The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Dearth of salesmen

    Dearth of salesmen

    Since I read the play, Death of a Salesman, about two decades ago, I have never lived down the pithy vitality of its language, its barebones fury and patterned telling of a lovelorn world. Its genius of moral ambiguity is vitiated by a harsh human story that haunts all those who believe they will grow old one day.

    But most potent for me has been its message about the ordinary worker, who toils from day to day and loses most of his life force to the employer, whose savage flair for profit is exceeded only by a fierce disregard for the tint and tonic of blood flowing cheerlessly in the veins of the employee.

    At the end of the day, the hoary hour comes. He stares at the stark emptiness of his stewardship of many years, his inability to care for home and hearth, and to keep the family out of want and despair. He kills himself because the salesman made his pitches, travelled the cities of America in its grim entrails, and comes back to realise that, for all his sacrifices, he never really made a sale.

    The play, written by American author Arthur Miller, was received by the world with chilly gratitude for its poignant tone and cheeky sincerity. For me, it has been a story that reminds me always of many loved ones I have known over the years, who have worked their whole lives and ended up as though, as Willy Loman – the main character – says, their lives were a “wonderful lie.”

    Individuals may not make a sale, but what of a nation, or a government, when it desires to sell itself? For the first time, I was compelled to look at the play in the context of a nation selling itself last month in New York, the world’s headquarters of the sale.

    It was at the tony New York Palace Hotel, located in the 50th street in Manhattan, around some of the shops and offices advertising and selling some of the world’s marquee brands. Feet fast and eyes dreamy, many buyers and sellers find the ambience of Manhattan the congenial locale. So that was where the Nigerian Roundtable took place, and it was billed as an investment forum to advertise Nigeria’s best to a city and world of appetite and profit.

    But when I entered the hotel, I saw the sights that could only be described as Nigerian. I met a lady, dressed in a iro and buba and it was easy to know she was one of us and I asked where the Nigerian event was happening. I was on vacation, and I wanted only to enjoy the sights and other joys of the city. But the reporter could not miss out on such a potential news event. It turned out, though, that while I waited to see foreigners, all I saw were Nigerians. Most of them were dressed in suits, except some of the women, especially the two dames of subsidy, Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and Petroleum Minister Diezani Allison-Madueke.

    My eyes swept over the hall. I saw only a sprinkle of foreigners. Most of the attendees were Nigerians. I wondered what the difference could have been if the show took place in the tranquil relic of Lokoja or conceited grandeur of Abuja or in the bustle of Lagos.

    The Jonathan administration festooned the place with ministers and special advisers and even envoys from outside the United States. You would think it was a big deal, and Nigeria was going to finally nail the issue of investment.

    But as speaker after speaker spoke, it was clear this was a case of Nigerians talking to Nigerians. The few foreigners were already doing business or talking business with Nigeria, including Goldman Sachs. And I spoke to a lady, an American who said she belonged to a consulting firm for companies that invested “in your country.”

    So while a lady like Allison-Madueke made an elaborate show of making a pitch, I could not but see how comic it all was. She spoke about the changes in the oil sector including NNPC unbundling as well as the new bill, and she celebrated the upsurge in electricity supply. More comical was Okonjo-Iweala, who had earlier been cautioned by reporters when she rebuffed a question from this newspaper’s correspondent based in the U.S. She spoke at the event about savings, about the government’s attempt to restrain its spending and the general atmosphere of ease for investment.

    But what was odd was that two state governments that had good stories to tell were put in the middle of this oddity. They included the Delta State Government and the Akwa Ibom State Government. Delta State Governor Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan was represented by his senior adviser, Oma Djebah. Dr. Uduaghan, I learned, had to return to Nigeria for pressing matters after a high-scale meeting with the top brass of French diplomats, including the prime minister, for bilateral matters. Djebah, in his characteristic verve, spoke of Delta State’s potential in such areas as agriculture, health, maritime, manufacturing and education.

    But what caught the imagination was when Akwa Ibom Governor Godswill Akpabio took the stage. He had been on song speaking about his infrastructure accomplishments, as well as the investment potentials of power, education, agriculture and a wide gamut. He is one of the best governors in telling his own story, with clear-eyed humour and enthusiasm. But the drama came when Okonjo-Iweala interjected and wanted Akpabio to speak in favour of savings.

    “But I am in a spending mode,” answered Governor Akpabio, smiling. The Finance Minister, who is often described as the coordinating minister of the economy, generated some murmur in the audience, and some wondered why the minister was sounding such naïve tones.

    I wondered how a country that had poor infrastructure, education, healthcare, and many other deficiencies would be speaking savings in an investment forum when it expected people to come in and spend. It is a reflection of how Okonjo-Iweala does not understand her job that she had to embarrass herself and the country. Anyway, only a sprinkling of foreigners was there.

    Is it not by spending that you energise a poor economy? Even anti-Keynesians also know.

    Just outside, I encountered a local newspaper the New York Post that reported that Nigerian contingent who attended the United Nations General assembly had enmeshed New York traffic with its big limousines in major arteries. They wondered how such a country with its poor profile should make a grandiloquent contrast in their roads. No wonder President Jonathan came with a flood of ministers and other aides. Our nation went to New York to sell itself but New York was absent at the party. It became an interior monologue. We failed there. Then we sold something awful: our primitive love of excess with our limousines. New York did not buy.

    The worst sale came during the meeting of the U.N. on polio with President Goodluck Jonathan attending. I managed to attend. Two things struck me. Our President Acted unpresidential when the Australian prime minister entered late. She shook hands with Bill Gates and others including Pakistani prime minister. They all sat down to shake her hands. When it got to Jonathan’s, he stood up. Next was U.S. Secretary of Health who also did not stand up. Our president slumped back to his seat as though unable to find traction sitting upright. That was not a good way to sell a President. The other point was that the President said he would eradicate polio when this term ends in 2015. Fellow Nigerians, President Jonathan has now told us that he would run for another term. A poor way to sell an intention. I wonder what his speech writers were thinking, just as his Independence day stumble.

    We don’t have many good salesmen.

     

    Mimiko’s mimic men

    My column last week generated not a few hate mails from those who clearly were partisan and I accept that. They are MimiKo’s mimic men. But none of them was able to fault my content. They just questioned my motive. That is a clear case of intellectual ignorance. Rather than read, they were embroiled in psychodynamic rigmarole. They chased the wind on end. That is the quality of the coward. I would really like it if readers actually read.

  • Brother today, gone tomorrow

    Brother today, gone tomorrow

    A story looms in Ondo State, and it is not just about Governor Olusegun Mimiko and his opponents. He has cast himself a pariah to the story of brotherly love in the Southwest with the cold eyes he casts on the cooperative spirit of the Southwest. But the election is about that but not about that.

    It is about whether the man who rode to power on wavelets of glee, éclat and abundance of hope has translated programmes into fruition of joys for his people. But it is about that and something else.

    For me, it is about history and its perfidies. Is it possible that the people of Ondo State, with their historic warrior pedigree and political literacy, forget who now stands as their chief executive? We are our memories. Once we forget, we are lost.

    Mimiko came to power with the air of a progressive, and many thought, including yours truly, that he had defrocked himself of his unstable past. Unstable in the sense of his sense of association. You associate with those with whom you share things, and not for the opportunism of personal profit.

    When he decided to abandon Obasanjo, who was no little villain at the time, one could have thought that Mimiko had decided at last to prove his critics wrong. He had changed his chameleonic obsessions. He had become born again as a man of constant beliefs. That he would not allow the refrain gain ground that this man who jumps ship will jump ship again. That his hop from one party pole to another has made him too much of a feverish self-seeker, traitor, apostate, impostor even to the point of sanctimony. Brother today, gone tomorrow.

    What Mimiko is doing by cozying up in the labour party against those who made him, his Southwest blood, reminds one of the words of Joseph Conrad: “There is no friend or enemy like a brother.”

    But the rhythm of the Yoruba race, as other races, does not play out without turncoats. It all began with the Yoruba wars of the 19th century. If the Yoruba wars made the Yoruba race, Awolowo made the Yoruba man. The Yoruba wars threw up motifs of heroes and traitors, and it was sometimes difficult to tell one from the other. Whether it was the palace intrigue that upended the naïve Aole, or the rampaging Afonja, or the patrician pretensions of Ijaiye’s Kurunmi, or the Kiriji inferno, or the republican stealth of the Ibadan generals, the definition of hero sometimes depended on where you stood. What came out of that war was that each group in the Yoruba race fashioned its own identity based on sovereignty.

    Enter Awolowo. The patriarch defined along what principle that sovereignty rode, and it was properly explained by the great scholars who told the story in the days of its crucible. Richard L. Sklar and Billy J. Dudley documented the Egbe Omo Oduduwa and its transformation to the Action Group party, and how most of its members reflected the ideological leanings of its people: the progressive world view. But there were principled dissenters. One of the most prominent was Adegoke Adelabu, the impresario as conservative who held the region in spell if only for his theatrics. But he was respected and respectable for his consistency.

    What the southwest sought to avoid was the turncoat, the sort that pretended to belong. That was the cloth from which Ladoke Akintola was cut. As Awo was the John the Baptist of the modern Yoruba man, Akintola gave birth to the traitor. We have had a good number of them, if in little incarnations. One of them was Omoboriowo.

    It is interesting that Mimiko was in bed with the Southwest ‘quisling,’ when the pulse of the region beat with the hoary wisdom of Chief Ajasin. I have wondered how a man who supped with Omoboriowo, with all we know about him, could enjoy trust among progressives. It is the story not only of forgiveness but naivety in Southwest politics. But it is the story of Nigerian politics as a whole where party or group membership tests do not consider the rigour of belief and activities. It is also a testament to the chameleonic agility of Mimiko to manoeuvre through the thickets of regional politics.

    He was not done. He moved in with former Ondo State Governor Adefarati where he served in pivotal positions, and the man thought Mimiko was the man in whom he was well pleased. Mimiko could still hop out of the camp. He saw Agagu, the former Ondo State governor, and liked what he saw. He also served with him, even though Agagu belonged in a polar opposite party.

    He left Agagu and moved to the centre with Obasanjo, probably in the hope of working with him to torpedo the governor under whom he served. He did not get his wish and went to the Labour Party, and earned the support of the Southwest. He left Obasanjo for the same reason he joined him: self-interest.

    When he became governor, he seemed set to change the state. He began with what he called quick wins, in which he gave communities what they craved, like a town hall. But this was the work of the local governments which in his four years he has disenfranchised by not organising elections, and making no plans in that direction. He set himself to build a model school, on whose dream he has not delivered. He has not completed one road project. He has built the mother and child hospital, which is commendable, but he makes so much noise out of this whereas other states, such as Lagos and Delta that have done more do not make so much noise.

    The markets he built are for local governments, and is that how to account for the money he collected in three and half years as the only Southwest oil-producing state. If he goes next door to Ekiti State, he will see what Governor Kayode Fayemi has done within two years. The whole of Ado-Ekiti is a massive infrastructure site, a thing that marvelled many who visited when he buried his mother a few months ago. Also next door in Edo State, Governor Adams is another marvel. Mimiko is sandwiched between performers. His anaemic stewardship is his worst show of betrayal.

    Betraying the people is at the heart of the matter. In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare portrays Brutus as the traitor. But the real history shows otherwise. The historical Caesar betrayed Pompey, and Brutus stabbed him. Caesar was not popular with the people. Brutus betrayed Caesar, but Caesar betrayed the people. Shakespeare cast Brutus to be a worse villain than he was. The real traitor in history is Judas, who was trusted and betrayed the soul of a whole faith and world.

    You can betray your associations or fellow ideologues, but you should not betray the people. Mimiko even betrayed Gani Fawehinmi by claiming credit for the diagnostic centre. It is owned by a private concern. What he has done is to betray both the living and the dead.

    In his play, An Enemy of the People, Scandinavian writer Henrik Ibsen tells how two brothers are pitted against each other, one tries to hoodwink the people and the other tries to save them. The people are caught in the two narratives. One of them is a traitor, and the protagonist talks about nobility, not of talent or birth or even intelligence, but the nobility of character.

    The election is as much about brothers as it is about character. Making that decision is a task before the Ondo people.

  • Out of Golgotha

    Out of Golgotha

    We need a constitution for the varied peoples of Nigeria. But we need the varied peoples of Nigeria first. That is the conundrum in the search for a document that will tell us how to engage ourselves. But what we are looking for is not a constitution, but a formula for success.

    I recall years ago when Hilla Liman was the leader of Ghana and the country was in a constitutional ferment. The thick-set man with a professorial air purred: “No document, no constitution can govern a people if the people are not ready to govern themselves.”

    So while we have debated, sparred, issued petitions and memoranda over how to shape our new laws, we should consider whether what we have will redound to a society of legitimate hubris, the sort that produced the United States of America after contentious hours of cerebral exchanges. Or the French constitutions from republic to republic even as Charles de Gaulle saw his ego bruised. Or the British whose unwritten model continues to marvel although the country had to see itself decline. It was once the empire where the sun never set but now a shrinking island. Its finest hour came in the era of the man who coined the phrase with his courageous growl: Winston Churchill in the Second World War

    But no one can doubt the conjuncture of the two requirements in today’s Nigeria. We have a fractious people, debating the most trivial obsessions with as much zeal as the earthquake matters. These tell us that we are as far apart as we are close. We also need a template that will make these heterogeneous challenges worth the sweat and blood of the past few years.

    If the Niger Delta States seek one thing, and the Southeast neighbours seek another in the midst of a rampaging North, what shall we say of the Southwest cousins who are working out a coherent document of internal engagement? This tells us that we are not discussing as yet other important ingredients of this formula: how do we educate our children to engage a technological world where even a cutting-edge nation like the United States is feeling left behind? How do we get our healthcare into a high gear where its brightest do not have to travel abroad to be doctors and its sick cannot get cure unless they travel abroad? Most of the country is not covered by infrastructure development even when the extant ones are in a state of terminal decay.

    We produce a lot of food but most of it rots away while we go to a foreign country to launch an export product – palm produce – that we once taught others how to seed.

    We are still in the early days, in the morning of Genesis where to identify anything we have to point because many things in Nigeria do not have a name yet, to adapt Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s classic novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

    So what is the constitution going to do for us if we are not ready to do it on our own? We have been calling for a truly federal state, for fiscal discipline, for the extirpation of corruption, for the rebirth of education, for a return to the agrarian glories of the palm oil days, the cocoa boom and the groundnut pyramid. We do not do these with any sense of togetherness but only with a sort of wistful impotence.

    The northerner wants oil in the Chad for revenge as much as the oil-laced Niger Delta denizen basks and gloats. But for us to have a true constitution we must be aware of who we are and how we relate to the others. We have not done a good job of that yet, except the Southwest that has come together with its integration strategy. The South-South will have to do something, but it has a greater challenge than the South west, the north and the Southeast, which enjoy greater degrees of cultural symmetry. In the Southsouth, the people are not one, in spite of the impression given outside. Contiguity does not amount to homogeneity. Given the histories of inter-ethnic conflicts and suspicions in the region, sometimes the relationship of the groups reminds one of playwright Jean Paul Satre’s famous quote: “Hell is other people.” It will take a personage of Obafemi Awolowo’s image to construct such an alignment in the region. The concept of the South-south as a region is still arbitrary, just as Okoi Aripko described Nigeria as a mere geographical expression. Goodluck Jonathan does not have the moral heft or charismatic aura to do that because he thinks more like a Bayelsan than a South-south faithful.

    The North did well in that front in the past, but only as a hegemonic project. The ebullient Governor Babangida Aliyu, as leader of the Northern Governors’ Forum, is investing his region with a sunny look while pushing positions that bring the North together as a force. Outside the Northern Governors Forum, the North has become fractured and it requires an outsize figure like the Saudauna to string the various tendencies together.

    The Southeast has the potential but only the potential. Its elite have lofted a mercantile opportunism above the practical good of an industrious race. Not long ago there was little outrage when some of its leaders dared to sell its presidential rights away of a bridge that was their right any way. That was when President Goodluck Jonathan remembered that his middle name was Azikiwe. It seems to me that only the memories of the civil war draw the Igbo together and that is a tragedy. But the people suffer month after month from the ravages of another civil war, which comes in the way of slow lynching.

    The Southwest provides the best example. With the exception of Ondo State because of a Judas governor, the rest of the Southwest is framing what is truly a formula for success. It wants to work together in the areas of infrastructure, trade, education and seeks autonomy rights within a federal structure. Where I differ with them is their call for a parliamentary system. The problem with presidentialism is not its expensiveness. Corruption suffocated the First Republic. A corrupt people cannot ennoble a good system, and vice versa. It is what we bring into the system that will make it what it becomes.

    That brings me to where this article begins. Is it the society that makes the law or the law that makes the society? The society makes the law so that the society can become itself.

    When constitution monger Abbe Sieyes wanted to fashion a constitution for France in the Napoleonic era, the dictator wanted to insert many clauses that would make him a czar of France. Sieyes theSn asked Napoleon: Do you want to be a king then? We reject the present constitution because the military made it. Constitutions do not come out of vacuums. Prophet Isaiah wrote about the connection between law and experience: “To the law and to the testimony, if they speak not according to this word, it is because the light is not in them.” There is no law without a testimony and vice versa. We need to see episodes of our lives in the law before we can make it work, or else it will set us up for rigmarole.

    “The revolution was in the hearts and minds of the American people,” asserted Benjamin Franklin in the high noon of the American Revolution. The 13 colonies saw themselves as different countries. But under the charisma of George Washington, they framed a constitution. They saw themselves in it. Even at that it was not perfect. The people lived with it and have made several amendments, fought a civil war, accommodated the minorities and women, Catholics, etc . That is because they loved the country before they loved the document.

    So as we contend to make a new law, we have to show if the document is just a theatre of war or a way out of Golgotha.

  • The compassionate state

    The compassionate state

    Before he became governor, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola always let the world know that he was a communist. That is yesterday’s ideology, even if North Korea and Cuba still latch on to the fragile and terminal gasps of the idea.

    Yet students of history know that communism saved capitalism after the Second World War. The welfare state enjoyed a rebirth when countries, especially those in Europe lying prostrate after the conflagrations, kindled a romance with the idea Marx and Lenin wrought. The liberal canons of democracy and free market became lost in the cloud when the ordinary citizen craved the heres and nows of food and shelter.

    The West, including the United States, strengthened the social buoy of the poor and vulnerable although the idea dated back to the years of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the 19th century. That way, the countries kept the communists on the fringes while the Soviet Union glamorised the fantasy in the so-called Third world with champions like Cabral, Ortega, Lumumba and Castro.

    Yet, the capitalists could not deny the idea of compassion for the poor. You cannot joy in the spoils of capitalism while the poor gnashed their teeth. In The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad observes that the condition for luxury and opulence is security.

    Long before either capitalism or socialism became organized ideas, Shakespeare expressed the philosophy of compassion in his play, Coriolanus: “that distribution undo excess and each man have enough.”
    What Ogbeni is practising in the State of Osun is not communism, but the beginnings of what the Western countries did to save their system: protecting the vulnerable.
    In his world, the vulnerable are those in the underbelly of a rabid capitalist system.

    They are the old who cannot earn any more money, the young and old who cannot get healing, the children too poor to afford books and food at schools, the disenfranchised business person who cannot get seed money to pursue the dreams of independence. They are the people whom Abraham Lincoln referred to as the reason for government: those who cannot stand well on their own.

    I had an opportunity to sit as an observer at the state of Osun’s executive council recently and observed the essence of his style. The meeting lasted about eight hours, and two main commissioners were asked to present their stewardships in the past two years. One of them impressed me: the deputy governor who also doubles as the commissioner for education, Titilayo Laoye-Tomori.

    Its uniform and feeding projects in schools were the most telling. As Laoye-Tomori showed in her power-point presentation, in the past year the inflow into schools had leaped from between 25 percent and 30 percent. The students would now have school uniforms, spinning an industry and a jobs spur that locals are taking advantage of to tailor and provide the uniforms all over the state.

    This narrative is touching in that education is perhaps the greatest driver of development in the modern world. American dominance has been attributed to education as the supreme driver. The world we know today is American, whether it is the car, airplane, the internet, the cell phone, the ipad, the movie, the suburb, the radio, television, the electric bulb, etc.

    They did it because they drove innovation. It is a country that makes things because it knows things. The thousands of children in Osun who are abandoning idleness at home and on the streets for school are witnessing the greatest liberation: of the human mind.

    At one stage at the meeting, when he referred to the ambitious education programme, he burst into a Sunny Ade song “aiye nreti eleya mi o…”. He stood up in his characteristic soulfulness and some of his executives wafted along with him. It was a song of irony. It meant his detractors were waiting for his failure, but it was also a caution to his team not to disappoint.

    It costs N30 billion, the biggest project in the country.
    The tablet of knowledge, a computer that would have all the lessons and books for the students is a new thing, and the deputy governor said it was close to readiness. I anticipate that as it combines modernity with the potential for commerce and jobs.

    The other point of compassion is Agba Osun, and it is not its N10, 000 a month to elders that so touched me as the medical system that provides treatment to the vulnerable, especially the elderly and handicapped, in their homes. This cannot work without having all of them in a data base, and the young of the OYES programme built the data base.

    This is what the youth are doing but interlopers, in their willful ignorance, said they are militias for secession. The state has obviously a mobile medical system where communication between the deprived and the caregiver is streamlined. It is not perfect, and I am not sure everyone has enjoyed this even if the government is impressed with what it has done so far. I recall, too, that in the number of intakes in schools, the deputy governor’s figures were questioned in one of the districts, if for a negligible discrepancy.

    What is being done for the elderly in terms of free healthcare in some states, like Lagos, Delta, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Ekiti, will help improve life expectancy. But personalised care in Osun raises the stakes.

    A peep into his style was his conversation with permanent secretary. Ogbeni had accused the ministry of not making an input into the education programme. It is a tribute to his open-mindedness that the permanent secretary was at ease to lash back in her courteous way. She said they actually offered their proposals but the governor did not implement.

    It turned out she was right. But ever the irrepressible Ogbeni with his tuft of beard, lean face, eyes alert, he asked the ministry to express the ideas and they were debated. I learnt that the Aregbesola administration in less than two years has convened more executive meetings than the seven and a half years of Oyinlola’s Gestapo era.

    After the U.S. won the war of independence, Jefferson accused President Washington of apostasy for creating an elite society with Alexander Hamilton when he set up institutions for a strong federal state. This tension led to the birth of the two-party system with Jefferson breaking away from the Federalists to form the Republicans that protected the weak.

    That tension exists today with those who believe that anyone who is poor and fails is necessarily lazy. Philosopher Herbert Spencer says welfare institutionalises indolence. From the droves of children going to school in Osuns now, we know that is not true.
    It takes an Ogbeni to prove that.

  • Fashola’s way of life

    In one of his sermons, the numinous Christ differentiated the broad way from the narrow way. The narrow way leads to life, the broad way to destruction.

    That was my thought when the Lagos State Government introduced the new traffic law, the most ambitious and comprehensive of such legislation in the history of this country. And who else to do so but the governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN). When the news made the rounds, I also anticipated a row, the voices of dissent and resistance.

    It has been called draconian, ruthless, inhuman. I call it the law of the narrow gate. Back to the numinous Christ. He said the broad way attracts all sorts of people, the wicked, the good, the fools, the heartless and the lawless. A cocktail of such human types would lead to destruction. It is the way of indiscipline, the albatross of chaos.
    So the law says: don’t eat, don’t drink, don’t beat the red light, don’t bring your okada to the major spines and arteries of the cities, don’t ride okada with two persons, keep away your cell phones, don’t drive the danfo with nonfunctional lamps, drive your heavy trucks only at night, et cetera.

    And I say why not! Go to the Lagos road and you will know why. A man in suit navigates a one-way street with the reckless gusto of the shirtless danfo driver. The rabble has converted the dove. It is time to reverse that. Recently, the streets were lined again, and the purpose is to keep commuters on their lanes. Only on Saturday, I watched a man in a new Honda Accord hug the street, as though he could not see the border between my lane and his.
    The road fines are heavy, and that is how it should be. When I first started driving in the United States, I was almost tempted to throw out the foil wrap of a cake I had just consumed on my way from Denver to Boulder in the state of Colorado. It then occurred to me that there was a sign that a fine of $1,000 loomed. For a cake that cost me about one dollar? That is the discipline we need to abide by the law.

    The road is not just the road. It is the place where we all meet. The President’s siren blares when he commutes, CEOs and the drivers are forced into the same space. The driver can hear some of the conversational intimacies of the most powerful man in town when even the wife is as far away as Madagascar. The road accommodates the slouch and the efficient, the rascal and the devotee, the sinner and preacher, the drunk and the sober, the virile and impotent, the blessed and the cursed, the damned jalopy and the chariot of the Lord. The road, whether it is as thin as needle or wide as the heavens, becomes a broad way. Broad is the gate and wide is the road that leads to destruction, many there are who find it.

    Wole Soyinka wrote a play at our Independence in 1960 and it was aptly called The Road. The Nobel Laureate, ever a traveler, is a devotee of the road. He has shown this in his marquee plays, poems, memoirs and novels. In real life, he became the boss of the Federal Road Safety Corps. The phrase Aksident Store haunts me from The Road. It is the store where all the vehicular scraps from around town are kept by a sort of tout called Professor.

    The new law is to avoid the accidents and pare the rate of scraps of tragedy on our roads. Obedience of the law is better than the sacrifice of the limbs and health of our commuters.

    As a reporter in the United States, I once visited the Denver jail for a night, and what struck me was the number of people behind bars for what is designated as DUI – driving under the influence. Of alchohol, that is. That was Denver, a tranquil cow town of low blood pressure with minimal traffic infractions.

    The road is the place of all human activities. There many wars are fought, many peace treaties signed, many lovers consummated. There children are born , David beat Goliath on the road, Samson mauled a lion barehanded. Also: Ija Ore in the Nigerian Civil war, the walk of Moremi into myth, the pogroms and festivals of our people, the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War when Germans ensnared Americans by changing road signs, the conversion of Paul, the road to Golgotha, Mohammed’s trip between Mecca and Medina, Budda’s nights of solitude as shown in Nobel Prize-winning novel Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, the young wooer of big words in Soyinka’s play whose bag got empty and sent for a bigger dictionary, the actions in Death and The King’s Horse man, the mad man in Achebe’s short story, the slaying of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart, the assassination of Murtala Muhammed and John Kennedy. Every day when we wake up, we might as well remember the song of the American rock star, Bob Seger: Here I am/ on the road again/ there I am/ up on the stage.

    In the movie, The Great American Traffic Jam, everything happens from the birth of a baby to the pursuit of a criminal to the glitter of a band with guitars blaring.
    The American novelist, Jack Kerouac dramatised the rebellion of the young and restless in the 1950’s with the novel On The Road where a group of lads travel all over America in search of meaning they cannot not find. The road is nothing but a process. It is not where we are going to but where we are going through. Just like searching for regular power supply, real federalism as well as end to armed robbery, ethnic and religious bigotry, rigged elections, etc. We are forced on it whether it is well travelled or not. That was Christ’s point.

    If we don’t make it a good one, the road becomes the end of the road. Another novel, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy tells of its apocalyptic potential. We neither want to make the road an endless search nor the finisher of our souls.

    No law is perfect. When the Americans developed their constitution, they admitted it would be improved along the way. That is why they have several amendments. Somebody asked me how she could carry her baby from her home to the main street without Okada since there are only Okada. While the spirit of the law is to save the child, the convenience of mother and child may not enjoy infrastructure as yet. That is the challenge to make more roads open to such families. It is work in progress.
    The spirit of the law is in the right place, and most of it is right. That is where we should focus. Governor Fashola wants a way of life in which a narrow gate leads to life, not to death and destruction.

    We follow Ebenezer Obey’s line, “ Irin ajo la wa yi o/ ori gbe wa de le…” That is the high way, which Prophet Isaiah says the unclean will not take. That is Fashola’s way of life for Lagosians, a road pruned of dirt and deaths. It is in that spirit that Soyinka writes, “Traveller, you must set forth at dawn/I promise marvels of the holy hour.”