The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Patience goes home with grace

    Patience goes home with grace

    Governor Umo Eno is in mourning for his departed wife and partner for decades. When the Akwa Ibom State Governor remarked that she had all the virtues in a wife, no one can confirm that more than 22-year-old Grace Emmanuel. Emmanuel bombed twitter with the pathos of her story. She is a mother of four pushed to the limit by her destitution. She was employed but not gainfully. So, she was feeding her children with chicken and fish feeds in the poultry farm where she was a staff. She was actually stealing them in an act of desperation.

    Patience Eno heard of the story and she was moved. She unfurled a N500,000 donation to the young woman. But it was not a cynical gesture for throwing money and looking away. She gave her a furnished accommodation with kitchen utensils, and food supply for at least three months. The girl was earning 15 thousand naira a month in her work place, but the First Lady supplemented it with N20,000.

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    She had a psychological grasp of Miss Emmanuel’s condition.  A mother unsupported by the children’s father. A lone at that age to care for family.

    Hear Patience Eno’s words: “We are mindful that this is a girl that is still a child, doesn’t have a bank account, no phone. You don’t raise money and give to her in bulk. She is already vulnerable. So, anything you give her that could make her live flamboyantly, she is going to fall prey. People will come under the guise of love and deceive her,” she added.

    She said she should go through counselling, and if she was ripe for proper work, she would get proper training. That was the last public testament of Patience Eno. She goes home with a halo of compassion and humanity, a halo of grace.

  • Taming the bandit

    Taming the bandit

    Blue Duck is his name, but he is not as pretty. He invokes the fear of a bandit because he is one. Fierce, unforgiving, blood in his eye. He is a big shot in the wooded and woodless wilderness and part of the reason is that he is a good shot. His gun is a magnet to any target and his skills and tenacity beat the bird in Achebe’s novel that has learned to fly without perching since men have learned to shoot without missing.

    Blue Duck can shoot down any quarry, mighty or small, running into or debouching from a hiding, in the air, under cover. He rapes women and rips men apart. Law officers dread him while in his hunt. Many of them have fallen under his attack and his grin of menace. For him, gore is not gory, but a form of glory. For him to be a martyr, other humans must not matter.

    But he is at once admired and feared, mistaken for a shadow here or a rustle in the bush there, floating in myths and legends, his acts overtold and his humanity spelled out as though narratives of a priest or a monster. He is a charmer and a brute. In the words of Oscar Wilde in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, he has all the qualities of a peacock except beauty.

    Blue Duck is not in northern Nigeria. He is not in Nigeria, but he is a representation in a great American novel written by Larry Mcmutry called Lonesome Dove, a big tome of almost a thousand pages about the so-called wild, wild west when that country crawled with bandits.

    As it is no more so in the United States, we hope so for ourselves. That same expanse of land now boasts such sprawling habitues of civilization from Houston, Texas to St. Louis, Missouri to Denver, Colorado.

    It did not happen overnight. We have to do the work. It begins with small, methodical triumphs. Some caviled at the president for thanking the men in uniform for perishing a man who gave peril, headache and death to Sokoto and its neighbours. It only shows how hatred can blind us to our own blessings. Recently, also, T.Y. Danjuma made it a cakewalk to oust them. This same Danjuma, who only knew coups, and not democracy. He served in the civil war. He is not like Gen. Alabi Isama, who has experience in handling bandits. Danjuma knows conventional battles. In the civil war, his area under General Shuwa was the easiest. It was Brigadier Adekunle’s Third Marine Commando that won the war.

    Recently, the Chief of Defence Staff, Christopher Musa, announced the gains of the military against some well-known scourge of our homes, schools, highways and forests, and we should only goad him on. The battle is still on. But some big names and not-so-big names have been killed of late.  Some of the big names that have gone include Ali Kwaje, Kachalla Hililu,Alhaji Bello, Baleri Kaduna, Damana, Dangote, Shadari, Umaru Nagona, Dogo Gudale, Buharin Yadi, Nawagini, Abulkarim Pacha-Pacha, Kachalla Dan Baleri, Kachalla Dogo Kwaddi, Lawali Dodo, Kachala Naguru, Bello Kaura, Nagalla, Malami Dan Idde, Babangida, Ali Karami,Kachalla Zakiru.

    These were men to be feared. They loved to be feared. They killed, and justified their killing in the name of God. They remind one also of a tale in Lonesome Dove about a man who stole 15 horses and when he was caught, he was sipping tea and poring over his Holy Bible. He cast a sort of divine aura over his larceny. Like Blue Duck, these men evoke a sort of brutish glamour among the Nigerian people. They may not be loved, but they are admired. That is part of the war against bandits. It is also to demystify them. They are seen as the beau of the bush, rich, powerful, even indomitable. They don’t pretend to fight for light and beauty as we know it. They define their own beauty and it works for them.  They are like American bandit Jesse James, who felt slighted when he was called a thief. “I am not a thief. I am a robber,” he quipped.

    So, when the army cut down the above names, it is a success not just against the criminals but also their crimes, and the crime is, in part, the glamorization of evil. They all had boys, some as many as five hundred, who kill and maim and steal. They have created a sort of distorted brotherhood. Not the sort that Shakespeare extolled in his play, Henry V: “But we in it shall be remembered/We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;/For he to-day that sheds his blood with me/Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile.”

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    Our bandits have capsized the sublime promise of that oath. So, when they die, that band that began as a foul bond dies. Some of these fallen were into gold mining like Lawali Dodo and Ali Kwaje and Kachalla Halilu. Others planted themselves on highways like Baleri Kaduna and Dangote. Others snatched expatriates, others kidnapped anyone of importance. They had division of labour and division of territory, and they cooperated and sometimes were at war with each other over loot and place.

    But they all met their end. Kawaje, who had over 500 boys, was connected to 10 bandit leaders. He was downed by an airstrike. Halilu also had over 500 boys and was named the king of bandits. He died in a military operation. Dodo died with him. After his death, Alhaji Bello also was struck down in an airstrike. Damana died from a gun wound. Dangote perished from a battle with a rival gang, so did Zakiru. Shadari died in a military operation. An IED was Gudale’s vanquisher. A vigilante group wiped out Nawagini in Katsina. Pacha-pacha perished in a military action, so did Dan Baleri, Idde and Karami, while Kwaddi lost his life in a combo of a vigilante and military operation.

    But we are still in the throes of war as a few big names are still lurking. They include Kachalla Dogo Gide, Bello Turji, Dan Karami and Black and Standard, and others. Dogo Gide, one of the most feared, is believed to have gone underground, but he is still trying to do havoc in such places as Sabon-Birni, Birnin Gwari and Saulawa in Kaduna but the eye of Governor Uba Sani has chastened his ability to do harm. He also operates in Shiroro, Kagara, Zungeru and Munya in Niger State, Madada, Dan-Dallah, Babbar Doko, Dan-Sadau in Zamfara State.

    Turji is the kingpin of them all. To get him, according to security forces, will be “seen as the fall of banditry in the Northwest.” This is because he has a vast network, and has access to a huge cache of arms. He is laying waste many communities, and is involved in gender violence. His lieutenants are also very influential. Dankarami is next to Turji in strength and influence. Both are rivals who, however, cooperate to duel security forces. Some consider him more lethal than Turji, perhaps because he is older. His mother has been arrested. It is not clear whether as a bait or because she was an accomplice.

    Black broke away from Turji just as another known as Standard cut away from Dankarami. Both now work together as one militant group known as Black and Standard. They still relate with their former masters. The fight will not be easy, but it seems to have begun. When the Americans were gunning down Al Qaeda bigwigs with intelligence powered by satellite technology, victory seemed farfetched until they became limp. We can do same with the same technology and persistence.

  • Okpebholo and Sanwo-Olu

    Okpebholo and Sanwo-Olu

    It was an important visit. The Governor-elect of Edo State met with the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, in Lagos. But what the new governor can learn from Lagos are many. The BOS said he would ply Monday Okpebholo with the state’s developmental template and the ideas to help him save Edo from the ruins of Obaseki.

    We can recall that Adams Oshiomhole did same once he became governor. He brought his team to understudy Lagos and borrowed ideas that could fit into the rise of the Niger Delta state. When he was done as governor, Adams became a model of development Obaseki pooh-poohed. The man derailed and went his own way, the way of pain and regret from the people.

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    When the new governor-elect heard the sounds of victory last week, one of his promises was to go back to the Adams project.

    That is all fine. He has something else to learn from the BOS, though. It is his ability to strike a balance between politics and governance, and he did it by working together with all the interests in the state’s politics. That was what plagued his predecessor. The BOS promised not to hark back to a time of division. He has managed the disparate forces who worked for his victory the first time. They liked him so much that they did not undermine his search for an encore. He is a sunny first citizen who governs without coattails of rancour.

    The incoming helmsman of Edo State must learn that. It took a potpourri of interests to make him governor, including Adams, Ize-Iyamu, Dan Orbih, et al. All of them would want influence. Although Oscar Wilde says “all influence is immoral,” for him not to kill the morale of his stewardship, he must learn to navigate big egos. It should not turn into pounds of flesh for him. it takes emotional intelligence to pursue that with success. The BOS of Lagos can teach him one or two about the Omoluabi spirit that helped him to do that.

  • Ofone!

    Ofone!

    At the best of times, he always looked like a man who did not sleep last night. But at 4.40 am on Sunday, Godwin Obaseki had murdered sleep, his own sleep. He could not prepare for church. His eyes were alert enough for sermons but not his spirit.

    Sitting at the INEC office like a regular citizen, he crouched over his phone, his face quizzical. He did not lose a wink, did not doze or snore, was not tired. He lacked the ennui of a loser. He still nurtured hope.

    He sat alone, and confused. He was suffering from a territorial crisis. Where was he to be? He was not supposed to be at an INEC office. It belonged to umpires. He was probably mistaking the word umpire for empire. His – an empire – was crumbling. INEC office was not his gubernatorial territory. But there he was; he, an interloper. He was supposed to be in bed. He banished his pillows. He was not antsy for a snooze. He could not nap because he had been caught napping at the polls. He should be at his party’s situation room, or at home as a receptacle of updates.

    But he was at the situation room. However, his situation cut a pathetic pose. He stood, paunch forward, face morose, alone among people. He was looking at the last clock of a pride ticking away into oblivion. He witnessed it after he overstayed his welcome at the INEC office. The governor, amidst his police guards, was ushered out of the office like a regular tout, booed until he turned his scowl into a toothy smile, the most embarrassed smile in Edo. From the video camera, his cameo of a smile revealed some of the whitest teeth you could see anywhere. He might have wished the polls rewarded his dentition. Which is a contrast to one of his term-expired governor neighbours who tormented the television set with his set of broken incisors, neither white nor set but unsettling.

    This was Obaseki, the peacock of Edo State. He was getting his comeuppance with his people on whose back he had betrayed, he had puffed, he had a subpar performance, capsized democracy with a rubberstamp house, tossed about his deputy, undermined the monarch in a revanchist plot, desecrated Bini symbolisms.

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    The people just gelded this same Obaseki. He had exhibited nervousness in the runup to the polls. He borrowed a book from his party’s notorious patriarch when he belched out the lingo of desperado. He promised do-or-die if his Asue Ighodalo did not win at the polls. But he had a bluster unlike the patriarch at Ota, who had an ex-soldier’s braggadocio and an appeal to the muscular use of force. Bravado is not enough for a third-world election.

    You could use Bravado in the west, like his counter in the United States has done. All he did was say the word, and the army beat its chest and they stormed the Congress. And ever since, Trump’s army has been agile, angry and at war with the rest of America. And the others are afraid. The Owu chief had raw muscle, men, thugs, police and soldiers. After Obaseki’s little huff, the IGP pulled Edo State police commissioner and that was the beginning of his castration. He tried to recalibrate the phrase after a backlash, and that showed that he did not have his mentor’s mettle. The Owu chief never ate his words. He spat fire instead.

    At the night of the election, APC top brass had begun to stir with pride. I called one of them, and he quipped, “Are you calling to congratulate me?” I wasn’t. Just wanted to confirm a video. Then I asked about the word Ofone, and I had not finished my sentence when he broke into pidgin, “Ofone naim be the song for Edo now.” He was too ecstatic for dialogue.

    Ofone means it is finished. They mean it is finished for the arrogance of a man who did not know that democracy has an expiry date for every office holder. That he knew he commanded awe but he would be awe-struck by the time he was up. That real majesty is democracy but more so is time. Time does not respect anyone. As the bible says,”I have seen the wicked in great power and spreading himself like a green bay tree. Yet he passed away, and lo, he was not.”

    Fate is telling him that the Edo servant for eight years now departs, if not in peace, according to the laws of democracy and the people. His eyes have beheld the humiliation of the polls.

    Today, he would be thinking many things, and perhaps for the rest of his life. He may not forget agony but he probably will outlive it. He will not forget Adams Oshiomhole. Why did he not show more humility or even understanding to the man who picked him from obscurity in Lagos, but he decided to pooh-pooh him. An act of betrayal.

    He will not forget his deputy, Phillip Shaibu, who worked for him like a little boy, as a point man and even a bull dog. He did not afford him the courtesy of humane discussion even if he decided to pick someone else as his successor.

    He might also contemplate the phrase “Edo no be Lagos.” He rallied his people against an outsider. Does he know that he was a Lagos pick? Now, for irony, he might also say to himself that Asue Ighodalo, like himself, is a Lagos boy, too. He beat Lagos but Lagos beat him back in the last laugh when he picked a Lagos boy like him. This time, Okpebholo the homeboy wears the crown. It is the pirouette of destiny, a revenge of history.

    It is the way things end, a certain sense of destiny seems to work things to oust persons who always believe they know it all. He thought he could control time. But only God can. As Shakespeare said in Hamlet, “There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.”

    He will also think about the election day. The failure of rational expectation. He could muse about how men plot festivals and end up with funerals. Like a sour dawn, like another line from Hamlet, “The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” It is this air of ironies that will plague Obaseki. Epic collapses are ironies. Federico Lorca’s play Blood Wedding was a nuptial mirth of dance and feasting until the tragedy. But Obaseki’s story is often comic.

    When you saw him in public, he had an air of glory without purpose, a man who thought he had love everywhere but not enough. Now he leaves power after thinking himself a godfather. He realizes he is neither god nor a father of the throne. Okpebholo, who did not show any assumption of arrogance, has now bested his best man.

    He will contemplate another line from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: “But man, proud man/Dressed in a little brief authority/Most ignorant of what he’s most assured—His glassy essence../Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven/As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens/Would all themselves laugh mortal.”

    Vincent Akanmode, deputy weekend editor of The Nation, characterized the moment like a poet. Hear him. “Okpebholo won at the polling booth, Akpata in the social media and Obaseki in none.” I should add that Obaseki won in his fantasy.

  • Elupee candidate

    Elupee candidate

    It still baffles me, the video clip. Is it a work of artificial intelligence or a temporary loss of intelligence. I saw the clip of Labour Party candidate Olumide Akpata while lamenting his prospect. He was referring to a poll as his buoy of hope. It was not a poll by a university or funded by even a political party, not commissioned by his own party or any other one. But by who? A TV anchor. And he referred to it as a reason he thought he was headed not just for victory, but a landslide.

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    I like to think he was not the one. After all, he is supposed to be a man of evidence  as a former president of the Nigerian Bar Association. For him to stoop to fiction, gives one a window on how the rabble of that party thinks. It is the sort of delirium that works that crowd.

    They performed so poorly in Edo guber poll that I wonder why TV stations present the numbers as though it were a three horse race. The third horse has not hoofbeat and cannot neigh.

  • Fintiri, it’s finito

    Fintiri, it’s finito

    If anyone challenges an election before INEC announces, it should not be Fintiri, Adamawa State Governor. He it was who survived the impunity of Hudu Ari, who did the same thing against him.

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    The man is facing the consequences of his action. Fintiri is doing same to challenge Edo governorship elections. He is acting like a gangster who is becoming one because he was made by one. He should know that once the process says it, the only other option is the court. Not freelance impunity. For now, it is finito.

  • Smart city, smart country

    Smart city, smart country

    It is for the contempt of the past that President Tinubu made China the centre of gravity a week ago. While some media outlets and commentators washed up ink and airtime fulminating over Agbaero and his arrest without asking why, the president and his entourage focused on the future.

    Ajaokuta Steel, neglected by a generation, is whirring back to life. Solid mineral tie-ups, infrastructure development, power generation, and deals amounting to billions of dollars. These were sweet pies that some commentators wanted to ignore as poison. Some had criticized two governors for accompanying the president. While all the critics saw was jamboree, what they accomplished was progress. They were smart, as smart as the smart cities they are working on.

    They are Governor Uba Sani of Kaduna State, and the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu. From what seemed a gloomy beginning for the Kaduna chief executive, the new helmsman of the north’s pivotal state sees a rosy horizon. Debt or no debt, he is not going to grieve over what’s lost, or bemoan a prelate class’s silence over a contract with his predecessor. Not for him the sentiment of the Shakesperean play, Love’s labour is Lost.  He went to China for the state, and he penned a suite of sweet deals. Just like Sanwo-Olu, their desire is to turn the main cities into what town planners call conurbations.

    Before the China visit, Governor Sani has been working on safer schools by consolidating schools to make them lean and mean, and easy to access and secure. He has revived the Panteka Market, as the number one tools hub for the north. He has unveiled the lithium making factory, a surefire source of jobs and tonic for the nation’s economy.

    He penned an MOU with Huawei Technologies, Chinese premier tech company. It covers the following: state-level unified command centre, enhanced security, intelligent traffic system, e-government and office automation, smart education, smart healthcare, ICT talent, renewable energy and public transportation. This is quite a huge pot and its ambition is shown by the breadth of the areas covered. This is the power of a smart city. A smart city has a smart transport system that must segue into a smart healthcare system that must work in tandem with smart schools, and all must source their nimbleness from a smart government office. The result is a smart people. As Lincoln said, the greatness of a country consists in the quality of its citizens.

    These deals are going to build on the Kaduna Technology City now being upgraded to a Smart City. It also has a first in a state: a digital Innovation and Entrepreneurial Centre that uses existing ICT Hub empowerment and ICT business clinics.

    Says Governor Sani: “I signed into law a bill to make provisions for the development of tech-enabled start-ups in Kaduna State…The key objective…is to position Kaduna State’s start-ups ecosystem as the leading digital technology centre…” it is in this light he has ramped up the “Bridging the Last Mile Initiative 2024-2027.”

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    For the BOS of Lagos, he announced his deal with éclat. “Lagos, yet another Metro line? Absolutely. The Green Line Metro is here.” It was an eclat for a clap. He signed an MOU with China for yet another colour-coded city on the move. We have had the blue and red. It’s now green light for the Lekki corridor. For a governor noted for big-ticket projects, the Green train is not a surprise. This is part of what Lagos has been becoming, a smart city as model. The Green line is a 68-kilometre wonder that will connect the Lekki Free Zone to Marina. In a sense, it is ancient and modern. The Lekki Free Zone is, perhaps, the fastest growing zone in all of Africa. It is a catchment of new estates, new businesses, educational institutions, high-tech innovations, entrepreneurial gusto and the siting of new landmarks. It is from its belly that the new express from Lagos to Calabar will sprout. Traffic logjams have been a perennial headache of Lekki, and it is because people outpaced development. The train will be a disruptive solution. It will, as the governor has noted, link areas like Victoria Island, Ajah, Ikoyi.

    “This rail line is projected to carry over 500,000 passengers daily at launch, rising to over a million as demand grows,” he said.

    With blue, red and green on course, the government will be dusting its masterplan for the other colour-coded trains, including yellow, purple and orange. A smart city is an interconnected city. It is its capacity for every part to talk to one another in a nimble automation that distinguishes 21st century city and the ones in the past.

    For the modern world, cities are the bellwether of civilization. In the past, cities equated our sprawling villages today. Athens, Rome, Babylon, et all. But their inhabitants reveled in their geniuses. Horse-drawn carriages were high-tech. Roads without tars or cars, or wood-fueled fireplaces amounted to the acme in innovation. Candles were dainty but not because they shed light. Electricity was still in prophetic infancy. Faraday was not imagined; his foetus was not even fantasised. Their shrines were too dark for their gods to conjure light. Lions dueled humans in the Roman coliseum as counterpart to the UEFA League or World Cup. To travel then makes today’s planes and cars the machinations of witchcraft. Yesterday’s conceit is today’s contempt. In his sprawling novel Lonesome Dove, a tome about the wild, wild west in the United States, Larry McMurtry writes an epic about rural America before big, beautiful cities rose out of the underbelly of cowboys and Indians as the vast region from Texas to Montana was a trap for rapes, kidnapping, murders and whoring. There is hope yet for us.

    The smart city we envision is not the big, bright Babylon lamented in scriptures in the line, “fallen, fallen Babylon the great!” It is not the one of duplicity in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, or the one of the lecher in Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana, or political vanity and cultural extravagance in Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi, or of greed in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, or of religious chicanery in Olga Tokarczuk’s The Book of Jacob, or Dicken’s London of filth and cunning.

    We seek a smart city of beauty and rule of law and imaginative citizens and profits cohabiting with human generosity. That is what Governor Sani has started. It is what Sanwo-Olu is delivering. It is what President Tinubu wanted for his country by taking the two gentlemen with him. It was no jamboree. It was real.                            

  • Of Aisha Yesufu, Pastor Itua Ighodalo and Obidient hypocrisy

    Of Aisha Yesufu, Pastor Itua Ighodalo and Obidient hypocrisy

    Just suddenly, all is quiet in the social media on the Obidient front. It was after Julius Abure, the turbulent Labour Party Leader, took off the gloves and delivered an uppercut. It was in the form of revelation. One, that Pastor Itua Ighodalo was – or is he still? – a signatory to the account of LP or Elupee. And guess the other signatory. Some in the social media are calling her hushmummy. But that may not be fair. They need more imagination. Diezani will be jealous. They need something original for Aisha. Abure said both Aisha Yesufu and Itua Ighodalo signed the comings and goings of the Eluppee purse. We are not talking no-shishi here. A lot of chin chin. We are talking billions of Naira. Not one or two billion, but a purse in the neighbourhood of N12 billion. And not Naira alone. We know Elupee is international, not just because Pitobi had offshore accounts when he was governor and kept money aside for himself and family. After all, a governor is worthy of his election.

    Funny, that Aisha now recognizes the courts. Was she not the one that gave a vote of no confidence in the judiciary when the Nigerian people outvoted Elupee? Now the courts are important. She said those who are aggrieved should go to court. That is, those not happy with her position on how the money was spent in those giddy days of LP ferment. We want transparency as clear as a person without a hood. We cannot hide accounting inside Hijab. Let’s take apart the hijab from the signature.

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    Again, Pastor Ighodalo has an interesting story. He was angry with President Tinubu, then candidate, for running for the election. Ighodalo was for Osinbajo then before the primary. When his pastor friend lost, he pirouetted to Pitobi, the closest he could to a pastor. So smooth was he that he rose to the sumptuous reaches of accounting. Was this not the same Pastor Ighodalo, who, before the last political dispensation, could not take his feet out of the gates of Bourdillon? It’s like the character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night who said “make me a willow cabin at your gate,” signifying permanence. I still wonder what is going on in this man’s mind about why he made a U-turn on his supposed friend without decency. He could not blend empathy into evidence and experience into testimony. I thought a man who saw Bourdillon in its interior would have acted as a good witness. He did not have to support him but he should have made a case. He just looked the other way and openly dismissed his ambition. He should have articulated what he knew and the whys and wherefores of his new course. Most people, given their past association, would not turn it into an open antagonism. You would think he would be one of those to have cleared the air when the Christian elite launched a calvary against the Muslim-Muslim ticket. But he carried Judas’ halo. If it was not fair, he was not alone in this sordid fare.

    But more perplexing is that the Obidients were angry over the money the lawmakers spent on cars and few acts of laxity by some persons in the government, and all of them do not amount to the money at stake in the Elupee scandal. That is, N12 billion and over half a billion dollars. If this is not hypocrisy, I wonder what it is. Obidients have not called for a proper audit of the account, and this was a barn they filled with their own sweat, I suppose. They don’t even want to know who is feeding on the harvest. Charity should begin at home.

  • The first kiss

    The first kiss

    Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)’s dilemma about embracing Pitobi is not PDP’s alone. It is also an Obidient quandary. The LP dilemma over PDP merger is not LP’s alone, it is also a PDP’s.  It is the jigsaw puzzle of Nigerian politics. It was created by PDP itself.

    But it is too simplistic to put it that way. We saw it last week when PDP said it was on the cusp of healing itself, and one of its formulas is to bring everyone home, including Kwankwaso and Pitobi. Like Medea in Euripides’s rendition of the Greek tragedy, they are looking at what might have been. Before she slaughtered her two sons, Medea avenged her traitor and power-crazed husband Jason by murdering his new wife and her conniving father, King Creon, who snatched Jason from Medea. Medea looked back at the time of her love with Jason with an unblended alchemy of fury and tenderness. Memory drove her to a witchcraft of envy and murder and regicide.

    PDP spokesperson spoke with sumptuous nostalgia on how they might have trounced Tinubu and his APC if they had come together. Kola Ologbodiyan probably read in his mind the scripture when David eulogized how “good and pleasant for brethren to dwell together in unity.” Only that the precious oil of the election poured on their head did not reach down to Aaron’s beard before it gave them a splitting headache. They were already three persons. This trinity had no unity.

    They are like divorcees with the fantasy of their first kiss. The fantasy is sweet, but the reality is like quinine without the cure. Between the first kiss and divorce, they had blisters and sores, fought bedbugs of cash in the other room, flew dinner plates across the sitting room after equity failed in sharing it, lied to their children about what they shared, kissed lovers across the aisle in furtive hours. They want to cancel all that memory to reenact the hour of the first kiss?

    That is the problem with PDP. The first kiss never comes back, like Chekov’s short story of a woman who had a kiss in the dark in a party and spent all her life wondering about it and who had kissed her. Neither Pitobi nor Kwankwaso’s NNPP are sure they can reenact the bliss of that romantic kiss.

    They hope to return to the first kiss believing that they are like water into water and no one can know their differences anymore. Old things have passed away. Behold all things have become new.

    First, they must stop lying to themselves. One, Pitobi has outgrown who he was when he was a candidate who rebelled against PDP and picked up LP ticket. Since then, he has amassed a big and rambunctious following, and that makes him a force in the political sweepstakes. How formidable that force is today is doubtful. It may have retreated into a rump. But it is still far bigger than Pitobi ever could have been under the umbrella. During the election, PDP lamented the collapse of its unity as stormy Nyesom Wike turned the party upside down. Now, the story is not different. Pitobi did not relent, after building a coalition of faith and tribe in southern and central Nigeria. He hoped he had enough to pull off a win.

    It was an illusion that political Mathematician Babatunde Raji  Fashola(SAN) laid bare as a prophecy. But Kola Ologbodiyan and Professor Pat Utomi goaded their candidates on. Fashola’s Math as prophecy came into reality because, like Oedipus in Sophocles’ play, they did not listen. They saw victory in a cloud. They were afflicted by what literary critic G.D. Killam called “insistent fatality,” in characterizing Okonkwo in Things fall Apart. They saw death and careened into it like a drug.

    Since things fell apart, PDP has been trying to bring everyone home. But it is important for them to know who they are now. Pitobi does not know. He has diluted the religious part of his Obedient movement. The Tinubu administration has allayed fears and quieted ballyhoos about an apocalypse about the Muslim-Muslim ticket, with a cabinet and appointment profile that undermines any allegation of pious bigotry.

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    So, if Pitobi goes to PDP, will he become a deputy to the party’s point man? That will not suit the feminine-voiced Anambrarian. That will, to all intents and purposes, be the Nunc dimittis of the Obedient movement. PDP forgets that the reason the Obedient movement was born was because, one, they wanted a party to fix their dilemma of southern and central Nigerian Christians not voting for a Fulani man and a Yoruba man. They did not want Tinubu, a Yoruba, and did not want the moral cross of voting a Fulani man in a prostitute like Atiku for another possible eight years. For this big chunk of the Obidient cause, Pitobi was not a candidate, or even a person, he was an excuse as a cause. But the excuse has grown into a myth for its core followers, many of whom dumped Kanu as a cultic hero (almost as sacred as Ojukwu) for a more practical one in Pitobi.

    PDP will have a lot of problem blending that crowd into its own party. Again, there were the Endsars component and ill-digested radicals and lawyers who clasped to their bosom the same Pitobi who they had associated with a perverse elite before his born-again LP sojourn. How will they blend? I can hear them echo Apostle Paul, “Come ye from among them and be ye separate.”

    But that makes the Obidient crowd too small to fight alone. Wike is the immediate nemesis of Ologbodiyan’s party. Last week, the FCT minister warned the Bauchi governor and other interloper PDP governors that he has the capacity to undermine peace in their states. For sure, they cannot expel Wike form the party. Unlike Ganduje,who had ward miscues, Wike is still a stalwart of Rivers State PDP. He put the party echelon on notice last week for a reason. He is capable of determining the presidential candidate of the party next election cycle. Remember, but for Tambuwal, he was on the path to victory in the last PDP primary.

    It shows how powerful he can still be. Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed, the hypocrite who called for removal of fuel subsidies in the open during Buhari’s time, suddenly became a critic of its removal because he wants to run for president. The megalomaniac, who responded to this column the last time I ribbed him, has been quiet over Wike’s jibe.

    What it means is that we are back to Fashola’s mathematical prophecy. Their followers are only going to line behind them. And as troubled as the APC may be today, it is more united than its foes, and a house divided against itself must beware of its wobbly legs.

    Before any of them can unite, they must decide who is guilty. For without guilt, there is no reconciliation. The issue with Nigerian political class is that we allow guilt to fester without atonement. If these groups reconcile, there must be penance. Who will do penance if Wike reconciles with Bauchi Governor? Or if Pitobi goes back to PDP? Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia trilogy, the first was about guilt known as Agamemnon, the second about atonement known as The Libation Bearers and the third is about absolution and known as Eumenides. When have we had a major reconciliation in our politics that evokes absolution? I don’t know when. Our politicians don’t reconcile. They embrace like pigs. We keep a narrative of patchworks that turn back to haunt us. Hence, we have parties without philosophies. The people inherit their lies and illusions. Sir Ivor Jennings had Nigerians in mind when he asserted that, “the people cannot decide until somebody decides who are the people.” Pitobi must be wary to make a decision like a merger for the Obidients. He risks losing them. If he joins PDP, he would have decided who his new people are, and they may not be called Obidients.

    So, it is time for them to heed Shakespeare advice, “to thyself be true.” In a satire of class and manners, the great Oscar Wilde penned the play, The Importance of Being Earnest, in which lovestruck men try to change their identities in order to marry two women who only want to marry men named Earnest. In the end, saying truth to themselves matters.

    Nor is identity so easy in politics anywhere. In the age of absolutism in Europe, Catholic France was defending Protestant Netherlands against its Catholic enemies and Catholic Spain and Germany pitched tents with Protestants called the Huguenots in France against the Catholic French king. And Oliver Cromwell, a Protestant who slaughtered many Catholics at home, made alliance with the great Jules Mazarin, French Catholic leader. If you compromise faith, you can compromise anything. We saw Pitobi the other day in the shadows of a mosque.

    The story of PDP and Pitobi’s LP will make a great study in crisis of love and marriage in politics.

    If their first was luscious, the next will be Judas kiss.            

  • Sherriff’s certificate

    Sherriff’s certificate

    Going home is always an education. I was at Warri recently for a royal fest, but I had eye on a project, a massive flyover project in the city that the Delta State Governor, Sheriff Oborevwori set in motion late last year. From the airport, I did not wait for long to see. The car ran into a traffic jam. In Warri? This was not Lagos. I asked the driver, “wetin dey cause this go slow na?” He replied, “na Sherrif bridge o,” he replied cheerfully.

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     That part of town was now different. The contractors created a bedlam of service to the city with cranes here and there, traders humming to profits and workers’ shirts and trousers whose colours had succumbed to the imperatives of dust and other materials of work. From the beginning, the flyover curved into space and I observed a happy disruption to the life of the Wafarians as the residents called themselves. Somebody asked after I saw the flyover, “the governor try?” I answered in the affirmative.it is good to see a mega project in my childhood city after years of paralysis. It is good to see a project rise from the ground into a potential marvel. I hope that much progress will continue. Governor Oborevwori has shown of late that he wants nothing but quality. He cancelled a contract to build a model stadium in Warri because of a bumbling contractor. He has revamped major arteries like Lower and Upper Erejuwa Roads and security has brought back night life. His thoroughness made him order a contractor back to site on the Isheagu-Ewulu Road in Aniocha Local Government. Hence, former President Goodluck Jonathan, in a flush of political innuendo, said the best certificate the Sheriff can advertise is his work for his people. So far, it’s A on that report card.