The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • …And El-Rufai goes to court

    …And El-Rufai goes to court

    It is interesting that former Kaduna State governor, Nasir EL Rufai, has decided to go to court and he is seeking N1billion for damages. It is good that he has responded to In Touch call for him to break his silence. But rather than account for his alleged infractions, he is giving it to the lawyers. That is not characteristically Nasir, who does not give the glory of his story to others. We are still waiting for him to talk, with typical Nasir bluster.  Silence is out of character, especially when his character is at stake. Again,

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    what of all the others accused who have fled the country? Is he a general without a foot soldier, not even his friend Jimmy Lawal? Why are they fleeing their master? The matter is still on the boil. The EFCC is on the matter. Is the court case a calculation to thwart an official inquiry and possible prosecution? Is it a court case to stop a court case?

  • Use and abuse of power

    Use and abuse of power

    Three governors bear the spotlight in this season of rebellion. The first is the governor of Kano, Abba Kabir Yusuf. This man In Touch calls the demolition governor. Many across the country are emoting, Haba Governor, conflating his middle name with exclamations of horror.

    The other, Sim Fubara. His shortened first name evokes communication but has acted as though his network has lost touch with our democratic fibre of being. Some are wondering whether the man is tempting a Rivers of blood.

    The third governor is Uba Sani, who has turned into a fighter of accountability. His tongue is mute, his mien unfazed, but the people, on the streets and in the fiery chambers of Labour unions, are pelting charges at his predecessor, not him.

    The three men present a lesson in the use and abuse of power. As for Abba or Haba Yusuf, he was elected into office but he has performed his task like a man who captured power. Slim, close to gaunt, he does not readily invoke the image of a bulldozer. But nothing in his public image casts him otherwise.

    His first fear was that he could be “court-martialed” out of power after the ruling of the Court of Appeal. He had bulldozed not a few houses. But he did not deploy his signature demolition squad as yet. He was waiting for the supreme verdict on his legitimacy. Once that was in the bag and the talakawa applauded in street chorus, boys kicking dust bowls of ecstasy humidified with tears of joy, the path was set for the great anarchy.

    He removed Ado Bayero and installed Sanusi. Sanusi exulted over his being exalted. But his was a sort of Pyrrhic victory. Haba Yusuf saw it as a leveler of Ganduje, not an elevation for Sanusi. Now, he had all the powers. Governors often do in this dispensation. Russian best short story writer and playwright, Anton Chekhov wrote in his play, The Cherry Orchard, that a giant should not use his power like a giant. That is when absolute power corrupts.

    He could have removed Sanusi, as I noted in my last offering in this matter, by following the rule of law. What Haba Yusuf has not done is follow the process with patience and rigour. The giant is so in a rush to fell the goat that he stumbles head first before his quarry. He acted like a child who tumbles out of the mother’s lap for scrambling to grab the feeding bottle or who splashes half the milk in the feeding bottle because he is not patient to trap it between his lips.

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    The governor could have quietly nudged his rubberstamp legislature to go through the process of dissolving a law, and gone through the local government requirements before passing the law. He could have followed the court process like an obedient servant. He did not. Now, the courts are playing akwete with him. It is not enough for his commissioner to interpret the federal court verdict about whether it affirms Bayero on the throne. It is not necessary for him to demolish a palace, or for him to order the police. That is what we see with a baby in power. If, in the end, all his efforts are quashed by the courts, and Bayero reinstalled, it may be a reprieve. The governor may restart the process and have the last laugh. He may, by then, have exhausted taxpayer’s money, legislative calories and time for more worthy ventures, all to settle an old score. Meanwhile, the battle of the royals festers, a civil war of thrones, games of wiles and guiles. Rather than govern on the streets, he is warring in the courts.

    As for Mister SIM, Rivers State is a little different. Fubara was Wike’s boy wonder for his people. The man was not heard and hardly seen when he was on the cusp of power. He was at first on the run from EFCC even though he was running for office. Abraham Lincoln has been quoted without evidence as the author of the quote that if you want to test a man’s true character, give him power. That does not obviate the immortal virtue of those lines. That virtue is lacking in Fubara. He took on power, and he bruised it. As a governor of Rivers State, he has powers that many other governors eye only with envy. He has resources. He has party loyalists. He has stability of tenure. What he lacks is a stability of temperament. Too many goods for his own good.

    Yet, he has thrashed about like a bull in a China shop. He has pulled down a building, passed a budget without authority, anointed a four-man legislature, corralled the house inside the state house, run many court errands without guile, made many juvenile quotes. This is a man who could have followed the legal process with finesse while winning his battles. But he has destroyed the China and hopes for bumper sales. He is making a bazaar without wares.

    The latest is the battle of local governments. He did not need to shout that he was going to probe them. Why not leave that to those whose offices would do it and await the result and appear as though you were just obliging a routine? Why not wait another six months and allow the local government chairmen under the new legislative era to satisfy its time. Six months is no millennia. Its eternity will wear out, and he could set about his own men to take over. He has the power but he does not have the patience. A juvenile in an adult task. He is dazed by flattery, girded by hangers-on, serenaded by court jesters, anointed by pseudo elders. A teardrop for him.

    These two men should learn from their Kaduna counterpart. When he was sworn in, he did not complain about his purse string. Rather, he set out uniting a fractured state, seeking ways to pay bills and begin projects. But there was so much he could accomplish with a lean, or evaporated purse. He did not go out to sling a shot at his mouthy predecessor and friend. When labour wanted to duel him, he said he was not a man of violence. This is an irony for a man who is a past master of battles in the trenches as a civil rights, democracy, rule of law activist. He clearly understands the current and pulse of governance.

    He has not bulldozed like Haba, nor upset the apple cart like Sim. He merely presented the matter to what Thomas Jefferson described as “the tribunal of the world.” The house took it up, but he said nothing. Elders have ululated, but he did not stir. Newspapers and televisions houses have irked and ached, but his mien remained the same. He has not gone to court, but the EFCC is on the matter. He did not take the matter to the House, but the house took it up on its own. He did not run to the media, but it is on their menu.

     No one can accuse Governor Sani of insolence. He has insulted no one. No one can accuse him of impunity. He has not violated any law or seems to. Protests convulsed the streets last week over El Rufai’s men showing a bravado of guilt during Sallah. Rather than go sober, they were mouthing the unprintable. Yet, no quote from the man in the saddle. He has employed his powers with finesse and dignity, what the French call savoir faire. Even his friend El Rufai will find nothing to tar Governor Sani, who has not said anything about his predecessor and fellow traveler in the past. He has fired a salvo without a string.

    It tells of how we need to reflect on how we recruit leaders in this country. Fubara and Yusuf are examples of how not to use power.

  • Heroes on famished roads

    Heroes on famished roads

    “This war changes us as we remain the same,” is a poignant line from two-time Booker Prize finalist Chigozie Obioma’s new and third novel, The Road to the Country. It is haunting narrative of Nigeria’s civil war. Reading through it reminds one of a line from the Vietnamese American novelist and author of the Sympathiser, Viet Thanh Nguyen. He wrote, “All wars are fought twice. The first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” That line haunted me as Obioma’s novel closes. As the war ends, federal troops force Igbo to chant “One Nigeria.” In his wake, an old woman, in the midst of a broken country of rotten corpses and about a million dead, is defiant. She yells “hail Biafra,” several times. She does not say it to the faces of still belligerent federal soldiers.

    While it is compelling to ask the IPOB folks and their closet sympathisers to read Obioma’s tale about the mangled flesh, deaths and devastation of the 30-month inferno in Biafra, that old woman evinces the death wish in the human soul. History repeats itself, and that is the tragedy. If a person who just witnessed carnage is unbowed, how do you evangelise peace to their children and grandchildren who are eying the nozzle and smoke of the battlefield?

    Perhaps that is the cautionary tale of Obioma’s absorbing offering. Biafra started with fury but not fire.  How do you pursue your own justice without arms? Adichie raised that question in her Half of a Yellow Sun, and yours truly in my own novel, My Name is Okoro.

    But The Road to the Country is the first major story about the battlefield, the soldiers, their interstices of fear and mortar fire, the ducks and raids, the ogre and pathos, even the romance that subdues a voracious war as a devourer of men, women and children.

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    The story starts with guilt, and we follow Kunle, half Yoruba, half Igbo, who goes into Biafra in search of his brother Tunde, on wheelchair because he sent him out of the house many years before the war to follow a ball he kicked to the streets. There Tunde is hit by a car. Kunle wants a happy doing with Nkechi. That never happens, but it is the beginning of Tunde’s handicap and Nkechi’s shift of affection to Tunde.

    The guilt takes Kunle to Biafra. He does not see Tunde before he sees battle and he becomes a Biafran captain. His romance with another Biafran soldier Agnes is haunting. But in all, it is a story of a people who cannot rely on faith alone. It is a tale of ungunned gallantry that leads to an epic collapse and rump of a cause. Biafra fights with unfunded heroics and ill-equipped audacity. They turn ogre into romance and romance into nightmare. We see its moral contradiction, as in when many die of kwashiorkor but Colonel Ojukwu, in his plenty, sends choice drinks to a mercenary officer who would balk in the end.

    Written from the Biafran perspective, it reminds one of Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front about the First World War. Obioma’s style alternates between gore and empathy, daring into mangled flesh in a mangled land, a tale Nigerians need to read to understand how war can make heroes on famished roads.

  • Common sense

    Common sense

    The question of minimum wage has often made me think of the word commonsense. The very word provoked the American Revolution when a non-American used it to sue the conscience of the world. Thomas Paine employed it as a phrase, not a word. He titled his pamphlet, Common Sense. He was history’s first pamphleteer of freedom. The little piece of literature morphed into a torch of liberty in the infant nation, just like a century later when Harriet Beecher Stowe published her uproarious novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

    Paine, in his subversive tone, asked a series of questions when his own country England held the Americans in colonial throttle. His questions were simple but pithy, and riled a continent against an island. One of his questions was how should a mere island hold a continent in its grip?

    Today, there are quite a few questions of commonsense that NLC’s Agbaero and TUC’s Osifo ought to ponder. We must admit though, that reason has failed to pass muster in their universe. One, when George Akume, the country’s first scribe, said he could not pay his drivers N100k as salary, Agbaero and co. lashed out. Did they ask Akume what his salary is, what his bills are? If they say he is a “big man’ and can pay, it is because they often suggest politicians and government high-fliers misappropriate allowances for personal use. So, if they want him to steal to pay, are they not encouraging looting our treasury? Does that make them wise or foolish, or even corrupt?

    Two, I asked the question last week? Is the NLC or TUC prepared to pay their security guards N250k as minimum wage? Are they going to milk the workers to obtain the money? Will NLC and TUC release their own prepared salary scale now and let us debate how they can pay for it.

    Three, why is labour insisting on minimum wage for less than 10 percent of Nigeria’s work force? In saner societies, labour duels corporate elites who purloin the sweats of the teeming employees. Here in Nigeria, they attack the governments. Not that they should not. Their focus upends the logic of the philosophy of Labour. So, if the Federal Government pays N250k, how do they want to enforce it on the major labour centres in the country? Will they force it on the one-man business limping for survival? To demonstrate the irony, President Joe Biden recently ennobled the picket lines of autoworkers demanding better welfare.

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    Four, why is Labour so parochial in its vision of the purview of their work for the Nigerian Labour? There are many areas Labour has perennially ignored. Why have they not paid attention, for instance, to foreign oppression of the Nigerian worker on our soil. Why have they not drawn a charter for the Chinese, Lebanese, Indians et al, who are reigniting a colonial slave ethic in their fiefdom of factories and shops across the country? Why have they not marched on Ikorodu and Ogun State where factories and warehouses have overshadowed the air and water with near apocalypse of pollution? Citizens crouch with diseases and mourn unheard. These quiet tik tock to death has become commonplace in the Niger Delta where rivers and farms have turned dark with crude oil and paralysed citizens and criminalised their consciences. Are they not workers, too. This new Labour is not like some of their hefty men of old like Imoudu, who understood the scythe and horizon of the Labour philosophy. The new honchos have turned themselves into a salary union, rather than a Labour union. A Labour union is a thinking fortress of society. They create a cooperative pool of ideas. They are also a moral vortex. Did Adams Oshiomhole not save nubile beauties from the predation of an amorous banking elite and policy? The great French writer and philosopher mapped out how great movements die. They start with utility, then they turn into privilege. At last, they fall into abuse. NLC and TUC are in the final phase. That august movement requires a rebirth.

    Can the Labour not see its task as government’s partner in squelching the big ogre of the age: fake products. Or don’t they think labour should stop water-borne diseases in the form of “pure water” or fake drugs killing many in the country? American poet and writer Lucille Clifton noted that “We can’t create what we can’t imagine.” What our labour leaders need is imagination. Garcia Marquez, who won the Nobel Prize for turning the creative world upside down with fantastical tales, once proclaimed: “Freedom to the imagination.” He once also asserted that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” Agbaero and co. can’t imagine a Labour approach other than through strikes. It is a monotony and deadness of the imagination.

    Hence, they shut down the national grid. A thinking Labour will not shut down a national grid. Records say the nation lost over N100 billion in the last strike. Is this a labour that seeks productivity? When Akume called them saboteurs, was he not right? If they cost the country N100 billion, what moral authority have they to challenge those who spend less to acquire SUVs? Do they have a moral authority.

    In saner realms, positions in national grid and arms industry are not only given to their citizens, they are especially screened. National grid is not just an institution. Working there is not just a job but also a national service. It entwines both commerce and national security. Only a man of unpatriotic mindset will embark on a rant to defend shutting down the grid. Not even today when the nation is trying to stop banditry and other forms of subversion.

    Is it commonsensical for Labour to seek salary hike for a fraction of the workforce and not eye the ire of inflation? If the salary jumps, inflation jumps, not only for those who will earn the new pay but those who can’t. The new earners earn a status of false privilege because the new pay dissolves in a revanchist inflation. It becomes a double jeopardy for those who do not earn the new pay and they are the majority. They will stoop under more inflation than the new earners.

    If Labour is a thinking group, will they not muse former Ekiti State governor Kayode Fayemi’s point that they should map a federal salary policy? Sokoto cannot pay the same salary with Lagos. In the United States, wages are not created equal. They could have mused the point distinction between salary and wages Babatunde Raji Fashola’s (SAN) made in his book, National Public Discourse. He reiterated that point at Pastor Poju Oyemade’s The Platform.

    Labour should know that they are partners, not necessarily cosy twins, with government. “They are,” in the words of Shakespeare, “both in either’s powers.” Labour needs commonsense for a common sense.                            

  • Abiola’s unsung partners

    Abiola’s unsung partners

     June 12 gives us reason to reflect on the man M.K.O. Abiola. We speak of those who fought with him, and they became torchbearers of democracy like President Tinubu, who bathed in many accolades last week. We have had over the years phonies who claimed to be Abiola’s fellow travelers and those who were true fighters, especially in the media. In journalism, we had a few who were close, especially in the Concord newspaper, his media outfit. Apart from Dr. Doyin Abiola, his widow, the Concord fellows who were close have been rather shy of public self-praise. These were men, to use Christ’s language, who were beside him in his days of temptation. The first was Olu Akerele, his confidante. He was with him through thick and thin, and visited him in detention a number of times. He held his confidences and was possibly a man who could have been eliminated for his closeness.

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    There were the trio of Dele Alake, Tunji Bello and Segun Babatope. Alake was editor of Sunday and National Concord (the daily), and so was Bello. Babatope was of the editorial board. These men were with him behind the spotlight. They were the soldiers on the parapet. These men may not have been mentioned in the past week. They deserve their accolades. Akerele saved my life in the heady days when he alerted me to cars, a Jetta and Peugeot 505, stalking me around Abuja where I was managing editor. I fled town before IBB men woke up. Onanuga ran Tempo and the news. He was Abiola’s buddy until he broke away on principle with Dapo Olorunyomi, Kunle Ajibade, Babafemi Ojudu and Seye Kehinde to form The News. But June 12 brought Onanuga to join Abiola at the barricade.

    Yet some were not close, but significant. Bagauda Kaltho, who was derided for being a northerner fighting a Yoruba battle, died in the struggle. Alex Kabba almost fell at the NUJ press centre to journalism traitors but fled to the U.S. Embassy. Kunle Ajibade was in gulag forever. Let’s not forget Chima Ubani, the ‘immortal governor of Lagos’ These may not be Abiola’s close aides but they fought as though they were. They were Nigeria’s aides.

  • A short history of stumbles

    A short history of stumbles

    President Bola Tinubu’s personal drama stole the June 12 show with a slip and fall. Characteristically, he rose and waved in a parade. A social media tumult followed the story. They raised the spectre of the man’s health. The saw the fall but didn’t see the rise. It is the mindset of those who see. In media studies, it is called selective exposure and selective perception. The person is what they see. Those who saw a fall are fall-minded. Those who saw the rise see hills and not valleys.

    President Tinubu spiced it with humour. He was prostrating to democracy. It reminds one of what Ronald Reagan quipped to his wife, Nancy after a failed assassination attempt. “Honey,” he remarked, “I forgot to duck.” Nor is what happened to President Tinubu ever new in history. Not long ago, tall and gangly Joe Biden stumbled, and it was a laugh. Some said it was a measure of age, not health. But it was a transient spectacle to Americans. What of tall and gangly Obama, who stumbled on Airforce One? He reemphasized it while stepping on a podium. His tall frame came down on a stage. We saw that with George H. Bush who lost his step on a Japanese staircase, and gave his Democratic foes a hearty laugh. These were tall men.

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    Our macho man of Russia, Vladimir Putin, is one of the short men who fell. American media reported a fall in his home staircase. So steep was the descent that his anal parts became generous with faecal releases. The world did not see that. But we saw his sudden fall on an ice hockey rink. Another chunky fellow, our great Narendra Modi of India, came down on a staircase almost blasting his head on the marble floor.

    The spectacular was related in a new book sensation, Demons of Unrest by Erik Larson about the prelude to the American civil war with eerie similarities with the last Nigerian election. The author relates an episode when Abraham Lincoln was on a long train ride to his inauguration in Washington. He panicked over his now famous draft of his inaugural speech. The tall and gangly Lincoln suffered a structural collapse as he came down on a staircase in an Indianapolis hotel. And people could not laugh as the man fell among a raft of suitcases.

    Stumbles are no respecter of presidents. To paraphrase Jesus, let anyone over 15 years who has never stumbled or fallen in their lives, come out!

  • Labour as anarchist

    Labour as anarchist

     The Labour unions are agog, and a sort of vanity has enveloped them and their enabling lawyers. Agbero and co. are like the anarchist in the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev’s fiction who wants to pull down the system. When asked what to put in its place, he answers, let it come down first. That is not the prudence of working. It is the logic of the Jacobin era.

    They want the federal government to pay over N300k. If the money were available, it would be nice for all. But lack of a math sense is troubling  Agbero and his TUC counterpart, Osifo. One, they think it is the federal government alone that would pay. Two, the governors have hollered that they can’t pay above N60K. Some are making noise about SUVs and Hajj money, and they should. I have not heard the Muslims complain, though they make the majority of the population. Again, Agbero and co should ask their lawmakers to return their SUVs and ask Pitobi to recant his assertion that they need the cars to work. Only then can Labour shed its hypocrisy on government spending. As Zebrudaya says, “what are good for the goose are good for the gizzard.”

    But have they done the math of how much a month any salary increase will amount to compared with the money in the coffers? It is not even the amount that should bother us but whether we have the funds to pay given the state of the purse.

    We need them to break down for us what it will cost. If we know that, we can now determine how much we have and can make.

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    Our Labour unions have turned into salary unions. That is not the substance and concept of unions. It is about working with employers to lift the people’s welfare. Labour is not an enemy camp. They cooperate to agree and even to disagree. That also involves propounding ideas. The NLC and TUC have no worthy idea other than shut down the grid, paralyse the banks, etc, In the last strike, it was an irony. The very poor for whom the strikes were for were not at home. They were in the markets selling wares, on the roadsides repairing tyres and in homes doing the plumbing.

    Labour also forgets that most employers cannot afford N100k minimum wage. Would they embark on a strike against the moi moi seller for not paying his employee N100K, assuming we get that far or low? When all is done, I would want to know what the TUC and NLC are paying their security guards.

  • Air El Malam – Flight 423 billion

    Air El Malam – Flight 423 billion

    Kaduna State has witnessed two flights. One is money, and the other is human. The latter flight is because the former is airborne. The money flight comes from fraud, while the human flight soars from fear. We can call the airline Air El Malam in its cloudy accounting.  From my investigations, the flights are international and involve two continents and three countries.

    We hope that the flights have return trips, or else the EFCC and Pastor Olukoyede may have to employ Interpol. For his peace and that of Kaduna, we should hope that all those who have left the country are on vacation or some sort of medical rejuvenation, or businesses that have little to do with the new report from the Kaduna State House of Assembly about the first flight that involves N423 billion taking wings from the state accounts.

    That first flight, in financial parlance, may be called capital flight. But this is not strictly capital flight because capital flight can be legal and even wholesome.

    The report, a 175-page affair as long as a novella, involves corruption allegations of gargantuan dimension, both in dollars and naira, traced to the little man who bestrode the most iconic state of Northern Nigeria. This writer was the first to do a comprehensive expose on the seedy tale of a government that had projects that eyes could not see, claimed to issue contracts without due process, some by blackmail and others by sheer bravado. Contractors collected money without work. Undocumented Contracts yielded funds to questionable accounts and documented money spun fairytale contracts. So, fiction became money and money became fiction. One of the satisfying events for a writer is for public occurrence to vindicate his report.

    We hear that former Governor Nasir El Rufai is in Egypt. I expect that he will return soon, and I don’t want to invoke the line from scripture about those who seek refuge in the north African country. But many in the state are worried that the folks indicted by the House report have left the country to the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Can we say they fled, or they are merely visiting?

    Let it not be that they pled guilty with their feet and fled. Let it not be told that their flight tickets are saying, “I am guilty, my honour, because I have no honour.” Let it not be imagined that they fled to houses they bought abroad. Such purchases may invoke in the purloined homes the phrase in scripture that cursed is in the house of a thief.

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    The sum of N423 billion is no small find for even the grandest larceny. Malam EL Rufai, as I stated in an earlier piece, is often not a man to bait. He replies even before you drop an acidic sentence. Now, we neither see his face, nor hear his voice. The small man has become a hermit. He who was in a quiet swagger and eyeing with an avaricious eye the illustrious ambition of 2027, is like the haunting Comfort Omoge song about the fellow that everyone searched for but could not see. He is an invisible man.

    He has promised to respond. When I wrote the expose, he said he would respond. He didn’t. When the House met, he said he would respond. He didn’t. Now that the report is out, he said it is false. But that is all he has said.

    But this is the second phase of the invisible man. In the first incarnation, he loved the gossip. He was in stealth flight mode. He was meeting the president’s foes in furtive nights and unknown rendezvous. Then he made a show of his visibility. He met Pitobi. He even met folks of the SDP. Then to escalate the vanity, he met with Ribadu either to show off or to taunt those who knew he was showing off.

    Then his successor Uba Sani cried out when El Rufai’s sins blazed forth like a fire that wanted to consume the state. Ezekiel the prophet wrote about a city being a cauldron and people as flesh in the heat. Governor Sani did not want that. All state stakeholders were invited to see. El Rufai is his friend. But the state is more important than a man, especially if he was setting the state on fire. The labour unions wanted to go on strike. They had to see the books and the rot of his predecessor. When they saw it, they winced, and decided to halt the onslaught.

    Labour was part of the townhall meeting. The governor could not bear the pain alone in his liver. His revelations generated a collective sigh in the state.

    The irony is, among  the political elite, the religious leaders and the military and intellectual classes, no one has faulted Governor Sani. In all, the only person defending EL Rufai is El Rufai. Hence all those in the indictment, including a certain gentleman named Jimmy Lawal, who held an amorphous office of senior adviser/counsellor was, like a tortoise in an African tale, present in many of the sordid affairs. Who is an adviser and who is a counsellor? His acts, according to the report, is as questionable as his designation/s.

    Unlike others with the outsized ego of an El Rufai in a small body, the former Kaduna State governor did not need anyone to encourage him. He was the man who birthed and cradled. He did not need a court jesters or buffoons to inspire him. He needed no minstrel with a guile, no hymnals of tease, no ministers of affection and no drumrolls of flattery. He was his own bouquet. If he falls, he will be like the mighty tree crashing alone on a forest glade.

    There is a lot of work to do in the state. After such depredation, the new man in the saddle has set out on a repair mode. His own flight has to be turbulent, the rough air of redeeming the state debts, of revamping the projects, of getting the pensions to the retirees. Imagine on the former governor’s watch, billions of naira allocated to the aged did not go to the fellows with the hoary crowns. The work has begun for a new turn.

    The language of the report was instructive. In the many loans, the only one that was used for what it was earmarked for was the N1 billion for the purchase of security vehicles. Each of the others, including N14.3 billion, N10 billion, N17.5 billion, N7.5 billion, N18.043 billion, N10.5 billion, N20 billion, $129.8 million, $209 million, $26 million, $350 million, $130 million, $62.8 million, $150 million, $20 million, $80 million, $280 million, $470 million, $494 million, $494.6 million and $16.8 million, was accompanied with such a phrase as “they were not utlilised for what they obtained for.”

    The report says, “the debt management unit seems not to be aware of some of the loan facilities… “But a reckoning is afoot, and the nation waits what will happen now that the report is being forwarded to the EFCC. Is this history repeating itself? When he assumed office, EL Rufai took his predecessor to the EFCC. According to the House report, the state has never been so indebted in its history, and the hermit man had virtually no debt to pay when he assumed office.

    This is not a time for the former governor’s secret rendezvous. He should meet the Kaduna people and release his voice box and give account. Not him alone, but all of them abroad.                      

  • What’s wrong with tribe or native?

    What’s wrong with tribe or native?

    For one, I am blasé about whether we continue with the old or new anthem. For sentiment, I vote the old. Maybe because it was the anthem of my childhood. The lyrics lilted my natal tongue, a hymn of beginning. Or maybe it is because of the majesty of its rhythm, the haunting, almost ecclesiastical simplicity of its diction and because it beats the other anthem in its philosophical range and appeal. It is more solemn, more visceral in content.

    Those who oppose it for colonial reasons may have their point. They are entitled to their nationalist, may I say nativist, embers. Then they should campaign to eject Nigeria as a name, English as a language, eagle as a national symbol, abolish Ikoyi, rename River Niger, etc. It will never end.

    If you pooh-pooh the anthem as a colonial legacy, why should you accept the other anthem of 1978 that came from the soldier. We loath both as anachronistic and cynical. Why incinerate the messenger if the message is a balm? The objection to the words native or tribe come from lack of understanding of the dynamics, nuances and range of language, or from a ferocious insistence on being contrarian. Some say it’s a racist trope, the white man’s habitual sneezing at our inferior ways. A tribe often has chiefs, chants, rituals, et al. Don’t we? Are we afraid of who we are? Is the English bard superior to the Yoruba ewi? A tribe is often with a language, don’t we have Itsekiri, Gwari, Bini, Igbo, Fulani, et al. Does that make us inferior? No. If the white man says we are inferior because we have chiefs and palaces, then they should look to Buckingham Palace for an answer. For their sirs, we have chiefs.  If we accept that logic, it is not the white man we should blame but our own submission to their self-acclamation of superiority.

    If they use the word to mean we are backward, it is their business. We didn’t, and I don’t, sing it with a sense of an inferior. A tribe is a group, tied together by a community of language, accent, ethos, culture and history. If the Yoruba have it, they are a tribe. The English have it. It is what Michel Foucault calls the rhetoric of discourse. Some people use certain phrases to pursue agenda of superiority. Foucault also asked a question, what is an author? And another of their own, Roland Barthes, proclaimed the death of an author. The premise was that once a thing is written, it is no longer the possession of the writer. The readers take authority from the author. Hence the Bible was used to authorize slavery and also to liberate slaves. Ditto apartheid. Ask Bishop Tutu. The language was redeemed by the readers. Literary theorists call it hermeneutics, or reader-response theory. Some say everyone is a text.

    If we deny we are a tribe, it is because of inferiority complex, or colonial mentality. We want to be described as ethnic so we can appear civilized. Even the whites don’t even use the word ethnic for themselves. It is their choice. The white may not call themselves tribes, but they call the Indian aborigines native Americans. The Indians call themselves tribes with pride. They sing their songs and wiggle to their beats and rhythms with gusto. It does not take away from their pride or authenticity. They do not want the white man to inferiorise them with contemptuous rhetoric so they abandon their own lives. I met a white American lady in 1991 who objected to calling the Indians native Americans. She said she, too, was a native American because that was her country. Many blacks have appropriated the word nigger as a term of endearment among themselves.

    Our people abandoned our local names to bear Ambrose or Rose, to sound like them. We changed to Oluwadare, Usman and Chinyere. Is that inferior? No, sir. Hence Derek Walcott wrote, “I met history, but it didn’t recognise me.” We were forced to canonise their suits with ties and jackets that perspire under the African sun. But we have the elegance of our costumes and caps with their salubrious virtues that let in the genial air. I remember Aime Cesaire’s poem that complains about a suffocating suit. But it is not about the suit, it is about whether you wear it because it enhances your aesthetic profile, or because it is the white man’s. After all, the most common photos of the poet is Cesaire in the white man’s suit.  Soyinka once warned about the tiger shouting its “tigritude.”

    We make ourselves colonial slaves by fighting against the word native or tribe because the white man said so. To be a native is to be authentic. These days followers of Trump call themselves nativist because they love white over immigrants. If you don’t want to be native, it is because you want to be modern, ride cars, live in mansions of western architecture with western carpets and air-conditioners, speak in the American or British accent, and look askance at your own village song or dance or their masquerades.

    It’s a matter of choice. You can make the new anthem native to your heart if you wish, or alien if you choose. I am writing this on a laptop. But I use it to assert my native pride. It is not about being a white man’s gadget. It is whether it suits us as an anthem. Many who resent it have not embarked on any textual analysis. They fished for native and tribe, and they holler and say it is from Tinubu, so it is wrong. That is juvenile.

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    Yet, many of us love chieftaincy titles, and love to bow to our kings. We don’t want to be called tribes or native. It is either ignorance or hypocrisy. On the gender part, I concede that the word “man” can change to “one,” and that will embrace both man and woman.

    In one of the best novels published this year so far, Percival Everett recasts one of the iconic novels of the American canon. He was following Edward Said thesis that we should feel free to write against the canon. Everett has done it to Jim he calls James in his own version of the novel, James. It reworks Huckleberry Finn, a novel in which Mark Twain tells the story of a white boy and an older slave in a picaresque tale across America. Twain makes Jim the slave a passive character. Everett makes Jim his father and deliverer, casting him in dignity. He took back the story. He also gives him utterance as a proud man. Achebe employs the English language in Things Fall Apart to reply Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

    Since we have changed to “Nigeria we hail thee,” I embrace it. As I said on TVC Breakfast show, it does not change us if we do not want to change ourselves. After all, the first anthem did not neutralise a civil war and we sang the second anthem from Ali Must Go into the storm of June 12.  Just as Paul said of circumcision in the Bible, “Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision avails, but faith…” The real question is, do we have faith in our country? The anthem can inspire us if we want, and derail us if we make it so. It is like changing a shirt. It can be cosmetic, or it can impress a date.

  • Turbaned or Turbanned

    Turbaned or Turbanned

    “In those days, there was no king …: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” Judges 21:25

     The theatre playing out in Kano is not fun but funny. But to historians and a certain breed of political scientists, it is fun because it is funny. In this comedy, heads roll, laws are broken, a judge is invisible, palaces are at once in one place and another, one turban becomes one plus one and one minus one, we have kingmakers and a grudge match.

    Some will call it absurd. But it is the sort of tempest that will fit any dramatist’s twist.

    Today, there is an emir. Tomorrow there is another emir. The next day, some say there is an emir, and the other says there is another emir. Some then conclude, there is no emir at all.

    One emir is inside the palace, and the other is outside the palace.

     Some say the legitimate one is in the palace. Where else should he be? Others say the legitimate one is outside the palace. Again, the authorities with the full attire of police and retinue of secret service are with the one outside the palace.

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    But is the one inside not supposed to have the police with him?

    To bring humour to it, both are turbaned. Both are hailed with ranka dede.

    Then, a governor, known for his penchant for gubernatorial bulldozing, is halted by the courts. Who halts a bulldozer? But the bulldozers throw out a charge. The judge of the court, he alleges, pronounced a verdict in absentia. He was not in court, not in Kano, not in Nigeria. He was ensconced in Biden’s neighbourhood in a democratic setting when he was making a verdict on a feudal matter.

    So, says the governor, Abba Yusuf of Kano. Sanusi Lamido Sanusi was installed at about 5 p.m., when the courts had closed for the day. So, how did they get the restraining order when the matter had not happened. Of course, they turned it into an ecclesiastical, nay celestial entity. Maybe it was not just a judicial injunction but a prophetic injunction.

    The first court in history to hear a case before the crime and passed verdict.

     In these days of Guinness Book of Records, this is the turn of the Nigerian judiciary.

     Some have asserted that it was a virtual judgment. When did the law procedure rule that judges could sit virtually from their bedrooms or hotel suites? I am yet to know that, pardon me. But even then, if he passed the verdict, was he operating on American time? Pacific, Eastern, Rocky Mountain time, Central or what? Maybe hence, he did not know that the courts had closed. Or was it a case of a closed mind bent on neutralizing the bulldozer? Even then, what was the bulldozer thinking when he defied the court of the land.

     If the court was wrong, the remedy is not self-help but another court. Yet, the National Judicial Council will do well to gaze with its focal lens the doings of the judge.

    The NJC had just put the hammer on a few errant men who were more wizened than wise. We also had the episode of Sanusi first in the state house  as the bulldozer paved the way with an ultimatum to Ado Bayero.

     Now, some are not sure who is behind this. Some tried to link Nuhu Ribadu, but the NSA has sued an upstart deputy speaker of the Kano State House of Assembly who was speaking without evidence.

    Yet, the real story is much like Wike versus Fubara, as the matter is being pursued by law, but it is a grudge match. It is, like all palace intrigues, inside the family. But politics has taken over family feud.

     It is because since the colonial lords pushed out ancient kingdoms and teased them with the House of chiefs, thrones and monarch have become tools of the state. Former governor and bitter enemy, Ganduje broke the emirate. Critics saw it as breaking the royal calabash.

     Now, with Ganduje clucking in Abuja and with no more edicts on his lips, Abba Yusuf can play bulldozer. Ganduje can only say Haba Abba! Even former governor in the Second Republic, Abubakar Rimi, who dismissed an emir of Kano as no more than a public officer under the local government chairman, said he would toss any king if he committed an offence.

    That is the process. Yusuf did not want to play the sophist. He did not want to quibble on his intention, which is revenge. He did not bother to go through due process.

     He is supposed to issue a query, as Ganduje did, and wait for a response before unleashing a hammer. The local government and the commissioner of local government and chieftaincy affairs ought to be the channel between governor and emir.

    But it is clear that whatever the route the demolition man of Kano has opted for, the cards are still in his hands. Under his watch, Emir Sanusi would triumph. In this matter, it does not matter who is right. It is in the words of the novelist, Bessie Head, a question of power.

    Ado Bayero strolled into the palace under Ganduje as vendetta. Sanusi does the same for the same reason. Emir go, emir come, apologies to Fela. The governors are like gods using the emir for their sport.

     In King Lear, Shakespeare says this about gods and men. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” Some governors play gods with kings. They actually play king to kings, democrats when they please, autocrats when they choose. It is not about the law. It is about the governor. Edicts don’t always make convicts if the governor evicts it.

     After all, the Edict of Worms – what a name – was  slammed on the renegade priest Martin Luther during the Reformation in Europe, but he escaped execution. If the police defy Mr. Bulldozer, it may be for a moment. We shall know who deserves the turban or who should be turbanned. Maybe not who deserves, but who will be served.