of making his poetry go viral.

    The minister’s spokesman, Segun Adeyemi, has said his boss should not be blamed for Jolayemi’s trouble with the police.

    Who complained to the police?  Why did the police desperately arrest and detain the journalist’s wife and siblings? That was unjust, unreasonable and unlawful.  The CDHR said Jolayemi was being illegally detained at the Federal Investigation Bureau of the Nigeria Police Force, Abuja. Why?

    It may well be that the minister is not responsible for the actions of the police.  But he should feel concerned that such actions were carried out concerning a matter that concerns him.

    Jolayemi’s wife also said his family had tried to get Mohammed to drop the case.  ”According to my brothers-in-law,” she said, “they sent representatives to plead with Lai Mohammed to drop the case.

    They said the Oba of Ilala in Kwara State and some other traditional rulers had gone to the minister to plead with him, but he has refused to respond.

    Some even went to the minister’s hometown in Oro to plead with elders in his community, but there has been no positive response.”  These efforts to placate Mohammed suggest that the journalist’s family is certain about his role in the affair.

    What prompted Jolayemi to compose the Yoruba oral poem in question?  It is a scathing work full of unprintable lines.  The poet also punched Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development Sadiya Umar Farouk.  Jolayemi’s work is not a panegyric.

    It is confrontational and provocative. The poet was probably unprepared for the police, which is why he went into hiding initially.  Did he expect Mohammed to laugh off the poem’s content?

    However, the poem’s content does not justify the poet’s arrest and detention. It also does not justify the arrest and detention of his wife and siblings.

    People in power need to learn how to live with criticism, even the foul type. The reckless reaction, allegedly by Mohammed, has only helped to further draw public attention to the poem’s content.

    Jolayemi has been accused of committing “an offence contrary to Section 24(1) (b) of the Cybercrimes (Prohibition, Prevention etc) Act 2015.” Section 24(1) of the Act made it an offence for any person to “knowingly or intentionally send a message or other matter by means of computer systems of network that (b) he knows to be false, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult, injury, criminal intimidation, enmity, hatred, ill will or needless anxiety to another or causes such a message to be sent.”

    The sentence on conviction for such an offence is a fine of up to N7, 000,000 or imprisonment for up to three years or both.

    In this case, the prosecution will have to prove that the poet’s criticism is based on falsehood. But is it?

  • Sick IMSUTH

    Sick IMSUTH

    By Emeka Omeihe

    It is not always political leaders make statements that are revelatory of realities within their spheres of authority. It is either they exaggerate situations to cover up their shortcomings or get even with perceived enemies.

    But the statement credited to Governor Hope Uzodinma of Imo State when he received the report of the visitation panel on Imo State University Teaching Hospital IMSUTH, Orlu appears one of the few exceptions.

    The chairman of the panel, Prof. Frank Akpuaka had briefed the governor on the scope of their work including the challenges they met on ground.

    Among the debilitating deficits they encountered, are inaccessible roads, infrastructural decay, poor funding and inability of the institution to retain staff. The panel also reported that all equipment in the radiography unit including; MRI, CT scan and the Mammography are obsolete. There were also issues of low patronage and maladministration.

    For these glaring shortcomings, the National Universities Commission, NUC, denied the medical school accreditation such that in the last four years, it had been unable to admit medical students. Such was the chilling tale of a teaching hospital as told by the visitation panel.

    Apparently startled by the sheer weight of the challenges confronting that singular institution, Uzodinma was reported to have said that IMSUTH is sick.

    But he did not just stop at that. He extrapolated “if IMSUTH is sick, then the entire health sector of the state is in trouble”. He could not have put it in a better way. And that is precisely where we enter the fray.

    Imo State University was the second state university to be established in this country in 1981 coming after Enugu State University of Science and Technology ESUT in 1980. The institution, built through communal efforts by the old Imo State, was a child of necessity to satisfy the high educational needs of thousands of qualified indigenes regularly denied admission into federal universities on account of discriminatory and suffocating admission policies.

    The story of how the university relocated after Abia State was created and the thorns strewn on its way is beyond the scope of this essay. But suffice it to say that the university has since grown with tremendous impact on its immediate constituents.

    It was in furtherance of this objective that the Achike Udenwa administration committed itself to the establishment of the university teaching hospital in Orlu to offer tertiary health services from its present site.

    That administration selected the site and built both the teaching hospital and the School of Nursing from the scratch. Before Udenwa exited office, the hospital was firmly on ground as full services had commenced.

    As a matter of fact, all the equipment in the radiography unit including the MRI, CT scan and the Mammography which the panel said is now obsolete were already in that institution early 2007.

    But they were still in the containers because the houses where they were to be installed were not ready before the end of the tenure of that regime in May, 2007. Thirteen years ago when they arrived, they were modern and the first of their type in that part of the country.

    Curiously, in the four years Udenwa’s successor, Ikedi Ohakim was on the saddle, these vital equipments remained in the containers as no effort was made to install them. The story then was that Ohakim had other plans to relocate the hospital for very inexplicable reasons. With such mindset, the hospital suffered criminal neglect during that regime.

    If a government could pay scant attention to the affairs of a teaching hospital, its overall disposition to healthcare delivery would no longer be in doubt. It was during that period the exodus of qualified health professionals and some of the problems listed by the panel began to manifest.

    The deplorable state of IMSUTH was a serious campaign issue when Ohakim made a second term bid. Ohakim could not actualize his devious plan of relocating the hospital before his regime had a fatal electoral accident.

    That was the miserable narrative as Ohakim dismounted from the horse.

    Then enter Governor Rochas Okorocha, a man who rode on populist crest to wrest power from an incumbent. Okorocha showed no interest in the affairs of IMSUTH either because of his obsession to obliterate the achievements of his predecessors or to score cheap political points.

    Soon, he began to implement a bogus and ill-advised project of constructing 27 general hospitals in each of the local government areas of the state.

    Huge contracts were quickly awarded and bloc structures purporting to be hospitals sprang up near the major roads in the 27 local government areas of the state.

    In the eight years Okorocha held sway, not even one of these hospitals was completed and delivered to provide the services required of them.

    He was later to embark on a bizarre bazaar of donating some of those structures to military and paramilitary federal institutions. Nigerian Police got the one in Ideato South, his local government. The Nigerian Air Force got another around Ngor Okpala.

    Yet, there is no functioning general hospital in both the Ideato North and South local government areas where he comes from.

    The one that existed somewhere in Ideato North was quickly dismantled when the bogus idea of 27 general hospitals cropped up. That is the story of the 27 general hospitals. Today, those structures have been abandoned and overgrown by weeds.

    They stood for practically nothing in the subsisting emergency created by the corona virus COVID-19 pandemic. Imo would not have been contending with bed spaces if investments committed to those projects did not go down the drains.

    The buildings are still there. But I am told buildings do not make hospitals. There is much more to a hospital than bloc structures. Okorocha had a disjointed, disoriented and suspicious healthcare deliver policy-a policy that left the teaching hospital a ghost of its former self.

    It was an era of strikes qua strikes, nonpayment of salaries of staff and exodus of qualified doctors. The road to the hospital was completely cut off with medical students staying more than 10 years before graduation.

    In the last four years, the medical school has been denied accreditation by the NUC because of inability by the government to fund the institution.

    Yet, this is a hospital that trains doctors, a referral hospital that should be on first line charge of government’s investments in the health sector.

    Whatever image it cuts, mirrors vividly the state of health of the health sector in Imo State. IMSUTH is really sick, so also is the entire health sector of the state. It is not enough for Uzodinma to recognize that IMSUTH is sick.

    Neither will it make the required difference if the objective is to get even with political adversaries. His sincerity will hinge on the steps he takes to reverse the narrative. Can he?

    It is instructive that the visitation panel was set up by the short-lived but action-packed regime of Emeka Ihedioha. He had engaged IMSUTH staff that was on strike before he assumed office to call off the action, awarded contract for the rehabilitation of the road to the institution and was on serious efforts to address their lot before the unexpected happened.

    Uzodinma is a beneficiary of Ihedioha’s foresight in setting up the panel. From the way he spoke, he does not seem under illusion on the enormity of the challenges of the institution.

    But he must go beyond emotions to frontally tackle the IMSUTH challenge and the yawning development gaps in the state.

    This is not the time for grandstanding or running down imaginary foes to gain legitimacy.  The difference will predicate in the way he attends to the overall development of a state that has had all its institutions despoiled, desecrated and brought to an all time low by amateur and buccaneer leadership. But can he rid himself of the legitimacy hangover evident from some of his actions?

  • Waiting to fly

    Waiting to fly

    Sam Omatseye

     

    THIS is not a time to soar. But then it is. That is what everyone thinks these days. I remember the song of childhood about flight. “If I had a wing like a dove/ I would fly, fly away, fly away /and be at rest…” We are airborne in our spirit but grounded in reality.

    At the moment, we all seem to be at rest, from work, from play, sometimes from the law, from bear hugs and public excitations, from travel, from faith, from fiestas. But everyone wants out of the egg, to break out like the baby dove or squab, flutter the wings and zip into the air. Something happened that seemed to have caught our fancy recently. It was not the arrival of an aircraft from outside the country that was arrested and impounded. That was against the law of travel. It was a British airliner. It dropped on our land like fly on a plate of egusi soup. It might have been a bad flea for the feast, except that no feast flares these days.

    Not the other incident in Port Harcourt with Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike and Caverton Helicopter. The first was a case of violation of airspace and territorial rights. The second was an issue of federalism, and the rage of a state governor against a perceived central bully.

    But one happened without controversy, and it was the sort of flight we seek these days without hope until the flight of Covid-19 takes a rest or flies away forever. It happened with the landing of a local aircraft from the Akwa Ibom State, by aircraft years a relatively new affair. When I saw the picture, with the state Governor Udom Emmanuel on the stairwell, and the plane sitting in its tantalising majesty in the airport, it put the whole Covid-19 burden in perspective. Udom and a pilot were not flying. The machine had no ambition but rest.

    We are all here, like the plane on earth. We want to move, but we are a mobile race. The reason we made machines is to move, to get from one place to another. It is what we dreamed from beginning. Gods were in the skies before we got there. It was before the Greeks came up with Icarus, who crashed and Daedalus, who restrained him, and when the Wright brothers defied earth and tested gravity. Before the machines, the Tower of Babel also tumbled. In her novel titled: Flights, the Nobel Prize Novelist Olga Tokarczuk writes, “Barbarians don’t travel.” We are back, at least temporarily, to the age of caverns.

    Even in the law, we have grappled with flying. As this essayist argued in a recent piece, the exigency of safety over all else in our federal state has harked us back to the state of nature. We had to suspend everything that appealed to the niceties of law because to be safe was the first condition of citizenship. Even Amotekun, for all its ethnic comforts to regions, took a back seat though it was the only topic boiling in the new year.

    Talk about social distance, but not before socializing. What more way to explain a lack of flight than that we cannot have the owambes. How many chickens, goats, cows, ducks have ducked because no parties. Goodbye to big society birthdays, weddings, funerals that might have feasted on animal cruelty. No appetites, no plates clanking, no dances or money sprays, no inebriated chatter. Interior Minister Rauf Aregbesola turned 63 in virtual silence. Dele Momodu exploded online on his 60th, but the fellow did not have the opportunity in public to devour his delicacies, like the ones we had together in Ibadan and other places in the Southwest in our reporting days. The mama puts and their intoxicating varieties.

    But what of those who cannot work? Talents at rest. The engineer, the artist, the salesman, the pilot, the contractor. Rather than work, they remain at home, brooding what might be done. They want to fly with their creative juices. But they are, in the words of the American writer, the rabbit is at rest. But it is no time to rest. It is the noon of the bees, the time to break the egg and break out, in “one equal temper of heroic hearts,” in the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson.

    Yet as we say, the roads are not happy. Soyinka always sees the road in his plays as the theatre of human action, whether in the play of that name, or the Jero plays, or Mad Men and Specialists. Because of Covid-19 fears, contractors are not able to take advantage of silence to do road work as they might. Road work may lead to blood work, and positive tests.

    Cars are coy. The big and flashy SUV, the bold, brash tyres roll only in the neighborhood. The engines roar in the yard to keep alive. Few people in the buses. Social distancing tame the bonhomie of intracity mobility, the jokes, the fights, feisty repartee, the quotidian theatrics of commuting are gone.

    Even the sick are afraid to be sick, not of coronavirus, but of common fever. They don’t want to visit the hospitals because you might contract the dreaded disease. Small ailment may be an entrapment. It is still so because we don’t have records of how many people die of malaria or diarrhea because they don’t want to die of Covid-19. They die because they do not want to die. “Something startles where I thought I was safest,” noted the playwright Walt Whitman.

    We noted that it is not a time for the rich to fly to safety, that is, to choice hospitals abroad. They cannot take shelter. A few big names have died of Covid-19, and they will not be flown in from London or Germany. A boon to local medicine. We cannot fly out of ourselves. Whether we are good or bad, great physicians or poor ones, we are stuck with our own competences.

    We cannot believe the way we used to. We cannot huddle in the church. Even to sing, and dance, cannot be the same. To sing in a choir is to tempt the Covid-19 beast. Spittle from different lips is airborne together, and faithful folks may form a fellowship of infection. Those who have private jets and want to evangelise will have to do it the humble way: online. Now, Skype, Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, et al, have overtaken the tactile power of worship. Daniel had said in the Bible that he read but could not understand, but the Spirit told him, “Go thy way Daniel, many shall be purified and made white, and tried…people shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.” To Christians, today the prophecy is in full bloom.

    Those who travel, and do businesses across the world, continent after continent, this is a humbling time. Never since the time of colonial expansion into Africa, when the imperialist merchant Cecil Rhodes made virtue of conquests and profit, especially in Southern Africa, has commerce cowered. If Rhodes were alive today he would not pronounce his famous quotes, “I would annex the planets if I could.” The irony though is that within the era of Covid-19 American astronauts shot into space in its first commercial launch. Just like birds or astronauts, commerce worldwide is taking a beating. Money is going away like the Bible line: money mounts wings and flies away.

    So, what Akwa Ibom State did was to tease the future with its Bombadier CRJ 900 aircraft, which for effect claims to filter dust as well as “microscopic particles such as bacteria and viruses… removing contaminants and greatly enhancing the quality of air in the cabin.”

    As the plane is still on earth, so are all of us, hungry to fly.

     

     

  • Lockdown enforcement

    Lockdown enforcement

    By Emeka Omeihe

    A number of issues arose in the course of the current fight against the corona virus COVID-19 pandemic that raise questions on the capacity of the law enforcement agencies to live up to their statutory mandate.

    Not only did such lapses expose the failings of those at the leadership of our security organizations, they added up sabotaging government policies to contain the viral disease spread. But in all these, the nation was worse for it.

    In the wake of the rising spread of the viral disease, the federal government banned inter-state movements to stem further escalation. That decision was informed by the reality that whereas some states were recording a fast spread in the disease, some others had no incidence of it at all. And given the manner of its spread, restricting inter-state movements would effectively diminish community transmission, it was reasoned.

    No doubt, it was a well thought out regulation whose efficacy depended more on the law enforcement agencies. The state governments went further to give their own peculiar interpretation to the regulation which has worked with varying degrees of success. But this difference in success levels is hinged essentially on what the law enforcement agencies made of the order.

    Incidentally, information from across the southern states on compliance with the restriction order on inter-state movements has been quite disappointing. At the centre of the infractions that marred the order, is the transportation of truckloads of almajirai and other able-bodied youths from some state in the north to the south.

    From Oyo to Abia, Cross River to Anambra states, we have been inundated with worrying reports of this category of youths and children making their ways into the southern states in circumstances that have remained largely suspicious. The coincidence of such illegal movements with the decision of northern governors to return the almajirai to their home states did not help matters. Kaduna, Jigawa and some other states have been contending with the almajirai who tested positive to the viral disease after their deportation from Kano State.

    It is therefore to be expected that the presence of such youths in high numbers, defying interstate lockdown is unlikely to go down well with a lot of people. Matters were not helped by their mode of entry into these states. The fact of their being concealed in truckloads of food items and cows that fall within the essential services exempted from inter-state movements’ restriction further lends their motive suspect.

    Many of them have been detected and turned back to their states of take-off while some made a success flouting the restriction order. Eyebrows have been raised by some governors in the south on how the almajirai and the other youths managed to beat the security cordon, in some instances traversing about seven states before they were caught. This has been the source of the suspicion of connivance with security agencies and allegations that the almajirai are on a mission to spread the disease in the southern states.

    Expectedly, there have been altercations in some quarters querying the southern states for turning back the youths to states from which they embarked on the journey. Some have even gone to ridiculous lengths pandering to the fault lines of our defective federal order by insinuating some agenda in the entire exercise.

    They cite extant laws guaranteeing freedom of movement to all citizens to fault the back-loading of the offending youths to their states of embarkation. But that is where they got it all wrong. The fact remains that those youths (whether of the almajiri hue, suspected bandits, terrorists or even innocent people) were on an illegal voyage. There is a subsisting ban on inter-state movements and anybody caught flouting the law deserves corresponding punishment. It is an emergency period and we are all confined to emergency order. We are in abnormal times where the freedom of the citizenry is being circumscribed for public good.

    So it is neither a matter of freedom of movement being assaulted nor that of state governors acting arbitrarily. It has nothing to do with the rights of any and every Nigerian to live in any part of the country of his choice. That right has always been there and all citizens had savored it bountifully.

    But we are being guided by a new order. We are confronted by a viral disease that has held the entire world prostrate. With the pandemic are new challenges, new ways of doing old things. And in these unusual times, there must be strict adherence to extant protocols to substantially tame the ravaging virus.

    These are the sacrifices we should collectively own as part of our contributions to save humanity. So, it gets somewhat confounding when people for whatever reasons, begin to question the decision of the governors of the south to turn back youths attempting to enter their states in manners that are evidently suspicious. The governors are doing the right thing.

    After all, their counterparts in the northern states took the first decision to terminate the age long almajiri order and return inmates to their home states. There are reasons for terminating an order that has been with their establishment for donkey years now. They are entitled to that decision since humanity always contends with change dynamics.

    There are also posers as to what business such young persons with no skills have streaming to the south where competition for survival is very keen. From the reports we get, many of them that managed to get into some southern states were offloaded at the food markets or cow sheds with little evidence they have any roof to lay their heads.

    Some of them stream aimlessly along the roads and markets while others were seen in other open spaces, raising more concerns about their mission. And with the scaling down of business activities consequent upon the lockdown, how this category of people intend to survive remains largely curious. Their presence no doubt, raises serious security concerns especially given the plethora of security challenges the nation is currently facing. These are some of the issues. They go beyond grandstanding and bandying tendentious allegations.

    But the security agencies share much of the blame. These movements could not have been possible without connivance or laxity. It is not a surprise that some governors have accused them of taking bribe in lieu of allowing them free access. It is difficult to fathom how a trailer load of food items carrying a large number of youths could possibly maneuver the security checkpoints on the way from Kano to Oyo or Ebonyi State without being detected. Is that possible? NO!

    But as the nation was contending with these security lapses, there arose a confusing order from the Inspector-General of Police IGP, Adamu Mohammed instructing all police formations not to allow the movement of essential services providers during the period of the subsisting curfew. This came as a rude shock to many as the order contradicted all known norms during emergencies. Even at that, during the many weeks we had to contend with the virus spread, essential services providers had always been allowed free movements.

    So, how come the IGP woke up one morning to decree that this category of people will not be allowed to do their work as the curfew lasted? How come also the senior police officers he purportedly engaged in a virtual meeting with, never drew his attention to the inherent dangers and incongruity of such a directive? And from where did the IGP get the authority to countermand President Buhari’s order on the issue? We ask these questions because in every emergency situation, essential services providers are usually allowed free movement. The law enforcement agencies fall within this category. It is to be imagined what the situation will be if they are restricted from doing their duties during emergencies.

    The IGP has reversed himself. But not before the Lagos State chapter of the Nigerian Medical Association NMA embarked on a sit-at-home strike for being harassed by the police while answering the calls of their duties. Who knows the number of those that suffered fatalities as the counterproductive order lasted? In serious climes, somebody would have lost his job for that irrational and ridiculous order. But not here!

  • Ajayi Crowther University and Osoogun

    Ajayi Crowther University and Osoogun

    By Femi Macaulay

    It is commendable that, from September, Ajayi Crowther University, Oyo, Oyo State, will have a campus in Osoogun, where the celebrated cleric after whom it is named was born and captured by slave dealers in 1821. The private university was established in January 2005.

    “Following a decision from the Governing Council meeting held via Zoom Video Conferencing app on Friday, May 15, 2020, the University is to register its presence at Osoogun town, to further immortalise the Anglican Sage, recognising his works, refined values, achievements and sacrifices,” the university said on its website.

    According to the university’s website, “The Vice-Chancellor, together with the Bishop of the Ajayi Crowther Anglican Diocese, the Rt. Rev. Kemi Oduntan, and a native of Osoogun, Dr. Sola Ojenike, visited this site to earmark parcels of land, about 40 hectares landmass for the Ajayi Crowther University, Osoogun campus.

    “This campus will host the Centre for Anglican Communion Studies, Centre for Mission Studies, Department of History and Archival Studies, Entrepreneurship Centre and Faculty of Agriculture which is to take off in September 2020.”

    The plans include the Crowther Museum and Archive and a mausoleum for Bishop Ajayi Crowther “whose remains need to be reburied in his home town Osoogun.”

    This development is significant, coming after the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM) had chosen the Crowther monument site as one of the country’s 100 most important monuments during the centenary celebration of Nigeria’s amalgamation in 2014.

    Rt. Rev. Oduntan brought the collaboration between the university and the community to my notice. He is a passionate promoter of Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther.  The Baale of Osoogun, Chief Moses Osuolale, “warmly received” the Vice-Chancellor of Ajayi Crowther University, Rt. Rev. Prof. Dapo Asaju, signifying the community’s backing.

    I visited the Crowther monument site some years ago when I attended a Thanksgiving/Holy Communion Service in the village to mark the yearly Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther Day Celebration. The Church of Nigeria, Anglican Communion, has declared October 3 Crowther Remembrance Day.  I saw the storied tree. It is said that Crowther and other captives were tied to this tree before they were sold into slavery.

    Nearby, there were ruins of a place said to be Crowther’s home, where he was captured. There was no architecture in the ruins. A signpost said to have been erected by the Iseyin local government to indicate touristic intentions had no visible inscription.  Crowther’s statue stood at the centre of the village.  The state of a secondary school named Bishop Ajayi Crowther Memorial High School showed neglect.

    In October 2013, the Bishop Ajayi Crowther Diocese in Iseyin, Oyo State, organised a fundraiser for the completion of a new building for the Bishop Ajayi Crowther Memorial Anglican Church in Osoogun.  The old church, built between 1958 and 1960, was in a dishonourable state. The new church is still work in progress.  The truth is that the church needs financial support for completion.

    The birthplace of the illustrious cleric who in 1864 was ordained as the first African bishop of the Anglican Church at a ceremony in England should have a befitting church.  It is a testimony to Crowther’s quality that in the same year he was also given a Doctorate of Divinity by the prestigious University of Oxford.

    It was in Osoogun, in present-day Iseyin local government area, Oyo State, that his life began as well as the story of his life.  It was in his village, Osoogun, that Fulani slave raiders seized him in 1821. He was eventually sold to Portuguese slave traders at the age of 12. The young Ajayi of Yoruba ancestry was rescued by the British navy and taken to Freetown, Sierra Leone.

    Crowther described his enslavement as “the unhappy, but which I am now taught in other respects to call blessed day, which I shall never forget in my life.” In his progression to priestly prominence, he took an unlikely path, helped by unlikely destiny helpers. For him, slavery turned out to be a springboard to celebrity.

    It is noteworthy that in 2015 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, publicly expressed remorse for the sin against Crowther at a   ‘thanksgiving and repentance service’ in England.    Welby is the leader of the Church of England and the symbolic head of the worldwide Anglican Communion. His apology on behalf of the Anglican Church spoke volumes about Crowther’s place in history.

    Welby said: “We in the Church of England need to say sorry that someone was properly and rightly consecrated Bishop and then betrayed and let down and undermined. It was wrong.”  He also said in his sermon: “In spite of immense hardship and despite the racism of many whites, he evangelised so effectively that he was eventually ordained Bishop, over much protest. He led his missionary diocese brilliantly, but was in the end falsely accused and had to resign, not long before his death.”

    Crowther died of a stroke in Lagos in 1891, which was possibly connected with his desolation. “We are sorry for his suffering at the hands of Anglicans in this country,” Welby said.

    Described as “extraordinary,” Crowther played an undeniably effective evangelistic role in the early days of Christianity in Nigeria.  Not for nothing is he regarded as the father of Anglicanism in Nigeria.  “Today, well over 70 million Christians in Nigeria are his spiritual heirs,” Welby said in tribute to his pioneering efforts.

    Crowther’s achievements are remarkable, considering his unremarkable beginnings. Following his conversion to Christianity and his baptism in 1825, he adopted the name of a prominent British clergyman of the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS). He studied in England and attended the Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone, where he advanced his exceptional interest in languages, which became of immense use in evangelism.  He made history when he was ordained as the first African bishop of the Anglican Church.

    Crowther’s language skills produced the first Yoruba translation of the Bible, which was completed in the 1880s, and a Yoruba version of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. These projects demonstrate how seriously he took his Christianity and his evangelism. He also produced primers for the Igbo language and the Nupe language.

    Osoogun is a place of history; and Crowther is a man of history. The Osoogun campus of Ajayi Crowther University will make the community visible, and should help develop the village.  Other projects to promote Crowther’s significance should spring up.

     

  • Three sovereigns

    Three sovereigns

    Sam Omatseye

    Our constitution is a scaffold that wrestles with itself. Since 1999 when it came into being, it has been searching for itself. An odyssey without self-discovery. It is alive with the bones and biceps of a sumo wrestler. It is strong but not healthy. An elephant that is not agile. It roars without a message. Rosy and robust, it is a carrier of diseases. It careers on without a compass. It is a beast, a beauty but also a burden. It is ultimately a priest with dubious sacraments. Justice may be blind, but this is not a maiden with a fold over its eyes. It peers at justice but it tears at it.

    We saw this last week when Covid-19 pitted three forces against themselves over the Friday prayers ahead of Sallah. The Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Saad Abubakar III, warned against any massing of the faithful on prayer grounds because of the dangers of spreading the ailment. Some governors across the north countered that their prayer grounds were holy and wholly for Allah. They ignored the leader of the faith, the ear and eye of the Almighty and oracle of the mystics. The states included Kano, Bauchi, Yobe, Jigawa, Gombe, Borno and Zamfara. From the presidency came the word that everyone should mutter their supplications in the solitude of their closets.

    Suddenly the constitution became a shadow presence in this wrestling match. We are supposed to have a federal constitution. That leaves the decision in the purview of state executives. But the president has powers in a federal constitution to subvert the cocky brow of any state executive. We saw that in the language of the inspector general of Police who warned against any prayer activity, whether Christian or Muslim or even traditional, that contravened the federal position. We often turn the word federal to mean central, which is exactly a travesty.

    As the state-versus-centre conflict unfolds, how is the power of faith? Constitutionally, faith leaders should subject themselves to temporal authorities. So, Lords temporal is powerful. In the hearts of the people, the lords temporal are temporary. The lords spiritual are eternal, come from heaven. The lords temporal are bound by the human document that comes and goes. The lords spiritual, in the people’s heart, may be flesh and blood, but their spirits soar above us, like the eagle consorting with angels. The lords spiritual are in the people’s heart, the temporal in their heads. Hearts trump heads.

    After all, who fights for the nations the way armies scrimmage for gods? Is that not why nations at war coin their patriotism with the register of the almighty? When you fight for the country, you are fighting for God. The enemy nation belongs to Beelzebub. Hitler coined Nazism as a battle between Christ and Jews who slaughtered him? George Bush saw Sadaam as fighting against a Christian America. Saladin in the Crusades inspired the faithful who bested the Christian army and seized Jerusalem for Allah. Even wars against those of the same faith see themselves as authentic believers against hypocrites or despoilers of the sanctum.

    But when the sultan said all the states should respect social distancing, it also provided a paradox. The spiritual authority was bowing to science. The temporal authorities were bowing to faith. Faith respected science; the others defied science. Where does the constitution, a secular document, provide an answer? It would have been interesting if such a matter went to court. The faithful, though, does not need a court. God judges in his time. The seculars live on courts. Such a duel would apply a temporal document, the constitution. The faithful believe Koran superior to the constitution. But the governors, all Muslims, would be in a delicate position dueling against their God in a human court.

    Separation of religion and faith is rooted in Islam. In the early years, scholars stayed away from the government. The Christian faith, which always wanted the church as an interloper, borrowed the concept from Islam. The United States Constitution saw to that in the polemical engineering of Jefferson and Madison, and it made its way into the First and Second amendments. Before that, we know of the Holy Roman Empire, which historians described as neither Roman nor Holy. England formed a church in homage to romantic squabbles with Rome. Men like Thomas Cromwell and Henry the Eighth dramatised the era as superbly recorded by historians and recreated in fiction like the Booker Prize-winning novel, Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. The irony though is that the concept of Caliphacy, which in Nigeria dates to the 1804 Uthman Dan Fodio onslaught, has come to cast Islam as prioritising theocracy over what Buhari has called for today: prayers in the closet. ISIL, Boko Haram, Al Qaida, only are extreme manifestations of the perversions over the ages.

    Jesus himself was not a great advocate of open and uproarious prayers or the open banditry of the prophetic word. He said pray in private, God will reward you openly. He also said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” That is the strain that the Sultan reflected for Islam when he urged caution. Those who defied the sultan were also playing politics with the faith. According to Yusuf Alli’s reporting, some of the governors noted that defying colleagues were influenced by local leaders, including Ulamas. It is the politicisation of the mystical.

    But if the constitution is agnostic, what of the centre versus the periphery? The states, as Lawyer of lawyer Wole Olanipekun, noted in an interview on my TVC Show ‘The Platform’, give birth to the centre. The problem is there was never a formal handover ceremony from the parts to make the whole. Impunity is therefore fuelled by lack of memory. Without memory, there is no desire. How do you say you handed over power to me when there was no such event in history? The 13 colonies did so in the United States and deliberated in perhaps the most turbulent fest of ideas in history.

    The 1999 constitution is foisting an unnatural power from the centre, and that is accounting for the fulminating actions of men like Nyesom Wike. Covid-19 is perhaps bringing out the beast in the Nigerian nation.

    Sallah prayers brought out three De facto sovereigns: the governors, the president and the sultan. The matter is settled outside the constitution. So we ask, why do we need the law? It means that when we have good men, the law is superfluous as Apostle Paul asserts. When we contend with bad laws, good lawyers save them. When we have bad laws, good people save us. What do we have today? We have bad laws searching for good men and lawyers.