Daniel Bwala is an interesting fellow. He quit the Tinubu vortex because, according to him, he could not accept the so-called Muslim-Muslim ticket. He joined Atiku, and TVC Breakfast show invited him to explain a crisis in his party when Wike and Atiku crossed swords over Ayu’s chairmanship of the party. He appeared on TVC Breakfast show, and I asked him why Atiku was insisting on retaining Ayu as chair when Atiku also came from the north against the party’s constitution. He replied that the party would remove Ayu after Atiku had won the election. It was an admission that the arrangement was not neat or just. So, I asked, “Do you want to do the wrong thing first and the right thing later?” Whether out of shock or technology glitch, he disappeared from the screen. Then he returned fuming. To all intents and purposes, that was the end of the interview. He became paranoid and went to social media to say I came to the show just because of him. He also ran scared whenever TVC called him. He asked if I was behind the interview request. I don’t recall him appearing on TVC since. I may be wrong, though.
Now, he met with President Tinubu and has threatened to defect to APC. I like Bwala. He is a consistent man. Just as he was going to do the wrong thing first and the right thing later, he joined Atiku first and his plotting to join Tinubu later. A man should always do the right thing at last. A cheer for Bwala.
Two anticipated judgments from the Supreme Court made the waves over the weekend. One in Kano State and the other in Plateau State. The top court ruled that it was wrong to cancel about 165,000 votes with unsigned INEC materials. In the second, they upturned the appeal ruling over dubious primaries. If the top court gave us justice, has it brought us peace or clarity? Lawyers will have to contemplate this. Do we give justice to placate a crowd or the law?
In the Kano case, does it mean we can always accept unsigned material as authentic against the law? Will it not open a floodgate of false documents. Democracy is about the majority as it is about the law. Majority cannot stand without the law. It will breed anarchy. The law must always act in the interest of the majority. How to navigate this is the conundrum. It can engender confusion. Hence, Thoreau wrote, “The law never made anyone a whit more just.”
The Plateau matter highlights how we should define pre-election matters. The same Supreme Court dislodged a governor in Zamfara State for a similar matter in the previous election circle. In Bayelsa State, a deputy governorship candidate’s certificate annulled a ticket even though it was presumably a pre-election matter. Rotimi Amaechi was made governor over a primary miscue. Are we sure, justice is not becoming jaundiced or circumstantial in this country? Now, a cloud of illegitimacy hangs over Lawmakers in Plateau. Do we blame the constitution or judges? According to law, the appeal court is the Supreme Court on matters of the lawmakers. How do we fix this puzzle? Just a thought.
When former CBN chief Godwin Emefiele was at the acme of his powers, a group was in bed with him. We may not forget them. They were called Obidients. They were his cheerleaders when he gave money a new sort of power. The power to disappear.
Their leader said it was a “little inconvenience.” The so-called Atikulates did not possess the roar of that crowd, but were happy to be the enabling whispers, the woodchips fueling a wild fire. They were suffering, and in Fela’s satire, they were smiling at their own tragedy. Pepper was scarce. They smiled. Ogbono soup out of the kitchen? They guffawed. Yam and bananas rotted into market stenches. They jubilated.
They wanted one man to fall while they starved. They were instituting a fast to bring down a stronghold. After all, some of them prayed, and cast out demons. They wanted power by abrogating the power to buy and sell, to eat and be merry, and ultimately to sit on the throne in Aso Villa. Money failed so they could win.
They did not ask why we had new bills and could not see them. They saw it though we did not. They had an eye of understanding. We did not have faith. They had it aplenty and could move electoral mountains. The new money was there. They materialized it; we were not spiritual enough to see. The money notes were new in the imagination. New in policy. New in Buhari’s vault. New on Emefiele’s lips. New in photos online and television. In the illusions of some commentators on teevee and newspaper columns. A few times in parties among a peacock class. Only not in our pockets.
It was a fairytale abundance. But for the poor, even many rich, it was out of reach. When some fainted in bank halls, they celebrated. They were not seeing the dead, the dying, the hungry, the stalemated economy. Afterall as playwright Bertolt Brecht wrote in his The Good Woman of Setzuan, “Stomachs rumble on the emperor’s birthday.” Rather, they saw an opportunity, a demoniac fire in the eye, to spot the foe, and bring him down.
Mefi, as his folks call him, took on the picture of a folk hero. The Obidients and Tinubu’s folks saw him differently. Tinubu and his associates warned that it was a premature, tendentious folly. Where was the new note, and how much would it cost to do it? It had an implication for the economy, inflation, cost of living. The poor would suffer at last. Tinubu cried out in Abeokuta that it was not for us but for the benefit of a cabal of feline machinations who wanted to choreograph the polls to a pre-determined end.
Rather than listen, they scoffed and even gloated at him. It was so bad that Mefi became so full of himself that he thought he could be president. Against the law and above commonsense, he rolled out the campaign drum to run for primaries. It was a delusion of grandeur. He thought himself a new superman in the mould extoled by German philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche. It was against CBN Act. It did not matter to him. He was not even a party member, but he wanted to rig it, to finagle his path to power.
This essayist needled him on it. He organized a shadowy group to reply my column with a two-page advertorial in this newspaper. He was on a roll. He brought a lugubrious moment on the nation. The Obidients and Atiku’s men cheered on, even if they knew he was not their candidate. Indeed, after his ambition ran upon the rocks, he was determined to derail the man whose destiny was unstoppable.
In the end, the act is speaking. They have met their nemesis in a man named Jim Obazee. He never speaks. Some cannot pick him out in a picture parade. But Emefiele and Buhari’s creatures are on a parade of the people’s firing line. Many of them are the same people sounding drum rolls for them only a year ago.
We must be wary who we cheer. Many of them do not understand economics. They are naïve at the working of politics. They cheered their own undoing. Now that Emefiele is turning into a pillar of salt, there is no one to save him. He is alone, his face at once moronic and defiant with his gigantic Bible. The Obi’s creatures are not sorry. They are cheering. They are just looking at the disaster they helped wreak on themselves and their country. Their leader is dead from the neck up. Nor is Atiku capable of any hour of interventionist wisdom on this matter. For their ambitions, they fired blank bullets. But the people they wanted to ride to power fell in great numbers.
The new money saga gave Mefi a platform to get away with our money. We do not know the scale yet. If they open 593 accounts, and one of them is over 500 million pounds, the imagination should rupture to contemplate the rest. So, we wonder why the Naira is mincemeat to the dollar. Inflation is mate to eagles in the sky and airports jam with japa.
Mefi was not alone. But the most tragic part is that this story should happen under Muhammadu Buhari’s watch. It is the nightmarish irony of it all. The saint who made sinners. The man voted in to clean up the mess presided over a corpse as worms peeped in and out of rotting flesh. He has said nothing. Buhari was sleeping on the wheel ahead a motorcade. It is the tragedy of leadership without supervision, of a Shagari-esque fetish for the ceremony and magnificence of power without the rigour of accounting. He was the Orpheus who could not flute the beauty from the dead. But Orpheus had passion in the Greek myth. He had love. He wept for his love. His tunes dazzled the monsters, mesmerized ghosts, defanged demons along the way to rescue the beauty. He failed only because of excess of eagerness. Buhari had no zeal except for his own hubris and material security.
He had more money to give Babatunde Fashola (SAN) – his Trojan – to work. More to fix power. More to rewrite education. But only the foreign accounts were rewritten for a cabal who are yet to be named. They plumed themselves while we fumed.
Our Buhari was a capital disaster as leader. But he was first class at one of the great vices of civilization: indifference. “The opposite of hate is not love, but indifference,” writes Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. Albert Camus, another Nobel laureate and chronicler of the absurd, calls it the “unreasonable silence of the world.”
I call him the BOS of Lagos, but Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu is turning into a governor of landmarks. He ended the last year with two important bridges, one in Oyingbo and another in Ikeja. As if to stress the value, he was validated by his governor colleagues. For Oyingbo, the calm governor of Ekiti, Biodun Oyebanji. For Ikeja, Kwara State governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq spiced the launch with his presence. He also is known to have completed the first big train that now whistled through the arteries and corridors of the city. Very soon, both blue and red lines will colour our commutes in Africa’s buzz of a city. On the Lekki corridor, he is plotting a new airport. In the shadow of all these big-ticket dreams is the Fourth Mainland bridge, whose funding seems to be in gear. In the United States, presidents are known for specific things. Same applies to governors. George H. Bush called himself the education president. Roosevelt inked his name on the Great Depression. Governor Sanwo-Olu is marking himself out as a man of big things.
Buhari is known to throw up exceptional women, home and away. When in power, his wife was exceptional for being ignored by the power vortex of his uncle, Kingibe, Malami, et al. She was the counterfoil to an iridescent tribe of grasping intriguers and fuddy-duddies. Now, we know more. We know now that the sins of his humanitarian minister had little humanity. She didn’t display the showy vanities of Jonathan’s Diezani, who is now in a picaresque saga from country to country running away from her iniquities back home. Buhari’s humanitarian minister is a dodger, too, if not artful enough for a suspenseful plot line. My view may be premature, though. When the pastor-led EFCC invited her, she first ignored him until she found the right excuse. She borrowed from former PDP National Publicity Secretary, Olisa Metuh, who found refuge in a neck brace. Soyinka mocked him in his new play, The Wheel of Justice, staged by Tunde Awosanmi, in which a Metuh’s character materializes in court on a wheel chair in the comic and burlesque glory of a neck brace.I don’t want to imagine Sadiya Farooq in a neck brace. It would not be funny but a delinquent recast of history. The woman who was supposed to run a hospitality extravaganza for the poor already has followed the hospital line. She said she was not well enough to heed the EFCC summon. The drama is still unfolding, while another unfolds with NSIPA’s CEO Halima Shehu, who President Tinubu fired over N17 billion intercepted on its way to infamy, into unauthorized accounts. Meanwhile, about N37b fraud charge hangs over Farooq’s head. More, we hear, is coming. It was the same woman who never had rest on false charges as Buhari’s amour until the news that she disbursed two billion naira on school feeding to students who were not in school. She never got punished for that. Perhaps that is why the corn has grown into a tree. If there is no consequence, corruption festers.
It is amazing that women should be in the news. We have rid them of their innocence. See what Farooq’s successor has done. Betta Edu cannot plead naivety. She was a commissioner in Cross River. She has just embarrassed her employer and women who see her as role model. Before we had women like Dora Akunyili and even Oby Ezekwesili, whose derailed obsession in the last polls defaced her otherwise sturdy public profile.
Just before an interview with him for TVC in one of Lagos’ highbrow hotels, I asked Governor Rotimi Akeredolu in Yoruba, “Bawo lara sir?” How is the body? We were both standing, awaiting the crew to set the stage.
His reply was wordless. A grimace, a surrender and a lighted pair of eyes. I asked again. Still wordless. I knew, before what was perhaps his last major interview, that what was afflicting this man did not signal a cheerful prognosis. He had just returned from Europe for a medical checkup. Beyond the grimace and surrender, the lighted pair of eyes indicated a warrior on a defiant march. He would not, in the words of Poet Dylan Thomas, “go gentle into that good night.”
When his health was unraveling, I imagined his lighted pair of eyes. I saw them when he announced he was traveling out for treatment. When the controversy raged over why he was in Ibadan and not in Akure. When his then deputy, Lucky Orimisan Aiyedatiwa, fought to stay alive. In the back-and-forth of recriminations. In the battle of the women, one a wife, the other a political climber, hiving a home. The concoction thickened with shadowy schemes of allies and foes. Snarls of forged signatures and denials. Two elephants were wrestling, and the Ondo grass withered. We did not hear his side of the story. We cannot bury him in unsubstantiated charges. As Sophocles notes, “A dead man cannot testify in his own funeral.”
As the theatre bustled on, Aketi’s life dropped with every heartbeat, until last week, as the year petered out, he surrendered to the way of all flesh. As David sang, “What man is he that liveth and shall not see death? Shall he deliver his soul from the hands of the grave?” So Aketi goes, but what a man he was.
It is now a matter of legacy for him. After all the fight, power is transient, and the whole hoopla of who owns what has melted in tears and mourning. Our people and politicians should know as Ebenezer Obey crooned that Ile aiye o to nkan. This life is nothing. Vanity upon vanity, all is vanity. Both sides were saying, like Napoleon, “God gave me this crown. Whoever touches it should beware.” Or what John said in Revelations, “Hold thou fast which thou hast and let no man take thy crown from thee.” But it is all for nothing.
David Diop, the French-Senegalese writer, wrote in his new novel, The Door of No return, that monuments are in our stories. What story did Aketi leave behind? It was of social justice, of fierce nationalism and federalism. In my last interview, he warned those politicians who, for selfish reasons, would want to privilege law over convention in jettisoning the pact by southern governors that the presidency should come to the south. He, a lawyer and senior advocate, said the law is important but convention vitalizes the constitution. Any society so captured by law as to forget tradition will have neither law nor tradition – my words.
He also called for justice within the realm of justice, and was worried that the Supreme Court had to open up not only to judges but also academics and lawyers. He cried about the power of the CJN, playing with the acronym. He said the CJN is now the controller of the NJC. The same alphabets.
Aku orire
The new governor may have been carried away. It was still mourning in Akure and the new governor, Aiyedatiwa, was sunny and jubilant. He purred, Aku orire, meaning, “let’s celebrate our good fortune.” He should not even have allowed himself to be sworn in so early. By such hasty swearing-in, he stepped over Aketi’s body. He should have grieved. Was he also laughing over the corpse of his benefactor? He would not want to be characterised as such but that was the optics in his smiling visage and air of buoyant joy in the room. He was already the acting governor with all the powers. He could have waited a week. The powers of acting governor are not diminished if he is not sworn-in. He could, at least, have acted rather than put up that sordid act.
He probably was not aware of his haste. He has to apologise for that lack of sensitivity over a man who held him out of the shadow, supported him to be a member of the House of Representatives, made a major enemy because he picked him for the senate and nominated him into the NDDC. While appointing him his deputy, he virtually assured him he would be his successor. So, why not exercise patience and not act as a baby on a mother’s lap jumping for a feeding bottle as though it will not come?
In his sober moments, he probably would realise his mistakes. He did not know that Aketi’s sacrifice was not a thing of pride to him. So, did Aiyedatiwa not appreciate all of Aketi sacrifices for country and even for him? The video has gone viral when Aketi gushed on the man and import of his name Lucky, and Orimisan – my head is good- and his surname that means the world is now ours. I recall the story of Lucky Igbinedion, whose brother Bright never enjoyed his good fortunes. The saying was that it is better to be lucky than bright.
He needs to address this in public so we can all move on. He owes it to Aketi’s soul, to Ondo State citizens and to all Nigerians.
Old men come in different stripes. We had the pious one who sought to depart in peace in elder Simeon as he beheld the Lord, his salvation. We have Hemmingway’s old fisherman of the sea who toiled heroically but brought home only a skeleton. Paul enjoined fathers not to provoke the children to wrath. A bumbling old man in Ferninand Oyono’s novel received a medal only as a mockery. Jacob blessed his children before he left. The father Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s novel is a planter who bequeaths storm for a generation of his family. Prophet Samuel left a blessing. In politics, Awo called someone a son of perdition. Zik poured woe on another. In Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, an old count sheds tears of apology to his daughter on his deathbed and another enriches an almost total stranger.
I wonder what E.K. Clark is becoming in his hoary years? He calls for Presidential intervention and, when he gets it, he cries constitutional foul. Who flouted the law if not the one who brings down a house of democracy, passes a budget with four men, withholds pay from public officers, invokes tribe in a multiethnic state? Clark wants trouble, not tranquility. His man Fubara says he wants peace, will abide by the peace pact, and they will work together. No peace is perfect. He wants war. The pact seems one-sided because Fubara acts were lopsided. Clark should learn from the words of the Latin American writer, Victor Borges that “a smile is the shortest distance between two people.” He should not fill faces with his own frown as a new crackles into being.
Ignoramuses of our history should watch it. Same applies to the hecklers of our unity who extol schism. The visionaries of hate through tribe and religion should go and see. The musical is Kakadu, a rumination of our history in dance and play. A nightclub before and after the civil war is a metaphor of a fallen nation from idealism and hope to a belly-up posture in self-doubt and mutual suspicion. The nightclub is called Kakadu and it means life, or what the French would describe as joie de vivre. Emeka (Ralph Okoro), more idealist than erudite, and Bisi (Sharon Adaeze) are star-crossed lovers, more sanguine than Romeo and Juliet. They pursue their romance before and after the war. Just as Kakadu turns forlorn and profitless during and after the war, so their romance meets the crosswind of family and cultural resistance. They make their point in a wedding euphoria that will confront a new scourge: armed robbery as an archetype of broken peace.
It is a whirlwind – choreography, songs, throaty charms, raunchy moves, flair of humour, and a trip through the twist dance of the sixties and songs from Bobby Benson to Victor Uwaifo. The stage is devoured by lugubrious scenes of rage, surrender and tears after the civil war, with body counts and pockmarks of war that IPOB should see. The owner of Kakadu bears a phony name Lugard Da Rocha (Ben Ogbeiwi), a dual evocation of a Lagosian identity and the colonial author of our geo-political tension. He turns out to be an easterner who stays behind in Lagos as his tribe folks and relatives flee the city. He might seem a traitor to the east, but he bears the name before the crisis. Is he a true Nigerian who has transcended tribe but now has to apologise for his humanity, for being a person first before a tribesman? Or is he a natural impostor? Is he a prototype for amoebic, protean Lagos? His spasm of tears of self-pity that Ogbeiwi acts with great pathos must challenge us to define what we want: whether to emphasise nation or empathasise with tribe. It also flirts, if timidly, with the issue of who owns Lagos.
Written By Uche Nwokedi (SAN) and directed by Kanayo Omo, the musical may have been better shorter. It overromanticizes the pre-civil war relationships among the tribes. This same Lagos where Zik and Awo drew swords, backs were stabbed and tribes twirled machetes even before independence. The last scene of a Yoruba man leading an armed robbery may have twisted the tribal colour of waves of robbery after the war. Unless, of course, it is projected as a metaphor of civil fracture, even that may be controversial.
This musical ought to be seen by all, especially in a philistine society like ours. Kakadu becomes, in my coinage, Kaka-ku, Ku being Yoruba for die.
Barely 24 hours into the trip, he had developed a cramp, lost a tyre, gulped five energy drinks, walked three kilometres, been tormented by despair, hugged a rescuer, emptied his purse, slept at 3.30 am in a dingy hotel, pedaled on in the harmattan tyranny of northern Nigeria.
That was Samuel Erukoghene Okoro, 38, an Urhobo man of Delta State origin who transcended weather, landscape and the verities of human danger on Nigerian roads to make a statement for governance on a bicycle.
When he stepped foot on pedal, it was not about fear or courage. He was not immune to those sentiments. He was not above them but defied them. It was about the goal, and the goal was his state of origin where governance has been a challenge.
He said the initial steps of the new governor were promising: infrastructure work across the state, dispensing mercies in a depressed economy and a political tact that brought together even the sympathy of the opposition.
He had absorbed his biography as a public officer. So, to encourage him he was going to undertake a 1,200-kilometre trip from his residence in Damaturu, Yobe, to Asaba.
It was his journey, but it was a social one, too. He had engaged a WhatsApp group of 255 persons as angels over his shoulders. They monitored him as he moved from city to hamlet to village to city, all the way through the Middle Belt until he arrived at his state where he was received by, not only the Governor, Sheriff Oborevwori and his deputy, but also his wife, kids, mother and uncle, all of whom had waited, at times with fear, at times with despair, as he passed through the breathtaking physiognomy of grasslands, valleys, hills and rocky terrain to his home state for Christmas. His wife and two children left Damaturu by conventional transport to Asaba while he and his moving machine plodded through the adventure.
The journey began December 9. While he had a map in mind, the journey would impose another. He works for an NGO known as Cooperazione Internationale that works with the World Food Programme, and the job had opened routes for him in northern Nigeria.
“I had gone through routes in the north to distribute food for Boko Haram victims, so I know where is safe and where is not safe,” said Okoro, who landed the job after he served as a youth Corps member and never returned home, though he graduated in chemistry from Federal Polytechnic, Oko in Anambra State. He married there and has two children.
“I also asked the security officers and they asked me not to go through Kano and Kaduna. They are not safe too,” he recalled. He secured a clean bill of health from the University Teaching Hospital in Yobe, and he was set to go.
Between a sleepy town Darazo and Bauchi town, his tyre flattened – precisely 30 kilometres to Bauchi. He trekked for three kilometres with his fallen companion and stopped at a fuel station before calling a friend, Taiwo Ogundipe, who was studying for a master’s degree in town. Ogundipe fed him and arranged for a vulcanizer who said both tyres were bad and he obtained new ones. Ogundipe drove him to the fuel station where they picked him and he continued his trip to Jos.
Jos was hostile.
“Between Damaturu and Bauchi, the weather was too hot and my lips went bad,” he complained. In Jos with its joyful weather, it was the people who were inclement. Harangued by bandits, residents thought he was a spy for bandits. So, no one would tell him the way to Lafia, Nasarawa State.
“I was there for about three hours and frustrated,” he said. kindness came from a pocket of police officers after he explained the reason for his adventure. But he passed the night in a rundown hotel in Jos.
“It was like ashawo quarters,” he narrated with humour. At this time, he was already broke.
“My wife was the one sending me money through O Pay,” he said. The wife did not do him charity. He was going to pay back. He left Damaturu with only five thousand naira. Not that he had a bag of cash at home, but he did not want to impress robbers with a cargo of indecent sum.
The journey seemed free flowing until he arrived at a nodal centre between Akwanga in Nasarawa State and Makurdi in Benue. The village is called Camp Garuba, and there he met a hero’s reception. He was at a bukka when he relayed his story, and the villagers regarded him in the light of a local who had made a similar trip for popstar Davido. When they asked for his tribe, they introduced him to an Isoko man he recalled as Jonah Godspower whose wife – Blessing Oghenekome – made him a plate of yam and fried egg. But he was already filled up. Jonah’s second act of hospitality did not work for him. “Where he gave me to sleep for free was not good,” he said.
But it was in Camp Garuba that he changed route.
“They said I could not pass through Enugu because of stay-at-home order, and that it was not safe. They mapped another route through Kogi State,” he said. Meanwhile, at every stop he was feeding his WhatsApp group with pictures and videos of his stops, laments and triumphs. When he lay on the roadside, passed a road sign, looked like he was passing out, where he slept, where his tyre upended the journey, when he trekked beside his bike in a parody of Ebenezar Obey’s song, Ketekete. He saw valleys and hills, bushes and about a dozen snakes crushed to death by vehicle tyres more than twice the size of his bicycle. One slithering beast had a red skin. No wild beast menaced him.
Between Makurdi and Naka, he saw “hell.”
“We can’t describe it as a road,” he explained. He could not ride the road, especially through Ankpa. “If rain falls, you can’t pass it.” His vehicle collapsed. And he could not afford okada to the place as they wanted him to pay N1,500. And that was all he had until he explained his story to one of them.
“You want to kill yourself,” said one of the men when he reached the repairer’s shop. But he became an instant celebrity as people flocked around him taking selfies. At Ayangba, also in Kogi, soldiers arrested him until he showed them pictures of his trip. Hostility turned to rapture and even roguish compassion. They asked why he was doing it the hard way when they could stop a trailer to deposit him near his state.
“What’s the honour?” he replied.
“You get mind o,” replied the soldiers.
At Okene, he confessed to his WhatsApp group that he was tired. He could not go on. The road was hilly, and ploughing through tasked the last fibre of his strength.
“It was gallop after gallop,” he recounted. “I would trek a little, ride a little.”
His WhatsApp group mocked, but he said it was no comedy. He had slept in shacks for hotel, barely ate a standard meal, drew strength from energy drinks, and trudged along with little for money. An incoming trailer barreling down a valley almost threw him off the road over a steep edge. Just before that, a woman had looked quizzically at him at a restaurant. “You dey do this for Nigeria? Dem go remember you?” He had retorted that if they didn’t remember him, at least it would be on record for his children.
When he was near Auchi, “I had no energy to push on.” He thought his bicycle was dead. When he took okada to a nearby repairer, the joke was on him. “The repairer was an Hausa man. He said he would not cheat me. There was nothing wrong with the bicycle. It was him that was tired. The vehicle only needed oil.”
His legs were now shaking, as he plodded along to Uromi in Edo State. This was day nine of his trip. Hotel price hit the roof at 12 thousand naira. He told his whatsApp group he had nowhere to sleep. His brother sent him N20,000 and members poured forth in naira donations. He had a fortune of N33, 000.
“I said I didn’t know I could get this much from the group. I only had to realise this as the trip was coming to an end.”
He called the Director of Protocol, Sunday Onoriode, to notify him he would arrive the next day. Onoriode asked him to stay another night at Uromi because Governor Oborevwori was out of town. He should proceed the day after. On day 11, he set out only to hear that the governor was still out of town.
“I slept at another ashawo quarters at Agbor in Delta State.”
On Day 12, he arrived in Asaba, the governor, his family, uncle and mother, all happy to welcome him. He presented the bicycle to the state government.
To quote T.S. Eliot, a hard trip he had of it. But it is a picaresque challenge of one man, two tyres, a felicity of WhatsApp friends, feet over pedals for over a thousand kilometres to his governor and political elite.
The duel between Nyesom Wike and Sim Fubara recalls the episode between Napoleon and a Russian envoy. Master craftsman Leo Tolstoy waxed it into a legend in the most ambitious of all novels, War and Peace. Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte dropped a handkerchief in front of the Russian ambassador and expected the envoy to pick it up. In irony, the Russian dropped his own handkerchief beside Napoleon’s and picked his own fabric. The French general stooped, in spite of his fabled swagger of a hat and his imperial majesty, to retrieve his piece of cloth. Fubara thinks his handkerchief is whiter, lacier than Wike’s. But Wike is the haberdasher.
Fubara is in such a satiric contempt of his former boss and benefactor. In his wry mood, Wike must be wondering why Fubara is in such a wry mood. The drama is unfolding so fast, few have enough time for context. The fight is in several incarnations: between godfather and godson, benefactor and beneficiary, gratitude and disdain, Ijaw versus Wike, FCT versus lawmakers versus executive. In this fight, law has fallen hostage to the sophistry of SANs. Are the defecting assembly men leaping in the dark, or are they lurking to pluck down the governor?
There may be a failure of definition here. Maybe Fubara was never born as Wike’s son while Wike thought himself a father, an obstetric upheaval, a new oedipal twist. Not like Kwankwaso and Ganduje, Chime and Nnamani, Ibori and Okowa, Akpabio and Emmanuel, Kalu and Orji, et al. Which model is Fubara re-enacting? Psycho-social pundits may classify Fubara’s act. Is it an imitation, adaptation or parody of previous father-son lock-horns? Others have said, it took a year, sometimes three years, before the godson cut off the umbilical cord. Street roar, boardroom brawl, a slap in the face, a menace from hirelings, which?
Fubara does not fit any model. It is not even Chime versus Nnamani. Before his investiture, Chime had invoked the holy spirit to arrest Enugu State House demons while Nnamani still inhabited the palace. Fubara denies any cord or accord. Fubara model is a parody. If others waited, he had no patience. If Chime threatened, Fubara’s lips were still. Even if it took three months before the blood spill between them, the quarrel must have started three months earlier.
Given the gale of resignations, the bulldozer’s rumble, the stealthy coalitions, yaps of protests, we may say Fubara’s is new, a virgin clearing. Even in the perpetual tumult of Rivers State politics, it is a virgin clearing. But each of them is fighting and hurting, and are, in the words of French Poet Baudelaire, “I am the wound and yet the blade.”
Fubara is denying the Wike DNA. After denying the political bloodline, other links are easy to cut. He can say he is no beneficiary because the people, not Wike, voted him in. His is not disdain because he is now governor and Wike is not. Yes, it is an Ijaw matter because he is the first in the Fourth Republic to mount the chair. Wike gave and he is trying to take it away. This thinking is the making of Fubara’s delusion of grandeur.
If he has a grudge, there is a right way to be right and a right way to be wrong. His is a wrong way to be right. Even when we are right, we don’t have to be right. That is the life of good breeding and maturity. Fubara lacks it. You don’t blast an edifice costing billions to advertise your piety.
The issue is that once in power, it is easy to become the power itself. That is the problem with men like Fubara, who played the obsequious buffoon while he followed Wike around during the campaigns. He was bidding his time. That is the cynic at play, the quiet, grasping power monger. He thinks himself a liberator, a revolutionary even. He is the one who is going to bring down the mighty man of valour. He sees himself at once as a hero and rebel, who would, in the words of Albert Camus in The Rebel, “die on one’s feet (rather) than live on one’s knees.”
What is at stake is not Wike or Fubara, but democracy. At the moment, it is a question of power. Many are saying Fubara is currying the Rivers street by playing the underdog. No one really knows the story. Some say it is money, but no evidence. Wike has denied it. Some say it is control of the state, but Wike says it is about the integrity of his political family. But Fubara has kept mum, and the Rivers street is apt to clutch at the commonplace narrative: that it is a bully hectoring a puppet. The absence of a good open brawl, with Wike jabbering and Fubara swiping back, has left the whole drama a fight without blows. The only idea next to democracy is Wike’s assertion that Fubara is dining with the enemy. In politics that is crime number one. Charles De Gaulle’s close friend and topflight novelist, Andre Malraux once wrote: “If you abandon a certain number of deputies or if they abandon you, that is an incident. If you abandon an idea, that is not an incident, it is a suicide.”
So, what is Fubara’s idea if not suicide, for he has abandoned the family that enthroned him. Perhaps hence the APC executive was dissolved, and the lawmakers who defected can now take their place in the new party. It is a realignment of forces. Fubara is giving shelter to malcontents, shelter of a leaky roof.
Some lawyers have said there is no crisis at the national level. They probably forgot that it is because he fought Atiku in the centre that the party in Rivers State was cut into two, with persons like Secondus and Atiku’s cronies on the other side. Major PDP players including governors in the party split the party. Fubara is a product of that maelstrom and Wike is in the centre of it. Let us be wary and let the court takes its course.
He has probably seen the end, and he may be eyeing the deep end. Illusion is a companion of power. He may see a bad end and may be heading inexorably towards it, like Oedipus. He may think himself a sort of Prometheus who brandishes a revolutionary torch. In his play on Prometheus, Aeschylus quotes him as saying, “No misfortune can fall upon me that I myself have not foreseen.”
Big events took place of late. One is the continuing raft of resignations. The second is the pulling down of the house legislature. The third is to sign a budget with four lawmakers. The four lawmakers’ scenario is a spillover from the Obj years of impunity. Obj amassed a few men to impeach governors. Fubara used it to commit a governor’s impeachable offence with the budget. He gives the impression of chaos. Fubara believes he is levitating himself as a man of destiny, out on a sacred mission. We saw that in the way he pulled down the house. He thinks he is pulling down a stronghold. But it may show he has no strong hold on power. He is probably thinking like the irreverent philosopher Nietzsche who wrote, “To raise a new sanctuary, a sanctuary must be destroyed. That is the law.” So, with all the trouble going on, he sees his act as what the sawdust Caesar of Italy, Benito Mussolini proclaimed, “the holy religion of anarchy.” It consumed him. Fubara should not see himself in the mould of Napoleon, who crowned himself and wife Josephine in Rome. He then declared, “God gave me this crown. Let anyone who touches it beware.” He lost it all at Waterloo. His head defiled crown and could not hold it.
Reno Omokri tweeted that the crisis in Rivers State contrasts that of Ondo State as mirror of cultural differences. He may be right if we take away the Wetie and Agbekoya affairs. But the southwest state has handled it with tact while the Rivers State has been a quicksand.
The Rivers State crisis also reminds us that political turmoil sometimes does not involve the masses. They look on and take sides. While the streets yelp, the solution lies with democracy’s puppeteers, in the halls of courts and the intrigues of big men. It is a feline hour, and the schemes of men and cat often rhyme. That is what is unfolding.
So, Fubara should be wary of stacking up impeachable offences. Or else, the bringing down of the house may begin the obsequies of his reign.
