The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Bringing Abiola home

    Bringing Abiola home

    The play, Kashimawo, succeeds as a revival of interest in one of the icons of our democracy. Many expressed nostalgias about the enigma of Moshood Abiola, Kashimawo being his middle name. If only as a reminder of the times and the tortured era of military gestapo and the heroics of the times, I applaud Joseph Edgar for producing it and Professor Rasaki Ojo, who wrote and directed it at the Muson Centre during the Easter weekend.

    For me, the play fails in mythicising a man whose story is myth enough. Portraying him as a fruit of Osun goddess is apocrypha. Abiola as a child survived after many died. As he told it himself, his parents expected him to die. Never in his life did his parents or Abiola say he was born of a shrine, and that his coming impoverished his father. He came from a poor family. He, a great dancer and singer in spite of his stutter, performed daily on the streets to secure balls of eba for the family. That was good enough material for a drama.

    Read Also; FG funded 3rd Mainland bridge repairs, says Umahi

    Presenting him as going to heaven in the hour of June 12 struggle minimizes his right to claim his mandate, as though God preferred having him to giving us democracy. That implies God prefers death to justice. The clever part of the tale is making Abiola rattle Death, who shows uncharacteristic sympathy for the hero. It makes Abiola larger than life enough to equal death, if not larger than death. That, I think, may have been further explored.

    The acting, though, was classy. Actor Biodun Abey’s Abiola was particularly sunny, even though the author provides him a one-dimensional hero whose romantic peccadillos are barely hinted. Portraying his source of wealth might have put his personal sacrifices and heroics in more nuanced human contexts.

  • Tinubu’s race

    Tinubu’s race

    Easter is about Christ’s rebirth, but it is about more. It is about loss and betrayal, trials and triumph, the folly of the crowd, suffering and sacrifice, the unrelenting motif and futility of death. Unlike Soyinka’s Elesin Oba, Jesus did not dodge death. He embraced it, teary-eyed, for his own vindication. He foresaw his vindication. Few men ever know theirs. In fact, Christ did when he asked his apostles what the world thought he was. Some said Elijah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, or one of the prophets. But when Simon Peter said, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God,” the Lord lighted up and said, “Simon Bar-jona: for flesh and blood has not revealed this unto you…” He knew his legacy before the world woke. He knew that as leader, redeemer, teacher, moral exemplar and lamb for slaughter. Throughout history, leaders often contemplate legacy. Some have a hint, though, before they expire. Like Lee Kwan Yew who did not want his home preserved because fanatics would turn it into a shrine. Or George Washington who bothered about his legacy as a slaveowner but freed all of them. Mandela is remembered more for his epic heroics as freedom fighter than as a genius of governance. Pericles craved a tender epitaph for his sentiment for his people but the Parthenon and wars still overshadow his pacific offerings. Charles De Gaulle only wanted to resist his army superiors but ended up as France’s best citizen of the 20th century. Abiola’s fabled wealth takes a back seat to his martyrdom epic, just like Dele Giwa who did not want to be anyone’s hero. Leaders, no matter how great, must wait for the cold eye of history to stare over their mausoleums. With a low-key birthday, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, must have had a moment last weekend to muse over his 72 years. What did he want to leave behind. Did he want to be one of the leaders? Not like OBJ who set the polity aboil, or meek Jonathan who stumbled to make a statecraft from being crafty; or Buhari whose mess he is tossing into the trashcan. He must have quizzed our avatars: Awo, Zik, Imoudu, Macaulay, et al. Of all, he must have concentrated the Ikenne titan. As a politician, few give Awo enough plaudits. They stigmatise him as a man who rose on Zik’s ashes, and tar the Action Group as an ethnic stronghold. But Zik burned himself. Awo admitted in an NTA interview that Zik was a cut above him during the nationalist forays. But in the 1980’s he quipped, “Zik has lost all his lustre.” Many forget, though, that Zik subdued his profile by trying to ride without grace over another ethnic group in the 1950’s. Zik’s trajectory was paralysed after that debacle when he threw up the ethnic card by ousting Eyo Ita as premier of the east. It was the springboard for Awo to soar. As Conrad wrote in his Heart of Darkness, “Our strengths are accidents arising out of the weaknesses of others.” Perhaps Zik spurned Awo’s offer to serve under him as prime minister in the First Republic because he was scared to be Awo’s boss. He preferred to sip tea as a cipher as president under Tafawa Balewa’s NPC. Yet Awo could not transcend a western appeal in spite of the gorgeous adventurism of his vision. It was his Achille’s heel as a politician. Neither the north nor east hugged him. President Tinubu must contemplate Awo’s politics and applaud his own exploits. Like a father, Awo must admire Tinubu’s ability to make APC not only a party but an institution with electoral sweep across the country, an unbeaten feat in Nigerian political history. He must look at him as a son who learned from a father’s shortcoming. APC beats Nigerian National Alliance (NNA), a northern rampart, that won because it enjoyed incumbency. APC upends United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA) that won nothing but thrashed about like a caged beast. The All Progressive Congress (APC) comes top in strategy, pan-Nigerian alliance, fortitude and charm of success. He learned a thing or two from M.K.O. Abiola who coalesced a nation for June 12. That was Asiwaju Tinubu’s model feat as a politician before he won on that platform. That platform wanted to push him off his train but he, with cunning and courage, steered it for his own victory. A twain unparalleled. No politician, whether in colonial or post-colonial Nigeria, came near this extraordinary achievement. As innovation goes, Awo is the Pele. In spite of his massive doing in making Lagos a model, Awo knitted a wider tapestry, the west. Both laid foundations. Awo’s was completed by his traitor, Akintola. But imprimaturs of his genius remain, from free education to Cocoa House. In spite of the complexity of Lagos and how he reimagined it and turned it into a foreshadow for all the country today, Awo’s larger canvas is hard to challenge. Zik and even Ahmadu Bello envied and copied his doings. If Awo’s politics disabled his ability to work the full Nigerian space, President Tinubu’s politics has offered him what Awo desired: the whole country. Awo’s politics restricted his fertility to his western region. This is Tinubu’s Archimedean moment. If to be the president is his lifelong ambition, it is his lifelong opportunity. He may not have had Awo’s sublime persecution. The Ikenne giant went to jail and mythicised his image with his grandeur and rhetoric in court. It galvanised an awe for all time. It was that chapter of his history, more than free education, first radio and television, that gave mystique to the Awo brand. During the presentation of the Awo Prize to former agriculture minister Akinwunmi Adesina, Awo’s profilers left out root of his special aura. It was his enemies who made him a hero as much as the free work of his hands. “Great heroes need great sorrows and burdens,” wrote Peter S. Beagle, “or half their greatness goes unnoticed. It is part of the fairytale.” Asiwaju has had his own plethora of persecutions. This dates back to the NADECO years, his time in detention, his release and junta’s pursuit of him in the United Kingdom and United States, his marshalling of resources to sustain the fight at home. He epitomized NADECO abroad.

    Read Also: Call Ganduje’s attackers to order, APC chief tells Soludo

    Back home, he baited the bear of Ota and his mechanics and machinations. Tinubu alone stood fighting while others fell to fall behind him. The coalition of forces in the country massed against him. The last two polls showed how a barrage of bile and accusations both local and external followed him but washed off like water off a duck. It is not that they accused but that he triumphed. He has remained an eel to his foes who are still on his heels. It takes time for such mystique to sediment. More than Awo, he has a heartbeat in the grassroots. Awo, with his aloof intellectual carriage, exudes the mystery of a patriarch, more like a monk and wonk in politics, like Ghandi. In a column for the Daily Times in the Second Republic, Ray Ekpu compared Awo and Zik, and observed that if Awo met a child, he would start rattling out statistics about how many children suffer malnutrition or are out of school. But Zik had no time for such romantics. The Owelle of Onitsha would embrace the child in tears. More dramatic. Awo compensated for his lofty remove with great grassroots organization. He was a paragon of Max Weber’s charismatic hero. Tinubu is more earthy, can dance and sing. He traveled with a minstrel in a truck in his younger days. But he is not given to Zik’s visceral theatrics or Awo’s ascetic poise. He will need to show more of that emotion in his presidency, especially his humour. Rather, he was a magnet of quotes from emilokan to church rats and holy communion. The last election was too bitter for dance floor moves, though he tried. Ideologically, though, Awo was systematic, though doctrinaire. Perhaps that was his weakness. It gave room for his enemies to turncoat in his fold, and he did not have enough of the politician’s flexibility. He once said, “I will not compromise on principle. If Jesus or Mohammed compromised, they would not have the following they have today.” But even Jesus said, the “Sabbath is made for man and not man for the Sabbath.” President Tinubu is more pragmatic. Like Alexander Pope writes, Tinubu “make(s) use of every friend and every foe.” He fits into sociologist Karl Mannheim’s idea: “For progressive people, the present is the beginning of the future.” So, President Tinubu must be cogitating his opportunity. He ascends the throne in crisis, a depleted treasury, a roller-coaster currency, a bitter divide of tribe and faith, a confused ululation of the opposition. Many dread it. Tinubu wants it, though. Bill Clinton lamented he had no war to fight, like FDR or Lincoln, to propel him among the greats. In my new book, I call Tinubu a shorebird who soars as the clouds tumble. In his idea, the anxiety of influence, Harold Bloom says leaders – or writers – wrestle with “the greatest of the dead.” In Nigeria, Awo is nonpareil, the greatest. For Tinubu, unknown to him, the wrestling match has been for a while. Sons want to be like fathers. Good fathers want sons to surpass them. Pope also wrote, “Our sons their failing fathers see/And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be…some bright idea of the master’s mind.” Awo would be smiling on his son’s sojourn in Aso Villa. We must admit these men lived in different epochs, and it may make rosy speculation to wonder what each would do in the other’s place. Again, Awo prospered in a pre-internet age when people craved mystique and idolized leaders. In ancient times, people filled unknown details with sweet myths. In modern times, Hannah Arendt attributed charisma to the industrial age. Today, we slaughter leaders who give us bread and medicine. We decide who to forgive and pardon. The individual sins mean nothing. If the devil worships at our shrine, he can be forgiven all his sins. We bow to those who build shrines and tribes, like Trump, Erdogan, Putin, Modi, Netanyahu. They adhere to Jean Paul Sartre’s lament: “Hell is other people.” Recall last Lagos guber poll. No one debated the trains or schools but God and tribe. In his new book, The Age of Revolutions, Fareed Zakaria laments our post-material revelry at the polls. It is Tinubu’s race for the future, even as Awo the father looms for protection and caution. In this weekend of resurrection, is the naira rebound his first step into that light?

  • Sailing at 60

    Sailing at 60

    Owanbe is in the tale. The Yoruba word literally means “it is there.” It’s a metaphor for an epicurean night, a happening party, with the who’s who splashing cash and exhaling glamour. Turning 60 is a big deal, but for Senator Tokunbo Abiru, owambe here means innovation and sailing with talent. What is there – the owanbe – is not vanity but sublime hope in a generation. He turns 60 today with gratitude. But showing gratitude are young men and women enjoying work epitomized in his SAIL Innovation Lab, a fruit of a foundation of the senator and his wife. Here he has graduated almost 1700 persons by providing them with free training in posh setting on new technology.

     In what was his stepmother’s bedroom, about 200 students gathered for a class. They are the lucky ones from over four thousand applicants from his senatorial district in Lagos. The bedroom is just one of many rooms in a vast compound the Abiru family used to call home in Ikorodu, including Tokunbo the third child and now Supreme Court justice Habeeb Adewale – the fourth child.

    Read Also: Navy Sailing Club marks Independence in style

    The large room shone with a white wall and desks crowned with new computers. Young men and women were taking lessons from a young man on indexing. I asked Ismail Ibrahim, who looks in his late 20’s, about his dreams? He owns a fashion outfit and wants to leverage new technology for fashion. I asked him if he knew Steve Jobs. He did. Like the Apple maven, Ibrahim wants to make an innovation for the world. Awari, a well-known tech company in Europe, has employed many of SAIL graduates now working for it based on SAIL work. Other graduates came around who are working in reputable outfits in the country. Vice President Kashim Shetima has honoured it with his presence. So, too, the minister of communication, Bosun Tijani. He can replicate it around the country as tech points of light. Senator Abiru, who has almost completed another centre in Lekki, has shown the way. Happy birthday.                                                    

  • The shrine of oil

    The shrine of oil

    Okuama is a little village, obscure, unknown, absent from the map. It is like a meteor. Just when it hit the limelight, it expired.  It, however, still looms in our imagination for intrigues, oil, bloodlust, death and the evisceration of a village.

    From the beginning of time, cities, hermits, villages and even empires have atrophied. We only wish they do not suffer oblivion like Okuama.

    Some that don’t disappear lose lustre, like Rome, Alexandria, Vienna. Or here at home like Calabar. Near Okuama, Warri is not its illustrious past, hence Governor Sheriff Oborevwori wants to be its warrior of return. But what comes to mind are Zaki Biam and Odi. They are testaments to OBJ who still haunts the Nigerian tale like a tortoise.

    Some places go out of sin like Sodom and Gomorrah. Out of floods like the first world. Floods almost blanked out Lokoja last year. Some cities succumb to war. The firefights of the Yoruba Wars lapped up Ijaiye and Old Oyo.

     But evacuations are not new to history. The most famous is Moscow during the Napoleonic onslaughts. The little general arrived the city without people, including Czar Alexander 1. Everyone had left. But it was, unlike Okuama, not a retreat of surrender. It was strategic humility, stooping to conquer. Napoleon’s men were on the run afterwards. In War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy retells the movement of the people out of their town.

    For Okuama, though, it is a mystery. Soldiers came, soldiers went. While the investigations are ongoing and awards go to the army officers and men killed in cold blood, questions are more than answers. Why would senior officers, including a commanding officer, go for an adventure of peace, hardly armed, in a ‘nondescript’ village to resolve land disputes? If it is about land disputes, why was the governor of the state not brought into the picture? The same land disputes between Okuama and Okoloba villages that the governor brought both communities to Asaba for resolution? Both communities signed agreement. So did anyone break the truce? If it was broken how come the army would go there for its resolution without the knowledge and input of the governor, house of assembly, DSS and police, most of who were present at the February dialogue.

    The Okuama people had had problem with Okoloba village. They said the Okoloba people who are Ijaws wanted to build a shrine as part of a mansion on Okuama land. They also claim big militants and a former top government official who led a high-profile agency backed the imposition of the shrine. The Okuama, who are Urhobos, balked at it, and this led to the killing of three Okuama villagers. Is it true? The casus belli was the kidnap of one Anthony Aboh, an Ijaw man. The Okuama people say they did not kill him. But he is dead. How come?

    Read Also: NNS Delta hands over 10 suspected oil bunkerers to NSCDC

    So, why would top officers of the army get involved in a local matter in a bucolic retreat? Why in Okuama, and did Okoloba natives take part? If it was a peace meeting, why would it end with apprehending Okuama leaders?

    Reports of reprisal kidnappings between the villagers abound. When I spoke to a top military officer, he said the rift was all about oil. In Niger Delta villages like Okuama and Okoloba, federal officers would not be concerned unless big men are involved, and the magnet is oil.

    There were also claims that the village has been burned. The army denied it, but we have seen videos of Okuama on fire. Who burned it? If the people have fled their town, who remained to set it ablaze? No one expects that the villagers would set their homes ablaze, like Muscovites did in Moscow to sabotage Napoleon. Napoleon himself was stunned. Hear him: “What a terrible sight! And they did this themselves! So many palaces! What an incredible solution! What kind of people! These are Scythians!”.[37]

    If these sins were going on, who then killed the 18? Who had such bloody hands, such audacity? A senior government official told me in pidgin, “our people no try at all.” There is no justification for the killing of men in uniform. Whoever did it must be fished out and made to face the law. Governor Oborevwori warned against hiding them.

    But we must also investigate why soldiers flock like bees to the Niger Delta. If it is bunkering, is that why the army is settling quarrels? It is a paradox that in suing for peace, a crime occurs. We should not turn oil into what the poet Harriet Monroe calls “mysteries the gods forbid.”

    How innocent are soldiers in the region? The army should also investigate its own and probe the scramble of its men to the region. If the casus belli of the row between Okuama and Okoloba is the shrine, it is because of a bigger shrine: oil. For all the breakthroughs to stop oil theft, the Okuama drama shows it is alive and well because many are digging our wells. The god is not on earth. It is under the earth and water. Oil floats on troubled waters, a sea without a plea. A viscous mammy water flirts. It is a dark, slimy, seductive and crude deity. To the god are all the sacrifices of deaths, rage, blood spills and, of course, the conflict of tribes and the death of a village.

    The person I pity is the village  farmer or fisherman who, in the course of their work, knows the killers but can only tell on pain of reprisals and sudden death.

  • A king and his mother

    A king and his mother

    In the understated grandeur of décor, food and fashion at the high-end Harbour Point event centre in Lagos on Saturday March 23, the Olu of Warri feted his mother who turned 70. But the Ogiame Atuwatse 111 put it in context. It was not just the facility of food, music, dance, the majesty of high society presences. It was about a son honouring a mother, a kingdom appreciating a mother. “God honours honour,” he says in a cadence of a poet.

    His mother, Olori HRM Gladys Duroorike Emiko-Atuwatse, Iye-Olu Atuwatse 111, has lived a life of sacrifice as a romantic, a mother and a queen. If we add what the General overseer of the Foursquare Gospel Church of Nigeria, Reverend (Dr.) Sam Aboyeji, said in a short sermon, she also has shown that virtue as a woman of God. He called her pastor.

    Read Also: Intervene in cooking gas hike, APC chieftain begs Tinubu

    As a romantic, she abandoned her dreams and career all lined up for her in the United Kingdom to marry then Prince Godwin Toritseju Emiko in Warri. “She gave it all up for her husband.” The story threw my mind back to Hillary Rodham, who, as a young attorney in Washington D.C., was soaring to the top. But she gave it up and moved to rustic Arkansas to marry a bushy-haired young politician, Bill Clinton. The friend who was driving her out of Washington told Hillary that she could still change her mind. Hillary loved the love, and never looked back. Just like the Iye-Olu. Hillary became first lady, senator, secretary of state and almost became president.

    But a new part of the Iye-Olu story is that she is the first to bear that title in 173 years. The last time a mother of a king was alive was during the reign of Ogiame Akengbuwa, who died in 1848. “The same God who made her Olori Atuwatse 11, kept her alive and whole to be elevated to Iy’ Olu Atuwatse 111 (an honour that kept reserved for her for a whole 173 years),” he noted.

    The scene played host to Itsekiri tradition and dance and sartorial designs and colours with inevitable cameos of Yoruba, the Iy’Olu being Yoruba-born. The scene was ornate without superfluity, what Shakespeare would describe as “not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy.”

  • Facts and prejudice

    Facts and prejudice

    Abdul Ningi may not like it when he wakes up in the morning. He is called a senator but he does not attend the senate chambers. He is called a lawmaker but cannot make laws. He is a politician in exile. A public officer of sorts without an office. An irridentist with an eerie agenda, he is an island. To sedate the senate, his colleagues have robbed him of the name senator for three months.

    What he cannot deny is that he is an Atiku acolyte, a sly bigot and a fly in the ointment of democracy. He was no backbencher in the Adamawa chieftain’s crash last year both at the polls and in the court. He was like his chief of staff and director of the campaign. He is no candidate for conscientious objector. He is a fellow traveler, and he is also a pied piper’s victim and marionette. As a bigot, he is borrowing from Atiku’s proclamation during the last presidential campaigns when he asked all northerners to vote north. Atiku did not disguise his plagued and wounded soul. He may be a prostitute, but he has his favorite customer: northern bigotry.

    Senator Ningi is borrowing from the hollow book. Pity that he has been suspended for three months. He can take shelter in Adamawa’s bosom. He has made himself guilty of two often related sins: a bigot and hypocrite. A bigot of religion and region. A hypocrite because he claims that the budget was padded, and he did not raise a finger when the same budget went through the rigour of debates, additions and subtraction. Did he have eyes that did not see, ears that didn’t hear, or body that did not feel as the motions passed on the budget? He did not know mathematics then. He dusted up his book of pluses and divisions and multiplications after he discovered two things. That he could speak to BBC Hausa radio and the bitterness of the election loss reminded him of what might have been.

    Read Also; Immortalise late Olubadan, PDP urges FG

    So, he says there was padding before he said he did not say so. He said the executive presented a budget of 25 trillion naira and the senate, his senate, ballooned it to 28 trillion, adding 3.7 trillion naira. In his effort to invoke north, he stumbled. His northern colleagues abandoned him. In his mathematics, he stumbled and fell. In English language, he also hit the rocks. It was a trinity of failures. What he did with success was, in the words of Senate President Godswill Akpabio, damage the hallowed chamber with a hollow peroration.

    He sounded a drum to his northern fellows but no one danced. He had to vacate his chair in the northern senate forum. He became a lone ranger, a bitter droplet in the northern tea. He showed himself a bad example of how to be a bigot, just like Atiku. Ningi was campaign director under Atiku, so it was the malice of the defeat that was still prodding him into mangling figures. Senate leader Opeyemi Bamidele and  Appropriation Committee Chairman  Olamilekan Adeola  threw direct jabs at him. Has anyone addressed Bamidele’s assertion that it is Senator Abdulaziz Yari’s malice of loss fighting back? He referred to those who did not want  Akpabio to outlast a year as senate present.

    But certain issues have to be clarified. It concerns constituency projects. It is controversial and some have argued against it. But whether we want it or not, those who support it say it testifies to lawmakers’ heartbeat in the grassroots, that they see and feel what the executives sometimes miss. That is, taking the intimate projects to the precincts of the people.

    Two, this is nothing new. It is a fixture year after year. Why is Ningi stoking an old fire that warmed his old bones in the past as though the heat is new? In this budget, he has constituency vote amounting to hundreds of millions. He did not cancel it. That is why Senator Bamidele  says it is not a northern or southern matter but a Nigerian matter. But his fellow senators knew it was coded appeal to an irridentist impulse. That is why it is dangerous. Senator Akpabio asked Ningi for evidence, but he adduced none after battering about like a ram.

    On the 3.7 trillion naira charge, Senator Adeola  spelt out the list of allotees, including the judiciary, national assembly, NDDC, NEDC, etc, that amounted to over 3.2 trillion as first-line charge without details.

    The dangerous part of this narrative is that some have not understood the political issues but have looked at it as mere mathematical and corruption issue. If it were a corruption matter, Ningi would have raised it when it was under scrutiny. His fingers would have pointed at him. If it were a mathematical issue, we are not running a senate of farmers and hunters. There are engineers, professors, bankers, historians, etc in the chambers. So there is a lot of mischief in the matter.

    Padding, for instance, is misunderstood even by so-called genuine commentators. If you pad, there has to be a base or skeleton. You cannot pad a toe with cotton wool, if there are no bones and blood veins to cover. If a project is padded, there must be a cost and the difference with the approved sum is the padding. What is that difference? If it is not clear what the real cost is, no one can say padding has occurred. You can say it is opaque. In that case, you who accuses should do the costing before charging the law maker with padding, or exaggeration. Senator Bamidele  responded by saying that we cannot determine exaggeration until after the budget period expires. It is then auditing will kick in for the facts. After all, a budget is a statement of intention, not necessarily funds disbursed.

    It is also a failure of monitoring in the past that has led to this vexed hour. Have we ever compared budget with execution cost so as to develop a roster, constituency by constituency, on who gobbled up project funds? Groups like SERAP roar so as to get press clippings to submit to their sponsors abroad and at home.

    The whole hoopla is about facts and prejudice. One lawmaker’s fact is another’s prejudice, one man’s padding is another’s envy or bias. One man’s pride is another’s prejudice. While some call Ningi a whistle blower, others say it is an irridentist cry.. It is time we acted like the two lovers in Jane Austen novel in which the pride of the wooer and the prejudice of sweetheart melt into what Thomas Hardy calls a “happy doing.”

  • Our Jacob and Esau

    Our Jacob and Esau

    One Emma Ochuko Arodovwe stirred the internet with a poser, by asking readers who would they prefer, a Frank Kokori or Babagana Kingibe? Such a question would not make sense, if Kokori basked in material splendour after his grand sacrifice for democracy and human rights in Nigeria’s dark hour under the jackboots of soldiers.

    Kokori died in want. He could not afford his hospital bills and no one heard his cry until the humane heart of his governor, Sheriff Oborevwori, commanded sympathy in form of medical assistance. Kokori died at 80, after a sojourn of heroic quests and conquests. Soldiers lost sleep and had daylight nightmares over him. He quieted the streets, paralysed work, mobilized oil by sterilizing it. He hid while in vain they searched for him day and night. He was betrayed by an aide to the man who epitomized the June 12 struggle. At last, they caught him, locked him up, but did not have peace. His spirit soldiered on in the streets, in the rage of NADECO and the turbulence of many Nigerians.

    Why did he not have a great burial, or why did Nigerians not weep when he passed? But Kingibe has had a different trajectory. It means Nigeria reward Judas rather than Jesus. Jesus died a death of sacrifice. But this Kingibe has had his 30 pieces of silver. He betrayed but he thrives. He was rewarded with posh offices, including serving as secretary to the  government of the federation. He was effectively the head of government bureaucracy, the nation’s first administrator. He enjoyed the spoils of the rich and powerful. After that, he has been not just Babagana Kingibe but kingmaker, and baba of sorts.

    Read Also; Immortalise late Olubadan, PDP urges FG

    Presidents defer to him. Candidates seek him, a traitor, to garland their ambitions. Is he not blessed? Is it no a good thing to deceive to receive? That is the sort of strain that runs through Orodovwe’s piece. He writes with a ruminator’s doubt, unable to take a stand for justice. But for sure, in spite of his travails, his bait by Ngige and abandonment to the Siberia of government in Imoudu’s institute, Kokori died a better man than Kingibe would ever live. He died for the most precious of all values: honour. Kingibe cannot boast of that. Kokori lived for ideas, not material things. He died for others, not for what philosophers call negative freedom, that is freedom to care only for yourself and family. He was a hero. Kingibe is travesty of that virtue.

    Even those who go to him do accept him but don’t respect him. They praise him while despising him. They take from him what they will not digest. Kokori was like the English hero Thomas More, who Playwright Robert Bolt describes as a man for all seasons. He was not likeThomas Cromwell, a villain,  that  Hilary Mantel penned for applause  in her historical novel, Bring Up the Bones. He is also not Cardinal Wolsey, who flattered his king into infamy and lost his soul. More privileged conscience over foul consensus, truth over pirouette.

    The saga between both men is like the Bible Story between Jacob and Esau. My Government College Ughelli classmate, Dr. Joe Agidee, so characterized it. Kokori is Jacob, who owns the meal but gives it up for honour. Esau is Kingibe who sold his honour for a mere plate of porridge or privilege.

    Kingibe was not alone in the perfidy. As another classmate, Victor Agbro, reminded me, Ebenezer Babatope, Lateef Jakande, Iyorchia Ayu, Olu Onagoruwa, et al, follow Kingibe’s fashion as turncoats. For all his magisterial strides as governor, Jakande’s image diminished after his tour with Abacha. He became the grand old man who could not hold his ideological liquor but bowed to the moment to defile a legacy of honour.

    Even if he died poor, Kokori’s soul was rich. We cannot say so of the man whose main ticket for swagger today was that he abandoned his ticket of honour with Abiola.

  • Beating all odds

    Beating all odds

    A few days after his colleagues elected him speaker in 2019, Femi Gbajabiamila was already looking ahead.

    Plopped down in his chair with a wrinkled brow, he had a matter in mind.

    “Has Asiwaju told you about his intention to run for president,” he asked me, his face part smile, part earnestness.

    “It goes without saying,” I replied. “He does not have to tell me.”

    “It’s going to be tough,” he predicted, the furrows clearing into a sunny visage. “But don’t underestimate his reach in the country.”

    His face was now increasingly more sanguine. “He has acquired a lot of IOUs across the length and breadth of the country.”

    As for him, he was ready to stand behind him, treasure, toil and all.

    This author relished his sentiments of Asiwaju Tinubu’s bid. It looked like a long shot, but he can shoot long. He is an archer whose bow and arrow fire in the storm. He is like the species known as shorebirds that cruise to higher altitudes in stormy skies. He is like the character in John Webster’s play, The Duchess of Malfi, who said, “I will thrive some way: black birds fatten best in hard weather, why not I, in these dog days.”

    So, I reckoned, like the Chief of Staff, that he needed to fight the good fight of faith. Faith, in this sense, had no God or mammon. It was the fight of a man of politics. But paradoxically, the issue of mystical faith or organized faith loomed in the horizon, and it was the least he expected in the fog of war. As a man of many battles and not few heroic conquests, he had the gear and stamina for the contest. The only obstacle I saw was not the general election but his party. Other than the vagaries of fate, the ineluctable force of destiny would either work for him or quelch him. The former happened.

    I knew the president – Muhammadu Buhari – did not want him. The peacocks and vampires around him did not want him. Some stakeholders in the country did not only resent him, they were afraid of him. The plot thickened quickly. Conspiracies festered in sewers and in the open. And it began with the party’s top brass. In cahoots with the presidential cabal, they edged out Adams Oshiomhole’s executive as the first major step to immobilise Tinubu’s ambition. They also broached a consensus candidate. Law crippled them as they fell foul of defining the phrase they coined, and they could not even manage the idea of open and closed primaries. At every turn, they stumbled into crosswinds. Their own weapon turned their own folly.

    Tinubu was never fazed about the task ahead. He peered a rose-scented garden when others saw for him a forest of a thousand demons. In 2021 December, he said he was preparing a speech towards the end of January, 2022, to announce his intention to run. He would wait for the yuletide and new year euphoria to ebb out before throwing himself in the ring.

    But he was not a man to predict. Early January, he paid a visit to President Buhari at the Aso Villa, and on his way out he walked into a storm of reporters.

    “I wondered what I was going to tell the reporters,” he recalled. He decided instanta to tell them that he had just discussed his ambition with the president. There was no need to formalise his entry into the race. No fanfare or ceremony necessary. It was there he uttered the phrase, “It is my lifelong ambition,” a quote that set in motion a long train of quotable quotes that juiced up his campaign north and south, spilling over to the first flushes of his presidency.

    The word was out. Not that it was not out before. It was now out like taking the peel out of a groundnut. Everyone knew what it was, peel or not. Everyone knew he was running. Everybody knew the hour was coming. Announcing it was only a technicality. As Poet Samuel Coleridge wrote, “Anticipation is more potent than surprise.”

    I had said once to him that I didn’t fear the general election, but only the party primary. Little did I know that after the party wheelhorses failed at the primary, they would move their artillery to the final battleground.

    “If you win the primary, you will have nothing to fear,” I had declared in my naivety. He did not say a word in reply, only a smile, half-quizzical, half knowing. Very close to the primary, though, we spoke on the phone and I wondered if he was wary of the moves among the other contestants. I asked him, if he had a plan B in case the party cabal wrung the ticket from him and played a Houdini with the primary. He did not sound worried. I wanted to know if he might contemplate another platform, or party, or if he intended to fight it early or preempt any move to foist another candidate. His voice was aplomb.

    This time, he replied, saying that he did not see or sniff any such major impediment and if he saw it, he would know how to respond. He would not say how he would respond. He did not think the party was capable of mounting any resistance or throwing any punches above the muscle and cunning of his ambition. He had a lot to depend on, his long history as a political matador, his inner reserves of strategy, his repertoire on the battle stage. He was ready. He said something I took to heart. “I have looked at the whole situation,” he said speaking about his ambition and reason for running. “I told myself, If I didn’t run, I am damned; If I ran, they may want to damn me. So, I had to run anyway. And I know that I will win.” He was speaking like a man in the eye of battle, suited for war like David and damning Goliath.

    It had always been his attitude never to abandon the party he formed. In the heady days of the Buhari era when he was ignored and alienated, he resisted overtures. He saw it as self-betrayal and a cop-out. He was set to fight for his place in his own home.

    So, when he picked up the APC ticket, and said in the air of celebration that he did not expect to win, it was the humility of triumph. The battle gear was no longer important. The brow and fury of war were already calm. The guns were mute. The party was won over. That part of the quest was over. Humility was the next virtue.

    Read Also: Tension as Senate meets over N3tr alleged padding of 2024 budget on Tuesday

    His is also a matter of destiny. He did not have a hand in all his victory. In some of them, he watched himself rise like a swimmer on the crest of a sudden tide, or a shorebird. For instance, he was not the one who coerced the northern governors of his party, some of them with ambition to be president, to coalesce to endorse a southern candidate. He did not rally some northern governors to meet with President Muhammadu Buhari and say they did not believe the party should field a southerner because Atiku was too formidable to tackle with a southerner. A northern gladiator called for a northern foil. They returned with a list of themselves when the president asked them to draw a list, and the president shunned them for advertising themselves. He wanted someone else, Ahmad Lawan. His candidate was not the choice of the northern governors, so they compelled then Governor Simon Lalong as chair of the northern governors to convene a meeting. When it held, it was more a chaos of finger pointing and colliding ambitions than a strategy for a northern point man. Less out of altruism than love of the south, they yielded.

    Tinubu was not there when the party chairman was throwing tantrums over the choice at a party stakeholders’ meeting with President Buhari. Not a shadow of Tinubu was there when the northern governors were summoned to defend the idea of a southern candidacy to President Buhari. It was not he who was on Lalong’s lips when he defended the justice of having a southerner.  As Richard Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “history affects us more than we affect history.” It was a case of an unflinching hand of fate working for him. Even in epic tales from Shaka to Odysseus to Sundiata, the hero enjoyed the mercy of the gods.

    It was not Tinubu who set Peter Obi on a collision course with his PDP. He did not set the party on fire with five governors led by then Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike. Or Kwankwaso who turned the Kano tide against PDP.

    It is still speculative if all those votes would have gone to the PDP, although it is generally believed that the southeast votes were Peter Obi’s gift to Tinubu. Negative became positive. Could there have been a renewing of strategy if it was a straight fight between Tinubu and Atiku? Would Atiku have succeeded in rallying Christians the way Obi did? What kind of bona fides would he have invoked from his logic or biography to impress pastors who saw an apocalypse in a so-called Muslim-Muslim ticket. Would southerners and those in the Middlebelt have picked a Fulani to take over from a Fulani? Would a Tinubu hatred have forgiven Atiku’s sins? We can only speculate. Maybe Obi came to quell all their anxieties. He was a “godsend” expiation. He gave them an excuse to make peace with their conscience who would not vote a Muslim or a Yoruba man.

    It is an irony that what they did not see during the campaigns are too obvious very early in his stewardship. For instance, the appointment of a Christian from southern Kaduna as chief of defence staff, Christopher Musa, let out a reverie of delight, a geo-political epiphany. Or an EFCC chairman as a pastor must have calmed apocalyptic fears.

    Now, they see that having Oluremi Tinubu as wife was a big indicator of Tinubu’s pious neutrality. Or Kashim Shettima’s many accommodations of his Christian folks in Borno while he was governor was an act of genuine grace.

    As the new Bishop of Katsina Diocese and first Hausa Bishop, Gerald Musa, told me, some clerics were bought over during the polls. It also shows that politicians exploit elections to lie and deceive in order to flatter the people’s secret hopes.

    The polls are now over, and governance has begun, and the elections are taking backstage as we face the heres and nows of governance.

     Excerpts from Sam Omatseye’s new book: Beating all odds: Diaries and essays on How Bola Tinubu became President, due for presentation March 12.

  • On the move in colour

    On the move in colour

    The governor of Lagos State may not look it, but he is one of the most hardworking chief executives we have ever had, anywhere. It belies his sunny exterior, casual grace, folksy bonhomie and genial good nature.

    Never combative, he does not require what locals call ‘gra gra’ to leave imprints of industry. Before last week when the second in a chain of colour-coded trains hooted into being, he touched the heartstrings of the masses. A soup kitchen might have quelled taste buds, but he had given a food hub. After the food hub, we might not have expected the money he rolled out for traders in the lower-tier of the entrepreneurial ladder across the local government areas. Or slashing of transport fares. He heard the rumble over cost of living, and he bared his heart with palliatives.

    But the launching of the red line train in Lagos was a sort of mini-festival. It was a day of memory and a day for memory. It was a day of memory because it was time to recall how such a milestone project began. It was a  day for memory because the dream came to fruition, a day for infrastructure diary entry not only for Lagos but for Nigeria. A day of recall and a day to remember.

    Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the BOS of Lagos, was happy. With his vintage cap and good humour, he looked like a man who did not have much sleep the last night. But joy outshone furrows of drudgery as he spoke about how it all began. It was a time for humility as he gave kudos to all who started the work. He thanked the visioner, now president, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, who in 2003 wrote the vision. And others ran with it. First it was the then governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola, and then his successor, Akinwunmi Ambode. Yet, in the exchanges of baton, Governor Sanwo-Olu turned it all into bells and whistles. He finished the tape. All is well, as Shakespeare writes, that ends well. But he did not just do that. He propped them with interlocking infrastructure in roads and overpasses. Between the blue line and the red line, he erected five overpasses. Trains are ground transportation, but they often glide above road arteries. He laid the groundwork. He spoke with gusto about the other colour trains in the works, including the green line that will snake through Marina to Lekki corridor. Projects like this re-echo Shakespeare’s line when he asserts that “fancy outwork nature,” or when he says, “nature must obey necessity.”

    Within two-weeks, Governor Sanwo-Olu showed a full-rounded performance, reflecting the hardware and software of governance. It is the triumph also of the imagination. As Lucille Clifton wrote, “we can’t create what we can’t imagine.”

    That day was a sort of toast for the man who dreamed. President Tinubu drew mockery during the campaigns about what he did for Lagos, and one of the highpoints was the colour-coded trains. Some who would not accept evidence, even if it drowned them, denied the barebones of the project and wailed that work had not started on the train. While denying the dreamer, they also denied the dream.

    Read Also: Demolition of buildings in Lagos has no ethnic colouration – Sanwo-Olu

    That red line day became another red-letter day for President Tinubu and a funeral for the naysayers. The day provided a platform for the president to give the country a taste of what is to come on a national scale, a cautionary note for the critics and their amen corners. He said something the media chose to pass over. He said corruption was fighting back. With a face of casual gravity, he warned that he would fight them to ruins. What was he referring to? Who was he referring to?  Does it concern the Central Bank of Nigeria reforms, the reports about drainage of public till, the N23 trillion printing extravaganza of our money with no gold-paved mansions or roads to tell the story.

    A fellow journalist asked last week, “is the president going to commit class suicide?” I said let us see. The man has always been a thorn in the hide of his class, and it was in such a tempest that he rode to power, clawing the musclemen of the class with their gog and magog. He is the ultimate contradiction in that narrative, abiding the class but also rebelling against it. He has always managed the delicate balance like a chess player. It is that special skill he will need to manoeuvre a stormy Nigeria of feudal sharks, wily intriguers and lurking upstarts.

    Hence, he gave a swipe at labour, Agbaero and company, for their resort to strike with their enabling lawyers. They are strike-happy now, but neither they nor their enabling lawyers stoked the flame of street unrest when the Buhari men and Emefiele tossed the naira overboard last year in the runup to the presidential polls. They thought it might buoy their candidate to Aso Rock paradise. Rather, they met Dante’s divine comedy. They are not laughing, though. They scowl on the streets when their tortured brow on television and boilerplate rhetoric do not prove adequate. Now that they are in the wrong end of fortune, they have suddenly realized the ire of the oppressed.

    For all the power and preening class in Abuja, Lagos remains the test tube of Nigerian politics and governance. And the BOS of Lagos is demonstrating it with all its range and intensity.

  • A punch on memory

    A punch on memory

    It is a pity that we could celebrate Punch Newspaper without celebrating the man who dreamed it. Sam Amuka, that is. Cursory mention does not do justice. The newspaper has become a mainstay in Nigeria journalism, a testament to visionary stability and longevity, just like The Nigerian Tribune. I doff my hat to the newspaper that has soldiered through the turbulence of Nigerian politics and economy and has shown that it is possible to survive the climate of odds and ends with focus and attitude. There is not much weakness to point to in the newspaper, except its occasional penchant for juvenility. But its stature has come to stay, and all should applaud its managers for keeping faith not only with tradition but to the quicksand of changing times.

    But to mark its 50 years without celebrating the founder of the Vanguard Newspaper is not only a disservice to him and the profession, it is a disservice to memory. Amuka dreamed the Punch after he left the Daily Times and founded a publication known as Happy Home. Restless, he wanted something else, and he met a man of money in Olu Aboderin, who offered to partner. Amuka served as the Sunday paper’s founding editor. But things did not go well, and Amuka, often known as a Sad Sam, decided to take the matter to court. It was grinding in the court until the Sketch newspaper slammed the proceedings on its front pages. That got Olu Aboderin’s attention, and he decided to negotiate with Amuka. Amuka left and started the Vanguard newspaper.

    Read Also: Ex-Lagos commissioner to curate PUNCH’s 50th-anniversary photos

    Bitterness is not enough to discard memory. To have left him out is professional ingratitude and adds to the worry about  an a historical generation. Our newspapers should not be guilty, like the rest of society, of the game of amnesia. Few who took part in the anniversary may have thought it was an Aboderin show alone, apart from cursory references to Amuka.

    Amuka, a giant of giants in this trade, wrote columns of great impact. He started with what he called Off Beat, a column whose icon was a man blowing from the wrong end of a trumpet, a picture of a sardonic Uncle Sam. His columns, including Sad Sam, were biting satires that cut the powerful, often the military, to the quick. But because he penned satire, his pieces barbed power, yet they had nothing on him because jabs came out of laughter.  Just like laughing gas that hurt by making you laugh.