The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

Earthquake Wike

When he was appointed minister, this essayist announced Nyesom Wike a third-term governor. But few knew he would carry the halo of his state of provenance to his governance of Abuja. The man enters Abuja with expectations. A town where he never passed a night in eight years as governor will now give him a bed and a pillow.

As Mister bulldozer of FCT, some feared his first stop was Atiku’s house. No dice. Others said, First stop PDP secretariat. When last week he became earthquake Wike, neither Atiku nor PDP was looking over the rubble of their palaces. They are probably the coward in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart who is looking at the ruins of the brave man’s house from the comfort of his window.

But those whose lands went bust had exercised the fortitude of folly. The FCT minister gave them time to update their documents. He advertised them in the newspapers, including this one. They did not heed. Wike was not a man to bait. He acted and, like dominos, big names and small fell. The roll call was breathtaking. One of the big names was Peter Obi, the mister clean who has kept mute at the time of writing this essay on why he did not comply with the law. Others fell, too, including former governor Imoke, former Supreme Court Justice Niki Tobi. A corporate Bulldozer crumbled to the official bulldozer. That is, Julius Berger. This should not surprise anyone that Wike, in the early going, is the minister on the front perch. Politicians, moguls, celebrities, puny souls were lapped up.

As governor, Wike was a man of shifting parts, often like a jigsaw puzzle. Even though a governor, you probably saw an entertainer. When an entertainer, he could become a philosopher. When he philosophised, he could come across as a fighter. When a fighter, at times you thought him a man of peace. Even as a man of peace, a pugilist is in the offing, like a tiger about to roar.  As we witnessed often, he strutted on project sites, under his hat and behind his dark goggles. He could become Al Capone but we knew he was not. He was just Governor Wike. Defiant, beloved, working.

When he entertained, we were amused. When he philosophised, we mused. When he governed or came with projects, his fans emoted. When he fought, others felt like taking off their gloves with him or against him. When he mounted a peace offensive, some took offence while many were happy for a hug. As Mister Project, he lay brick after brick. He slammed asphalt on highways. For every cement he plastered, It appeared he was burying his foes beneath.

He was a governor who some first saw as quicksand but later understood that he was marching his state on a firm footing. He marched, his people behind and beside him as he mounted projects, fought political wars, galvanized a people, united them and sometimes made his state, Rivers, the centre of the universe. He brought on the political platform a peculiar view of the social contract.

This was his dimension of what philosophers like Locke and Rousseau crafted as social contract. Wike’s social contract did not come only in the soaring terms of a formal agreement between the governed and governor.

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He had his election. He was voted and sworn in. He gave an inaugural speech. He took on the epaulettes of office. He had guards, motorcade, powers. But that was a technical social contract. Everyone in power must have it.  It gave his mandate the starchy air of the letter of the law. But the sort that Wike projected is a rare form of contract between the governed and governor. It is the contract of the impulse, the contract of the heart. In one word, the bond of the psyche.

That was in evidence when he was launching a project and he burst into a rhetoric:  As e dey pain dem, e dey sweet us.  He burst into a song. He became the first governor to be a song writer. He had no filter of a producer or contract. Out of a spontaneous blaze of poesy and lyricism, he entertained not only those who attended the event. He had encased in the hearts of a nation an album of politics. Children sang it. Parents launched it as missiles at their neighbours. It became a chorus in lovers’ spats. They invoked it in local quarrels, in evocations at church, in the fights of the Holy Spirit against the devil. But from a song that was meant to remind us of the G-5 or Integrity Group, Wike had turned an intra-party feud into a cause celebre, a grudge match into an hour of artistic genius.

We saw that in his desire to satisfy every aspect of Rivers State in his work of the heart. He built schools, courts, hospitals, stadiums. He understood as an Ikwerre man the need to traverse the ethnic groups, moving to Ogoniland, Kalabariland, Andoni, et al, embracing each land, and reminding them that he was not a governor as bigot. He had a kaleidoscope of interests.

As if to stress that, he also popularised the phrase, Inye ne ba, inye ne ba, which showed that the world must be lived in mutual understanding.

But it was all for Rivers State, even when he made forays on the national stage. He ran for president, and it seemed he was on the cusp of winning his party, the People’s Democratic Party’s, nomination, when a gang-up derailed a fait accompli.

He started a war that many saw as patriotic. Why would the party not play fair, why would it not be faithful to an agreement? In a nation wracked by sectarian and regional suspicions, why would his party impose a sectional idea. Why would the PDP make Abubakar Atiku, a northerner, its flag bearer after all the southern governors had agreed that it must go south. Again, the party said it would not remove Iyorchia Ayu as party chairman, presenting both party candidate and chair from a section of the country.

It was the principle of fairness that thrust him on the front burner of national politics, launching the Integrity Group, and its missiles as a party that did not know how to make peace.

It was here that Wike, in all his eight years, showed his mettle as a man, guile as a politician and strategy as a leader. The party had sleepless nights, saying he only had one vote. He was disposable. He was not a factor. He was a sour grape. He was in his last career lap in politics.

That was how he was able to make a bond with the nation the way he made a bond with his people in Rivers. He did not do it as a gentleman. He did not do it as a compromiser. He lifted principle over a flimsy pact. He did not succumb like a victim to a rapist.

In the end, he won. He won for principle. He won at home, sweeping the state for his PDP, while letting the world know that PDP in the centre broke because they broke the basic law of organization: faith in the rules. He gloated over PDP loss in the centre, while the local chapter swept the governorship, senate, House of representatives and the state house of assembly.

Some gripe that he is a PDP man in APC government. APC says he is welcome. He sits in an extraordinary position of being a PDP man from a honeypot state with an APC sympathy. If some people are losing their lands, others are losing their party because of this man. The former loss may not equal the latter. Whatever the case, Earthquake Wike rumbles so some may grumble.

September 25, 2023
Akpabio’s hundred days

Godswill Akpabio is a specimen for the theatre. He once confessed if he had another life, he would be a comedian. But his comedy has been sublime, if controversial at times. He has been all his career. As governor, as senator and a minister. He is not going to be different as senate president. He has chewed up his first hundred days, and one of the most fascinating in the history of this republic.

Few will ever forget how he emerged. The night before the contest, many thought the prize would go to former governor Abubakar Yari, his followers clucking like a cock. The day after, Yari lamented like a jilted lover over treachery. Akpabio had his burped like one after a lush meal. His triumph was more interesting than Saraki’s that came through the backdoor. It was nail-biting and when Akpabio clutched it, he glowed without a gloat.

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He brought some cheer to the grueling ministerial nomination process, and played a role to calm a restive labour union and showed grit in stirring the house away from a war in these tempestuous times. However, for me, it is his sense of generosity that makes one know he wants to run the august assembly with malice towards none. He himself ensure that respectable committees went to his foes like Yari and Aminu Tambuwal. There is a lot of work ahead, and he will need his reserve of humour and open-mindedness to navigate the headwinds ahead.

September 25, 2023
Shabby and shoddy Chimamanda

In a recent CNN appearance, novelist Chimamanda Adichie told respected anchor Amanpour that the tribunal verdict was “shabby and shoddy.” Nothing wrong with her opinion except that she confessed she was still reading the verdict. How would she feel if one gave a damning judgment of her debut children book without reading it through? Amanpour, who was clearly wowed by a writer she announced as a superstar, did not see the shallowness of her verdict. Amanpour did not prepare for the interview, and it shows how hollow some western journalists are about African society. It is contempt on us when they do not probe their subjects. The same thing happened after the polls when Ajuri Ngelale rattled Zain Asher of the same CNN over INEC’s performance. We should not blame Adichie for an empty answer but CNN for a shoddy job. If she had asked the right question, the world would have known the author of Americana was in the mould of children fantasy. Again, maybe she would have blended into the slumber choir if she had accompanied her hero and kinsman Peter Obi to hear the verdict.

September 25, 2023
Macron, Fela and African slaves

Like one on a holy trip to mecca, French President Emmanuel Macron waltzed into the ecstasy of Fela Shrine. Smitten by the whirligig of rhythm, voice and beats, he acted like one of us. Nigerians praised him for embracing the abami eda. He descended from his Eifel tower to croon like us, dance like us, and blend into the smoke and tone of Afrobeat. Here was one Caucasian icon shorn of racial contempt on his white face.

Don’t be fooled. Sooner or later, as American writer Toni Morrison once posited, such white persons would betray you. Like autumnal leaves in Paris, Macron has unveiled his true colour. He declared that without France, there would be no Gabon, Niger, Mali or Burkina Faso. In simple terms, he asserted that there was no country until France made them. Macron ought to withdraw that statement. It is racist. For one, no one begged France give us nations after their own imperial heart. We have never lauded the British for lumping peoples to form Nigeria. They did it for themselves and not for us. He implied French West Africa had no past before their imperial adventurism into our lands.

President Macron is in league with white historians who have been banished from African historiography. He is like the Oxford Professor, Hugh Trevor-Roper, who, in 1962, wrote, “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at the present there is none; there is only the history of the Europeans in Africa. The rest is darkness…and darkness is not the subject of history.”

We can understand the fury in Niger and other French West African countries asking the French to leave their lands. Coup plotters have exploited this fever. It feeds their cynical egoism. The French treat Africans like children. Historians call it paternalism. Their colonial policy, assimilation, was a condescending strategy to hoodwink the black subjects and tell them they had promoted them from slaves to children. The French were superior, so everything they did must conform to French civilisation. If you wanted to mail a letter to the next street in Cotonou, it must pass through Paris.

Macron meant we should applaud colonialism. We should be grateful for slavery. They set us free. It is not restricted to the French. The British thought so, too, as witness the words of the Oxford professor. Lord Lugard’s companion Margery Perham wrote same points about Nigeria. Their great philosopher, John Stuart Mill, loved liberty so much that he recommended colonialism for societies like India and Africa. We were too primitive to be free. It’s like the Austrian nationalist Metternich, who the poet Lord Byron satirized. “He had no objection to true liberty,” wrote Byron of Metternich, “Except that it would set them free.”

Macron needs a little lesson in African history. Before the whites started taking over our territories, we were building our nations in the sweep of the 18th and 19th centuries, even into the early hours of the 20th. It reflected in the quality of resistance.

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Did he hear of the Dahomey kingdom, the Amazons of their army and the glorious soldiery of women who defied breasts for martial glory. They cut out of Oyo thralldom and even walloped some Yorubas into their fold until they chafed and fell, especially to the Egba. Did he know of the Agbajigbeto, the spies who might have given the CIA a model? Also, we had Samori Toure, the African Napoleon, who played the French against the British, and the Malinke hero of the Dyula Revolution introduced war strategies to stalemate the white colonialists for 15 years.

Macron should plough into the biography of Mahmadou Lamine of the Senegambia, and it was he, the great warrior of the Sarrakole tribe, who built a great coalition and a people with Islam to rattle the French and the conniving Tukolor. The French had to build the French Marine Corp as well as what was known as the Senegalese Sharp Shooters to mow down a great race. My later professor, Olatunji Oloruntimehin devoted a book, The Segu-Tukolor Empire, to the exploits of Lamine and his Sarrakole people.

Macron ossifies views of inferiority in our people. Again, it should challenge our people to read history. We had our exploits here, too. Did we not have the Habe dynasty for centuries as well as the Kanuri Empire or Kanem Borno, with the longevity of the Saifawa dynasty? Was that darkness? Did warrior Uthman Dan Fodio not capsize tradition with his 1804 jihad for over two centuries now? The Yoruba Wars gave a pageant of warriors: Sodeke, Kurunmi, Ogunmola, Latosa, Fabunmi, Ogedengbe, et al. Or the impregnable Itsekiri blockade under the doughty Nana Olomu, who puzzled the British Navy. Shall we forget the great Benin Kingdom and how its prosperity enticed the rapacity of the British to trade in the Benin River. Their historians called it massacre. I insist it was Benin Resistance. As we had heroes, we had traitors like the Obaseki ancestor of the present governor of Edo State. A similar story played out in Dahomey, now Benin Republic, when the king, like Ovonramwen, hid after the European onslaught. A palace quisling exposed his whereabouts.

If what the Africans were doing was to build wars of integration and nation building, the western historians called them barbarism. Yet, in the same period, Europe was embroiled in their own hostilities. They had what was called the Westphalian Treaty that forbade any nation to disrespect another’s sovereignty. Yet, we had Napoleon fight wars of meaningless conquests across Europe, leaving a trail of butchery all the way to Russia. There was no Gaul until France, only Prussia until Germany. The French roared against the Germans in brutal wars until Bismark humbled her with Alsace and Lorraine. The Roman Empire viewed some of the so-called civilized Europe today as barbarians, including the Germans and people of northern Europe.  Cavour and Garibaldi revived Italy. Professor Femi Omosini, in my European History class, interrogated the view that there was no concept of Europe until about the fifth century. It was seen as a period of total darkness. Its Middle Ages was also seen as a period of darkness. But their historians, who were waking up from the sway of Roman swagger, saved their continent from the somnolent narrative. When they woke up, they set Africa to sleep in the night of their historiography. Macron is a product of that prejudice.

Today, the French West African countries still store their treasures in French Central Bank, and African leaders beg in order to withdraw. In 1958, France browbeat colonies to sign an accord called Loi Cadre where France determines how they run their country. Guinea’s Sekou Toure, who had Samouri’s DNA, said no, until he imposed a sit-tight tyranny.

You understand why Macron is nervous. During the Second World War, Charles De Gaulle set up the Free French when Germany overran his country. It rallied blacks to help liberate France. They were colonial subjects being asked to save France that had now become a colonial subject. Africans became slave of slaves fighting for their master slave. The 19th century African warriors were the precursors of 20th century Negritude movement that highlighted African dignity with poets like Diop, Senghor and a subtler Soyinka,  who said “a tiger should not shout its tigritude.”

For all his charisma, De Gaulle expressed discomfort over photo-ops with visiting African leaders when he was president. At the Fela Shrine, Macron was friendly but not a friend.

The Bard’s barb

Professor Wole Soyinka threw a broadside at the Obidients last week, and they turned crybabies on their familiar turf: the social media. The bard said Peter Obi came third and his followers know it but are just indulged in what the Yoruba  call Gbajue. He translated it as force of lies. I would rather translate it as “lies by force.” In his Nostromo, Joseph Conrad described it as “the bravado of guilt.” No matter. But what is striking is that when Soyinka described Obi during the hustings as a “new kid on the block,” the obidients had love for the bard.  He was not a Yoruba man then. A new kid who was governor with old guard, in bed with Atiku in 2019, pitched Catholic against Anglicans, cannot explain why he stashed money offshore while a governor and erected Abuja marque supermarket, etc.  Soyinka’s intervention shows that there were a few fair-minded Obi supporters who have sat back and seen through his fraud. Obi is the Gbajue in chief. Soyinka is sincere enough to admit that the man did not win. The obidients have no such grace or integrity. They cannot abide the barb. They are innocent of facts and processes. They cavil at the Tribunal verdict without asking Obi’s lawyers why they had no facts for their claims. Of such persons, the Bible says, “I will send them strong delusion that they should believe a lie.” Like Pharoah’s hardened heart. Their pastors as well as the Catholic elite should read their Bible. A teardrop for them.

September 18, 2023
A Blue Line of thought

he Blue Line launch by the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, has suffused the news waves. Many are hungry for a ride. A programme for the ages has come to fruition. The paradox is that the BOS had all these programmes, including the train, housing, education, etc. to sell his bid for a second term. COVID 19 defined the term more than anything else, when his daring overshadowed even the presidency.

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Yet, at the election, his performance was not on the front burner. It became an election about identity, not about progress, pocket book, the anxiety about prosperity. It was about whether you were Yoruba or a non-indigene, Christian or Muslim. Democracy stood on its head. Hence it has been proven many times that performance is no guarantee for electoral success. It is often an ‘us versus them’ syndrome. Bisi Akande, for instance, was reputed to have performed well during his stewardship as governor of Osun State. He did not get a second term, partly due to Owu chief. Same to Oyetola. Churchill was voted out after leading the country through the worst war in history. He would later be voted the best British of the century but he lost his reelection bid. Clinton could not help Al Gore succeed him even if he gave America its greatest economic expansion in history. We have to be wary of turning democracy into a game of closets and cocoons. We have the obidients to thank for that. Some of them are enjoying the Blue Line, and they should.

September 18, 2023
Court and conmen

Ghost tsetse flies yielded their toxins to the court air. It infected young and old, big heads and small, politicians and lawyers, snoring SANs, governors and ministers, shut-eyed journalists. They turned heads clockwise and the other way. Their minds clocked out. Some nodded for stress out of stress. The most comic stiffened ramrod, eyes closed, heads immobile, like some sort of electrocuted zombies. Absent Obi. Absent Atiku. We were deprived the chance to know how they dozed. Vice President Kashim Shettima did not oblige the toxins, his eyes flapping and basking in their victory laps.

But afterwards, Atiku’s and Obi’s eyes trembled with fury at the judiciary. Apparently hurt, they are hurtling to the Supreme Court. They may have to explain what the tribunal said about their con games. The judges said the petitioners gave promise without premise, advanced premise without evidence, evidence that stretched credibility, facts without figures, names without places, identities without names. They accused the president about certificate but presented a witness as expert without a certificate, and a copycat mathematician. How do you expect a primary to pick a vice president when the law did not say that. Was that not puerile. How do you want to make Abuja citizens democratic royalty? It makes their 25 percent into 100 percent if you could win 36 states and lose but fall short of 25 percent in FCT.

What was the point of saying you had charts and tables attached but they were nowhere in sight? Why say votes were inflated and you had no figures? No mathematical explanation. No addition or subtraction. How did they want the judges to know? How did you present somebody as Amazon expert only for the fellow to have no letter of employment? What of the fellow who came as polling agent and said he visited about 20 polling units after results were computed at his own. So, he stopped time like the Old Testament miracle in the 20 polling units so he could visit them one after the other?

You say polling units suffered irregularities without naming them. How do you turn hearsay into facts. You have three weeks to get your witnesses together, and you fail. When the proceedings are in full steam, you smuggle them in. Is that judicial 419?

In trying to prove rigging, they revealed themselves as riggers, and what amateurs at the game! All eyes on the riggers. Obi deployed a phrase, “coterminous with justice.” The word simply means sharing a common boundary. Coterminous is not synonymous. If Obi wanted coterminous, it won’t help him. A neighbour is no resident. I wonder who the speech writer was.

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The frauds are shouting fraud in court. Before the polls, the Labour Party acknowledged it did not have polling agents in wide swaths of the country. So how was it going to prove fraud in those areas? It must only depend on imagination. If Einstein said “imagination is more important than knowledge,” he did not mean fiction, he being a scientist himself. He meant imagination enriches knowledge. Knowledge precedes imagination. Hence, the Poet Shelley called for powers to imagine what we know. Elupee did not know. It merely imagined votes. That breeds fiction.  To bring fiction to court is fraud.

As for Atiku and PDP, they had the resources and personnel to deploy agents in all the over 700k polling units. As veterans of elections, you do not only prepare for polls but also after. The big parties prepare funds to tackle post-election challenges, including funds to pay lawyers. With all the agents across the country, how could you not within a week get all the voting documents together and sort out discrepancies and inconsistencies?

The PDP elite  know the facts from their agents. The facts disappointed them because they lost. Hence, they sought a crooked way out: exploit SANs to dazzle the bench. Their quest for IREV and electronic transmission is red herring. Is IREV not based on concrete voting and the forms filled by their agents? Is that not why the electoral law states that the INEC should choose its own options for releasing the results?

The so-called Obidients set up an online portal to collate in real time the results of the polls across the country. When the numbers favoured Tinubu, they shut down immediately. Let them deny it.

Lawyers who say it is impossible to prove a presidential case, deny history. It was done in a number of states in this republic. Have we forgotten how Kayode Fayemi, Rauf Aregbesola, Adams Oshiomhole and Olusegun Mimiko became governors? There was mathematical with forensic rigour. They sifted polling unit after polling unit. Additions and subtraction yielded numbers that judges could assess. It was their agents who made the forms and facts available. If we can do it in states, why not extend it nationwide? And they predated the age of IREV and digital speed. This essayist did minus and additions of Ekiti polls on this page and some accused me of prejudging the case, or taking the wind out of the prosecution. In the same way, some people wondered over my last week’s essay if I knew the verdict beforehand. They are venting their frustrations. I knew nothing better than the average Nigerian.

I followed the proceedings that hollowed out Obi and Atiku. The obidients cut clips and video vignettes out of context and fed their folks. So, they raised hopes based on nothing.  They erected their own echo chambers.

I also pity the greed of its lawyers who flatter the secret hopes of Obi and Atiku, especially Atiku. One of the petitioners’ lawyers was copiously quoted in court. Did he feel flattered or chastened? He had warned in his book that a lawyer must follow all the rules, including amassing all documents within time. The judges mocked him for not abiding by his own precept. Remember Isaiah, “precept upon precept, line upon line, here a little, there a little.” The scripture was teaching how we should be faithful to our written word.

It is lawyers like those of the petitioners that prompted Shakespeare’s character with the madcap name Dick the Butcher in Henry the VI to say, “the first thing we do, let’s kill the lawyers.” The bard meant it in irony. But the point has never been lost on those who loath legal shysters. Jesus did not mince words when he proclaimed, “Woe unto you, Lawyers, for you have taken away the key of knowledge.” We know some SANs who make a case for one politician and take the opposite position for another. It is Janus-faced.

Obi knows he can’t win in court. He is keeping the hopes of his rabid folks on the burner. He needs the movement. They fetishise his name and hallow his halo. He enjoys the idolatry. Obi cons his folks that he is selling democracy but he is retailing his own ego and ambition. Give him some credit. He speaks with practised charm, even if he could not transport his razzmatazz to the court. False stats about China cannot prove you won a polling booth. Such folksy bravura has its limits.

During the campaigns, Obidients were told, including on this page, they were Tinubu’s ticket to victory but they jeered. Obi was APC’s hero. Ross Perot’s followers gifted Clinton the same grace against George Bush. Bush never forgave the billionaire with a southern twang. I likened the Obidients to Asahel’s folly in the Bible who ran, like Fela’s joro jara joro, without looking left or right in spite of warning until he rammed into his death.

The same thing took them to court. They wanted to translate social media delusions into electoral truth. As Apostle noted, they are “ever learning but never coming to the knowledge of the truth.”

September 11, 2023
Soun, Christ and the gods

Such has been written about the Soun of Ogbomoso and how he swapped his cassock for an Oba crown. I congratulate him, and even would celebrate with him if I knew him. What I cannot accept is the view that being an oba or traditional ruler is somehow in consonance with Christ. Not in my Bible. Traditional religion has its own glory, but it has no embrace with the Christian faith. Any pastor who claims it is pharisaic and a liar. Peter wrote about a royal priesthood. But the royalty of Christ does not rhyme with an earthly thrown. It is not about the Soun alone. It is all across the country. Our traditional crowns are not the Christian crown of righteousness. They come from ancestor worship. They pay obeisance to gods and spirits. Any rite it performs, its dances, its costumes, its chants, its food, et al, are rooted in a form of worship. We may coat it with linguistic finesse and say we went to school, and we have disavowed the gods. But they follow the same rites to enter the crown. The priests and queens of the palace gods still have their place. The faithful in the kingdoms still thrive. The king cannot banish them. Even if you build a church in the palace, you are only involved in compromise. Can two walk together unless they agree? Asked Prophet Amos. The witch of Endor could not invoke Prophet Samuel, only a semblance of his beard. Hence Paul said: “No wonder Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light.” The same Paul said: “Come out from among them and be ye separate.” It is not my place to say a person was called by Christ or not when he decides to put away the calling. Syncretism is part of our history, hence our cultures absorbed Islam and Christianity. Those who have read Fagunwa’s A Forest of a Thousand demons see the dynamic. If it is accepted that a Christian faith can work with a traditional crown, it is cultural triumph, not a mystical truth of the Christian scripture. It is like the conundrum from philosopher Nitzsche about “the Roman Caesar with a soul of Christ.”

September 11, 2023
Atiku, Obi lost cause

Pity Atiku. The court afforded him time. But he chose to fight like a beast scratching the air. He pushed his lawyers, SANs all, out of the fray. It was a tag team match in the ring, featuring Atiku Abubakar and Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

But what an anti-climax. Rather than pounce like a Doberman, Atiku took the battle head-on with the stumbles of a charging ram. His grief was to look for what was not missing in a certificate. The Chicago State University had said President Bola Tinubu is a graduate. He wanted to look for other things.

Credit him. He has good eyes for spellings, dates, signings and pictures. He noted that the school might have made mistakes. But his eyes lacked focus. But the issue was not whether he was a student. He did not address the fundamental matter. Did Tinubu attend CSU? If he spotted mistakes, who to blame? I think Atiku Abubakar should have sued CSU. It is they he has trouble with and not the fellow who went to school.

And if he sues, he would be, not Tinubu’s foe, but advocate. He would save Tinubu the trouble of a court itinerary, of the discriminating itch of picking SANs or American lawyers, or expending dollars to restore the purity of his nomenclature and the sanctity of his paper certificate.

He could not raise hairs over whether he was an honour student, attended classes or wrote exams. Without knowing it, Atiku has become a fighter for the Tinubu cause. He is a quintessence of the parable of the enemy being at peace with one.

So, Atiku could become a certificate revolutionary. He could teach the university how not to make mistake with a certificate. Rather than being men who fought in election trenches, he and Tinubu could become pals who taught Americans how to write certificates. But it is nothing new in the Universities as a recent report says one out of 10 certificates show one form of error or another, including grades.

Especially with a name like Tinubu and not Tom or Jerry. He could add another charge: Racism in spelling names or certificate racism. Has he heard how their broadcasters call African athletes in their country? Roll back tapes and hear how they pronounced Olajuwon, Okoye, Okafor or Adebayo, and he will have abundance of material for his bloodhound of SANs.

In the case of Atiku versus Tinubu, the issue is not whether he was there or whether he graduated. If it was a clerical error, maybe Atiku should sue for clerical error. It is not Tinubu’s headache.

Suing CSU is the only way he could have made something out of his adventure. For one, the case has closed in court and everyone is waiting for the verdict. He has no more prayers. If he goes to court, is he going to say the man did not go to the school? Or is he going to be the first person who had certificate errors?

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What Atiku is doing is what American historians describe as the lost cause. It refers to the southern partisans of the American civil war, who would not accept that they lost the war. They keep hiding under the so-called folksy charm of the south. They romanticise black servitude and deny the tyranny of the slavery era. They propagate antebellum beauty and the superiority of their soldiers. They even say they did not fight the war to keep slaves. They merely wanted to assert a federalist principle. They twist it as state’s rights. They exploit such delusion to fight to upturn racial equality today. At a Mississippi rally, Ronald Reagan proclaimed, “I believe in state’s rights.” A code for white supremacy. The KKK and Donald Trump are a product of that depraved conscience.

Not for them the modern credo of human equality. That It is not Atiku’s problem alone. He is often backed by the war cry of Obi’s supporters. They are twinedtwinned and twined in self-delusion. Atiku is a lone ranger vouchsafed to a populist rabble. Evidence is not material. They believe. It is faith without work, or faith without facts.

While the rabble kept saying they won the election, they also called for the army. They parroted lies about Tinubu’s health, parodied to their own shame the fashion sense of then candidate Kashim Shettima until they exposed how old-fashioned they were. They latched on to certificate anxiety and drug apocrypha and called the university so many times that the school developed a standard response to their hysteria. They thought if they called many more times, someone would say he did not know the school.

Atiku did not want to miss the train. He then issued a statement without evidence that President Tinubu was mounting pressure on the judges. Had he even taken time to examine whether his lawyers made enough case for his own victory? Maybe he did and discovered his SANs had a feeble offering at the Presidential Elections Petition Court (PEPC). Hence, he hollered at CSU for one last card.

In the same breath, Obi’s men continue their melee. They were looking for blackmail. They threw ads saying ‘all eyes on the judiciary.’

But they don’t want to win. They love a loser’s ecstasy. They love their misery as wannabe. It gives them vim and dynamism. It puffs their egos as phony intellectuals. They mistake rap for rhapsody. It is a masochist paradise. It is like pain without a pain killer. But pain is its own killer pill. In the paradise, they grieve, rant, squirm and rage. They illumine the darkness of their intents with deceptive glow, to skew narratives.

It is the physiognomy of failure. It is not like Okonkwo or Oedipus, who saw death and craved it. Or the protagonist of Gabriel Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, who spends his whole life waiting for the husband of his obsession to die. They, at least, have wish fulfilments. End gives apotheosis. It will embalm their heroes and sheroes. But Atiku and his Obidients crave an epic in search of great men and women, a tale without end.

They want a Sisyphean bliss, and they will keep getting almost there. Just like profitless adventures of Willy Loman in playwright Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman.

It is the way of lost causes. We are seeing it with Nnamdi Kanu and his followers. The agitation is the success. Some of our clerics need such euphoric intoxication. They keep preaching for followers to keep hoping. It is such attitude that inspired a distorted reading of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, in a new book, Why the Bible Began by Jacob L. Wright. He writes about how the Jews wove failure into nobility and justify salvation with defeats. Their misery, especially with the Babylonian captivity, they sang the Lord’s songs in a strange land. According to Wright, they poeticise bondage. Even after Christ, Christians see the crucified and suffering Jesus instead of the risen Lord. In the epic The Iliad, Homer’s account of the fall of the Trojans beats that of the Greek triumph. He paints fallen Hector’s exploits as though a hero. In the same way, Obi’s folks and Atiku have turned pity into piety, despair into desire, the prospect of salvation into a salvo and savoir faire. Two baseball clubs in the U.S., the Red Sox and Chicago Cubs, found love among themselves for a century until they won. Victory deprived them of a fine illusion. Frank Sinatra sang, “Here’s to the losers, bless “em all.” In Paradise Lost, John Milton pens Satan into greater grandeur than Christ.

The Obidients and Atiku will continue to guard and cherish their sweet melancholy, and even if they see victory, they would pray it never comes. And it won’t. They are like the main character in one of America’s classics, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence about the Gilded Age. The character spent all his life falling in love with his wife’s sister and another man’s wife. Decades later, when it is time to finally climb up the stairs to meet her, alone, he walks away.

September 4, 2023
Shettima at Bookshop

The sighting of Vice President Kashim Shettima at a South African Bookshop is making internet buzz. He sat, his eye popping between covers, like a student. Indeed, he is. It is what few know about him. When he was governor, his media aide, Isa Gusau, had lamented in an article that he had expected to follow his boss to the fancy shoe and fashion stores in Germany only to end among the scents and shadows of bookshelves. I sighted him once at a bookshop at the Murtala Muhammed Airport.

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We can muse on leaders and books, but no leader who does not read can engage his duties. Leadership requires cerebral light. President Tinubu also devours books, and I know as president he will find time for that. It enriches perspectives, whether to appoint a youth, to recalibrate an economic idea, to put an event or policy in perspectives, to handle a character conundrum. There should be no limit to what to read. ”Read only history,” Napoleon was quoted as telling some of his men. But he read everything from Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great to the poets and even English novelists. A man once eyed Babatunde Fashola’s official car as governor and recounted the books the governor was reading. Obama intrigued America with his reading list. Before him, John F. Kennedy, who popularised the James Bond series, was reported to have finished a tome overnight before deciding on the Cuban nuclear crisis with Soviet Union. He was enamoured of his predecessors who read. When a group of Nobel Prize winners gathered for dinner at the white House, he quipped, “This is the best gathering of brains in the history of the White House except when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Jefferson loved his books. When his home caught fire, he asked, “Was not any of my books saved?” that was all he cared about. Another predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, always had a book on his table, and he was notorious for reading between meetings and tasks. Simon Bolivar, regarded as the George Washington of Latin America, devoted his formative years with a mentor who made him read all the classics and study with avid zeal. Charles De Gaulle’s reading list was so fascinating that writers mailed him their new books. Churchill boasted that he read all the volumes of Gibbon’s The Decline and fall of Roman Empire. VP. Shettima may have turned our attention to something precious: Reading.

September 4, 2023
Not just about ministers

How the dances are over.  The ministers have scaled the rites of democracy that brought them to the big, cavernous temples of their offices. Over are the pangs of patience as to whether they would enter the inner sanctum. The president endorsed.

Over are the theatrics before the senate. We saw the range of offices, the temperament, intellect, and sometimes burlesque acts of the nominees. The flourish of Alake, the tears and humility of Musawa, the two credits of Mohammed, the perorations of Alausa, Wike’s bumpkin charm, the “incestuous” acclamation of Umahi, being in the same family.  Some ex-governors materialized like monarchs without a train, who a few months ago would have regarded their screening as lese-majesty. Some nominees crackled with boasts and self-congratulations. Fashions raged a cornucopia of Nigerian colours. And of course, the peacock vanities of “take a bow.” Television screens beamed the testy moment of Nasir El Rufai and the portent of a petition. For some, like Oketete, the bow had no return.  Godswill Akpabio played the good chaperon.

After that, it was time for oath. In the first dance, President Bola Tinubu spoke by picking them. In the second, they were a claptrap of voices, talking up their credentials. In the last act, they were silent again, except when they swore their oaths.

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Does an oath bear value here, or anywhere in the world? But that was necessary. The oath is not in the fashion, or in their grand and solemn visages. All that was an act. What is important is the oath in their hearts and acts, for there lies their integrity. “What other oath than honesty to honesty engaged?” asked William Shakespeare. They will engage their bosses, the president. But the real engagement is with their souls and that must shine, eventually, in their stewardships.

Three names were absent, and most notable was the former Kaduna State governor. El Rufai’s post was power minister, and that now falls on Adelabu’s  laps.  So, why the small man of Kaduna? My reporting reveals the man is at odds with the APC elite. No one trusts him, said a top party man. “Tell me, who did he not betray since he started his public career,” observed one of them. “Was it Obasanjo, Yar’ Adua or Atiku?” No one was willing to wager on that man.

It shows, as I have noted, that a good minister is not just about ability or the over-flogged word, technocrat. If El Rufai evinced it in BPE, Abuja and Kaduna, no chance this time. But a cocktail of factors makes a good leader or minister. A technocrat who is churlish, or lacks financial literacy, of emotional connection or social conscience will stumble, be he or she the jewel of their profession. A minister or an executive is a blend of qualities. Their great professionalism may matter only 15 percent.

If you are minister of communications, the great concern is not algorithms but people. Hence, Oppenheimer was chosen to make the nuclear bomb, even if he knew just a fraction of the technology. His value was in superintending the pool of talent. When the First World War confronted France, Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau was more at peace with his vision and his thinkers than the military. “War,” he said, “is too important a matter to be left in the hands of generals.” In 1982, recession bit the globe and economists were at a loss to explain how they erred. Henry Kissinger, a historian and former secretary of state, wrote an essay then and echoed the French man. “The economy is too important a matter to be left in the hands of economic experts,” he noted. Kissinger is a centenarian, and his mind is still plucking out new books. Paul D. Wolfowitz, the tenth World Bank President, never had a degree in banking or business but a PHD in political science. Jim Yong Kim, another world bank chief, was a physician and anthropologist.

What is important in high office is a supple mind and a good character. You are not minister because you are a wonk. It helps, but it is not as great an asset as many of our analysts say. When Napoleon went to war, he took on board many technocrats with him, including scientists, intellectuals and poets. But he quipped that they were like “coquets. You can talk to them, but don’t marry them or make them ministers.” Even Napoleon knew that in war, militarism was not enough for victory. He read history, biographies, poets, plays and novels. When he saw that his soldiers were reading only novels, he said novels are for women and maid until he was reminded that he had over 30 novels with him. The “petit corporal” wanted for his soldiers a broader diet than only novels. His biographers observed that Napoleon’s forays into literature helped him to appreciate human sentiment and relations and the potency of words that helped him as the great military mobiliser in history. He memorized many poems including Homer, Virgil and even Tasso. Charles de Gaulle, the next great French man, became an unofficial patron of the literati. Andre Malraux was his close friend.  Our leaders must read. Few know that President Tinubu is a voracious reader. Vice President Kashim Shettima was caught, amidst the buzz of the BRICS summit, in a South African bookshop as he often does when he travels. My father Moses quoted Francis Bacon to me as a little boy: “Reading maketh a man; conference a ready man; writing an exact man.” Reading must translate into action. The Bible that says “blessed is he that readeth,” also warns that “much reading is the weariness of the flesh.” So we had a Napoleon who read a lot and acted a lot. Even to read with appreciation we must act, too. In our pre-exam history class session with Professor Femi Omosini at Ife, he warned us, “read hard but play hard.”

So, our ministers must understand that their jobs are not about expertise but humanity. Talent must yield to sentiment.

But whatever a cabinet makeup, it is beholden to one man: the president. Every government throws up its cabal or what, in the days of Abraham Lincoln, was called The Trust, which entailed a few influential courtiers of his sentiment. Abraham had a team of rivals in which his foes became cabinet ministers. Obama popularized a book on that era by historian Doris Kearn Goodwin titled: A Team of Rivals. It inspired Obama to appoint his opponent Hilary Clinton as secretary of state. The Buhari era threw up a few. There are already whispers of those around President Tinubu. No administration runs without a few trusted fellows. Their influence will depend on their individual value and where the president lends his ears.

A key métier for ministers is president’s vision, which is the first quality of a leader. The second quality is to make leaders. That is where the ministers and other appointees stand. How they blend will determine whether vision meets team. That is the ultimate motor that will drive his legacy.

August 28, 2023