The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • The Dean departs

    The Dean departs

    I walked into Lewis Obi’s office at the African Concord, and I saw a man of deceptive simplicity. Babafemi Ojudu had hinted me there was an opening in the magazine for a staff writer position.

     Obi, soft-spoken and grave, said he had been reading me, but wanted me to prove my mettle.

     None of my scripts with Newswatch had impressed him as much as a hand-written note on a fading post-it paper from Dan Agbese. Agbese, who passed recently, had commended me for a series of stories I did where I filled the magazine from cover to cover, from soft stories to an international piece. Bylines are no guarantees you wrote them yourself. Great editors redeem poor writers.

    So, I started a journey with African Concord and with the editor I must give credit for making me bloom uninterrupted.

    Newswatch editors shaped me and honed my skill. Obi allowed me blossom. He is one of the underappreciated journalists in our history. He became editor of African Concord and the magazine was nondescript for a while until he did something extraordinary.

    He recruited some of the best minds of the trade. Some of them have become the backbone of the industry for a generation. They include Ohi Alegbe, Babafemi Ojudu, Dele Momodu, Kunle Ajibade, Femi Macaulay, Kunle Solaja and Seye Kehinde. We joined Okey Ifionu and Victor Omuabor.

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    No intruder, Obi had Bayo Onanuga as deputy and he was a sort of operations manager. The magazine became the best in the country in style, courage and content. When Obi became editor in chief, Onanuga was editor and Dapo Olorunyomi joined the crew.

    I moved to the newspaper’s political desk. No newspaper or magazine has had such a constellation before or since. Each of the fellows in that stable turned out to become leading lights. It is credit to Obi for his genius in getting all of us under one roof and engineering great intellectual discussions that lasted late into the night.

    Under Obi, I started writing essays and cover stories. He handed me a copy of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses mailed overnight by Onanuga from London, and I had four days to read it and do a review and story of the crisis it generated.

     I returned on Friday only to be told there was a Hezbollah threat fueled by a staff of the company. A glum Obi said not to publish.

    I called him Dean of Nigerian columnists then because from the late 1980’s to mid-1990’s he wrote the best columns in the country. Few will forget his masterpiece, The Caliphate’s army. Oga Lewis, thanks for the memory.

  • Did Akintola commit suicide?

    Did Akintola commit suicide?

    History often likes its villains, sometimes more than its heroes. Heroes titillate but can make you yawn. Virtue stirs the soul. Vice pushes us over the cliff. So, Villains make us gasp for exploits of the unknown. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan tempts with tempests in contrast to Christ’s even temper.

    In the Southwest, a familiar villain is Samuel Ladoke Akintola. He was a premier, a polyglot, a wordsmith, a thinker, a wit, a maoeuvrer and a political thespian. If he had all these before he departed history, he would still be a boring, if an eminently accomplished, man. But his imprint on time is what many of his Yoruba folks highlight: his epic betrayal.

    There have been efforts in the past few decades to nuance his tale, to pose him as a man of principle and an icon of governance, and even a faithful follower of the great Yoruba avatar: Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

    This season marks 60 years since he was dispatched during the 1966 coup. Some thought he met his comeuppance while inking their displeasure at the reason behind the episode when a certain Captain Okoro led some soldiers to his Agodi Residence.

     But a question remains quiet in the tale. Why did Akintola not surrender? His deputy, Chief Fani-Kayode, was not killed. They grabbed him, and Akintola was aware. After initial gunfire exchanges, the soldiers ordered him to drop his gun. But the premier would not. He battled to the death.

    This act may benefit from historical insight from a book largely ignored. Aristocratic Rebel is a biography of Nigeria’s top spy in the 1960’s and later an inspector general of police, M.D. Yusufu.

    The book is written by Ayo Opadokun, former secretary of NADECO.

    The book was presented with Yusufu in attendance in 2006, which means he endorsed all that Opadokun wrote in that underplayed classic of the Nigerian story.

    According to Yusufu, Akintola had been invited over to Kaduna by the then premier of Northern Region, Sir Ahmadu Bello on the eve of the coup. What was the reason? According to Yusufu, the NPC with then governor Kashim Ibrahim had asked the Sardauna to convey the decision of the Northern People’s Congress (NPC).

    “It is very clear that the Yoruba don’t like Akintola. Please, call Akintola and tell him that this alliance is off. Let him go and sort out his problem with the Yorubas.” That was the message the Sardauna conveyed to S.L.A.

    “I was the most senior Federal officer, so I had to receive Chief Akintola at the airport. The Sardauna sent along with me one of his ministers – Abuto Obekpa. That is why the New Nigerian (newspaper) photograph on the day of the coup captured me receiving Akintola at the Kaduna airport,” said Yusufu.

    According to Opadokun, …”if Major Kaduna Nzeogwu and his fellow plotters had lingered past that week before staging their coup, perhaps the course of Nigerian history would have altered.” History does not follow a script. It happens based on a constellation of forces. Hence, all true historians know that nothing is inevitable. It does not follow a dice. Hence, we cannot say the coup was inevitable.

    When Akintola returned to Ibadan, what might have boiled over in his mind? We shall never know. But it was obvious from the meeting with his coalition partners, he was a lonely man. Could he have gone back to his Yoruba folks? Could he have bended a knee to Awo and his people? Could he have apologized for his alliance with the NCNC against Awo, for his role in the wetie and the conflagration in the West? For his attitude to Ogunde and the songs of the minstrel that made him a pariah of the region? As professor Jide Akin Osuntokun has reminded us, he was disappointed with appointments at the centre with the Tafawa Balewa government. He was beginning to see that his quest for justice was now belly up. He was already seeing the fruits of treachery. He was not only isolated by his federal allies but also the Yoruba street where some had corrupted his initials S.L.A to Ese ole, that is the leg of a thief.

    Did he welcome the coup as denouement? Was his act of defiance to the soldiers actually a bravado of surrender to fate. Was it an escape route for his pride? Was the Are Onakakanfo  playing out the last act of a Yoruba eschatology?

    This is not only a material of historical inquiry but also for a sort of psyco-history. Did death save him from disgrace? For the realist, this is a grist to investigate the last chapter of valour, a man who had been a fellow traveler of Awolowo and his Action Group, and was such a loyal deputy that he was a natural to take over from Awo as the premier of the region.

    He was a great administrator who actualized much of Awo’s dreams, from Cocoa House to the now Obafemi Awolowo University. Yet, as Shakespeare wrote, the “spirit of men is in their blood.” Akintola saw power and imbued its hubris. The artist, novelist and playwright might see the conflict between character and ambition unfold in a brilliant soul. The playwright may tempt the premise that the man saw death as an opportunity and his great escape from a public apology or opprobrium. That is what a Gibbons or Tacitus or, Ibn Battuta or any  classic historian may dig up from an Akintola narrative.

    But there is another angle, for the traditionalist or cultural historian. One, it is the belief that the Are Onakakanfo, the post of the Yoruba generalissimo, is fated to tragedy. Afonja set the blood-strewn stage. By taking that position, he had signed a cultural death warrant. Did he contemplate it that night of bullets?

    The other point was farther back when the young men of the Yoruba race went to Ife to swear an oath to accept Awolowo as the leader of the Yoruba. The deal foreordained the AG. The other part of the oath is not this essay’s remit. But Akintola was part of the young men. And a line in that oath is, eni to ba dale abale lo. He who betrays will die.

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    Eminent lawyer Rotimi Williams also swore. When he turned his back on Awo, he did not oppose him. It is said that his mother warned him against defying the oath. The man turned to his profession and was never a politician again till he died.

    Was S.L.A’s fate tied to his breaking an oath, or it is mere superstition? This is the sort of story that excites political scientists and historians. Insights into the past and its big men are  not just about what they do but how they are framed by the societies they made and made them.

    In Sophocles’ King Oedipus, the Greek playwright teases the audience as to whether the story of Oedipus’ end is a matter of prophecy or hubris, or both. Our own Ola Rotimi has no patience in his adaptation, he thunders “the Gods are not to Blame.”

    He is taking the realist tack while the play nurtures doubt and sometimes endorses the agenda of the mystical.

     In his essay about such artistic quandary, Soyinka writes of Achebe’s Arrow of God and the author’s contempt for cultural mystery.

    The Nobel laureate describes it as “the secularisation of the profoundly mystical.” Shakespeare addresses this ambiguity in his Macbeth, a king who thinks no man born of a woman can kill him. Mystic fuels hubris to death.

    But to begin any such dialogue here, historians and biographers must address the riddle: Did S.L.A. commit suicide?

  • The Kaduna breach

    The Kaduna breach

    We are living in an era of the coward.

    As we saw recently in Kaduna.

    Guns are no evidence of strength when targets bear no arms.

     A proverb says, a coward is always in the mood to fight when he sees someone he can beat. That is also the definition of a bully.

    The bandit may howl, may tout a gun, may swagger and harumph.

    But he is a tyrant without a heart. So, when they invaded three churches, one a Catholic and the other two Cherubim and Seraphim, they only glorified a faintness of heart.

    Why did they choose to strike in Kaduna? It is tempting to say that it is a violence tinged with or even inspired by ill-will.

    For the past two and half years, the state under its Governor, Uba Sani has steadily steered away the pivotal northwest state from a stereotype of blood and fear.

    So bad was the state under its previous administration that when the then candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu visited one of the hotbeds of terror, it was not a mere campaign stop. It was like an army division rumbling into Giwa, one of the underbellies of bandits.

    Today, the place, including other areas of the state, including Kajuru where the depraved souls struck, have become neon of quiet after eons of violence. Today, Giwa is pivotal to Kaduna’s good times, with loads of lorries shipping cattle down south every day.

    When the story of the strike happened, it must have jolted even those who maintain peace in the state because it might have ruffled an atmosphere of confidence, of immunity. That can happen when you take peace for granted.

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    Perhaps, without excusing the police authorities, that may have led to the tentative acceptance and affirmation of the Kajuru abductions.

    I recall the same happened in the quiescent era of then governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN of Lagos State. Robbers rumbled into town and laid waste a portion of the city. It was a shock even to the elites of security of the state.

    Residents were taken aback, and reminds one of the lines of the Caribbean writer George Lamming, who wrote: “something startled where I thought I was safest.” As they say in security parlance, you only need to be wrong once for disaster to happen. That sort never happened again under Fashola or since.

    Why I suggest that Kaduna kidnapping might have resulted from envy is simple. Kaduna State has served as an island of peace in a turbulent region.

    There are those in the politics of the state and with partisan umbrage over the repeated stories of tranquility in the state.

    They had over the past year been posting narratives to undermine the new trend of security.

    Some of them were reporting the recent abduction not because it was true but as an opportunity to gloat.

    They were not thinking of the children and babies snatched from the belly of their God.

    They were not lamenting the women who had left home with pious songs on their lips and peace for their Sundays. They were not contemplating how that breach had turned an outback village off its balance.

    They did not wonder how fear had paralysed their fellow citizens.

    The coordinated attack on a Sunday makes one wonder if it was not just a mere bandit assault but a sponsored political act of brigandage.

    That might have accounted for why Governor Sani said he was not interested in politics or numbers but the effort to rescue the citizens.

    The target of churches may also raise the spectre as to whether the sponsors wanted to ratchet up an American doubt about government efforts to beat back the bandits and reinforce fantasies about Christian genocide.

    If that is true, then the sponsors, if there were, must be very naïve. It is easy to understand that someone, somewhere does not have peace in their desperate hearts over the rebirth of peace in that land.

    Being an island of peace comes with a price.

    In a recent address at the Nigeria Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Governor Sani had stated that some flashes of violence his government has observed came from other states.

    Could that have been the case with the church abductions? It was observed that the churches were located on the border of forests that abut on highways.

    As a writer stated recently, what happened in Kaduna State is a breach, not a norm.

    The media, in a hurry to report the event, has not put in context the calm of the state in the past couple of years, which must have raised questions as to whether it was a breach taking advantage of police and intelligence complacency, or the work of cohorts with political mischief. Or both.

    It indeed is a matter for investigation. In Shakespeare’s great play of plots and intrigues, Julius Caesar, a character says, “There is but one mind in all these men, and it is bent against Caesar.

    If thou beest not immortal, look about you: security gives way to conspiracy.” We cannot ignore the words of the bard. To investigate is to emphasise vigilance. As Joseph Conrad noted in his novel: The Secret Agent, “protection is the first necessity of opulence and luxury.” The first line of protection is to watch from the tower.

    Governor Sani, as a man with a human and civil rights pedigree, understands that security is not the only solution to insecurity. Hence, as the move to release the abductees continue, he scored two major infrastructure goals. One, with unveiling of the Durum – Kuruntumawa road, leading to eclat and jubilation in Makarfi Local  Government Area, a feat the locals say they had not seen in close to a generation.

    Another is the Audi-Kako asphaltic road in Zaria Local Government Area.

    He has also attacked the issue of unemployment with over 2.5 million citizens empowered with cash for investment. He has also established the largest hub for artisans and training in the subcontinent.

    Efforts like these ensure that to improve security means not thinking about it as security alone.

    It is the work of a governor to ensure the communities work together. That sets the foundation. Security forces take over from that.

    The synergy ensures success.

    Hence Sani over the past two years has stressed this cooperation with Abuja. It should continue. Gov Sani has always stressed the idea of inclusion, and one of his latch keys has been religious harmony.

    He is beloved of southern Kaduna today because he has brought them back into the Kaduna commonwealth. One of such symbolisms is the Christmas Carol services. It does not take away his Muslim fidelity. It shows he is at peace with his faith. He is also showing he is governor of all.

    But what is important for now is to bring home the innocents from the clutches of the cowards. That will be in spite of the Shakespeare line that “security is the chief enemy of mortals,” especially partisan mortals.

  • Awujale uproar and other stories

    Awujale uproar and other stories

    The uproar of the Awujale throne reflects a truth we deny in our souls. That we are republicans first. We may love democracy, go to polls, elect our governors and presidents, embrace constitutions and heckle our lawmakers.

    But everything shows that we love our monarchies just as much. The British created the House of Chiefs to defang the kings. They subjected them to civil authorities. The British were pretending to give us democracy without its cardinal tenet: freedom. It reminds one of the quote from Poet Lord Byron on Metternich of Austria: “he had no objection to true liberty except that  it will set them free.”

    Our kings have been without power. That is hard power, apologies to Harvard Professor Joseph Nye. But they have not lost soft power. And at the core of that soft power is honour, which philosopher Montesquieu says is the highest asset of monarchies. That honour is at the core of our spiritual sense of being.

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    That honour is the reason we have seen battles for the thrones not only in Ijebuland but across the country. We are still watching from the ringside the battle for supremacy between the Alafin of Oyo and the Ooni of Ife. Not long ago, the Ibadan traditional throne roiled after former Governor Abiola Ajimobi tweaked the status of lower cadre of rulers. In Benin, the former governor of Edo State, Godwin Obaseki, was in an atavistic battle with the Oba of Benin by trying to upset his supremacy with upstart chiefs.

    The Kano throne continues to excite the nation with the spectre of two emirs and the governor playing a delicate balancing role. The courts are also coy at resolving it.

    All politicians technically are above the kings. They dare not tell their subjects so, or even flex a superior eye. Even presidents will rile them at their own peril. Let us stop pretending that we are republicans. Modernity may be seductive. But our roots are too deep to yield.

  • No deadline for Oga Ray

    No deadline for Oga Ray

     We called him Yakky. We last met at the presentation of his memoirs, Beyond Expectations. When I left the NIIA venue, I did not know I was saying a final goodbye to Yakubu Mohammed.

    He was one of the four Newswatch Magazine founders, and the project of a generation was even his idea. He organized the seed financier. I never met Dele Giwa, although he was a sort of mentor and inspiration from afar. I learned different traits from Dan Agbese and Ray Ekpu. The great trait I learned from Yakky was to lead without being a bully. No one feared him. He never wanted anyone to fear him. But he was immensely respected. That is how I have tried to operate as a manager. It is Machiavelli, who recommended that leaders should be feared more than respected. That is weakness.

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    When we were paying tributes to Agbese a few weeks ago, Yakky was alive. No one thought he would be rested in the earth before my beloved Dan the Butcher. The one man alive is Oga Ray. Whatever you do, Oga Ray, you are not permitted to go. We are praying to Olorun Jehovah on our part. But on earth, beware of what you eat. How you exercise. Don’t stress, don’t eat that thing that upsets your guts, or take that beer a sip too much.

    You are a master of deadlines. There are no deadlines for Ray Ekpu. This is an order. Give us time to absorb the agonies and obsequies of Dan and Yakky. Please, spare us another. Not now.

  • Imam who saved Christians

    Imam who saved Christians

    Today, I reproduce my encounter with Abubakar Abdullahi, the genial matador for human coexistence, after he saved at least 500  Christians from a rage of bandits in Plateau State.

    Before he was an Imam, he was a man. He was 90.

    Before embarking on the journey, some locals said it was not far from Jos. Maybe 30 minutes. They may have been right if they reckoned with the landscape. The vision ahead promised booby-traps of bumps and body aches, even in a Toyota Land Cruiser that subdues rugged terrain into peculiar expressways.

    A contrast to what I had always known of Plateau State, with its breath-taking verdure, arboreal paradise and climate imported from Eden. The road to Yelwa Gindi Akwati was bald and ferocious with its dips, sways and rises on a rocky ride. Past tin mining sites, past monster rocks, riding through sand-clogged streams, the air sometimes crisp, sometimes a riot of dust. On mine sites, the graders lay still in mud-spattered cradles. Wealth lay beneath but everywhere you looked, poverty snorted. Someone remarked it was the scar of a failing federal system. Plateau State Governor Simon Lalong has lamented how rogue oligarchs with brigands siphon its mineral bounty.

    Peaks and valleys drape our vehicle with lights and shadows as we ride up and down the ragged road. We navigated a clump of trees here, a lone mango tree here and row of pear trees there, sometimes stunningly lush and some fading out of glory, all like sturdy fingers pointing to a baleful firmament. Also a cluster of grassy lawns had lost their lustre, but remain as insistent green carpets defying a birdless sky and an arid stretch of undulating land.

    “That is the first house they attacked and killed people,” a guide said, pointing to a mud house. The blend of thatched and zinc roof, black from fire, scattered all over a broken wall. We saw quite a few of such houses. It happened June 23, when a band of renegades rattled into Yelwa Gindi Akwati about 4pm with AK47, and undertook an orgy of killings and made a bonfire of homes. Their targets: Christians. That village also tenanted our hero.

    In the midst of this barbarous temerity, an 83-year-old man, Abubakar Abdullahi, stood for God and humans. He opened his mosque and his home. All who could enter he would defend. He had no arms, no brawn, no army. He, a fragile old man, with a soft voice and granite heart, asked the mosque to be locked, including an adjunct mosque. The mosques were filled. The overflow headed to his home of about five rooms. Men, women, children, all took shelter with their faith and an imam as their anchor. The goons came. The man stood at his door, between the militants and the helpless beings. The sky burst with rain, and the Imam fended them off with a plea. His mien appealed to them to save the souls.

    “I didn’t say anything to them,” he told me. “I was praying in my heart and looking at them.” The men were hooded, and spoke Hausa, Fulani and English, he said. As he stood before them, he tripped and fell. Rather than step over him, they stepped away, banged at the door of the mosque as well, but also left. All the lives were saved. Most of them Christians, as attested to by the Birom I saw there and his fellow custodians of the mosque.

    Were they 300? I asked. He said they were so many he could not count. I entered the mosque. If it was crammed full with people lying on the floor, it could have taken five hundred. It was not only Christians from his village but also those who fled there from neighbouring communities, including a place called Ex Land.

    In a region where Christians and Muslims have been reported to be at daggers-drawn, where the so-called herdsmen and farmers only met in blood puddles, this Imam bucked the narrative. He dared to disdain his personal safety for others and valorised human life without prejudice to religion. Because of him, hundreds of Nigerian men, women and children, secure a second chance in a year of wanton waste of sacred lives under the slaughter of ethnic and religious militants.

    He shunned the apocalypse of religious conflict and embraced peace now. Much was said about our Shero, Leah Sharibu, who stood her ground and would not surrender her Christian conscience on pain of death. She was a story of innocence and assertion of human resolve over the pressure of zealots. She represented the insistence of faith and human right.  The Imam staked his life to save hundreds of children like Leah and fathers and mothers. She tempted sectarian fealty, while the old man hailed over borders.

    Abubakar is a universal spirit. The Christian zealot will see remorse, the Muslim fanatic will find a new path, the atheist will coddle human pathos. He was a man with true evangelical zeal. A puritan of love and peace.  A partisan of harmony, not sects. He is not like the clerics who yelled for revenge, some in churches and others in mosques, cutting human society in cleavages of faith and murder.

    He did not abandon the Christians because they serve a different deity. “We are all children of God. Both faiths want peace.” He said.

    He counters the narrative where Christians in the United States bar Muslims from their country, and radical Muslims in the Middle East rape and slaughter Christians, where in North East, Boko Haram turns blood-filled eyes at The Holy Spirit, where a minister of defence is howling for grazing routes. Also a misguided president utters a wry plea for neighbours to accommodate each other. Mass deaths, mass burials. Dusk rapines, night raids. Families in disarray. We had all these where a man said no to slaughter, and yes to life.

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    Abubakar moved there like other Hausa-Fulani folks have done over the decades. The village has been a model of inter-faith harmony and even marriages. He arrived there in the early 1950’s when the Sardauna became the premier of Northern region.

    “The Christians welcomed us and gave us land,” he said. “We have lived together in peace ever since.” He noted that the Christians gave them the land where the mosque was built and they even contributed about N60,000 to build it.

     He also said those who preach hate between the religions have not studied the books.

    “I have read the Bible as well as the Qur’an,” he asserted. He read Hausa version. He spoke through translators. He said he saw many similarities between both faiths, and he read about Jesus’ miracles and all the stories, especially in the Old Testaments. “Jesus was mentioned about 25 times in the Qur’an and Mohammed five times,” he said. So he saw no reason for any frictions.

    Unlike many clerics, Christian and Muslim, who never face the ultimate test of faith, Abubakar excelled. In the novel Middlemarch by George Eliot, a young man who was undertaking a training to be a cleric raised doubts in the minds of some young women.

     A character said: “He would be a great hypocrite. But not yet.” It is like what Prophet Isaiah says of the weak,’’the children came to the birth, there is no strength to bring forth’’. Until a cleric excels like Abubakar, the potential of hypocrite hovers. Few are chosen.

    As for courage, he has no equal. He even turned down the government’s offer for protection. He deserves one of our highest national awards.

    He wanted to be a soldier and fight during the civil war. However, he had to remain at home to nurse his ailing father. When he died, Abubakar became Imam.          

  • BJ at 80

    BJ at 80

    It was a drama of an evening. It was more than a dinner for Professor Biodun Jeyifo. BJ, as he is fondly called, was marking his 80th birthday. He was not going to be generous to the man sitting next to him. Wole Soyinka, that is.

    He launched a barb at the bard. The memory travelled about 60 years ago. He charged that Soyinka only taught class twice in the full year, in the end, BJ was given a miserly B. Kunle Ajibade loomed from the sideline and tried to see the virtue of it all.

    If it was any consolation, Soyinka had invited him to abandon the English department and join him at dramatic arts. After a hesitation, BJ joined him and moved away from what Soyinka described as deadwoods.

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    Soyinka defended himself as a teacher, going back to his father Essay, and how he has the teacher gene. If he was able to pummel him with a humilating B, Soyinka did two things. First, he made a case for BJ to make a first class.

    WS made a fervent plea for BJ and wondered whether there was any essay that could match the authority of his voice and the rigour of his perspective. Soyinka made the point and won the day for BJ and became third to make first class in the history of the premier university.

    BJ would make the point later that that he was himself not liberal with his marks. At a panel held earlier, I spoke of his generosity. In a last class, I recalled using the word antipodal. The class drowned me in an uproar and they thought I was a showoff.

    ‘I like that word,” said BJ.

    I was vindicated. Ajibade and Ogoga Ifowodo made the point that BJ was stingy with his marks. It was paradox that he would complain of being shortchanged. There was  a case of an essay written by  Femi Macaulay. He scored him A- there was no such category as A-. He called Macaulay to his office and contended that the piece was not an a and not  b+. he just would not let Macaulay be.

    After his querulous issues with Soyinka. BJ confessed that WS gave him a note that opened his career in the United States.

    Dr. Bisi Anyadike, who runs a  school at Ife gushes  about how BJ inspired her.

  • Sheriff the Taiwo

    Sheriff the Taiwo

    All the talk of defection today began with a man’s daring step. Delta State Governor Sheriff Oborevwori broke the ice when he dumped the PDP. He is what, in Yoruba cosmology, may be called Taiwo. When twins are born, Taiwo comes first out of the mother’s womb as an exploratory act. He is sent to find out if this life is worth living. When he does not return, Kehinde, the other twin, after a wait, decides to join the brother or sister.

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    The sheriff opened the door, tasted the other side, did not return or look back like Lot’s wife. Others followed in his footsteps. It is the audacity of the frontiersman. It has become almost routine for the APC, and the last at the time of writing, was Caleb Mutfwang of Plateau State. He capped the whole of the north central with Benue, Kogi, Nasarawa and Niger states.

     It is always good to remember who took the first step. When he did it, it was courage. When they do it now, it is routine. Sheriff was the shepherd. Others the faithful sheep.

  • Billionaire squatters

    Billionaire squatters

    The picture of the coalition of the wounded a few days ago after Peter Obi’s next bus stop resembles the forty men who worked up a futile conspiracy against Apostle Paul. It was on false charges. They neither ate nor drank as part of their spiritual quest. They waited on God until they slay Paul. They tasted no morsel. A waste of palate. They also lay in a mockery of an ambush.

    Well, it had a good ending. Paul lived so they could eat. They were too cowardly to die.

    These so-called ADC men are not the types to neither eat nor drink. In fact, they are too fed to be fed up with the gourmet’s table. One of them, though, made a public farce in fancy clothes and pleaded hunger on television in a bash for billionaires. One of them has a Damocles of corruption hanging over his wife for billions of naira without a month of work. None of them would even fast except the mullah among them with a beard and a forked and profane tongue. He is fattening on the image of a pariah.

    The hypocrisy of brothers, but much more. It started with the squat figure among them who was shooed out of Kaduna like a bleating goat in a garden. He moved from the APC to the SDP, and asked over all his fellowship of wounded to a house of refuge. Some of them have a sore head or broken knee. He assumed a proprietary air. Then the owners of the land said he, an interloper, was a squatter. The landlords had no place for him. He had no grassroots cred, no papers, no love. The habitual noisemaker turned voiceless and even meek.

    They all, the wounded, remained in limbo for days. They developed an independent spirit, and wanted a party of their own. They were not good at it as they formed a new party known as ADA. It sounds like someone’s sister or mother or wife. Poor planners that they were, they discovered they had conjured up a copycat. They went back to their vomit. An existing party already had that signature. They were trying to imitate the coalition they were planning to defeat. Their first step was a crash, to copycat a name. A bad case of caricature.

    Then suddenly, they all came together under the aegis of the ADC. All we saw was a bad alloy of retirees. The new entrants of the ADC were bloated. Bloated as in bored. Too much money and nothing else to do with it. Preening, privileged, patrician.

    They had hardly enjoyed their new home when the true owners, just like the SDP, told them they are squatters. They came with area boys’ swagger. They are banding together to take over another person’s property. They are the impostors of the Omo Oniles of Lagos. If they are not bandits, what other word can describe them? They are the Bello Turji of today’s politics.

    They are all experienced politicians. But so far, they have shown that they do not know how to do a naming ceremony of a party, and cannot form a party. They do not know how to defect. Some of them have not left the Labour Party.  Those who left, like our man from Anambra State, did not know how to register. In the name of ethnic parapoism, he ignored the law and process. Enugu stakeholders say he is not of them or with them. So, they lashed at him. They do not know how to take over a party.

    Obi cannot leave his Obidient rabble in the lurch. He is hoping for a takeover of his own. If they do not give him the ticket, just as PDP did not in 2022, where would he go? Would he return to his tent to embrace his crowd of hecklers?. They say they will abide with him. Are his followers going to be obedient to Atiku? Is their leader now going back to his vomit as second fiddle? Is he going to content himself by returning to the boys’ quarters as Atiku boy? He cannot abandon his followers. They are his breath of life. He is just a squatter among squatters waiting to be a landlord. As for the other fellow, his hunger is a grudge match. He has nowhere to go but to bow to an inevitable crash.

    Atiku, the grand patron of defectors, has a bigger grudge. This is his last chance, and he is going to fight like a bear with a sore head. What we have in this new coalition are coalitions within a coalition. We have the Atiku crowd, the Obi crowd, the El-Rufai cretins and the Amaechi amen sayers.  When these bacilli of ambitions coalesce, we can only wait for the end of the story. We are in the first act of an interesting drama, and the most important conflict is not their ambitions and party nominations. It is the prospect of a legal and ego turmoil that threatens to end up like the Labour Party and PDP crises. Maybe not as bad. But not good enough for a fighter. Claims of conflicting legitimacy may splinter the organ. Everyone may realise that they are tenants of a tenant. Ralph Nwosu, a self-imposed place holder as ADC leader, will tell them, “I thought I was a landlord, but I cannot return your rent. Sorry.”

    The other issue though is that none of them has a big hold on their states or regions. Not David Mark, not El Rufai, who was shooed out, not Amaechi, who cannot hold 13 percent of Rivers State, not Rauf Aregbesola, who can only fete Atiku to a protem breakfast, not Atiku, who has been dishonoured from a title.

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    The bigger point of this so-called delusion is their claim that they are the rescuers of Nigeria. They are trying to play on our collective amnesia. They forget that we know all of them. This new group can be divided into major two past governments. The first are the Jonathan men. The second are the Buharists. These are the men who battled against each other just a few years ago. It shows us ideas have no traction in their action. The only outlier in the group is Atiku Abubakar, who has always been for everyone and for nobody. For instance, was Amaechi not a Buharist? Of course, just like Malami, who rose from fringe lawyer to attorney general. That man who spent the holidays with wife and son in prison for coddling loots cannot be thinking about ADC now. The Jonathan crowd is led by David Mark who this time is going to show us how the poor can afford telephones. For the Genzs and Millennials, this man was a minister under IBB’s military government and mocked the poor who could not afford telephones.

    These two governments, Buhari and Jonathan, precipitated the crisis that the present government is trying to solve. The Jonathan era wasted the boon of oil and had no rubric for solving the security burden. They spent the nation into huge deficits and rolled the country into foreign exchange rut. The Buhari administration was a footloose amalgam of failed men like Malami, who ran the country into a spend-and-waste economy in which N30 trillion  and billions of naira in debt made the present government the real rescuer. Now, they want to turn the logic on its head. They committed the sin and they are calling themselves the saviour. The sinner and saviour in one breath. They are a parody of the messiah. Jesus bore the sin without committing any. This is what made Jesus angry with the Pharisees. He said they were whited sepulchres full of dead men’s bones.

    The coalition should respond to the elimination of ways and means of N30 trillion and the billions of dollars of debts. These were the burdens that these same men created in the years of the locusts.

    They are playing geriatric politics, the game of old men who know that the time of the end has come for their dreams. It reminds me of the chilling biography about Nazi holocaust titled: Cold Crematorium by Josef Debreczeni. It is perhaps the chilliest eyewitness account of that misbegotten time. He wrote of a part of the concentration camp where the inmates were at once out of breath and still alive. Scrawny, wounded, slobbering, febrile, sterile, weak. Waiting for the grim reaper. Crematorium is hot by definition. But he called it cold because they did not need to go through the gas chamber to go.

    In the case of the coalition, time is their cold crematorium. In his prison memoirs, Soyinka called such fate slow lynching, the title he wanted to call The Man Died. These men of different stripes in ADC are typing out their last days as an assembly. Cobbled together by expired fantasies of power, they are awaiting ADC’s epitaph.

  • Who is on talakawa’s side?

    Who is on talakawa’s side?

    The state of the talakawa. That is the story we hardly tell in the whole theatre of banditry. Yet we know that it is the poor in the north who do everything. They are poor so the elite can preen. They wash their clothes, clean their cars, secure their homes, flatter their vanity in songs and dances, cook for them, fight for them. When it is over, they die for them. They are the lambs on the slab.

    For those who know them, they are called the almajiris. They are innocent on the streets, pan in hand with beggary looks. When I was a youth Corps member in Wudil in Kano State, I had one as friend. He ran errands for me. Mosquitoes upended my joy and he was by me day and night like a son as I tried to shake off the pangs and shivers of malaria. I don’t remember his name now. But I know he needed some mentor or official policy to redeem him from the life of a happy mendicant.

    I remember boys like him today, and I wonder what and who he is today. Is he in the throes of banditry?   Oliver Twist or a redemptive tale like Pip in A Great expectation? Is he still in the precinct trying to live out his days under the mercies of a kitchen, or a dinner leftover, or working like another friend I had in Kano city known as Sunusi, who was a security person but who could read every word of the newspaper?

    That was what we should contemplate as we await details of the sweet morsels of 16 tomahawks that rattled southern Sokoto. Some are trying to spin it in different ways. To some, it is America invading northern Nigeria. Some said it is the government of Tinubu, who allowed an imperialist to undercut our sovereign pride. Gumi, the irritant foul mouth, would rather have Turkey do it.

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    What is left out is the little boy and little girl, their fathers and mothers in the underbelly of the north. The man who had been paying fines or taxes just to retrieve masara or shinkafa from his farm. The mother who cannot travel without fear to her daughter’s wedding or son in the hospital. The fellow who has lost all hope because the bandits have destroyed all lifelines and he has caved in to their logic of brigandage. He now survives supplying them food and medicine. Of the mother who now carts her daughters to their beastly arms as aquiline comforts.

    They are the ones who live in the underbelly of Sokoto and Kebbi and Zamfara. They are the little fellows whose children lay in bunks and are ferried away by the goons of plunder. They are the ones who get slaughtered on the highways, on the farms, on the way to mosques. They are the defenceless citizens who seek mercy but get death.

    They have no one to cry to and nowhere to scream, except to their boy wonders of Ak47 and in their lairs in the forest glades of hate. They are the folks we must think about this season. We must not look at the bullets that torch the goons, because they have no mercy in the fibres of their beings. We must not look at it with the eyes of partisan fights because the first people we must fight for are those who have no Ak47 or armoured cars or who do not have bank accounts in Abuja.

    Hence, it was a pity when a section of the northern elite has kept quiet and tried to weaponize the misery of the folks for partisan benefits. But it is this section of the northern elite who have shown no pity for the commonfolk. They are not only politicians but a few clerics and even intellectuals and media. They think the fight to stop the hoodlums is about fighting against a region.  We have heard about the tormented soul of Gumi and his cohorts and a few politicians including men like Nasir el Rufai and Prof  Usman Yusuf, although the small fellow had said nothing at the time of writing. He had tried to turn ploughshares into swords, seeing a north and south duel when it should all be about lifting the real small fellows in the north. His successor is showing him how to do it.

    Thank God not all of the northern big men think like Gumi and some top media fellows who see fire when there is light. The fellows who do live in the secluded luxury of feudal rampart. They are not affected by all the hoopla of bandit carnivores. Their children are not in those schools. none of the reports has indicated that even the Kebbi incident involved a big man’s daughter. No. Their children are either in a top school in an impenetrable enclosure in Abuja or in the London at Eaton, or in Switzerland or in Canada or in Dubai or the United States.

    They do not need the hospitals. They go for checkups in the U.K. or Germany, when they are not splashing huge sums in choice clinics in Abuja or Lagos. They do not have to go to a bank in town. They have dollars at the ready, and they will spend at will. They have their homes in secure precincts, and their security guards are armed to the teeth. If you get past the security, the homes are fortes.

    They do not need to go to the markets where bandits storm and loot and kill. Their kitchens sizzle with aromas inside a fortress of their homes, and all the choice dinners and lunches and breakfasts are chummy between their tongues and lips.

    The poor pray in public mosques. The rich talk to God from beneath their roofs. They pray in peace, except when they fortify their ride to and from the place of worship.

    They are immune from all the news of the slaughters and tears in the villages and towns in the north. Hence some, like Bashir Dalhatu, who was an Abacha crony and now the leader of Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), can compare them to the Niger Delta militants. And they are saying we should coddle the goons.

    It is sentiment like this that gave birth to Aminu Kano with his Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU) and later the People’s Redemption Party (PRP) and he held sway in Kano and Kaduna, and some of the northern progressives today still see him as their ancestor. Alhaji Kano still personifies the tendency of talakawa empathy today as we can see in Kano and Kaduna where strong strands of people empathy still assert themselves.

    It is a time like this that we know who is on the people’s side and those who are in the cocky circle, looking down on the majority with disdain and make merchandise of the talakawa and politics of their aches and pains. This is not the time to turn the people against their helpers as Shakespeare narrated in his play Coriolanus.