The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Between protest and insurrection

    Between protest and insurrection

    Some of them are coming out of the woodwork. For instance, Ebun Adegboruwa has written to the IGP on behalf of a shadowy group, Take it back Movement. The other guy nestling in the United States, Sowore, swore from the comfort of his precinct. Adegboruwa wants the protest. He wants it so bad because of an injured ego. He is hurting, and has been hurting for a long time, especially after his own EndSars debacle when he saw shadows and called them deaths, and he wanted to turn apocrypha into fact, and he loathes the fact that he has been in silence ever since.

    So, for him and others like him, it is about revenge. He is trying to pose, just like Sowore who swore, that they are the real organisers. They are opportunists trying to be the face of an anonymous rabble squirming in the social media, most of them outside the country and hustling in the underside and nether class of western societies and some African countries. Adegboruwa should tell us if Take It Back Movement is legal, and who are the people behind it? What has happened to their bank account? Is it still frozen? Who funded it during the EndSars and who is funding it now? One call for freedom of expression demands another.  We need to know. This is the quid pro quo of democracy. That movement does not bode well for sanity on the streets.

    Men like Adegboruwa and Sowore are also naïve because they think they own a good measure of the threats we see on the internet. They see their own part as constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression. If they are clever enough to know that most of the triggers are anarchists, then they may serve as conscious decoys. This makes them lawful citizens while providing an atmosphere for a tranquil protest to fall into the hands of hoodlums.

    Hence, the IGP needs to extract a guarantee from him and his group that their so-called protests will not careen into chaos. Of course, he cannot guarantee. Endsars began in innocence and ended as tragedy. The IGP also should investigate Take it Back Movement, and go back to its history.

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    We are still suffering the scars today, especially those of us who reside in Lagos. We don’t want that again. As Marcus Cicero wrote, “To stumble twice against the same stone is a proverbial disgrace.” Go to Oyingbo and see the many buses now prostrate. Ask the police officer whose eyes were gouged. Ask TVC who has not reclaimed their torched newsroom. Ask investors who have limped out of business. Ask any of the EndSars organisers if they anticipated a fellow now in detention would be bullying his men to burn down the zoo, which he calls Lagos. So, let us not pretend we don’t know how these unfold.

    Because I called the organisers cowards for being faceless, men like Sowore swore and Adegboruwa roared to validate a seething mob. Adegboruwa, as a lawyer and sometimes brilliant SAN, knows the difference between what is constitutional and what is subversion. Let him address the demands, like the call for the end of the 1999 constitution, if that is not anarchy. Or the #endtinubu, if that is not a potential death knell of the Fourth Republic. Many of the protesters are not angry about hunger but have hunger for another nourishment: anarchy.

    There is a protest and there is an insurrection. Both are not necessarily the same. What happened on January 6 in Washington was not a protest but an insurrection. The widespread use of the term misses the tenor and intent of the organisers. January 6 started as a protest but exploded into an insurrection with wild men gunning for the head of the vice president and speaker of the House of Representatives. Before that, Donald Trump fired out his damnable rhetoric: “fight like hell.” And the rabble obeyed.

    People forget that a fragile democracy bears the fruits of its own suicide. History has shown that democracies have destroyed themselves, dating back to the Ancient Greece. In north Africa, an election overthrew a democracy. Before that, we witnessed it in the 20th century in Spain, Italy and Germany. Hitler was elected and galvanized it into a totalitarian sweep dissected and lamented by Hannah Arendt in her great tome, The Origins of Totalitarianism, voted by some of 20th century’s best work.

    Protests have done good for the world, even in societies weighted down by tyrannies. It was protest that brought democracies to many societies, that led to women suffrage, gave us Luther King Jnr and his fight for black equality. We see Luther’s efforts even now in the Olympics, like Simon Biles exploits and acclaim, that led the world to recognise Soyinka’s genius and reward him with the world’s top prize, that emboldened Ghandi to flush out the British in spite of Churchill’s ache.

    Many who call revolution ought to know that revolutions, especially of the sudden types have done the world no good from the beginning of time. The best societies are those that thrive on incremental reforms. The French Revolution started with all the great eclat and fortitude of youth. Even poet Wordsworth from England crooned, “Bliss it was that dawn to be alive/ to be young was very heaven.” Heaven was the last thing on their minds when slaughter and the guillotine swept the French capital. As great conservative Edmund Burke predicted, a despot would take over, and pin-sized soldier named Napoleon bestrode not only France but the whole of Europe with his authoritarian ethos. Russian Revolution sterilized the country and several others for generations until the epiphany of Gorbachev. It made the soviet empire a first-class military but a third world economy. Cuba had theirs with Castro but the country still wobbles in the twilight of the 1960’s. Perhaps the most telling was the year 1848 when across Europe boiled with revolutions, especially against monarchies. All of them failed. An observer remarked that it was a “turning point that did not turn.” It was an anticlimax for liberal minds. They wrought destructions but no progress. Such revolutions lead countries to start over and re-enact as, Hegel feared, the class conflicts that ignited that battle in the first place. It is like Shakespeare’s play, All Labour’s lost. What we see is that specialists become madmen and madmen become specialists, apologies to Wole Soyinka. In that play, Madmen and Specialists, Soyinka warns against the self-congratulations of men and cliques who mistake their views for the views of everyone and seize their rights by pretending to act on their behalf.

    In Britain, 1848 only witnessed mild protests. Yet, as Fareed Zakaria writes in his perceptive new book, Age of Revolutions, Britain remains a model for all nations as a democracy without revolutions. It learned from the years of Cromwell and the savageries of the beheadings that led to wars and no progress. When it chose reforms, it saw progress and it has enjoyed this since the 1680’s.

    I have no objection to protests. After all, countries like Spain, Italy, Hungary, Germany, Austria learned from 1848 that if they had protests and not revolutions, they could have grown to the same perch with Britain.

    The problem with the moment is that a section of the opposition has little value for democracy and would elevate malice over peace. The Adegboruwas concern us but only to the extent that they want to give, by default or willfulness, a gloss of legitimacy to imbecilities in the name of protests. We can parade ourselves as urbane but capsize our urban areas. We cannot be in bed with goons but breed bedlam.

    If you want to overthrow a democracy, does that make you a democrat? If you say #Endbadgovernance, it is fair enough. You can end bad governance by calling for specific rights and amends. But when it involves throwing out the constitution, then it is not protest but subversion. When you say #EndTinubu, you are calling for the overthrow of democracy that some so-called Obidients did when they yelled for the army. They are the Samsons of this era who would pull down the house with them.

    Yet, the Tinubu administration must learn some lessons. The season is not all negative. The pains of the moment can yield good in the end. As Samuel Johnson noted, “the equity of providence has balanced peculiar sufferings with peculiar enjoyments.”

    One, if President Bola Tinubu’s message of reforms is not getting through, it is for two reasons. First, that there are persons who are incorrigible. Like Paul said, “if our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that are lost.” Nothing to do about that. The second is that some of his storytellers, especially the ministers and department heads, are mute and acting like mere bureaucrats while they should serve as the evangelists of Tinubu’s policies. Most of them are failing and partly responsible for the gulf between policy and appreciation.

    Two, the grassroots policies like student loans credit schemes and local government reforms should be calibrated with transparency. Day by day reports of benefits and beneficiaries ought to be in the eyes and ears of the people.

    The fight for freedom is not piecemeal, it is a sustained struggle. As Russian writer Maxim Gorky wrote, “the only people who deserve freedom are those who are prepared to fight for it every day.”

    We are a feisty society, and we cannot be governed by being blasé about what we are doing. I expect the whole so-called protests thing to be an anticlimax, but vigilance is the biggest asset the government needs to make it so.

  • Hollow Soul

    Hollow Soul

    Nothing new happens in politics. They just take on new guises. Just like the series of haters of the Tinubu government. Many have said that the government is the first in our history not to have settled down before catcalls for a new era. They began the campaign for 2027 once they lost 2023.

    First, they wanted to delegitimise it through the internet, they crashed. Through street protests, but it foundered. Through an army coup, but no cruise. Anonymous billboards, no airborne. The foreign courts, no visa. Through our courts, what an anticlimax.

    After that, no respite for the victor. If Atiku was not making a sour-grape critique, Pitobi was in tow with his fulminating aside. Tribe and diatribe have become Siamese twins. Now it seems they have run out of patience. They cannot wait for another poll. They want to take it by force. If they cannot coerce the army towards a putsch, they want a push from the streets. They have issued bile upon bile on the name and policies of President Bola Tinubu, but the man does not fight back. He just focuses on his goals. He must be thinking like the German playwright and novelist, Johann Goethe, author of immortal play Faust: The likes of thee have never moved my hate.

    The call for a protest has been coming in trickles. Online soldiers in masks and disembodied voices have risen from a slow, burning cadence to a staccato. Now, the federal government says it is from a group known as Obidients. Translation? Sore losers. LP says it is not them. Obi says, without proof, that they want to arrest him. This essayist has no beef against opposition. It nourishes democracy and puts the government in alert mode on its erring policies.

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    But everything has to be done according to law and decency. Whoever is plotting a street protest should, at least, identify themselves. When students fomented Ali Must Go, the leaders of NUNS did not hide in the shadows. So did the protests against SAP and the June 12 annulment. And many others. So, why are these protesters hiding in the shadows? It is protest by cowardice. If they are democrats, they cannot be hollering for the so-called end to a constitutionally guaranteed term. They want to be who they are: barbarians on the streets.

    If they cannot identify who they are, they have no right to engineer chaos in our society. Refinement separates democracies from autocracies. When a group without a name mobilises citizens against the state, it is because they have no public legitimacy, and no moral anchor, and no legal mooring. They are harbingers of anarchy. Poet T.S. Eliot describes them as hollow men, who have “shape without form, shade without colour, paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

    The concept of Disobedience is different from these shadowy men. The man who conceived it was Henry David Thoreau. He never intended it to operate by stealth. Two major personages implemented it. They were Ghandi in India and Martin Luther King Jr. in the United States. They did not hide. History is their witness. The impending one is disobedient but not civil. Maybe Disobedience is their proper name. But they have to get the spelling right first.

    We saw this same obnoxious show before the judiciary handed down its verdict on the 2023 presidential poll. They hung billboard signs through anonymous means, until they were exposed.

    This time, they want to do same. Information reaching this writer reveals that a good deal of the instigators does not live here. Ensconced in their safe homes in Europe, North America and African homes, they claim to suffer on behalf of Nigerians. They say they are hungry and angry on behalf of those who live here. They are the ones who encouraged the ENDSARS imbroglio and were not here when it ran out of steam after some died on the streets of Lagos and made bonfires.

    We do not want the sort of mayhem we witnessed in Lagos. I personally witnessed it and was a psychological victim, and it should not come our way again. The TVC premises was torched, and its newsroom, the best in the country, was tossed by hoodlums. The popular show, Your View, abruptly went off-air and the goons threw all the staff in disarray. They roared to this newspaper and set up a bonfire, and I feared for my personal office library and started calculating the cost of recovering the books. I recalled Thomas Jefferson’s words when his home caught fire. He asked, “Was not any of my books saved?” I was more fortunate than the third American president and author of the Declaration of Independence. My books survived because of prompt intervention.

    Opportunists took over shops and looted at will. The major transportation hub in Oyingbo is a scary exhibition of madmen who burned new buses that the poor have been deprived of ever since. It will take billions of Naira to get those buses back. Some wondered why nearby Jibowu was spared. I am happy they didn’t go there. That transport area has charmed my memory from a little child when as a family we travelled home and I also travelled to school through the hub. We cannot forget online calls from Nnamdi Kanu for his hirelings to burn down the zoo, which is Lagos.

    The ENDSARS was projected more innocently than this impending one. Youths started it with a naivety of mission to solve a specific wrong. They even were praised for their dignity of comportment, the grandeur of the processions, and focus of their agenda. But naivety collapsed to cunning and, later, savagery. It recalls the novel, Butterfly Revolution by William Buttler about teens who were staging a mockery of a revolution until it spun out of hand and led to deaths and tragedy and regrets. Fantasy mutated into a barbarian hour. It is a reimagined Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the Nobel Prize winner.

    Many who do this in Lagos will not dare it in their own states. They are always picking Lagos where governance is head and shoulders above where they come from. They hold Lagos to a higher standard but say almost nothing about the turpitude of their states’ political elite.

    The so-called protests are a picture of unresolved malice. They hate the president, and nothing he does will please them. During the election campaigns, they all agreed that subsidy should go and the naira was overvalued, and we should follow a different path. But having done it, they are up in arms. They are like the children of Israel who complained about Pharoah’s whips but became wistful and romantic about their oppressor after crossing the Red Sea. They wanted to wheel back to Pharoah’s whips.

    They have not set out a suite of policies as alternative. They just holler and affect righteous poses. They remind one of the first few days of the Obama administration. The first black leader wanted to embrace his Republican foes. Rather, the senate leader, Mitch McConnel held a caucus meeting and they decided they were going to browbeat Obama into paralysis and shoot down anything and everything he proposed to Congress.

    In spite of that, he triumphed. That is what these Obidients are afraid of. They fear they cannot force Tinubu to fail. They have not stopped the superhighway projects, the food sent to the poor, the local government reform, the scholarship/ loan for students, the credit scheme for entrepreneurs, etc. What they are exercising is what Goethe, Germany’s greatest writer ever, calls “impotent hatred.”

    They are fighting against ideas larger than they, and they cannot come out of the shadows to identify themselves. They are Nigeria’s craven mob. What they are planning is the mockery of protests, a caricature of public rage. It is opportunism in the guise of a grand idea.

    They are in fruitless search, and they wish they can eliminate this democracy in order to enthrone their candidate. Will that be democracy or despotism? They are not even clever. They are blinded by hate, nurtured by hubris and emboldened by delusion.

    Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) has said “anger is not a strategy.” For these people, we can only say anger is their destiny.

    They cannot unseat the man or derail the president. As Goethe writes, “one should hate nobody whom one cannot destroy.” They are T.S. Eliot’s hollow souls.

  • Minimum Agbaero

    Minimum Agbaero

    At last, Agbaero comes to judgment. After all the fanciful figures, the President and his team were able to make labour reason. They had been labouring in vain.  One might have called it, like Shakespeare, all labour’s lost. But something came out of it. Not Agbaero’s fantasy, though. They still need to let us know how they swiveled from about half million naira a month as salaries to seventy thousand naira . It will be a revelation of humility.

    It is interesting that they did not only accept, they applauded. They did not only applaud; they shook hands with the president. And after warm handshakes, they waxed into choir. It looks like a comedy of sorts from a people who had made a cartoon image of the president.

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    We know this agreement is the beginning of what will be a tweaking of the salary scale upwards for all cadres of civil servants. Corporate Nigeria has hailed the move. But what of state governments who could not pay the last approved pay? We are waiting for Labour’s next move. At last, Agbaero and co. have now come down to the minimum.

  • Like father like fraud

    Like father like fraud

    A tweet went viral last week from the fingers of lawmaker and son of former Kaduna State governor, Bello El-Rufai. I did not see it until quite a few people forwarded it to me. A former minister also sent it to me with a comment, “This little prick needs to be put in his place.” What did Bello, a member of House of Representatives, write? “Thanks. I left the office early to see him off at the airport. I just told him a lot of you do love him and have been supportive. I shared some tweets to him. We also laughed at a shameless idiot, Sam the houseboy at 70, of the Toilet Paper called The Nation.” He accompanied the tweet with a picture of the back of his father, the former governor who bleeds rather than talk.

    So, that is the quality of a lawmaker in today’s democracy of the 21st century. A father is accused of stealing over N400 billion, the son goes to the toilet to defend him. Is that the sort of family that should spill into the public square? So, if father is an accused thief, son is a liar. What a combo of family.  Who is shameless if not a thief or a liar? The Nation is toilet paper but it was not so when it defended him in the past, when he made headlines against his enemies. It is because he has a toilet imagination that Bello’s father can be accused of stealing and he does not hide himself in the shadows.

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    He calls me 70, where is his fact? His father returned to Atiku, the man he betrayed for OBJ. he has returned to his own vomit. So, it is a case of a traitor cohabiting with a defector. What a marriage. And they say they love this country? Bello himself has been pampered by his father. He never had any real job in this country before he became lawmaker, except a stint at a Chinese firm his father helped him get. He schooled outside this country. I recall challenging his father at Sheraton sometime ago in front of my editor colleagues when he wanted to advertise his integrity. He said his salary was small. I asked him how he funded his children, including Bello, from a government salary that could not pay more than a month’s rent abroad. He could not answer me then. Now I know why, and why his son must defend his father.

  • Politics of money

    Politics of money

    I know of at least one local government chairman who had two abodes. One was in his local government area. The other was in Lagos. Their preferred abode? Nigeria’s commercial nerve centre. They were unnerved by their fidelity to the constitution that required them to operate as full-time employees of the tax payer. They spent at least 29 days in Lagos and one day in their offices. Sometimes, they never visited their LGAs in three months.

    Their reason? They were only chairmen in name and salaries, and occasional largesse from their benefactors. Their boss, the governor, had essentially trumped their roles. They bowed to the usurper. They were thankful to their abuser who enabled them to earn a living while pursuing their businesses in Lagos.  A cynical tryst.

    The Supreme Court verdict seems to have put paid to all that. Seems. The governors fought. They have quilted and yielded like constitutional creatures to the tip court in the land. They yielded but they are not bowed. The law, as Thoreau said, “never made anyone a whit more just.” The law may be right, but man must execute it.

    This is a triumph for Attorney General Lateef Fagbemi, and a quiet tremor of joy to grassroots politicians and, especially, to the Tinubu administration. We must accept it also as a victory for fiscal federalism. The president has been one of the rooftop cheerleaders of the idea, and for him to do it by following the law is a kudos to his constitutional integrity. It was a decision he too has taken against his own past, having served as governor who controlled local government funds. It is a rectitude of reversal. It is a courage of self-recrimination. He saw his dirt and cleaned it in public. It is understandable that governors did not want their powers to “go gentle into that good night,” to adapt Dylan Thomas’ poem. They “raged against the dying” of their powers.

    Yet we must admit that this was an act that makes the Supreme Court an activist chamber. Our federalism anoints two tiers: the federal and states. This naturally means money should go to both. If the law was made to save the money, it means the court in following the money has undermined the power of the state governors. It implied we have two political tiers but three financial tiers. What this means is that the court has made a law by interpreting it. No one can question its power to do so. Courts make laws and they are called precedents. Most who read this see the politics and not the law. But what is the use of the law when it creates injustice? That is the crux of Fagbemi’s point. The governors can only appeal to God.

    But there is a seeming naivety in the jubilation over the guillotine of the governors in this matter. Yes, the allocation will go direct to the chairmen. But who puts the chairmen on the throne? Of course, the governors. The governors control the electoral process. The governors nod who heads their local INEC. The governors can outspend most contenders for local government offices during elections. So, while fiscal federalism triumphs, political localism will contend. The governors may now put their men in offices and direct them on how to spend their money. If an LG chair resists, he may fight the local bear at his own peril. Money, it seems, answers all things. This will engender constitutional tension and stir democratic impulses.

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    The other angle is to see it as a case where local government chairs run to the presidency for cover. The president, where his interest beckons, may “mobilise” the LGs against their governors. I predict that if the governors pick most of the chairs, we may have the governors acting like British system called “indirect rule.” I think the phrase was wrongly used by historians as my former teacher, the late Prof. Tunji Oloruntimehin, asserted. A rule is a rule. We cannot say the managing director is ruling his finance department indirectly because he has a financial manager. So, governors will use stealth and tact to maintain the status quo. The idea of caretakers was an impunity of governors who did not want to pretend to be dictators. One of such was Pitobi who did not pretend to be a democrat when he governed Anambra State. He has kept mum so far on this subject. His lack of garrulity here is refreshing.

    Whatever happens going forward, two things are clear. One, this is a plus for restructuring. Two, we are in an uncharted territory. Will the politics of federalism yield to the financing of it? That is the question. It is a challenge to the integrity of the governors and the resilience of grassroots politics.

    Apostles of federalism have asserted that the biggest part of a nation should not be bigger than the smallest part of it. This is a theory that federalism has not fulfilled in any nation. Even in the United States, the award of electoral votes sanctifies inequality. The concept of federalism often wrestles with the concept of equality. In his America, Alexis de Tocqueville, praised the United States for what he called the “equality of condition.” This implies the absence of equality in class and institutions. But it means equality is an aspiration, not a fact. The system has a potential for rising over its tyrannical structure. Indeed, the U.S. was later to abolish slavery, enthrone gender rights and abolish Jim Crow laws about blacks. But, in fact, the injustices remain, in spite of the legal triumphs. Law only works where good people win. As Edmund Burke, the great conservative, asserted, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” It is about people, not the law. After all, the American constitution said all men were created equal, and two hundred years later, it is still a contention.

    What the  governors know and the constitution cannot wipe out is what Harvard Professor Joseph Nye calls soft power. It is often more powerful than hard power, which is the law. The battle in Kano and Edo states between governors and monarchs is the wrestle between soft and hard power. While in the local government situation, the governors may exercise soft power, in the Kano and Edo issues, the soft power lies in the hands of the kings. we cannot rule out “rogue” LG men who governors will tag upstarts. I suspect that if such LG chairmen run to the presidency for help, the president will be in a position to wield both soft and hard powers, and a strong and cunning president will browbeat any gubernatorial sleight of hand by making them slight of hand. That is why I say we are in uncharted waters, and both Fagbemi (SAN) and the president know this. As the Chinese says, we are in interesting times.

  • Soyinka’s theatre

    Soyinka’s theatre

    Our man of theatre now has one. Thanks to President Tinubu for naming the National Theatre for Soyinka. It is a no brainer that Nigeria’s preeminent theatre genius who earned global eminence in that area should have the biggest icon named after him. The Nobel citation refers to him as a writer who “fashions the drama of existence.”

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    We now have a shrine for such histrionics. Soyinka writes, and that makes him an inspiration to theatre. He feeds the stage with his works of drama. Soyinka performs, and that makes him a man of stagecraft. He is therefore both an inspiration and act for theatre. It is a combo of theory and praxis in one soul. Congratulations to the bard.

  • Soyinka and his enemies

    Soyinka and his enemies

    When an avatar turns 90, it should evoke a universal hurrah, especially if that personage is Professor Wole Soyinka. We can say that more people are rejoicing than those who are in pain. Yet the best writer this country has known is at odds with a certain mob of dark conscience.
    This essayist is more concerned about the young ones who have mutated into a monster of a generation and are even trying to deny him the name of a writer.
    I will ignore the older ones, some of my generation who have melded into that raucous chorus. Those are men and women, some of them prominent, who extol tribe instead of conscience, trump civility with imprecations, can’t act without cant, cloak the law with impunity. This tribe of men and women will not clap as Soyinka turns 90 but will fill the air with claptrap, with long-winded essays and pretensions to scholarship, erudition and inflammatory law.
    But what concerns me are the younger ones, some of them already 40 years old, but most of them younger.
    For the older ones, they know the pedigree of the bard. They followed in their lifetimes the sacrifices of his career and the genius of his offerings. But they have swathed themselves in denials. They are entitled to lie to themselves. But for the younger ones, I shed tears. This is a generation without what Frederich Nietzsche calls historical sense. This does not mean merely understanding the past, according to the German philosopher, but of deploying it with purpose for the present.

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    T.S. Eliot defines it as how to use the “pastness of the past” as though it has “presence.” it compels the attitude of William Faulkner, who asserted that the “past is never dead. It is not even past.” But you have to know the past to employ it.
    But these young ones do not know the past, so they are deprived of a historical sense.
    I must say not all of that generation are victims of this poisoned communion. Just a section, a wild, uproarious, unhinged, barbarous horde.
    It all started this season when Wole Soyinka pitched his tent with a certain presidential candidate. When he did, the conclave of catcalls clasped him to their bosom as their friend and ally.
    He even described Pitobi as a new kid on the block, which I thought was errant of the bard.
    I drew his attention to that at a certain lunch after the election. He was genuinely for the guy.
    But after the election, and the man lost, Soyinka was mum for a while. I learned he was undergoing his own research on how the polls went.
    He eventually saw that Pitobi lost, and that his followers wanted to hijack the republic.
    Unfazed, the bard came out and said the man he supported had lost and his followers were employing what he called “Gbajue,” a word more understood in Yoruba than any translation can attempt.
    In order words, it is what Joseph Conrad calls the “bravado of guilt.”
    They knew they lost, but they wanted to force their own republic on us all.
    A republic of agberos. Soyinka also expressed disgust at Pitobi’s mendacity over a meeting he held with him. He said what Obi made of the meeting was different from what they discussed. The bard had just seen the father of Gbajue pull his act to him at his Abeokuta redoubt.
    Since then, this mob has turned one of Africa’s most renowned writers and man of conscience into a villain.
    This has happened because of the collapse of decorum in our society.
    We no longer have a democracy of decorum or respect but a society of insults. If you navigate the social media and read and hear what they spew out in the name of free speech, you will understand that this nation has bred a generation of vipers.
    During the election campaigns, they operated like a faith with a cathedral. They had a general in battle, and sang all sorts of pious accolades as they cheered him on. But faith was his poisoned chalice.
    Pitobi didn’t know that. He was like the general Sisera in the scriptures who thought he had the great army. When the battle came, he quilted. The war was his poison.
    As the scriptures described the poison in an eternal line: “He asked water, she gave him milk, and she brought forth butter in a lordly dish.”
    The movement is still dizzy with that poison of illusion, a grand, delusional, self-aggrandizement. If they had a faith with a cathedral during the campaigns, they now have a faith without cathedral today. Their ecclesiastical leaders are seeing their icon pretend to be every one’s priest and follower, fasting for one faith today and another tomorrow, the sort of faithful that God said he would spit out in the Book of Revelations.
    That is their agony. They are spawning a new divinity in the mob, a god of chaos and rage, like the Greek god of the sea and water and earthquakes known as Poseidon.
    His exploits in Greek stories of shipwrecks and subversions are breathtaking. The Bible attributes the power to Satan in the Revelations and shouts “woe to the inhabitants of the sea.”
    This mob, who would not appreciate our bard, would do well to embrace logic. Rather, they profit in complaint. They have forgotten that this man has written some of the best plays ever written. Have they read A Play of Giants? Have they watched Death and the King’s Horseman? Do they know what his plays mean? Have they absorbed the awe of Idanre and Other Poems, or are they aware that this man who fought with pen and rhetoric and travels in the past wrote the long poem Ogun Abibiman dedicated to the fight for freedom in South Africa? They are ignorant because they are still making their Shuttle in the Crypt.
    These young men and women, who love Indomie, should read more about this indomitable man.
    Do they know that, in the throes of the Nigerian crisis, Wole Soyinka drove solo across the Nigerian borders to the Biafra and wanted to stop the carnage to come.
    Who among them can boast such courage? He stood for principle and that of peace, and that the Igbo brethren should not be forced into a fratricidal bloodhound.
    In his memoirs, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, he describes how Christopher Okigbo saw him in the east and yelled in ecstatic surprise.
    Okigbo, an immortal poet, was one of the casualties of that inferno. We lost him and how many more potential Okigbos have we lost to that needless war?
    Read two-time Booker Prize finalist Chigozie Obioma’s new novel on the war, The Road to the Country, a riveting new offering on the savagery of war. Soyinka drove on a lonely road to the country, and drove back. A top army officer told me that there was an instruction to apprehend and even eliminate any person or vehicle coming through the west from the east, except Wole Soyinka.
    He was a young man then. He was arrested and held by Gowon and the result was his prison notes, The Man Died.
    Has any of his traducers picked up a copy? One should wish that the plays, readings, seminars and other tributes of this season for Soyinka drown out the ululations of the barbarians.
    I want to recall some lines dedicated to him by the Ghanaian poet Atukwei Okai: “Let the greying day glow/Let the evening horns blow/ Let the melting mountains go/But let the sundown sow/ in your soul…the soil-sanctioned bulwark-bone…”

  • More news than rejoinder

    More news than rejoinder

    I would not have bothered to acknowledge the rejoinder written by spokesman Paul Ibe to my last week’s essay on his master Atiku Abubakar.
    But I decided otherwise because he, perhaps, unwittingly revealed a piece of news and confirmed my speculation in that piece: That embattled Nasir El Rufai, former governor of Kaduna State is now a partner with Atiku.
    Coming from Atiku’s spokesman, it is clear the fellow has no place in APC, where he fought and dined last season. So, it is clear why he also followed Atiku’s footsteps by visiting the former president, Muhammadu Buhari.
    He even visited a northern monarch and pledged his allegiance to the Adamawa fellow. This is even more potent as the APC in the State pledged their loyalty to Governor Uba Sani.
    It was a feast of allegiance. Enter Speaker of the House of Representatives , Hon Tajudeen Abbas. Enter former Governor Mukhtar Yero. Enter Senator Suleiman Hunkuyi. Enter party bigwigs.

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    Exit El Rufai. The big-mouthed man can now take shelter under the roofs of Adamawa since he is now politically homeless.
    It is a season of sealed lips for him as he tries to parry attention to his over N400 billion fraud allegations and an EFCC’s sword of Damocles hangs in the clouds over his head.
    It is amazing now that all his troops have fled, just like the general Sisera in the Bible.
    Are they going to be accommodated under the shadow of the Adamawa chieftain, too. Pity Atiku has no powers to stop a corruption trial or to free anyone. He may be a shelter but not a refuge for El Rufai and his minions. Even his followers are not coming back to the nation yet. They are crouching abroad with their loots?

  • The Visitors

    The Visitors

    Atiku Abubakar looks at himself in the mirror and sees a chess player.

     He may not be a certain politician who did so when he was governor and belted out a song of self-praise, to wit: “I am ugly but I am governor and the most powerful man in this state.” I spare the world his name and state.

     He, at least, exercised a sense of self-scrutiny and physical realism to chasten himself.

    Atiku lacks such self-deprecating humility.

    But he, of all days, chose a season of holy ferment to play a politics of visitation.

    As philosopher David Hume noted: “The corruption of the best produces the worst.”

    One can muse on visits and their imports.

    We know of arrivals of pesky in-laws and cold handshakes and placid smiles.

     The famous movie, Look who’s coming for Dinner with Sidney Poitier reverses that sentiment.

    The visit of coup plotters, like Buhari had when he was head of state.

     A handshake of grudges like the one between Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak that betokened blood and death. Between Hitler and Neville Chamberlain, after which Hitler mocked: “Our enemies are tiny little worms. I saw them the other day at Munich.” Or the bearhug of Russian diplomat Andrei Gromyko in the embers of the Cold War. Richard Nixon rebuffed Brezhnev’s hugs. He preferred handshakes. Or the handshake between Tinubu and Atiku during the 2023 election campaign at a chance meeting where both had few words to exchange.

    Tinubu turned it into a fashion moment adjusting something on his rivals. Sometimes visits are sneaky, like Odysseus, who returned from the Trojan War to see a flock of men trying to take his wife, Penelope.  Atiku was not the only visitor.  Nasir El-Rufai also came calling, a few days before he decided to go to court to challenge an avalanche of corruption charges. But beware of visits under the cover of God. We had the visits of the three wise men at the birth of Christ, and it is still a liturgical controversy today whether they are of God or of the enemy.

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     In his famous poem, T.S. Eliot calls it a “hard journey” in his Journey of the Magi. So, what are we to make of that visit. Shehu Sani put it in context. He described it as a “façade” and “surreptitiously a new attempt to build a strong northern alliance using ex-President Buhari as a rallying point to challenge and evict President Tinubu’s government in 2027.”

    He did not end his note without a prophecy. He said the “project will eventually kiss the dust.”

    He says they want to exploit Buhari’s folksy charm in the north and rally his mass following. Hence, I say the man has no sense of a real chess player.

     He wanted to play on the optics of a handshake to cast himself as a provocateur of the talakawa. He has invoked, without knowing it, a story of tribal prejudice during the 2023 election campaign.

    He stirred up the “our own is our own” mantra after he told the Arewa Council that the north should vote for their son. He forgets two things. One, that he cannot re-evoke the PDP primary strategy where he turned the north into a political horse trading. He took over Tambuwal’s vote and entrenched himself as the northern candidate. Two, his visit to Buhari reignites the allegation that the former president’s cabal were working for Atiku. That fueled the Nasir El Rufai’s rhetoric to confirm Tinubu’s camp’s charge that some elements in Buhari government wanted to sabotage his party’s candidacy. Does this visit not whip up that charge? Buhari will have, of course, to prove again that he is a party man, not an ethnic man. In the last polls, he had to brandish his voter’s card just to advertise his loyalty. Of course, Buhari will be forced to do same this time if the Atiku men want to play up the ethnic card. Atiku only remembers the north when he wants their vote. The point has ben made over and over as to what he has done to help the north as a big man of influence and wealth. His Adamawa State is one of the worst in development indices. The north has never done well. Atiku cohabits with southern elite where he makes wealth all the time except when he wants power. He is the most cynical politician of this generation. The second, of course, is El Rufai, who exposed Atiku’s ethno-regional chicaneries last year but he is in bed with him today. In the north, according to all researches including that of Redline and Oxford, most of the states have over 50 percent of citizens living below poverty line. In the northwest, in the last eight years, between 35 and 40 percent and in some states between 50 and 75 percent of its citizens were living below poverty line. These surveys covered between 2014 and 2023. Where was Atiku if not ensconced in his Dubai luxury rampart? For El Rufai, his Kaduna was 55 percent below poverty level when he could have done better with over N400 billion no one can account for. Yet, the Tinubu administration has appointed ministers in the north in the most critical part of their needs. Vice President Kashim Shettima made this assertion in the presence of Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila. Vice President Shettima asserted that for insecurity, President Tinubu appointed two defence ministers from the north, Abubabakar Badaru and Bello Matawalle, Chief of defence staff Gen. Christopher Musa. But there is more. Few have heard of the Paluka initiative, a non-kinetic programme, amounting to hundreds of billions of naira, that focuses on pursuing development in a suite of states like Kano, Kebbi, Jigawa, Bauchi, Sokoto, etc. It is to be pursued by ministers of health, defence, economic planning, housing, agriculture. The ministers of health and agriculture are also from the north. These ministers have done little to serve as the story tellers of their mandates, and should have been the ones to tackle Atiku in his megalomaniac visitations. For instance, why has the agricultural minister not shown how the federal government has devoted about N300 billion so far in that sector in the area of largescale farming, fertilisers, etc.? With his appeal to northern sentiments, Atiku forgets that a narrative of such nature projects the north in what French thinker Michel Foucault sees as prefabricated identities, a people without dynamic or conscience to be corralled at will towards unthinking loyalty.  Writers and thinkers like Zadie Smith and Charles Taylor have mused over how such identities can endanger and problematize civilization. The last election exposed the futility of such automatic fanaticism as the north had hefty votes for the APC candidate. As Shehu Sani asserts, Atiku wants to privilege prejudice over national cohesion.

    He is the most dangerous politician in the country, followed by Peter Obi.

    The Atiku visit reminds one of Friedrich Durrenmatt, one of Europe’s best playwrights’ masterpiece, The Visit,  in which a native and now wealthy lady returns to her town and turns the whole community upside down. Atiku may want to read that play, if he reads.

  • Food master of West

    Food master of West

    The BOS of Lagos made news last week over his 59th birthday, and his picture embossed social media and newspapers. In one, he was surrounded by his family and kids he once described as his bodyguards. A clap for him. But the news that seems to have slipped under the radar was his new assignment: as the food master of the west.
    In a recent meeting of southwest governors, they focused on the food crisis, and charged him to coordinate efforts to make the region flush with food again.
    He will coordinate the agricultural commissioners in the states and lead in mass production. His governor colleagues picked him because of his own showing in the provision of food in Lagos State. Like the subsidized weekly markets and food kicthens, et al.

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    But the west has only recently had to contend with such scarcity because of dependency outside, fueling inflation. It is part of the president’s meeting with governors to start a food drive across the country. The West has always had farms and food, and the BOS of Lagos may invoke the songs we sang in my school, Methodist Primary School, Ibadan. “Iwe kiko lai si Oko ati ada/ koi pe o koi pe o/Ise agbe nise ilewa/ eni ko s’ise a ma jale.” Education without a hoe or a machete/ it’s not complete/ it’s not complete/ Farming is the work of our land/ whoever does not work will end up a thief.” Whether it is pepper, or rice or tomato, or onion, or bleating goats and groaning cows, or the slew of vegetables, they are doable, not only in the Southwest but across the country. In my school days, I accompanied my grandmother Iyaruvie in miles of treks to the farm where everything from pepper to cassava to yams were blooming. We had a huge yam barn in our compound. Governor Sanwo-Olu is upping the ante in the Imota Rice Mills, and that is a model for the rest of the region. As Lagos continues to be a state of example, so should the West be and the rest of the country. With the farms thriving, harvests will overwhelm and subdue food inflation.