The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Gazelle versus Naija

    Gazelle versus Naija

    This has nothing to do with the slugfest in Ivory Coast, where Nigeria’s Super Eagles seem airborne. With the exploits of gangling Osimhen and the dribbling wizardry of diminutive Simon, we can only hope that the sing-song endures. The team that started like a stutter seems to be hitting its stride like an elocution. Soccer duels tempt miracles and disasters simultaneously. A team headed for victory may moan at the last whistle, like Cape Verde. Victory and survival sometimes are the same thing. As a famous American football coach, Vince Lombardi, once crooned, “Winning is everything.”

    We hope for the same as we face the headwinds of the economy. The gazelle is a beauty and beast. When it races, its footwork dazes the eye. Its speed meshes with grace, especially when a predator lurks. In Nigeria today, the predator are elites hemorrhaging the naira.  The gazelle symbolizes a race to save the naira against our collective suicide as a people. So, this essay is not about the lithe antelope with a fawn coat and white underpart. Few have heard of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) move named after the elegant animal. It is called Gazelle, and it represents a thrust to save the naira and the economy in the face of our collective suicide masterminded by the banking elite, conniving politicians and business elite. But all who can access the dollar are in on this project of self-death from the mechanic to the fashion designer.

    The NNPC, under Group Managing Director Mele Kyari, has approached the AFREXIM Bank for a crude oil for dollars deal. There have been a lot of jargon in this narrative like SPV and forward sale, et al. It’s modern-day trade by barter. But it is a swap in which we sell our crude oil for $3.3 billion. The bank sources the money from the international market, while our crude oil serves as both collateral and product for sale. The idea is simple. The economy, especially the naira, is in an emergency. Naira is, in the words of Governor Chukwuma Soludo, like a dead horse standing. The gazelle, like the virtue of its feet, is a speedy way to save the naira. We need money to rescue money. We need foreign money as oxygen mask for a gasping naira.

    The irony though is that the NNPC is doing this as a quick fix while we, as a people, are getting quick fixes at the expense of the same naira. It is a paradox also of having what we have to save ourselves but we choose to kill ourselves with it.

    That is why it is collective suicide, or mass suicide. It has been suicide by instalment. Today, we are on the cusp of total collapse. Everyone has contempt for the naira. It is not only the naira we hate but ourselves. We are like the addict who binges without heed to personal danger. It is what the critic Killam says of Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart, or King Oedipus in Sophocles’ play about a person who sees the end but would not stop until it comes. Killam calls it “insistent fatality.”

    I had a dialogue with our excellent finance reporter Collins Nweze, and I wondered what was going on with the value of naira. He said, “about 40 percent of the money in the banks are in dollars,” adding that speculation is the virus of the day – my words. I later had a close to 30 minutes dialogue with a top man in the finance world and he lamented our embarrassment of riches – my words, again.

    It reminded me of the lines in the Book of Revelations, “You say, ‘I am rich; I have grown wealthy and need nothing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind, and naked.”

    That is the profile of our suicide. The mechanic has 50 dollars, he hoards. He is speculating. The bank boss keeps one billion dollars for a politician friend. The trader stops his business because investing it is arduous and slow. He makes a few days hoarding what he makes in a year trading.

    The Bureau De Change are at the mercy of the banking elite, who starve them so demand rises and prices hike. It is clever. Individual nests grow, the collective sighs. This has been going on for decades. It has just reached its head with the naira spiraling down towards about N2,000 to a dollar.

    The new CBN rules – well not new – that compels the banks to release their dollars is a symptom of a decadent banking system. Banks are making trillions in profits in suffocating economy, and we did not ask how? The health of a banking system should relate to the DNA of the economic environment. A bank that thrives on speculation is a vampire. Making trillions of Naira in profit while you are not giving loans to power investments only reveals an unregulated system, a Hobbesian culture of rapine and predation.

    If the vice grip between the political elite and the business -especially banking – elite does not loosen, a rupture beckons. This is the time to hold the bank leaders – directors and managing directors and board denizens – to account. If the government does not, they will hold the government hostage. They already are, but it is going to get worse.

    Decades-long outcries over corruption happened only because of conniving banks. They are the wayfarers of stolen money. Impunity by stealth has waxed into a public howl.

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    NNPC’s Project Gazelle is setting the tone, in spite of the partisan wailings of Atiku. Atiku should tell hoarding Nigerians to open their vaults rather than impugn NNPC’s audacity. Gazelle is speed but it is also grace. The CBN can act with the dispatch of the antelope, a roe’s speed before the row.

    Meanwhile, like addicts on a binge, we look at naira’s death like Emma says in Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary: “Ah, it is but a little thing, death. I shall sleep and all will be over.” Societies have known to execute themselves while Individuals blame others and absolve themselves. The great writer on crowd psychology, Elias Canetti, made it clear in his Nobel Prize-winning expose, Crowds and Power. Hear him: “It is always the enemy who started it, even if he was not the first to speak out, he was certainly planning it; and if he was not actually planning it, he was thinking it; and if he was not thinking it, he would have thought of it.”

    History has records of mass suicides from Roman Empire resistance like Numantia to the Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe under Napoleon to even Nazi Germany. This happened out of national pride, or sometimes gender pride like women who killed themselves to avoid rape like the Dance of Zalongo in the Greek War of independence when the women of Souli threw themselves over the precipice with their children. It is an evocation of Chaucer’s Dorigen. The best living French writer, Michel Houellebecq, in his troubled novel Atomised, posits that post-Christian Europe is committing suicide for abandoning the creed that crowned her over the world.

    Many of these are suicide for pride. Ours with the naira has no redeeming value. If it is suicide on a binge, does it mean we are incapable of our own distress, apologies to Shakespeare? I don’t think so. As the CBN begins its onslaught, it must remember the speed of the gazelle.

  • Obi abandons altar

    Obi abandons altar

    Peter Obi is becoming everything to everyone, except what he was as candidate: A pilgrim. To the dying, he is a comforter. To the bereaved, he is a mourner. To the book launcher, he is a reader. He is also a party animal in birthdays, funeral after parties, etc. Recently, he became a football fan. As if to challenge President Tinubu to a fan duel for speaking to the Super Eagles before their flight over Angola, Obi materialised in Ivory Coast with his vintage supernova smile.

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    The only place he is not showing up now is cathedrals and front rows in church events. The failed philosopher, who has not uttered any philosophical idea other than recommend China as a cure-all, saw that the strategy did not work in the last polls, or that the so-called accusation that Tinubu would foist Islamic agenda on the country was a ruse of a campaign strategy. Old things have passed away. Obi is born again, not of the spirit. The man is trying to recalibrate his image. He is altering his ways by abandoning the altar. In the words of Paul, is he coming to the knowledge of the truth?

  • Ndume’s confession

    Ndume’s confession

    Senator Ali Ndume ate the humble pie after this essayist challenged him last week. He confessed his child is a staff member  of the Central Bank of Nigeria. But it is a half-hearted confession, the sort that Almighty God does not accept. He says, yes, his child works there. But he insists the move to Lagos was an ethnic idea. But he needs to come clean as to how his child landed the job. Did the smaller Ndume apply after a public job advertisement? Did the small Ndume do an interview with others or a written test? What was the process? If Ndume cannot confess to it then we must say that as a senator, he is one of the problems of this country. He needs to confess and say everything. If he wants to be a stickler for purity, he must show his hands as pure as wool.

  • Blood oath

    Blood oath

    Let us not quibble. First things first. I want Senator Ali Ndume to come clean. Does he have blood relations, in-laws, children, et al, working in the Central Bank of Nigeria? As lawyers say, those who come to equity must have clean hands. We don’t live in a world of fairytale morality. No one pleads sainthood. Let us, before playing hero, first confess our frailties. And then beg forgiveness.

    Mind you, if it is true, it does not dilute or aggravate his case against Nigeria’s top bank. Hypocrites are known sometimes to propose a righteous line. But be true to yourself before making disciples of others. Or else you are a pharisee. If he is guilty, then the distinguished senator, with his coarse voice and regional and messianic bravado, swaggers with an underarm of cobwebs. It means he spoke on Channels Television with a blood oath, the oath to defend his family’s spoils. He has conflated family with region. He has committed a fallacy of category swap. Family is family. Tribe is tribe. Region is region. Private interest is not the public good. He is making hypocrisy hip and paranoia into a purpose in order to evangelise brotherly hate.

    If he is not guilty, then let us toast the facts. But if he is, he does not belong in the conversation. We should address the logic of his concerns but not his pharisaic impulse. I would say same of Bashir Dalhatu, a former minister posing as a statesman, who turned logic into an absurd play on television. People like him flaunt SAN because of the low bar of assessors who make anyone who reaches the Supreme Court a gem. How many Supreme Court passengers are SANs? Many of them ride the coattails and benevolence of clients who insist on taking their matters to the top court or lawyers whose happy shoulders heave little ones for the ride.

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    Some say FAAN and the CBN should have explained their actions before decision. Now that the explanation has been offered, are they satisfied? No, of course.

    It is the royal sense. The entitled sense. They feel they know how things ought to be done after it has been rightly done. It is not rightly done not because it is right but because they, the right people, have not anointed it. They are the reason the nation is foot heavy, and lumbering into the future.

    Royals never bow to reason. Technocrats live in an opposite realm. Clash is inevitable. Take, for instance, the point about an overcrowded CBN building. It is now our tower of financial babel. The building marked a little over 2000 persons now domiciles over 4,000. Is that not official suicide? The building will not go down at once. Its structural integrity will suffer gradual violation. A creak here, a crack there. Just last year, such a building collapsed in Garki in Abuja. We have had a few in Lagos. The often-congested lift may lose its hinges, and that recalls the youth corps member who died at General Hospital, Odan, Lagos Island  last year because of routine negligence. CBN workers confess tight work space, and lack of creative berth in a choked air. Imagine the toilets and salmonella looming, or fire hazard. God forbid, the building falls and the same senators and pietists will blame government for ignoring warnings.

    On former CBN chief Lamido Sanusi’s arguments, they have virtually lost their tongues. Sources say, in CBN, it is routine that you could be deployed either geographically or departmentally after five years. Does Dalhatu or Ndume know this? What crime did Lagos commit? Why the hysteria once Lagos is mentioned? Is it not still our commercial capital? All the bank headquarters are there. The payment and communications departments have been gradually moving. For instance, the bank was spending lots of money hiring cameras and staff to Lagos too often to perform functions. They decided it made sense to station staff and equipment in Lagos as well.

    Abuja was not moved to supplant Lagos but to reinforce it. As some others have noted, across the world, countries separate commercial and administrative capitals. For every Washington, give me New York; Beijing for Shanghai, New Delhi for Mumbai, still Ottawa for bustling Toronto, etc. Dalhatu asked why not cite commerce ministry in Aba or Kano. This is called reductive reasoning. CBN is not moving, only a part. As for FAAN, it was former aviation minister – the worst ever in memory anywhere to hold that office – who moved it to Abuja. No one cried when he, a nativist bigot, employed his whole clan as if it is Air Sirika and Tribe. We are inhaling the fart he left behind. FAAN is only going back to default position. Dalhatu says we are now online, so we should work from everywhere. He should have advocated that all should work from their villages, not offices. His neanderthal mind should learn from the west. If he were wise, he would extol the 1,500 hectares of farmland the president launched in his Jigawa State last year, and anticipate with glee the 5,000 hectares in the offing for the north. Is that moving food to the north, or a plan to feed all Nigerians?

    Ndume says CBN should scatter the staff across offices in Abuja. How did he become a lawmaker? Does he understand integrity of operations, and the cost of setting up offices for people across buildings and the danger of compromised confidentialities? He is called the Senate’s Chief whip but somebody needs actual whipping. He and Dalhatu are outlaws as mainstays.

    The only flaw in the CBN and FAAN points is that they have not explained in Naira terms how much it would cost or has cost them to remain in Abuja. That may not sway the royalists who have their children all over the CBN and other choice establishments in Abuja. Those who toil through school lose out job opportunities to the kids of royals who schooled abroad and waltz like princes into the offices. If we take the inventory of the staff, especially those in the managerial cadre of the CBN, we will understand where the likes of Ndume and Dalhatu are coming from. Over to crack reporters. Some have said you should have the right cash to land a job while most of them have the right blood. If you don’t have the right blood, you are bloodied. Novelist Cormac McCarthy daubs it the blood meridian.

    Royalty here refers to entitled politicians. Ndume threatened electoral backlash. Dalhatu boasted the north has numbers and land. That logic admits they have lost the argument.

    They have privatized the contention. The average northerner is only concerned with bread-and-butter matters. Moving FAAN or some patrician children from Abuja does not change the almajiri’s fortunes or horizon. But they are recruiting innocents for their own selfish reasons. It is the subject of Isabel Wilkerson sensational work titled, Caste: The Origins of our Discontent. These holy willies like Dalhatu do not speak to fine men in the north who have outlived this cranky conservatism. Time will tell. I have met many of them that southerners don’t write about.

    In the past, the Kaduna Mafia, as we called it, was subtle. It did not flaunt power in the days of Isa Keita. The late Isa Funtua told me that he was secretary to the so-called mafia and they had retreats lasting days and everyone came with their cars, no drivers, no PAs. Today, the ACF, Afenifere, Ohanaeze Ndigbo, all advertise their parochialisms. We have passed the age of courtesy to an age of confrontation. They have embalmed a cult of hate. Buhari presented the worst of this class. Contrast IBB’s tenure with Buhari. Prominent names like Olagunju and Oyovbaire formed the core of his team. IBB was a despot, a smiling brute, but he tried, until he could not, to be as folksy. However, Ndume and co. are Buhari’s children. It is the consequence of the June 12 struggle. The bile burst out of the sore.

    The ACF is only grasping with hegemonic crisis. The north is not the monolith or monotone it used to be. The street is less a herd and more mercurial. “The old world is dying; the new world is struggling to be born…” wrote Gramsci, the philosopher of hegemony.

    But what is more important is for a few powerful people to understand that our unity is more important than the private fantasies of a few. For instance, a majority of NPA staff members  are from the north, but they are living in Lagos. Any complaints? Let the royals let the technocrats be.

  • Go, Baba, Go

    Go, Baba, Go

    After the genuine Yoruba group known as Afenifere drove Pa Ayo Adebanjo out as acting leader, the old man is not ready to abide. He says, through his acolytes, that he remains the leader and they plan to hold a meeting to make him so. I wonder why he is not inviting Peter Obi, or why the feminine voiced fellow has not spoken on his behalf. Adebanjo is a fighter but he is the bolekaja sort of wrestler. Except that he has neither the wisdom nor guile for that sort of muscle play. It is time for him to go, but the man would not budge. He is dancing to his own drum. He is dancing into the bush because that is where the drumbeat compels him. He does not know he is in the bush among the throbs of boughs and beasts until an amotekun leaps out into glare. The other drums say, go, Baba, go. He mistakes the language of the drumrolls for eulogy. That is the tragedy.

  • BOS Airborne

    BOS Airborne

    The closest to ancient Greek democracy in contemporary times is the town hall meeting, not elections. It is the only credible heart-to-heart moment in political accounting. It is a constant fair in American politics. Sometimes it is a mini-fest, a visceral touchstone. Other times, it can be a cantankerous affair, constituents jabbering and even jabbing. It is difficult to choreograph. It takes courage for a politician to hold it even if they want to be puppeteers and make the audience a mass marionette. The BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, held one a few days ago, and it ended with appreciation and without rancour. But most important, the governor turned it into a news show. He let us know that his stewardship is not only about roads, or bridges or even a policy like the single use plastics. The BOS is airborne. He announced that Lagos was planning an airline. With a new airport on the runway of his vision, it only made sense to start an airline. I called him a landmark governor, and he is not done. He had announced a medical university, the first of its kind by a state governor. On the airline, Joe Igbokwe triggered online names for it. Some call it Ibile Air, Eko Air, etc. From changing the landscape of the mind and the earth, he is set to race into the air.

  • Tinubu, Robin Hood and corruption

    Tinubu, Robin Hood and corruption

    It’s money for the poor stolen by the rich. The scandals affecting Betta Edu, Sadiya Farooq, Halima Shehu and their shadows cast over Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, draws the mind to the core of President Bola Tinubu’s philosophy of public service.  That is, take from the rich and give to the poor. It’s brigandage on behalf of the little citizen.

    In its final chapter, how he implements it will either reinforce or cast aspersions on his image as the Robin Hood of Nigeria’s politics and history. Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) bemedaled him with that name because of his doings as the first citizen of Lagos.

    The programmes in the Buhari era, including school feeding, cash transfer to the poor, et al, arose from Tinubu’s mind. Buhari defiled it. Unfulfilled ideas, wrote former United States President Richard Nixon in his memoirs, are “like babies that are still born.” The baby died under Buhari. Stillbirths lack the luxury of a sweet cry. This time, the president must not only make this baby let out a great inaugural cry, but it must punch, kick and let out mellifluous shrieks of dawn like the baby born in Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son.

    One of the tragedies of the modern era is its obsession with the poor. The first real culprit was the French Revolution. Before that, the elite did not pretend to love the downtrodden. In fact, religions and systems – from aristocracy to monarchism to feudalism – valorised the notion of the glorious eternity of poverty. The scriptures do not only say God loves the poor, but the rich will be blessed for taking care of them. No one goes to heaven for abolishing poverty.

    “The poor will always be with us,” said Jesus. To become equal with the rich, the poor must first die. The grave is the equalizer. On earth, the poor never won. After brandishing equality and fraternity, even the French Revolution roared back into its feudal privileges under Napoleon. Across the pond, the U.S. anointed a capitalist-feudal revolution with some of the fancy phrases for equality and freedom. “Give me liberty or give me death,” declared Patrick Henry.

    The first real system that devoted its idea to the poor was Marxism. Yet, when it came to fruition, the poor fulfilled Christ’s prophesy. Lenin and his country lived a lie for many decades until Gorbachev saved them with another lie called perestroika and Glasnost (restructuring and openness). Mao and Castro left a legacy that glamorizes poverty. The Russian people keep tagging along even though they invented a new oligarchy with their President Valdimir Putin as one of the richest men alive. The idea of Robin Hood, who is the eponymous hero of men who fight for the poor from Marx to Tinubu, is that poverty needs to be abolished. But the concept of the rich implies the preponderance of the poor.  Hence the bearded Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, part anarchist, part revolutionary, said “the possessions of the rich are stolen properties…”

    Not everyone believes so. Maybe that accounts for why the president places premium on his social empowerment programmes and the politicians see it as an opportunity for self-enrichment. He wants to take from the rich and give to the poor. Some of his appointees are perceived as taking from the poor to over-bloat the rich.

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    It is this divide in government, not only in actions but philosophy, that the president needs to articulate to his cabinet and staff. Perhaps the first step was the decision to suspend the entire programme and reimagine it. I hope the programmes is going to sleep to wake up with a new dream.

    The first act is not just to abolish poverty, but to abolish the contempt of the elite class. The contempt has two brands. One, cynical love. This is the more toxic. It implies the love of the poor from a distance. You love to send them money, send them bags of rice, but you don’t want them near you. This is often the case with philanthropy of the official kind. The word was coined by Greek playwright Aeschylus. It entails time, talent and treasure. It must give relief and improve lives under the rubric of social reform. The more intimate word is charity because it evokes sentiment of giving and sacrifice.

    The other brand of contempt is ostentation. In the old television drama Hotel De Jordan, the rich man said all the poor were filthy and smelly and should be deposited in the public dump. We had that under IBB when a series of public officers said telephone, higher education, etc were not for the poor. These days, it is more subtle and more dangerous. It is stealthy and hides in the sewer. When it explodes in the open, the smoke smells like Edu and Shehu.

    But it is no score for the poor. No system has ever saved the poor in history. It only mitigates, especially in the western countries. What is poor in Nigeria is not poor in Norway. But the worst form of poverty is in the mind. In my first visit to the United States, I had a discussion about poverty with a black American woman, a journalist, in Kansas City. I remarked that her complaint about the sufferings of her fellow blacks were touching but they can eat, clothe, and sown cars no matter how sputtering. Our poor see all that as luxury. About a year ago, an American journalist in Colorado could not believe that a friend of his who hails from Senegal could make anything out of used car spare parts he imported home. All poverty is not created equal. Otedola and Elumelu are rich but one is Forbes and the other is not.

    And at the bottom of President Tinubu’s Robin Hood philosophy is that the poor are often impotent. In his The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle writes, “We steal from the poor because they can’t fight back.” Hence they need a hero. When they fight, they either bring down the system or prick the elite conscience for a short time. When the system comes down like in France, or Russia or even Cuba, it is a few powerful who will rebuild and own it. When they prick the conscience like the Glorious Revolution or even apartheid, the structure shows a little mercy and returns to its old disdain. So, the poor keep paying taxes in cash and toil for the rich and never die in peace. Recreating the elder Poet Pinder in the play The Acharnians, Greek poet Aristophanes quotes him as saying, “What I’d saved to buy a coffin, I must spend to pay a fine.” Most poor don’t save enough to buy their coffins when they die. That is what is at stake for the Tinubu Robin Hood image and poverty programmes.

  • Sheriff 38, opponents zero

    Sheriff 38, opponents zero

    Governor Sheriff Oborevwori said at a thanksgiving service that he survived 38 legal onslaughts in his quest to be the governor of Delta State. The victory last Friday at the Supreme Court was the last of such battles. I don’t know of any public figure around the world who has had to confront such rat-tat-tat of charges other than Donald J. Trump. But Trump is losing his. Sheriff won all. In these days of Guiness Book of Records anxiety, Governor Oborevwori might have clicked something in that book, maybe for Africa, or for persons running for governor in a presidential system or regional governor in Westminster style. But it shows how the political class is riveted on power and how the courts have taken a pivotal part in our evolving political system. It is not only that he had these legal challenges, he conquered all. The attacks ranged from Pre-election to election challenges. I imagine how much lawyers were paid for each of those cases, and how we make career on fictive crimes. It is what Shakespeare calls all labour’s lost. But not for the cynical lawyers. For the politicians who challenged on flimsy ideas though, some people say it is one way the system takes back stolen wealth and redistributes to the system. But lawyers are not the right people to receive them because they are not the people.

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    The most telling is the emotional rollercoaster the governor might have navigated, the highs and lows of blood pressure, the second guessing of judges, the possibility of losing a status or what sociologist call status anxiety, the fear that his grand projects and vision might turn into a soap bubble. Happily, the big projects, including the revamping of Warri, no one will now distract. All is well that ends well. His detractors thought the court proceedings were the beginning of the end. As Churchill noted, it is the end of the beginning.

  • Utomi and Mega party

    Utomi and Mega party

    Pat Utomi denied widespread reports that a counter mega party would come. He wondered where the story came from. Editors must question their reporters for spreading lies. But more importantly, editors should question themselves why they did not question their reporters enough. My guess is that the media replaced facts with imagination. One of the perils of media is to turn anticipation into news. It breeds fiction. The PDP fellow in transition, Daniel Bwala, had said Tinubu would win 2027 presidential sweepstakes if PDP, LP and NNPP did not merge. Bwala was only saying it to embolden Tinubu and gain his attention, whereas the media thought Utomi and co were talking merger.

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    They should know that coming together would create identity crisis for Obi, Atiku and Kwankwaso. So did they ask what would happen to the Obidients? That tribe brooks no marriages. They know only one altar: Obi. Or else, they will lose their gumption and dilute like salt in a bucket of water. They love their body and they embrace their misery. They are like the character in the Count of Monte Cristo who said, “If you ever loved me, don’t ever rob me of my hate. It is all I have.” Does anyone understand this about the obidients? Obidients cannot Atikulate, neither can the Atikulates be Obidient. They saw their chance but they were lost in their own grandiloquent fury. Such combo is like bad digestion. APC is the first ever such party in history to make it. Others have been strange bedfellows since independence. It takes a special acumen, like Tinubu’s, to wrest such a morsel from a tiger’s jaw.

  • Who will dance naked?

    Who will dance naked?

    Before the play itself, the audience witnessed a bit of touching theatre. Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, volunteered to give a helping hand to Joke Silva, who sought help to walk up the steep flight of stairs to the stage at the Glover Memorial Hall in Lagos. A hand-to-hand mercy, a theatre of empathy. A woman of many histrionic triumphs, Silva produced the play, The King Must Dance Naked, authored by Fred Agbeyegbe, 88. The drama ran through the yuletide season. It’s about false identities, outrageous claims and redemption.

    The play bristles with contemporary resonance: our election angst, corruption, lies, heroics. Betta Edu, Emefiele, Sadiya, the last presidential imbroglio, all tumble through this play first staged in 1983. The theme, about a king who is probably a queen, has to unveil the royal sex under the shadow of a depleting harem. So, the society suffers famine and plagues because of the lie on the throne.

    At bottom is a power play, the question of legitimacy and their aftermath. Who should be king? Just like the 2023 polls. Who should be the president? Is it the woman who sounds like a woman but is a man, or is it the man sighing like a woman? The king is actually a queen masquerading as a man. Imposture and false right stalks the throne, as in Aso Villa. In the end, just like our polls, the truth emerges. The real heir is the one who is vilified, seen as no good by some cabals. The new king overtakes the queen. Just like Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, justice is not jaundiced.

    But a scene about a sacrifice to the gods reminds one of Emefiele, Edu and Sadiya, et al. The society sacrifices a big goat, a fowl and a sumptuous spread of food to the gods.  But a madman cons his reluctant wife to join in looting the sacrifice. The couple will achieve two things. They will preserve the society in the illusion that the gods actually ate their sacrifice and worry that they didn’t give enough. So they keep giving. Two, the couple will continue to fatten on the superstition of their society. The lazy prospers on the people’s sacrificial misery. It is the paradise of greed. Achebe pictures such a scene in Arrow of God when the chief priest appropriates the fowl of sacrifice for family. It demystifies the sacred grove. Rite becomes right.

    Just like Emefiele, who piled up 593 accounts and $6.2 million  carted away under camera lens. Meanwhile, people die, masses hunger, foods rot, hospitals count the dead. There is room for pity. The mother of twins faces the prospect of the killing of the female one, so as to keep the male. It is a testament to the patriarchal tyranny of our society, and that enables the corruption of men. Also, the former king owns the twins and the mother is a former slave who climbs into royalty.

     Feminine defiance bustles here, first in the woman who fights for her daughter. Two, the woman who appropriates the throne meant only for men. The three women in the ongoing corruption scandal today – Betta, Shehu, Sadiya – are asserting, in a reversal of roles, a place often reserved for men: Looting the treasury. This is not the feminism dreamed by Elizabeth Stanton and others who gave us the creed.

    There is, however, a moral ambiguity to the tale. And that touches Betta Edu. Edu is not your airhead political hustler. She is less than 40, but she is not only a medical doctor but bags a PHD in public health. She is a potential high flyer, brilliant, young, dynamic. Again, from records, she is not the first offender in funneling official money to private accounts. So, why is she taking a fall? Could it be a case of entrapment? Was it that she lacked social tact? Why did the permanent secretary or any of the ministry mainstays not caution her? Why did the bird carry the secret of the bedchamber to the market square? Blessed are those whose sins are covered. Maybe they did not like her and wanted her to plunge into the scandal? For such a thing to happen and this quickly, it implies Edu offended someone. Was she rash, contemptuous, irascible as a boss?  Is it the story of a tragic flaw? “All evil is in man, yet it can’t be fixed by man. It can only be forgiven,” wrote Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk in her novel, The Books of Jacob.

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    But she was supposed to know. Ignorance is no excuse. I pity her because she and Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo acquitted themselves with verve and innovation. Some even called Tunji-Ojo minister of the year. But competence is not more important than values. Corruption is like a rotten  bone that ruptures veins and blood flow. America’s defence secretary, Lloyed Austin, is being called to resign for not informing the president that he was undergoing prostate cancer surgery. No one is emoting pity for a sick man but they are stressing law and decency.

    Louis Saint-Just, the French revolutionary known as the archangel of terror, said the job of justice is “not to find the culprit guilty, but to find him weak.” To find the culprit guilty is to inflict punishment for punishment’s sake. To find him weak is to explore avenues for moral rebirth, like in the early concept of correctional facilities. In Nigeria, though, it is the society that is weak because we suffer a collective guilt. Not many calling for Edu’s head do it out of moral superiority but out of sanctimony and envy. If we were she, they would say, I would be cleverer and make all that money without being caught. Hence Saint-Just asserted that the republic of forgiveness only leads to the republic of the guillotine. We appoint public officers to serve, not to purify their souls. They must serve with conscience. Competence without conscience is cynical. So, there is no way either Edu or Tunji-Ojo will not soil the system by remaining in office. The Tinubu administration is probably going through a gradual weeding out of tares from wheat. As Paul wrote, “the removing of those things that can be shaken, so that those that cannot be shaken can stand.”

    Edu was given a task like Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan, to dole out good to the poor. But she might have fallen guilty to the line in the play: “For no one can be good for so long if goodness is not in demand.” Hence President Tinubu is overhauling the social empowerment programme to bring compassion back to charity. For there is no justice without compassion. Plenty does not guarantee a filled belly. As Brecht wrote, “stomachs rumble even on an emperor’s birthday.”  Shakespeare wrote, “that distribution undo excess and each man have enough.”

    Agbeyegbe’s play directed by Toju Ejoh was a great show in dance, song and movement, sometimes an invocation of the chorus of Greek plays by Euripides, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Sophocles. It makes us ponder our society as we thrill to the splendour on stage. And the grandeur and flourish of Itsekiri culture was on display. Kunle Ajibade called it “Itsekiri day.”