The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Last man sinking

    Last man sinking

    Seyi Makinde is one of the politicians that has the look of the meek but acts with the stealth of a reptile, especially the green variety. The reptile can do nothing until its back is against the wall in the home, and then it tries to deliver its strike. The thing is, the reptile is not supposed to be in the house and so its anger should belong to the landlord.

    That is the problem with the Oyo State governor. He is now in a corner and all he can do now is try to strike. But Makinde first showed a lack of creative flair. He wanted to fight Nyesom Wike and yet he borrowed his style. He gathered journalists in Ibadan, and the sitting arrangement is also like Wike. His is like what in literary tradition is described as the anxiety of influence in which you imitate the person as though they are imitating you. You have to perfect it or else they will call you a copycat and it will mean you are trying to flatter your model. In this case, Wike may not be impressed.

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    Then he turned it into an ego booster for himself. He told us how good a business man he is and how he can be president. He lies to himself in public about the tranquility in PDP. Everyone has fled, even his fellow governors. There was a pity of a picture online where he was sitting at a one-man southern PDP summit. He probably did not get the memo. Or he got it, but lost his memory. He is suffering because of his insistent illusion. As Roman sage Seneca wrote, People “suffer more in the imagination than in reality.”

    He wants to imitate President Bola Tinubu, who is known as the last man standing. Makinde is like a passenger in a ship that caught fire in Joseph Conrad’s novella, Youth. A fire was already gutting the ship. The first to know were the rats that were leaping out of the vessel. By the time many on board like Makinde  knew, the ship in its magnificence had been lapped up by flames. That is Makinde. He is the last man sinking. He just does not know. First, he needs to answer Fayose’s poser about another fire under his watch and a certain saga of N50 billion.

  • Who poisoned Buhari?

    Who poisoned Buhari?

    The enigma that was Muhammadu Buhari sprung up again for reckoning. In his new book:  From Soldier to Statesman, Dr. Charles Omole intrudes on our understanding of the man. He thereby has nudged the tall, angular figure with an ascetic carriage and rare, beguiling smiles from the solemnity of his grave.

    From the grave? Great men do not rest in peace when they leave. They are summoned now and again for eulogies and more elegies. They return for a moment, a seminar, or a political event, a comparison, an inspiration, to rebury them, or to historicize them into heroes or villains. We distort their words, reappraise their deeds, send them to Golgotha and back. We cast them in our image by reimagining the past itself as though it is now.

    Men like Caesar, Solon, Napoleon, Mandela, Churchill, De Gaulle, Lincoln, Awo, Sankara, Lumumba rise out of their epitaphs to be redressed or perfumed. Also, Hitler, Pol Pot, Franco, Mobutu, Idi Amin, and the sawdust Caesar also known as Mussolini help illuminate us even when they pollute. So, Shakespeare may have overplayed the ritual of death when he wrote in Hamlet, “Goodnight, sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

    No rest for Buhari this season. We have Buhari today back to the forge or forgery of a censorious nation. Omole’s book reminds us as Ralph Waldo Emerson does in his line that “there is properly no history but the biographies of great men.”

    Maybe Buhari was great. Maybe not. But two principal things strike one in that book, even as excerpts steal out to the public eye. First is the lament of his wife and former First Lady Aisha Buhari. And it relates to the man’s illness on the throne.

    Aisha said it all began when the former president abandoned his medical regimen because some of his folks insinuated that she wanted to poison him. A great charge that none of them have denied or even have tried to undermine. She said the regimen kept him in good health. But once he leaned to the so-called cabal, he abandoned the regimen, and his health began to fail him.

    Because of that he was out of the country for over 150 days. We recall that time as precarious for governance. Osinbajo took over and made a ‘royal’ misstep and fell into the doghouse of the power game. There were those who stoked underground intrigues and eyed a new berth as president for themselves. A certain small man from a power state up north and a certain mouthy man from the south-south were dreaming a tie-up as possible president and vice president. They are together again in a coalition in the same furtive game of futility.

    Meanwhile, stories of death or near so were exaggerating Buhari’s health. Not many of the intriguers were happy he returned to the éclat and applause of his adoring followers. But what bothers one is how a few advisers could destroy a throne because of their greed for influence and filthy lucre.

    They turned husband against wife because they wanted to turn a profit. They did. They twisted democracy in their own favour. They were political families and blood families against the greatest bond between two people: man and wife. They stabbed the first unit of the first unit of society in the country. Sociologists say the family is the first unit, and the president’s family is the first of the first units. One of cohorts, a fuddy-duddy, took over and felt entitled to hold court in Aso Rock as though elected. Another one, Abba Kyari even made himself NNPC board member and said with familiar impunity that it was Buhari who put him there to represent him. The chief of staff told the lie to Buhari, even when the president did not say so. He was the man trying to play double. He was a metaphorical Jibrin. The fuddy-duddy a family man; Kyari a political associate. Both led him to near death because they broke a family.

    Aisha was no goddess in Aso Rock. Neither did anyone expect her to be. But she was his wife. Before her, Yar-Adua had Turai as first lady who served as the garrison of the president’s heart. No cabal could push her down. She was the cabal, if there was one. In fact, a prominent woman today once asked in those days what Yar-Adua did to his wife that Turai would not forgive him but allow him to undergo public ridicule and trial? In other words, the man was dying, so why not let him go in peace rather than egg on the tempest of stories about his good health and return to power?

    Aisha irked the Cabal for trying to be the husband’s garrison. They took her down. She complained about Buhari’s lack of gratitude to those who helped him to the office after three tries. She was referring to now  President Bola Tinubu and many a foot soldier. But the man who mocked the other room would not listen. She also said her husband was listening to the wrong voices. She was challenging wickedness in high places and principalities in the vault of power.

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    She lacked Turai’s or Maryam Babangida’s influence with the man. She also did not have the wiles of the wives of ancient Greece and Rome, who turned themselves into matadors. It was because the man did not love his wife enough. He almost died because he abandoned his great asset. He had to return to her in a way because she resumed, in her confession, by slipping new medicines into his porridges. The man revived but time had been killed. “You can’t kill time without injuring eternity,” noted Thoreau.

    Losing over six months, of course, injured his legacy. How did that time affect his ability to operate with physical and mental confidence? How did that affect how he handled power, or ethics, or education or the other high imperatives of office?  We shall never know.

    So, if someone tried to poison Buhari, it was not the woman who revived her. In fact, we might say, the cabal poisoned him. They took him off work, derailed his focus and undermined his legacy. In the end, you will not blame the cabal but the man who made them his trust.

    The other point in the book was Dr. Yemi Osinbajo’s ambition. It is clear that he might have betrayed his naiveté. His team said he met Buhari about his ambition. To say he supported him showed the novice the former vice president was. If the man encouraged him to run, it did not mean he supported him. If he approved, it was not the same thing as endorse. Godfathers don’t ask anyone not to run. In fact, the father often is the initiator of the project. He clasps to his chest his favorite, and it was not President Tinubu. Tinubu was not naïve to rely on Buhari. Hence his Abeokuta rhetorical uppercut. If Osinbajo was wise, he was not street smart, nor politically savvy. He went to battle with a hole in his armour. The don was undone.

    He should have known that Buhari was propping up Lawal. If he did not know, he was not a politician. His associates, especially a professor, was gung-ho about Buhari’s support. The Katsina patriarch was cracking the nuts for the former senate president and Osinbajo thought himself the darling of the gods.

     He was entitled to his own failure as other hopefuls in the APC top perch who were hoodwinked and suborned into delusions of grandeur. The cabal filled its pouch. In that regard, though, Omole reveals nothing new.

    Omole’s book also shows that Buhari, for all the hero worship, was made of flesh and blood. And as Sophocles notes in his play Ajax, “He was just a man before this, wasn’t he?”

  • Fashola goes to court

    Fashola goes to court

    It was a brief moment on social media. Former Lagos State governor and minister as Trojan under Buhari, Babatunde Raji Fashola, appears in court. We do not know the case or the status of the client. It was just a sentence as the tall attorney rises to introduce himself. Here we have it. Fashola goes to court.

    It is interesting because the man has shown that real men can have a life outside politics. Political career is a good thing, and everyone with a social conscience should aspire to it. But it ought not be the be-all and end-all of a career. He has been in politics since he became chief of staff to the now president but the then governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. He became governor for eight years and minister for another eight approximately. He spent a huge chunk of his life in the arena.

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    He is a lawyer and good one at that, hence he is a SAN. Others should learn from him. One, having served in office, they can bring their acumen back to enrich the civil society. Two, many of them have acquired resources and ideas about a better society, and they mobilise them for good in charities for education, healthcare, environment, etc. such engagements can occupy them for a lifetime. Jimmy Carter is known for his work after he was president than his White House exploits. It is a pity that many of them think a reward for political office is another political office. Three, they should allow others a chance to try their talent as well. There is a certain selfishness that makes some of them angry when they are not called back for the meaty prize. They ignore their past privileges, the constipation of opportunities they have had, and they should bow for others.

    Aristotle noted that to enter politics one must have first done well in a profession. These days, persons leave school to become politicians.

  • The odd couple

    The odd couple

    Never in Nigeria’s political history have we witnessed a father-son duo like Olusegun Obasanjo and Ayo Fayose. It makes a fun tale for a festive season, except that this is not, at bottom, a funny story.

    If we needed a father-son story for the ages, politics and the southwest could never have chosen a better cast. You can call them a dysfunctional family. You can call them the odd couple. But they belong to each other as against each other.

    A quarrel – and a good one – is an important grist for the gist. And if Obasanjo were to pick a son, history gave him a better one than his bloodline could.  In this relationship, there is mutual respect because there is mutual contempt. One sentiment cannot divorce the other. Love and scorn never inhabited a better embrace.

    This is because they have similar traits. They both crave public theatre. Both covet the subversive streak. They disdain decorum or restraint. Both crack the public rib. Both display an earthy temperament, or what some can call bush men. Remember Fayose’s fake neck-brace and Obj’s tearing of party card?

    The one does not respect age, the other does not act his age. Some calls both elders, one being 65 and other allegedly 89. It is mutual fascination. The one could stop by the road side for a bite of roasted corn or plantain. The father could crash a ‘mama put’ for lumps of iyan and swigs of oguro.

    The story is told of how Obj, in the heat of the June 12 debacle, was hosting a meeting at his Ota farm. He wanted to down some pounded yam and egusi, and he wanted to eat it the best way to enjoy it: on the ground. No finesse of dining table, tray, chair, table cloth et al. Some arrivals concerned him and he wanted to be sure there was not yet in his compound any person of the Yoruba aristocracy. Once that was clear, his buttocks hit the ground and he dug in, as his wife would describe him, as a bush man.

    If Fayose was not tempting the bear, why did he want Obj in his birthday lair? It was not as if they had been chummy. At best, they were both affably distant. Public courtesies are no friendship. In fact, they reinforce animosity.

    Did he not get the hint when the man said he would not come free, and why did he send him dollars? Was it to broadcast to the world that he bought Obj’s presence? Maybe that was how Obj saw it, and he exacted a revenge or preempted Fayose’s public swipe at him for accepting his money.

    Was it a bribe? Maybe, but not in the legal sense. It is money of deference. But Obj does not see deference. He sees rebellion. As a soldier, he understands what it means to mutiny. He knows plotlines. Was it not the same Obj who summoned Kabiyesis to their feet?

    Obj also loves ambush. Fayose did not see that coming. So, when the man mounted the stage, it was as if there was a director behind the scene. Husband and wife stood, dressed in entwined glamour to mark the grandeur of a 65th birthday. Was it the day father and son would hug, and the bitterness of the decade would fade away? The father would serenade son, and they both would laugh away the tempest of the past. After that, a languor of reconciliation. Boring. No one lives boring stories.

    Not so fast. Poet Lord Byron wrote, “revenge is sweet, especially to women.” Byron might have known that some men do revenge for career, like Obj. There was a quality of respect for Obj that day from the visage of Fayose and his wife as the elder spewed out profanities on a man’s special day. Omoluabi is the core of being Yoruba. If you don’t have it, your kinship is delegitimised. Obj said he didn’t have it.

    Husband and wife, according to Obj, had taken a rebuke in a private phone call. They therefore did not expect a public show. They underestimated the old fox. The man can do anything anytime, and that is why he is obj. if the drama took place in secret and remained there, it meant he was not the Ota man.

    Stanley Macebuh, in an interview for the Guardian Newspaper, with Onukaba Adinoyi-Ojo, had described Obj as “crafty, very crafty.” Fayose knew that enough of a man who called himself father and threw him out of government house.

    Was it not the same Obj, who showed up General Olutoye? Was it not the same man who did little to win the civil war but took credit for everything, made himself Nigeria’s indispensable warrior, and made sure every other person was a poor soldier. He alone was the good soldier. Was he not the one who would not give Gen. Alani Akinrinade his plaudits, although he was the same fellow who helped negotiate and concluded the war? The same Akinrinade circled the home of S.B Bakare where Obj hid in the firestorm of the Dimka coup. When he became head of state he would not say thank you. He is guilty of what psychologists call the fear of gratitude.

    So, it seems Fayose wanted drama on his birthday, and no one could provide a better thespian script than the Ota man, an archenemy as elder, a boor and a bully. Maybe it was what he bargained for and maybe the former Ekiti governor relished a new fight.

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    After all, he lashed back in a letter to Obj, thanking him for showing that he belonged to a zoo. The other person who used such foul language in public is Nnamdi Kanu. It must have hurt, and so Obj outsped him in making the letter public.

    We had a father and son sort of feud before and this was in the east between the great Zik and Chuba Okadigbo.That was a serious one. There was no humour in that encounter. The young Chuba described Zik’s words as “the ranting of an ant.” Zik never forgave him. Rather he poured out a curse. For those who believe, Zik’s curse was effectual on Okadigbo, who rose later to the eminence of a Senate president before he was orchestrated out of office. By who? Obj. The Ota man is the tortoise in every Nigerian tale.

    But Obj has not uttered a curse. Many may not take him seriously because they believe he is too much of an old rascal for the gods to hear him.

    In his play Tempest, Shakespeare said: “good wombs have born bad sons.” Many fathers have fallen short of their sons. Okadigbo might have thought so of Zik, although there was no intimation of prior father-son tie in them. This essayist confronted Okadigbo a few years after Zik’s curse on him and wondered if it was true he was going to make peace to avert the curse. True to the former senate president, he turned irate and he might have resorted to something fistic if not for the posh milieu of the restaurant in Victoria Island.

    The tragic thing about their feud is that neither Fayose nor Obj fought because of some high principle or ideology. It was just street brawl. I might have recommended a great classic, Fathers and Sons, by Russian writer Ivan Turgenev who engaged fathers and sons across generations who were at odds over whether Russia should be liberal or nihilist. That is why the Obj-Fayose duel is not just about an odd couple, it is an odd story.

  • Lest we forget

    Lest we forget

    In the light of debates over the quelling of the Benin Republic coup attempt, it occurred to me that Nigerians who are 40 years and below did not really experience military rule.

    So, while we can accuse those in the 50’s and above of denial or mischief, it is clear that a majority of Nigerians do not know what it meant to be under the jackboot men.

    Military rule ended in 1999, which means those who were born 26 years ago and now in their late 20’s were babies when the soldiers bullied us. If we add 14 years, it means those who were in their early teens then saw it. At that age, they looked but did not see.

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    Unless you were 18, when General Abdulsalami handed over power, you did not realise what country was crawling under the soldiers, IBB and Abacha. If you are 40 or in your early 40’s, you did not see the banning of newspapers, you did not see jailing of dissenters, the slaughter of innocents.  You did not see the annulment of June 12 and how we fell into disarray, soldiers making laws and becoming laws themselves.

    You did not witness Abacha’s “ five fingers of a leprous hand” as Bola Ige described the five political parties who fell head over heels to make Abacha their presidential candidate. He crafted a mock republic of sycophants and lickspittles dedicated to the cult of one man. Good people were in hiding or on the run and bad one were peacocks on the streets.

    If he did not die, we might have had a life president.

    Men like Soyinka, General Akinrinade, Enahoro and now President Tinubu were wanted men by the junta around the world. Men like Adedibu, Wada Nas and Ebenezer Babatope, who was Awo’s super ally, became footloose sycophants of power. Fear and trembling took over the hearts of usually brave men.

     In fact, as Segun Adeniyi relates in his book, the last 100 Days of Abacha, on the very day Abacha died, Babatope was to be the lead speaker in a seminar on whether Abacha should succeed himself. Guess another man on the panel. Bashir Dalhatu, the chairman of Arewa  Consultative Forum (ACF). Retired army chief Buratai was one of Abacha’s honchos.

    Go figure. As they say in Warri, who no go, no know.

  • The miracle of Nnamdi Kanu

    The miracle of Nnamdi Kanu

    I have had some time to ponder the staying power of Nnamdi Kanu, whom I had at several moments described as an ethnic entrepreneur. I stopped calling him that long ago because he has transfigured into something higher: a genius.

    I do not mean, by this assertion, that the jailbird in Sokoto is now a sublime act. But he is a beautiful subject of study.

    What intrigues me is that he belongs to a group that swears and acts with blood and death. If his followers are just the street gang, the rough-hewn ragamuffins and the men with blood in their eyes, he would not inspire this essay.

    But what concerns me is that he has the sympathy, I dare say, the following of some of the polished and intelligent citizens of the east. After all, when the authorities threw him to the edge of the northwest, the first major guest is a man of culture and commerce, and a man of democracy, a man of Nigerian confession. Alex Otti, the governor of Abia State , where Kanu hails from, paid him a call.

    Even if Otti does not legitimate Kanu’s subversion, he is negotiating with it. He would not have visited if he did not carry with him the nod of his class in the east. By his class, I mean the Igbo intelligentsia, business, cultural and political elite. He walked into that jailhouse with the halo of the Igbo pride. He shook Kanu’s hands with the soul of his people.

    Yet, when you ask the most peace-loving of the Igbos, they would say they abhor the acts of the IPOB group. And they say it with all sincerity. The Monday paralysis in the east punctures the chief business of the Igbo people, which is business. So, none of them would like what his group is doing.

    Yet, before the day of verdict, some lawmakers from the east wanted to preempt Justice Omotosho’s judgment by asking for his release, and some form of out-of-court settlement.

    What all this means is that, from top to bottom with some exceptions, the Igbo head may not always be with Kanu. But their heart is with him.

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    This was the fellow that said openly that Lagos should be burned down. He called Nigeria a zoo. He tried to deligitimise the governors in the Southeast. He opened a war room during EndSars where he was directing his foot soldiers to burn and destroy. He impugned Peter Obi, the beloved of the Obidients, by railing at his sexuality. Ironically, his followers form the core of Obi’s followers.

    In spite of the visits and negotiations of the top men in the east, Kanu has not shifted one ground. He is not ready to foreswear Biafra. He is not ready to accept Nigeria. Has anyone asked how he has gathered senior advocates to defend him in court. Are they doing it for free? Of course not. SANs do not accept pittance to appear in court. Without pretty penny, there is no appearance.

    Who is funding them? Street gangs cannot afford a SAN. No one has come out to tell us who the sponsors may be. If the lawyers are doing it for free, does that not add to Kanu’s mystique? He was not even a nice man to his lawyers. He openly insulted them, and he even threatened to fire them. Eventually, he did. Kanu has no resources for a court trial.

    Why, then, would the Igbo elite sympathise with him? It is because the sentiment of Biafra is alive and well. It is not a goal in most of their hearts. It is a treasure. It has moved from a lived reality in the 1960’s when the war was fought with bloodshed and destructions and miscalculations and blunders that led to its collapse.

    The elite who even fought in the war would tell you it was not a pleasant experience and they would not want to go through it again. When I was researching my novel, My Name is Okoro, I gathered this much from those who passed through its crucible.

    But man is a creature of sentiment, not reason, said Oscar Wilde. Biafra still lives in the hearts of many Igbos, whether a professor or a roadside mechanic. Kanu has shown for them a courage that is pristine. He is their diamond in the rough. They can live with the rough, so long as it cherishes the diamond inside. In fact, the rough is a protector layer for the lustre within.

    On the surface you would think that what Biafrans should fight for is justice. Justice may mean, even within today’s system, a fair shake in the polity. That would mean an Igbo president, good roads, better schools and education, peace and prosperity. In the days of Jonathan, the Igbo elite appropriated the Ijaw as Azikiwe, and Jonathan saw his opportunity to vouchsafed them his Ijaw heart. But all they wanted and got were positions as ministers and director generals and contracts.

    When Buhari came and gave them the best infrastructure ever under Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN), the story gained traction that it was Jonathan’s legacy. Thanks but no thanks. If Kanu recants his position today and renounces his Biafran stance, majority of Igbos will be disappointed.

    You can call him a ruffian, an anarchist, a hopeless irridentist, to most Igbo the man is a treasure. He may be stronger than an ideologue. Ideologues have a set of ideas about society and future. He has none. He is more of a utopian, like the spirit of a millenarian. That utopia is Biafra. Utopias are dreams, like soap bubbles. But they are delicate fantasies for which bloodsheds are deemed necessary. Although Machiavelli says ideologies covet violence, Kanu knows ideology limits him. He would rather gulp something that is at once simple and elusive. He has grown into a sort of charisma, like the fellow in Nobel prize novel The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk.

    In that sense, Kanu is not an ideologue of justice. He is a miracle. Dostoyevsky wrote about the three features that entrap a people: mystery, authority and miracle. Kanu has embodied all of them by insisting on the purity of the Biafran idea, and that in itself is worth all the bloodshed, all the fear and trembling on the streets in the southeast. It forgives his foul rhetoric. His admirers would not want the poverty he is causing in the east, but they would not want to compromise him or want him compromised. In a sense, being in jail is Kanu’s ultimate sacrifice for his people. He will not shift his ground, and the courts would not shift for him.

    They will not want him to go the way of Ojukwu, who had to leave Ivory Coast and sup with his conquerors in the National Party of Nigeria, the same people who saw Ojukwu humiliated a second time when he lost his Senate bid. Ojukwu lost his purity. They do not want that for the new Ojukwu. This Ojukwu bears no sword, commands no brigade, but holds something more potent: an idea. A sentiment.

    If the Igbo love their business, they love Biafra more. Before business is the Igbo soul, and Kanu encases it even when he is a boor. Man shall not live by bread alone. As I stated, men never go to war for bread. There is no bread martyr in history.  That is why I say Kanu, for them, is a miracle. The intelligentsia would not want to come out to condemn his acts. The sentiment is too strong. They remind one of the scene in Chigozie Obioma’s novel, The Road to the Country. As the war ends, some federal soldiers coerce some Igbos to shout One Nigeria, but an old woman, once the soldiers are out of earshot, yells “hail Biafra.” In Chimamanda Adichie’s  Half of a Yellow Sun, when the people are fleeing towns and villages, a woman insists she is not going to leave her home. Her home is inviolate, even on pain of death. That is what Kanu symbolises.

     Those who say they can negotiate with Kanu are in a dance. The Sokoto jailbird is the choreographer, and the choir as well as the audience want the tune to continue. They can finetune it, but not to stop it. the choreographer is a genius

    It creates a dilemma for them. They want peace, but they love, at least admire, Kanu, even if they cannot say it in public. Discussing it is like touching a sacred grove. The Igbos, from top to bottom, love Nigeria so much that they would not want to leave. Hence, when Ojukwu declared Biafra, he was not satisfied until he conquered all of Nigeria, and headed to Lagos. Hence when he died, I called him Omo Eko on this page. I told a journalist the other day that if Biafra is declared today, the next day Igbos will line up for Nigerian visa. She replied it was true and they like it that way. Biafra is a like a virgin. She must not wed.

  • The maidens of Maga

    The maidens of Maga

    Let us not spin the story of Maga the way we did the others. What others? Chibok and Dapchi. But why not? The names of the towns or villages may not sound exactly the same, but each leaves the tongue with two syllables. And they were all about girls. They were about night raids, guns and bandits.

    It was defiance, if not skullduggery. It was outlawry, if boys of slaughter. It was failure of security, if not the matter of AWOL. It had all the stains and iniquities of rape, even when they returned whole. Only in Maga did they return whole.

    What is whole? A nubile is no more pure when a man or boy, in the language of holy books, knows her. To know, in this context, is to hurt, bruise and sigh without her permission. That also means “to defile.”

    Now, some may think the girls came whole, and undefiled, because we heard no tales of rape. We did not hear that about Maga in Kebbi State when the bandits stormed the Government Girls Secondary School. We saw the girls return, speaking, sometimes with glee, and say “amin” to a male prayer. They seemed intact, swathed in hijab and even donning smiles, each taking her number in the count.

    Not so with Chibok, after the night raid. Years later, they returned in trickles. Those who were girls became women in their youths, became wives and mothers. Single mothers. Abandoned wives. Comfort to the barbaric passions of distorted souls.

     They became echoes of their past elegancies. They were, in one word, raped into maturity. Families rejected some of them, having regarded them as dead and buried. They were ghost from the past.

    From Dapchi, it was the same story with 110 young bloods. The poster image is that of Leah Sharibu, who reportedly would not renounce her faith. The politicians ululated, soldiers’ boots pounded forests, media cried, poets sang, yours truly devoted a volume of poems to her. She was alive, she was dead, she was alive again. She became no more Sharibu.

     She inhabited everyone’s imagination. She was everyone’s daughter, sister, student, neighbour, each with their vision of the demoiselle. She also became a convenient foil to forget the other 109, as though a tear from Sharibu was a tear for a hundred. It soothed the conscience.

    But to rape is not always to take a girl’s pride by direct sex. Western law has expanded the meaning in the definition of sexual harassment, including the portent of a smile. Geofrey Chaucer wrote tales of the vulnerability of the girl child, especially the Knight’s Tale with the themes of honour and fidelity with the maiden Dorigen. So, what happened to the maidens of Maga?

    We may say they returned maidens. That may be true up to a point. The girls were in their hostels at night. They were asleep. Intelligence had it that the goons were going to strike. The governor, Nasir Idris, knew, and he notified the army and asked for protection. In earnest, soldiers were deployed in the school.

    The students may have seen the uniform and guns and jackboots on campus. Hard enough to lull them to sleep.

     In hostels, students sleep early. By midnight, the hostel air might have succumbed to a choir of snores. By 1 am, the soldiers had a new song. They were asked to vacate the place. Why? No one is telling us.

    Reports say it was a soldier, a sergeant, who led them there and he was the fellow who asked them to leave. Forty-five minutes later, the demons blazed into the school. It was a thoroughfare. If a snore party, a new party had arrived, a party of ruffians, daredevil mission as their identity. They had barks for melody and guns for percussions.

    All 25 of them were whisked away, but one escaped. Imagine fear in their hearts. The rough handling. The bullying words, the shoving, the sight of guns. For the few days, it was the foreboding. Did they eat? Could they eat? They had diets they did not ask for. They had bath? Who supervised it if they had? If they didn’t, was it because they did not want to strip in the ambience of their abductors? Did any one see them the way God made them? Did any suffer menstrual miscue? How did they survive it? What kind of water, if at all. If they drank, what kind of water, what taste, what colour, what smell? Where did they sleep? Or could they? Compare that to the familiar beds in daddy’s home or the hostel where they were possibly dreaming. If this was not rape, then the word does not mean violation. It was a rupture of their familiar sense of peace, or even routine. What Alexander Pope ribbed in his mock-heroic poem, The Rape of the Lock.

    Had they ever been to a forest? Had they ever seen a gun up close? Had they been around boys of rapine who spoke without courtesies and who acted without finesse?

    The foreboding was worse. Imagine what they were imagining. Would they be taken to wife? What is the life of wifehood with hooded men?  Where is daddy, where is mummy? Where is my home? Where is governor? Why did the soldiers leave us? We saw them before we slept. In novelist George Lamming’s words, “something startles where I thought I was safest.” What will they think of the male species? May they not follow Alexander Pope’s line: “Beware of all/but most beware of man.”Our Maga girls in hijab may need rehab.

    In their young souls, their bodies were their cathedral, and so their yearnings. What they experienced was murder in their cathedrals, apologies to T.S. Eliot. In that play, very part of the building was sacrosanct except what happened inside. An ethereal collapse.

    That is why we must ask, why did the soldiers leave? Why did they abandon young girls half an hour or 45 minutes to the coming of their jackals? They left them in the lion’s den. If the reason is that they were not well-armed as some speculations say, why did they not call for reinforcement? They cannot say they are not aware of the sort of weaponry these boys wield in the forests, the Ak 47, Ak 49 et al.

    So, they should have armed the soldiers enough to eliminate them.  If they could deploy the armoury needed before the time, why did they not take them along and empty the school ahead of the invasion. Retreat is part of military activity. Even during conventional wars, soldiers have been known to evacuate territories ahead of enemy onslaughts. We saw that in Europe during the Second World War. It is no cowardice. Retreat is not surrender. So, were the deployment and military evacuation a charade? Was it just a show? They appeared to disappear, like Black Dog in Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel of buccaneers.

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    It was therefore callous for them to be left to the justice of bandits. Who was that soldier who gave the order for them to leave? If it was a sergeant, we are not hearing the full story. A sergeant does not have an authority for such an order unless in defiance of higher authority. If it is a higher authority, then we must put in context the cry of Governor Idris that some people are working against the government.

    The word is sabotage. We learn that the sergeant was summoned to Abuja, and it is supposed to give us hope that the truth will come to light. But what is even more potent is the suspicion that some people high up in politics and military are in on it, and they tolerate it. They even bask in the miseries of the north.

    The tragedy is that they are northerners, whether in the army or in the establishment. Who are the parasites? Who are the failed men who should preserve our schools, our girls. Rather they have spawned an economy of blood, where the weak, including maidens, are the wares of transaction.

    The head of the Arewa Consultative Forum, Bashir Dalhatu, wants to compare the bandits to the Niger Delta militants. So, he wants us to show them a hand of friendship. Dalhatu did not speak from a heart of peace. He may want to be friends with the goons, but he does not want to be friends with Nigerians. The Niger Delta militants did not abduct girls or raid villages to evacuate citizens, burn homes, rape girls, behead men. If we want to change them, they must bow. We cannot allow men like Dalhatu to lead a respected body like ACF. He is a politician. ACF should rid itself of partisan mongrels.

    We cannot solve the violence by coddling forest tyrants. I believe, with political will and cooperation of northern elite, we can flush out these vermin in our blood in six months. It is a choice and not a difficult one. Bello Turji and Dogo Gide are human beings. The bandits are not spirits. We only need to be spirited.

  • Dan the Man

    Dan the Man

    One afternoon, my phone buzzed.

    “Hello sir,” I said.

    “Hi Sam, this is Dan the butcher calling.” The great Dan Agbese’s voice was unmistakable, and so was his cheer.

    He was responding with thanks to my short tribute on his 80th birthday.

    I was a staff member of Newswatch, a magazine that revolutionsied the journalism craft, in writing style, investigation and essays. Above all, it endowed a generation with courage in the written word.

    Ahead of the cream of its editors was Dele Giwa, perhaps the most colourful journalist we have ever had. I knew Dele Giwa from a distance, meaning I read all his columns I could access. I joined the magazine after his tragic passing.

    My first experience in the company was not with Newswatch, though. When I was hired, Newswatch had been proscribed by the IBB regime, and the editors floated a soft sell known as Quality under the editorship of May Ellen Ezekiel, who tugged the popular fancy with her edgy column under the name MEE.

    I worked with her as a rookie but hoping to join Newswatch when it was reborn. One afternoon, all the staff were summoned to the office of editor-in-chief Ray Ekpu. Word had reached the company that the IBB regime would unban the paper the next day, and we had to be ready for the new edition. I had seen the other top editors and reporters around, but I never had real interaction, including Yakubu Mohammed, Soji Akinrinade, Dele Omotunde, who left for the Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship that this essayist would also attend later in his career, Nosa Igiebor, Dare Babarinsa, Onome Osifo-Whiskey, Chuks Iloegbunam, Anietie Usen, Ben Edokpayi, Louisa Aguiyi-Ironsi (daughter of Nigeria’s first army chief) and fellow reporters like Peter Ishaka, Janet Mba and Sam Loco Smith.

    As Ekpu presided, I was like a fly on the wall, observing for the first time the interplay of ideas that brewed the magazine on the stands every Monday. It was the first time I saw Dan Agbese up close. He was in his element, cracking jokes and sizzling with ideas simultaneously, and it was on his lips I was reminded of the phrase Kwarangida, which I first heard from the lips of good friend Solomon Olaniyan during my youth service in Kano.

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    After various writers had been assigned their stories, Ray brought up the society page known as Newsliners. Dan edited the page, and he looked towards me and said “Sam, who do you have?” I was flummoxed, though he said it with a smile. How was I to have candidate for that page? He asked me to see him later, putting me at ease.

    I was not yet a staff, but on a stipend. I was just happy to be there. When I met Dan in his office on the top floor on Oregun Road, he asked me to read past issues, and he suggested a few names I should follow, including Alao-Aka Bashorun, who had just become the president of Nigerian Bar Association, Oprah Benson – the Iya Oge of Lagos. I dropped down to the newsroom with no clue how to proceed. I asked someone for Alao Aka-Bashorun’s office address. I had it and was on my way to the bus stop when I saw a Volkswagen Beetle pull up just beside me and it was the actor Funso Alabi, Mr. Gyang in the hugely popular Teevee show Second Chance and perennial Soyinka favorite on stage.

    I said hi and told him casually where I was headed. And he said, “That’s where I am going.”

    He was a godsend. He saved the sweat and ache of bus ride and the intellectual toil of mapping the office in a geographic chaos of Lagos. Alabi was also a candidate for Newsliners, and once we arrived at Aka-Bashorun’s office, I interviewed him. Femi Falana was a lawyer in his chambers. What a miracle. A free ride, freedom from Lagos wear and tear, and two celebrities for my page. The next day, I clasped Iya Oge at an event at Airport Hotel. A day after I met the owner of Supreme Stitches, a fashion designer who is now Nigeria’s wealthiest woman, Folorunsho Alakija.

    I was told in the newsroom that Dan was the most difficult editor to impress. Having had a hard time with May Ellen in Quality, I was expecting Dan to query me on my first copy. Moments later, I saw his personal assistant come downstairs but he never looked my way. I was waiting for him to make the turn at the end of the newsroom but he proceeded into the compugraphy room. When he returned, I looked away nervously, hoping to hear my name. When I looked back, he had disappeared.

    I was even more nervous for it. I walked to the compugraphy room to see if he had rewritten everything. I saw my copy. Clean almost as I had written them, except the part about Aka-Bashorun being married with children. I asked the staff there whether there was any problem with the script. He was aghast at my impudence. Dan had sent a copy and I was asking if there was a problem? I walked away, my nerve more powerful than my whole body.

     I was to learn that Ray loved elegance, Dan poetry, and Yakubu a straight story. Agbese was my real first editor. I would not say I learned how to write from him. I would say, he gave me the confidence to write on my own terms. I had a problem with May Ellen because she had no patience with a rookie. I had to ask Iloegbunam and Usen to show me the Newswatch style. I came off understanding that I had to be myself. I had to forge my own personality on the page, in diction, rhythm, cadence and angles.

    Agbese let me be. Since I was writing mainly cultural stories, he was my boss. I remember his knack to cast headlines. I did a story on monitor lizards, a totem in Orogun village in Delta State, and he headlined it: Gods on Four feet. Another story marked the 9th edition of the Trade fair, and he titled it: Fairer in the Ninth. I enjoyed Newsliners, and my constant critic and appreciator was Femi Macaulay, now an essayist and editorial board member of The Nation, who was at the ready with a comment.  I was always on the move, at night, at parties, offices, sports arena, et al. I was doing other stories, but my impulse for politics was overpowering. I wanted to write a cover, preface to cover, etc. I was getting ahead of myself. I had not spent a year.

    One evening, Nosa Igiebor then observed why I was not paying more attention to the page. “Since we started that page, you are by far the best who has handled it,” he said.

     I thought I was just doing a routine job. I had read that page from outside and I was wowed by my predecessors.

    To be the best? I was emboldened, not to continue but to move on. “Sam, I know you are deliberately doing a bad job.” That was Dan. He did not tell me I was the best, he merely said he had not had a problem with my script since I started doing it. A rare compliment from the butcher. Yakubu – we called him Yaki -, echoed Nosa’s sentiment.

    Dan presided over our editorial meetings every Friday, and I also learned how stories were minted, perspectives born, and how a fest of ideas led to big stories. In one edition, I wrote the first story in the magazine under the Life section, and the last, Newsliners, one in the nation section, a Noriega piece in the International section and a culture story on fights in the music industry.

     One evening, Dan’s assistant came to me with a post-it note with words of commendation from Agbese. It ended with congratulations. That was the clincher when Lewis Obi hired me as staff writer in African Concord.

    I had learned from Dan the butcher, who was so called because he had a knack for tight editing. I was in heaven with him. I never experienced such cuts. You might write a 1000 word- piece and he could cut it to 300 and you would not query his skill. You admired your butcher, blood and all. He cut not to slaughter but to heal.

    He wrote with poesy. When Kogi and Akwa Ibom State were created. He described Kogi’s sound: “just like tin drum.”

     For Akwa Ibom, he wrote Akwa was like the sound of a stone released from a catapult. Ibom the sound of the pebble dropping into the pond. In recalling Giwa’s death he sang, “in this business of minding other people’s business, tragedy is a way of life.”

    I met with him quite a number of times after I left Newswatch, and his bonhomie and visceral charm remained unassailable. I recall seeing him at a party in late Joe Agbro’s home in Lagos, and he would not live down his experience with starch and banga soup, and wondered when we would relive the experience. We would never share starch again but his memory sticks forever. Good night, Dan the man.

  • Goodnight, Georgie

    Goodnight, Georgie

    The news broke my night. Georgie Gboyega Oguntuwase is dead. My fingers tremble on the keyboard. It cannot be.

    He was spry, funny and lived with the fun of life. We were classmates at Obafemi Awolowo University. I was not close to him until our second year.

    We sparred at times at tutorials, especially on issues of philosophy of history.

     In his third year, he wanted to be the students’ Union president. I keyed in with a slew of like-minded men like Tive Denedo, Femi Ojudu, A.B. Okauru and Austin Onuoha.

     Once we left school to spend a night out of town in his home, where we debated all night to produce a manifesto. I had never had such a collective exercise before except as a member of God’s Kingdom Society.

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    But this was secular with great worldly allure. I remember suggesting the preface quote from Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” He told me his father, a well-known lawyer, was enamoured of that line.

    It was an irony that his foe, also from History department with us, Chris Fajemifo – from Ekiti like Georgie – framed his candidacy as money politics. The truth was that we contributed from our little stipends to fund his campaign. He lost, but we were not broken, and the friendship lasted forever. Chris won the crowd with flimsy line: “John Locke said.”

    One day, when I wrote a piece anonymously to berate his politics, he called me and said. “Sam, you wrote that piece.” He was a topflight Ekiti politician with the PDP, a commissioner and party chair.

    “How did you know?” I responded.

    “Everyone knows your style, and again, no one in The Nation knows me by the name Georgie.”

    We laughed over it at lunch.

    “How shall we move on, /when you, Georgie,/ a pearly part of us,/ precious sliver of our soul/, have dropped like a pebble off our seacraft,/ if you sounded plum on the eternal waves/ you remain a plum above, in our mind.

  • Wike again

    Wike again

    If you watched the skits, cartoons and the outpouring of vituperations on Minister Nyesom Wike, you would think he committed treason, or something near murder.

     A lawyer with an Obidient imprint threw the word alcohol and another writer spewed out words like drunken and inebriated as though they tossed a breathalyzer at the man and he tested positive to alcohol intake.

    In Journalism and historical scholarship, the mantra is, “facts are sacred and opinions are free.”

    These days peddlers of lies in the pretension of intellectual pursuit feel free to befoul the facts.

     If Wike takes either writer to court, I would predict financial windfall for Wike, except that the outlets would go bankrupt trying to pay.

    A general once known in public as Buratai, who left his command in an ethical cloud has mistaken a land dispute with national security.

    Two ministers, one Matawalle, who was a disaster as governor and another one Badaru also a near disaster as chief executive of his state have turned a matter between a cabinet colleague and sullen naval lieutenant into a north-south matter, a semiotic confusion.

    As our Weekend Editor Festus Eriye reminded us last week, the umbrage against Wike had little to do with what Wike did.

     It was about what name they gave the masquerade before it came out to dance. Whether he performed well or not, the fact that they had given the dancer the name of a pariah, he could never have risen before the insult in their eyes.

     If they were not miffed because he turned the PDP on its head, they were not happy he upstaged a region with the sacrilege of being appointed the federal capital territory minister.

     Some, especially Obidients, flay him for “handing over Rivers State” to Tinubu in the 2023 polls. Recently, his sin was that he had the temerity to fight with Rivers State Governor Sim Fubara.

     In the words of Prophet Isaiah, it was “here a little, there a little.” His wrongs are the drips that became a poisoned pool.

    So much sentiment has beclouded many who should reason because of prejudice. It is often harrowing to read otherwise enlightened people chop logic with runaway drivels. It reminds one of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy’s assertion to “educate the educated.” The saying, “Jack was sent to school to learn to be a fool,” comes out in bold relief.

    So, should Wike have called the fellow a fool? Of course not. But was that the crux of the matter? Of course not.

     Wike’s temperament was that of an elder provoked. We forget that there was an antecedent to the incident.

    Members of staff  of the FCT had visited the site, as the director in the ministry reported. They asked if they had papers and it was obvious they did not have the requisite papers for residential homes. This same sainted Lieutenant Yerima and his fellows had threatened to open fire on the officials for daring to question their roles.

    That was when the minister came in. Could he have settled the matter without going there? Yes. Was he wrong to do that? Of course not. Since I first knew anything about works and infrastructure, ministers, governors and commissioners have always visited sites. Why is this different? Is it because it was Wike? Tactile evidence often helps the executive hands-on knowledge of his stewardship.

    When, a few years ago, Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu had a similar spat with a police officer, news media and online interlocutors who deride Wike today also described Sanwo-Olu with words akin to a wimp. I call this the Ketekete syndrome, apologies to Ebenezer Obey’s song about how hard it is to please humans.

    In the cultural sense, we can say the fellow ought to show some respect to an older man. He did not. There is a wiser way to say, “I cannot let you in without even infuriating an elder.” Rather, you disarm him. He acted as the minister’s mate. The uniform is no excuse to disrespect an elder.

    A few issues have been repeated. One, in these days when we have not enough men in uniform, what is a military man doing guarding a road buffer? The effusions of Buratai, Irabor and others forget that the society made the army. The army did not make the society. We are in a democracy, not a military autocracy.

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    Our love for impunity draws from two sources, our monarchical past and military rule. The soldiers collapsed these two traits into the persona of a bully, and they tyranised over us for most of our history. What Wike did was to assert the constitution over the uniform. But because many have not cut themselves away from the military cloth, they still think under the spell of the army. No wonder some still call for coup just because they hate the man elected to be president. A few careless, malicious writers recently justified the rumoured coup attempt simply for that reason.

    We should not forget that Nigeria is a state with an army, and not an army with a state. The soldier was made by law and so cannot be a law unto himself. There is no such constitutional order as we the army. It is we the people.

    Then governor of example Babatunde Raji Fashola exemplified this when he arrested an Army colonel who was fined for violating BRT lane.

     This republic was born with a slew of soldiers at the top and they brought with them the tribunitian impulse of the barracks. If you can touch an elder’s hem, it does not put you at the helm.

    It is a war not in the battlefield but on the constitution, and the people ought to understand that it is mental slavery and it makes us look like buffoons to act as though we are in a soldier’s platoon.

    Another unanswered question is how many times will the story of land and generals permeate the news? Did anyone ask how a retired general had the resources to afford over two acres of land in Abuja? How did these men turn Abuja into a general’s paradise?

    Recently, a news report said 84 out of 1, 978 entry points into Nigeria are without security operatives. Some of such needed operatives are land supervisors. It is not today big men privatise our armed forces. Some of them cook, take their children to school and even carry their wives’ handbags.

    The pity of the Wike-Yerima standoff is that the concept of democracy is still gasping for popular oxygen.