The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • An era of ghosts

    An era of ghosts

    Violence has acquired a new meaning in this election season. The old menu is passing away: Ballot snatching, bullies, glitters of knives and machetes dripping blood, barehanded goons, gunmen on rampage, bone-mangled streets, subdued alleys, cars and homes in ruin, innocents on the run. From sanguinary to the sanguine.

    Technology is upstaging all that theatre, if we do not reckon with IPOB’s daredevil daring.  We now are enshrining the sort of violence that Festus Iyayi lamented in his novel. A violence without the blood. No thanks to Godwin Emefiele and the men who crest Nigeria’s hierarchy of oil.

    It is our perversion of genius. We have always known how to reinvent our stories. Gunmen out. Conmen in. The con is happening in our body politic. This essayist wept over the new invisibilities of cash and fuel. They told us they have enough fuel for all. We cannot see it. But only those atop the hierarchy of oil can see it. We have become blind men walking. Emefiele says he has enough cash in circulation. We cannot see them. ATM machines cannot see them. The bank clerks and CEOs cannot see them. Only Emefiele and his men can see them. We are also blind. We are doubly blind.

    That, it turns out, is only one level of a ghostly era, a ghastly error. Fuel is called motor spirit. We have fulfilled the name. It has become a spirit. As Jesus told his apostles, “A spirit has no blood, bone or flesh as you see me have.”  In his play Julius Caesar, Shakespeare said, “In the spirit of men, there is no blood.” Fuel is the blood of the car engine. When it loses its blood, the car’s spirit vanishes. It is dead. The same is happening in the world of money. Without money, what can we do in a modern economy? The scriptures say money answers all things. Now money hampers all things.

    That is not the only spirit of the age, our version of the word zeitgeist. Asiwaju Bola Tinubu drew our attention to another dimension of ghosts. There are two types of ghosts: corporeal or embodied ghosts and disembodied ghosts in this political reason. Ghosts are wholly spirits. When Tinubu said it, it ignited a pushback from some who thought he was clutching at straws.  He said there were some people who did not want him to win the election, and last week this column was the first to make the point that some people did not win the APC primaries and their sponsored candidates were still wallowing in their shellacking.  The wanted to be spanner in the works.  I concluded with a Shakespeare quote that it is easier to play with a lion’s whelp than with an old lion. Not long after, Governor Nasir El-Rufai confirmed it. He made some revelations first with Okinbaloye at Channels and elaborated on it in his interview with TVC’s Journalists hangout.  Journalists like us do not say everything we know. When Dele Giwa wrote this, I wondered, as a student, at his restraint. Not so now. El-Rufai, for his revelations, is still restrained. He did not mention names. He did not cite episodes. But he revealed that in the combustion of the primary run, some villa tenants encouraged northern governors to muddy the waters by buying forms.

    These are the corporeal ghosts in Aso Rock. The ones that, as Shakespeare alluded to in Hamlet, “are doomed for a certain term to walk the night.” They are the night marauders of APC, the nightmares of democracy, the wizards and spoilers of presidential ambition. Tinubu added a new spectre to the plot. He alleged that they so hate his prospect to be president that they are contemplating the Samson option. They want to pull down this democracy and pave the way for an interim national government. They have wet dreams of a new Shonekan. In words of Poet Leopold Senghor, all their “dreams made dust.”

    They are also making ghosts of Tinubu. Anywhere he goes, anything he says gives them the creeps. They failed to kill his ambition. They even wanted him to die of illness. But he is the most travelled presidential candidate, lapping up miles on road and in the air. They have made Tinubu into Banquo’s ghost haunting them like Banquo did Macbeth. They are screaming, “avaunt and quit my sight. Let the earth hide thee. Thy bone is marrowless and thy blood is cold.” They are appalled that Tinubu’s blood is still warm and he will not quit their sight. He whispers them awake in their sleep and pinches their buttocks at their seats. Hence, they want, in the language of the Bible, money to fail in the land.

    Another man chasing ghosts is Atiku Abubakar. He said he was in talks to ally with NNPP and Labour Party. Obi said, no dice. Kwankwanso said, “na lie.” He was speaking with ghosts of both parties.

    But he is in cahoots with the presidency and the CBN governor by his own Freudian confession last week. He said the CBN and presidency should remain steadfast and not postpone the deadline for the currency change. He describes what we are going through as “little inconvenience.” Why did he say “presidency” and not president. This confirms what El-Rufai has said. Some folks in the villa want Atiku as revenge for their disaster at the APC primary. The Kaduna State governor said these fellows have never even won a local government election.

    Atiku has been wishy-washy on the currency crisis. He wanted it before he did not want it. After I poked fun at him last week for following Tinubu’s path, he exercised a pirouette. He now says we can ignore the people’s suffering. Did he see the naked woman at a bank, the fellow who slumped and died on a queue in Asaba, the fellows who cannot get money to buy fuel, who cannot feed. That is little inconvenience from his lofty tower in Dubai. He is seeing the wrong ghosts of the people. It was the same wishy-washy way he condemned the killing of a Sokoto girl before he regretted it. The same way he wanted to be a PDP member before he spat it out before he came back to his vomit. It is politics as whoredom.

    The cash problem continues, and Emefiele – his friends call him Mefi – has shown he does not understand the full meaning of finance. He understands the mechanics of it. He needs to read economic anthropologists like Karl Polanyi and Abraham Rotstein to get the grip of the intercourse between economics and society. Finance is not for finance’s sake. This cash policy just exposed him. The Kaduna State governor said one local government in Kaduna State is as vast as Anambra State, and it has only one bank. Only two local governments have banks in Borno. Did he factor this in? I recall making this point when he introduced this policy in November, and warned that it could lead us to this treacherous pass. Here we are. Here is what this essayist wrote on November 7 in  In Touch:

    “Also, as markers of the conflict of economics and society, dislocations are coming from climate change and flood as well as the insecurity and fear of movement. With flood affecting 22 states of the federation, many people are out of the loop of the so-called modern economy with its financial institutions. How will those cooking Kosei in Jigawa or Ogbono soup in Bayelsa access banks wiped out of contention by the unthinking might of a flood? Or an ancient town like Lokoja. With the fear of bandits in the shadows of northern bushes, how are the men and women who own fifty thousand naira as life savings, or even less, going to trust the streets between their homes and their banks? How sure is the trader with N20 million in the Southeast that the local militias will not mark him out on his way to his bank?” It shows Mefi does not understand the geography of finance, let alone its cultural nuance. He needs a crash course for we are on a crash course.

    I wrote further: “Mefi is trying to conjure a miracle without being a god. He is a prophet without the gift of prophecy.” We are witnessing his fate as a prophet. No one has faith in him. Riots have broken out.

    The so-called money swap is aiming at politicians. What a pity. They forget that the upper crust can circumvent it. But the ordinary citizen lacks any facility for manoeuver. The upper class has oppressed the common folk as a routine. Now, Mefi and his cohorts have installed a new layer of class tyranny. They are the ones suffering it more. Hence, Atiku calls it little inconvenience. It’s like the Bible’s picture of an economic apocalypse:

    “As with the people, so with the priest:

    As with the servant, so with his master;

    As with the maid, so with her mistress;

    As with the buyer, so with the seller;

    As with the lender, so with the borrower;

    As with the creditor, so with the debtor.”

    As cerebral Kayode Komolafe of ThisDay – alias KK- noted, it is not the constitutional job of the CBN to monitor election spending. Leave that to INEC and EFCC. He is playing electoral busybody. His own job he cannot do. He is doing another’s.

    And Atiku says it is little inconvenience. Mefi’s ghost of cash and the oil hierarchy’s ghost of fuel are not holy. They are unwholesome ghosts. All we want is to make our nation whole again.

  • Adeleke’s exit dance

    Adeleke’s exit dance

    When the dancing fellow was announced governor of Osun State, some fellows went viral online asking Sam Omatseye to apologise for lampooning Adeleke. Well, there was no point for that. I cannot apologise for berating a man who boasted that he was going to buy the voters with pounds, dollars, Euros et al. I was not going to say sorry to a man whose ungainly waist was going to turn state affairs into an alawada gig. Well, technology has had its final dance. It is a tribunal decision, of course. But it was less a human verdict than a magisterial sway of technology over human cunning and artifice. There were many ghosts in the elections. Machines do not see ghosts. So, they were winnowed away. To parody scriptures, the machines removed those things that are shaken so that those that cannot be shaken can remain. Ghosts of fake voters and thumb prints were removed. Ademola Adeleke was relying on ghosts. In the words of Job, he leaned on a house, but it did not stand.  So, I might have said they should apologise to me. But no matter. I don’t trade in remorse. Gboyega Oyetola, the authentic owner of the oruka, is waiting in the wings for what the people have bestowed on him. Meanwhile, Adeleke should start rehearsing his exit dance.

  • Emilokan 2

    Emilokan 2

    Before I put finger to keyboard, Godwin Emefiele – known to his friends as Mefi – ate his words. How it must have hurt his ego. Ouch! Or did he shout Yee!!!

    Some of us knew he would buckle before he would buckle up. He kept all on tenterhooks. But we knew it was coming. No one is congratulating him because he did no one any favours by that. The poet Robert Burns said, “suspense is worse than disappointment.” We are not going to thank him for the miseries.

    To reflect the discordant notes – no pun intended – of his CBN, my cell phone flashed with a text message from Mefi’s financial temple. The message read: “Don’t wait till January 31, 2023, to deposit your old N200, N500, and N1,000 banknotes with your bank and agents.” This was out of touch with the news that he had given Nigerians up to Feb 10 to deposit old bills. CBN news divided against itself? Was it latency in his system. His CBN is too late for its late news.

    It was a miserly one-week concession. But the man did not address the fundamental question. How is he going to avail us of the new notes? The news occludes the fact that the problem is the man at the apex bank and not the people. Or shall we say, he knows he is the problem or one of the coterie of men oppressing the people. He knows he is just playing a foolhardy spoiler.

    When APC presidential flagbearer Bola Tinubu sounded the alarm in Lisabi’s lair, his foes resorted to their adversarial impulse to attack him, including Atiku Abubakar. Then he, too, learned from his master and lined behind him. The CBN, he said, ought to rethink. I would have said he was changing his mind in tandem with the words of George Bernard Shaw that “Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” Atiku changed his mind to endorse Tinubu’s Abeokuta speech because he had no choice. His opponent was thinking for him. A tear for him.

    I used the phrase Lisabi’s Lair to refer to the Abeokuta warrior who liberated Egbaland from an imperial tyranny. So, when Tinubu stood twice in Egbaland in Emilokan One and Emilokan Two, he was standing on the eponymous shoulders of an Egba war chief who would not yield to a suffocating despot. Every March, the Egba celebrate the 19th century farmer who tuned his ploughshares into a sword. Tinubu was bellowing from his martial shadows.

    So, Mefi’s action to put off CBN’s deadline was at once a vindication of Tinubu’s outcry and silencing of those who thought he was paranoid. If he was paranoid, Mefi has put paid to it. We all are in the dread-lock of Mefi’s policy. He has to make the new notes available. He should liberate them from the owambe parties where the new notes have become new commodities fueling inflation. Rather than introduce new currency, he has turned the currency into new products. The new products have brought a new cartel of corrupt bankers. They have induced scarcity, and therefore enacted courtiers of new naira. We can call it the cult of Mefi’s new naira notes. Only the initiated can get them.

    Is that not what Tinubu implied? Mefi says the new notes are plenty in circulation. The people are not seeing them. The banks are not confessing to their possession. The same story with fuel scarcity in the country. The hierarchy of Nigerian oil says there is no fuel scarcity. But the people are suffering in long lines all day and night waiting for fuel. We are fulfilling two classics of literature. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, where everyone is expecting Mister Godot, and no one is seeing him. Or Samuel Coleridge’s Poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with the line, “water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.” In the case of the ancient mariner, they saw the water, the sea. They just could not drink it. Here, the cash is invisible and the fuel is invisible. But they are everywhere.

    The people must be blind. NNPC alone has the eyes to see the fuel. Mefi and his bank alone have the eyes to see the new notes. We all need to beg both Kyari and Mefi to give us what Apostle Paul calls the eyes of understanding, so we can see both fuel and new notes. We are like the citizens in Jose Saramago’s novel titled: Blindness where all the citizens in the city are turned into blind people. Some are more blind than others. A new set of powerful people rise out of it to tyrannise the majority.

    If we have fuel and car tanks pine, do we blame the fuel or the people who should supply? If we have notes and the people cannot spend them, do we blame the people or the officials who should supply? If correction lies in the hand that committed wrong, to who shall we complain?

    That is Tinubu’s point. And professor Itse Sagay echoed the same ideas. It reflects a deliberate immiseration of the people. Tinubu says a set of people with the government he called saboteurs are working with opposing politicians to cast the ruling party in bad light for electoral sabotage. Suddenly, they started saying he blamed the president. He has come to clarify, without diluting his charge, that he was not referring to the president who only a few days earlier had called him Mister President, and he responded Yes sir.

     A shadowy group can frustrate a leader within a government. They call them fifth columnists. The word derives from the lips of General Emilio Malo, a leader of the republicans who wanted to overthrow Francisco Franco’s ultra-conservatives in Spain in 1936. General Malo was leading a four-column army during the Spanish Civil War into Madrid and quipped that sympathisers within Madrid would furnish a fifth column to rout the city. His prediction foundered and Franco led the country until the 1970s. Hence, Tinubu vowed that the fifth columnists would fail. He came short of re-invoking the ‘Olule’ term this time.

    We have seen in the life of the Buhari administrations that some groups have undermined their leader. Recently, the DSS was trailing Mefi while the president was praising him. They didn’t brief their commander in chief, apparently. We can recall the same thing with EFCC’s Magu.

    Those who Tinubu beat at the primaries are still nursing an old wound. But let us remember Shakespeare’s words: “It is better to play with a lion’s cub than an old one.”

  • Sanwo-Olu’s week

    Sanwo-Olu’s week

    I read a piece by a certain Lade Bonuola. Not many know him, but in the journalism world, he is a familiar figure. Known more for his technical gifts than imagination, Bonuola once edited The Guardian. His claim to fame is less his guardianship of a newspaper. He also had The Comet whose travel lasted like its name. He is best remembered for his job as ombudsman for the Daily Times in a column known as Caught Out By LadBone. The legendary Dele Giwa had to draw his readers attention to the creative failings of his column. Bonuola came out of hiding recently to try to retell the story of Lagos. He implied what Jakande made modern Lagos. Men like LadBone need to study what scholars call historiography. He will learn how to handle historical material and put events in context. He implied Tinubu did nothing new. For instance, he referred to the trains. He referred to the opening of Lekki. He referred to sanitation day. He went on and on. So, when Buhari and the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu were launching the Blue Line last week, was it Jakande’s train? Would we not have had to modernize the rails with digital bells and whistles as we see the governor of Lagos do? Did Jakande have the plan for a refinery in the Lekki Corridor, the Free Trade Zone, the panoply of Estates, the Deep Sea Port? Jakande launched a road. Rinubu opened an express to Lekki. Jakande was opening a road to Lekki but Tinubu was launching a new city. If Jakande revolutionised Housing, can you recommend those flats for a 21st century citizen? The problem with men like LadBone is that malice sometimes overtakes their sense of perspective. Jakande was great for his time.  For all that, what was Lagos like in 1999? If he cleaned the city, do we blame him for the pile of dirt in the city at the turn of the century? If we should not blame him, then we must acknowledge the man who reimagined and rescued the place. But Tinubu has not tried to undermine Lateef Jakande, but to modernise. That is why Tinubu is refered to as the visioner of modern Lagos. We don’t undermine the present in order to glorify the past as Bonuola has done.

    If in journalism he did not show much imagination, are we surprised Bonuola lacks it in appreciation of history. We often say the young need to understand our past. Obviously, LadBone, who was an editor when I was in school, is not a young man. He failed to sully Sanwo-Olu’s shine.

  • Atiku’s UFO

    Atiku’s UFO

    It’s an oddball name.  A term like special purpose vehicle, or SPV, may not, on the surface, convey to the mind an aspect of commerce. For one, we may think it as an actual physical, moving contraption, like a car. It may even conjure a picture of an armoured tank, or a special car designed to protect a VIP, like a president or army general. It could also be like an unidentified flying object, or UFO. An unidentified company flying in corporate clouds. So, SPV is for VIPs. Or UFO as an SPV is also for a VIP.

    Indeed it is, if you have a man like Atiku Abubakar in mind. According to the revelations of Michael Achimogu, who will go down in history as an election-era whistleblower, Atiku thought his company called Marine Float is a sort of UFO in the business world.  He made it a UFO before it became an SPV. No one can identify it before he registers it. The company is named Marine Float, not Atiku Inc. in a business sense, Atiku dies, so he floats the new company and he resurrects in another name. Apostle Paul says, for a new testament to be born, the testator must first die. Except that, as this story goes, the act of rebirth as a commercial spirit, a new company owner, failed because Atiku could not transit. Just like the guy in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman who could not transform from flesh to spirit. No one could be a Christ. Atiku could not re-enact a Christ-like rebirth. He could not pull off a business Houdini or transfiguration.

    Even as a marine spirit, he could not float. Americans and Russians have stealth submarines and no one sees them until they strike. As a politician, he went into battle with his flanks wide open, even to a spy. He got exposed. In Nigeria’s superstition, the marine spirits were at work. He could not perform the rites the water spirits wanted. So, they got angry. Witches do not forgive. We can only expiate them. Atiku did not learn that lesson.

    Some have said, especially Atiku’s men, that the tape was fake. It was not Atiku’s voice. Atiku himself has not denied it. Maybe it is hard to deny himself. Or maybe, he is too cocksure that it is not him and he disdains it too much to comment. If it is fake, it is possible these days for a person’s voice to be faked indeed. Artificial Intelligence does fraudulent wonders. It is called deepfake voice technology. It happens. Maybe Achimogu faked Atiku’s voice. Maybe not. So, when the APC media team made the noise about the need to arrest the PDP candidate, maybe the Atiku people are not bothered because they feel the man has been faked. It is not voice alone that can be faked. Faces also can be faked. We are seeing it already in Hollywood.

    But the only way to find out is to investigate. Even the Atiku team did not have the courage to ask the EFCC to investigate. They have not exercised the courage of their own innocence. They don’t want to re-enact the theatre of the American presidential candidate Gary Hart who challenged the media to go after him. He claimed to be a holy man until a photo-journalist caught him with a svelte eve called Donna Rice on a beach. That turned his trajectory from the White House to the dog house of American politics.

    If it is a fake voice, we have technology to prove it. In fact, there are other ways to know if it is true. All EFCC needs to do is investigate Marine Float and the comings and goings of its invoices. We do not need the voice alone but also invoices. We can see ledgers for treachery. We can know the inflows and outflows and identify what is and was afloat in the company accounts over the years. The voice recording is just the tease.

    Two things are germane to this narrative. One, it reveals the slippery terrain of political relationships. Many top guns must be looking at their aides and wondering, who is the Achimogu among them. But it is not today that trusted men betray. Judas, like a green snake, is a natural poisonous tooth in the shrubbery. Maybe, they should start asking themselves whether they offended an aide, whether they treated them shabbily. But how do you define shabby? It is a problem in deploying favours, and whether you have given enough to stay in the favours of your workmen.

    The other issue is double standards in the media. When, as Festus Keyamo noted, the APC candidate Bola Tinubu was under severe scrutiny over drugs and certificate, the mainstream media hungered and thirsted. They made calls to the United States and sought court records. They kept investigating the drug matter after even the United States government through its embassy had come out with a clear statement on any case in court. They persisted and sought out voices to keep the matter afloat. The same was done with the certificate matter, even when the Chicago State University said he was not just a graduate but a model student or scholar.

    They did their job but turned partisan by badgering after the matter had been concluded. There is even a sense of frustration among some media gate keepers since they have no new angles to explore. It reminds one of the novel of Daphne Du Maurier titled Rebecca, where a woman is obsessed with another woman whose voice she does not know, whose face she never sees but has only access to her scent. The same applies to the fellow in Gogol’s short story The Nose. It is short piece about the written word where innocents are accused of stealing his nose. They have left the substance and are looking for shadows.

    In this Atiku-Achimogu saga, the media is struck by the numb disease. While the claim was on the social media for a while, it was ignored. Hence, it seems, the media team of the APC brought it to the open. The story may be true or fake. It is the job of the journalist to excavate and to do it without a flavour of a witch hunt. When this election cycle is over, I wonder what journalism scholars will say about the media of this time. What will students writing their term papers and theses say about verdicts and news judgment and fairness in the newsroom? Will they be proud of today’s gate keepers and their reporters?

  • Anyaoku fairer in the ninth

    Anyaoku fairer in the ninth

    Enter BOS of Lagos. Enter Chief of Staff to the president. Enter Obj. Exit boredom. The boredom had to disappear as former president Olusegun Obasanjo walked into the Metropolitan Club where the old and retired men of industry meet to recall old exploits over tea, and dine. This time, they gathered to mark the 90th birthday of an illustrious citizen, Chief Emeka Anyaoku, former Secretary of the Commonwealth. It was time to celebrate a man who distinguished himself in the course of his career. I have known him for a few years now, and have always prayed that we shall celebrate his ninth decade on earth.

    Many gave tributes, including the BOS of Lagos, who waxed eloquent and reeled out his virtues, and there was a touching moment when he described himself as “your governor and your son.” Others spoke, including an absorbing tribute by his friend who recalled his full life accolades like 31 honorary doctorates across the world. When Anyaoku spoke, he lamented the decline of the nation and denigration of the green passport.

    As I looked and heard the many tributes and his own short acknowledgment, I wondered that few knew some of the exploits of this man. No one recalled that during the civil war, his wife Olubunmi had given birth to a child, and he had to travel to Biafra to rescue children and also provide supplies. He had to undertake nocturnal flights in rickety aircraft to dare bullets and soldiers to land at Uli Airport. His wife wondered why he would abandon their new -born baby. He replied that their baby, then in London, was privileged unlike the ones in the heady hour of death and misery. Few also know that as Commonwealth secretary, his role in trying to secure M.K.O. Abiola’s release from detention brought ire to some of Abacha’s partisans and he escaped assassination plot. His family was also in danger. In spite of that, he met Abiola and also Abacha. He had to take a flight out of the country with the help of another head of state.

    When OBJ rose to speak, he said he worked with Chief Anyaoku when he (OBJ) was a member of the Eminent Persons Group that included former Australian leader Malcolm Fraser. In his dramatic way, he recalled how Fraser “looked down on me,” and he decided to deal with him. Anyaoku intervened for peace, and OBJ replied, “Don’t general me,” to the diplomat’s plea of “please general.” Peace prevailed. But we get a hint even from OBJ’s confession why he is no longer a factor in world affairs as he was in those days. It is because of his lack of finesse that his eminence is now only tolerated in Africa.

    The chief drama of the day reflected something of Obj. He announced his arrival by walking from the main table where the celebrant, Anyaoku, Governor Sanwo-Olu, Gambari, Buhari’s chief of staff, were seated. He walked to the back of the hall to meet Anyaoku’s wife, Olubunmi, who did not want to share the spotlight with her husband. He pulled her from her seat, put his hand around her waist as though a father taking a bride through the aisle. Anyaoku smiled at the spectacle and a hubbub overflowed the hall. But rather than set the woman beside her husband, OBJ retained his seat beside the celebrant, so he was sandwiched between husband and wife. So, what was his point? To put husband and wife together or split them? After that, he recalled Olubunmi Anyaoku’s wife left her handbag behind, and Obj walked out of the main table in a flourish to the back seat and picked the bag and held it up so all could see his act of generosity. At last, when all were leaving, Olubunmi sat beside her husband of many decades. What Obj put asunder, God eventually put together.

  • Fantastic voyage

    Fantastic voyage

    It has been long coming. Like the man awaiting a beloved one, we have stood on the train station, waiting for the hoot. We had hope, but no help. From year to year, decade to decade and a century dovetailing into the next, the weary beloved knows the journey is not an easy one.

    It started with a promise, and how lofty it was, how cheery. It was a hope, but it was a grandeur, a train slashing through the city. The man who etched the hope became known as a sort of prophet, an engineer, a fantasist. As prophet, he had no canon. As an engineer, he was a glorious impostor. As a fantasist, he dreamed, as most dreamers – alone. We all dream alone.

    But he was none of these. He wore a faith cap, but he had no noted pedigree of piety. He did not have any degree as certificates go. But he certified himself in hearts across the state and city. He was just a workman and warrior with the pen and news. Now he was also news as governor and performer. The theatre was on the streets, in schools, on the road, in hearts and in his stamp of hope.

    We called him Jakande or LKJ, a journalist whose trademark project would generate a journal of a journey on rail tracks. He was a man of spare means. His office spare. His car spare. His pocket spare. But his greed for the future was anything but spare. Of course, he never spared his Tom Tom that made his face bustle around the jaw as he licked and chewed. When he died, no one mentioned diabetes, and even if its sugar worked out any malice, it was of little effect on a man who departed the earthly train in his ninth decade.

    He learned his greed from another man of niggardly disposition. Many have come to call him spare, too. He, too, called Awo, had a greed for the future. If LKJ  was no prophet, he was only an engineer of human souls. He never had a head for design. But he was shaping and mapping a fantasy, making a huge, locomotive toy for adults. He was an engineer because he was first a fantasist. He was an idealist by that definition. As D.H. Thoreau noted: “idealist nations make the most machines.” It begins with the toy. Toys excite children. Toys excite adults, too. Big toys. You must think like a child to make toys. To make a computer, think of video games. Now war games. The computer came to birth in the chills of the Cold War. Like the Wright Brothers, you must think about flying high to meet the angels. As the French poet Rimbaud writes, “genius is the recovery of childhood at will.” Hence Jesus said all little children should come to him, and that all should be like children. The United States is often likened to a juvenile culture. President Ronald Regan, at 70, habitually posed like a boy as though a cowboy in a movie. Trump has exemplified the boy adult, a farcical version of a Lincoln, who also would not underplay the power of the séance.  His wife, Mary Todd, always thought her dead son was alive each time he visited the séance.

     But the same culture gave us the marvels of today. So, the fantasist is good. Years after LKJ, the fantasy haunted us. Buhari stanched the dream and recanted. Repentance is about acts, not mere rhetorical confession. After stopping the dream in Lagos, he did penance on a national scale by giving trains in Lagos-Abeokuta-Ibadan and others. Lagos, the springtide of development weighed heavy on Buhari’s conscience. Jakande haunted Buhari to compensate as president.

    But it is not just him. When Tinubu came on board, he revived the project. When some doubted it, the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, revived history in a public video of truth against malicious naysayers. Tinubu, a governor and younger, dreamed the same as Jakande but a different one, too. He came to modernise and re-draft. Babatunde Fashola (SAN), now the Trojan of works, became an “actualiser” and laid the first earth, “babying” the fantasy. One by one, block built on block, but he could not conquer time. No one can. Others had to continue. Progress is a relay.

    The project seemed to suffer another abortive act in a successor. But as Shakespeare said, truth sunk into the earth shall spring forth again. Enter the BOS. Enter a new belief. He promised but he was not going to torture us with hope. Fantasy chides the believer. In between hope and reality, humans have invented lies, cruelty and deaths. The promise of paradise in all religions has forced humans to erect civilisations and savagery. Before it becomes true, prophets lie, followers maim and torture, death camps are instituted, worship houses duel against each other, families divide, lovers elope, lovers abandon love, countries go to war, cults fume with daggers, fanatics overtake the fantasy with sullen stares and apocalyptic doctrines that compromise the purity of the faith, merchants profit, vandals plunder, patriarchs reign. Sometimes, hope is a curse, hence Apostle Paul says charity is better than hope.

    Read Also: Lagos Igbo community root for Sanwo-Olu

    It is that charity, that love that transforms hope into a blessing, that the BOS of Lagos has done with the train. Both blue and red lines will make us move. The city will move again. The trains will chortle as the people shuttle.

    It will bisect the city, and dissect it. It is a progress in a city signposted by molues and area boys. That generation is passing before our eyes. We have BRT, and that turns the agbero into an anachronism.  But gradually. In his play, The Road, Soyinka spoofs that tribe of men who con the people and profits on road tragedies. In another voice, Soyinka prays for the traveller while asking him “To set forth at dawn.” The train, blue and red, is a new dawn that LKJ fantasised and that Tinubu re-dreamed and set the template for realisation. As Nixon wrote in his memoirs, a dream unrealised is “like a baby that is stillborn.”

    But Soyinka wishes the traveller “marvels of a holy hour.” Soyinka does not trust roads very much as we see in his works, whether in Death and King’s Horseman or Madmen and Specialists or even in his novel, The Interpreters. In his The Road, the novelist Cormac McCarthy peers glumly at apocalypse. Jack Kerouac portrays a soulless journey through America.

    Trains are a different kind of journey. They form their own visions, their arbitrary pathways through human crowds and alleys. America was redrawn by the rail. It reconnected a continent as a nation. It set the pace for its first burst of prosperity.  This essayist will visit the other milestones of the BOS soon.

    But it is the work of dedication, a fury of fulfilment. The people know that hope is good when there is no doubt. You cannot argue against a monument. No one can quibble over it, even though humans want to deny the evidence of their eyes. Man was made just, says the scriptures, but he has made many inventions.

    The invention of the train, its hooting and whirring across the state awaits the invention of a naysayer. We shall see if they deny the comfort of their seats, the landscape before their eyes and the ears that respond as the coaches chug along and rumble by.

  • Atiku complex

    Atiku complex

    Last week, this essayist wondered at Atiku’s math for dumping five or six governors and replacing them with Ayu. The other mathematical oddity was harped on again last week by the APC governorship candidate in Delta State, Ovie Omo-Agege, when he lashed out at Atiku for selling the Delta Steel Complex that cost the Federal Government $1.5 billion  for a paltry $30 million. He has not explained the math to us. How does minus become plus. I am nonplussed.

    Maybe Atiku is the new Math genius in town and he knows something about figures that we do not know. But the man has no speech in this as in other matters. Ifeanyi Okowa has had nothing to say about that as governor of the state. Okowa, who is Atiku’s running mate, is running from facts. If Delta supports Okowa, it means the people are lining behind the man  who collaborated with the rapist. It is like applauding the gangster who defiled the spinster of the family. Abomination!

    Rather than address the issues raised by Omo Agege, Okowa keeps saying the man has no power to say the facts. Omo Agege has accused him of wasting the resources of the state. Delta collects more money than any state in the Niger Delta. But it is one of the worst developed. He should go next door to Akwa Ibom where another PDP governor, Udom Emmanuel, is doing work after work, project after project. This essayist challenged Okowa to come clean on his involvement in the Premium Trust Bank and that he asked the state agencies to open accounts there. The banks who gave him loans are not willing to disburse because of this. He has kept mum, and that is why the Atiku campaign is not flowing with cash. Okowa has not responded.

    Can we see why Tinubu calls Atiku Mister Privatise? I think he is also Mister Seller. The other guy is Mister Stingy who would not even pay his state government for his posters. He is robbing his own state of Anambra. Maybe that is his definition of stingy. It is stinging.

  • Kenimani complex

    Kenimani complex

    He was a PHD before he had a PHD. The first is an attitude while the second PHD is a certificate. The first played out as student, soldier, politician, head of state and ex-head of state. The second PHD was bestowed as ex-president. The first came on the street, office, family lounge and war room, battlefield and on the street. The second was in the classroom. The first as spoiler, the second as scholar. The first was in his character but the second was written in characters. The first PHD is a study in impiety. The second was in the study of piety.

    In my days as a staff writer of the African Concord, my editor Lewis Obi asked me to do a cover story on the man. It was the military era and IBB was president. Olusegun Obasanjo had made news the way he did often: criticising the government. Lewis Obi drew my attention to what his biographers had started to call him. PHD. What did it mean? Pull Him Down. In researching the piece, I encountered a phrase that came from the lips of urbane writer and editor Stanley Macebuh, who had worked with him. Macebuh described OBJ as “crafty, very crafty.” For former ruler, every good guy must come down.

    If you examined the life of the Owu chief, you would learn that he loved that character. He loved to pull down so he alone could be on top. He loved to tarnish others to burnish himself. We saw that when IBB was president. Since he left office as head of state, he only had bad things to say about his successors. He never gave private advice but gushed out public scolding. He knew he had immunity. His former boys would not ruffle him. So, he exercised it in impunity. No one could arrest him until he dared Abacha. He hit Shagari, clobbered Buhari, threw broadsides at IBB. He alone had the pure record. Hence when he became president, he relished the name baba. He was, after all, the father of all. He reveled in it.

    Until, of course, he started to reveal himself as what Yorubas call agbalagba akan to kos’inu gorodom. (The mighty crab that fell into a drum). It is eminently untranslatable. But it means an elder who has become a big disgrace. We saw that in Odi when he played a butcher. We saw that in the third term agenda when he was the ‘grandfather of corruption,’ as reechoed in his Hard Talk interview of the BBC. He invoked the phrase “overheating the polity,” when the country sweltered from crisis to crisis. He was the one who visited families, ate pounded yam and danced with the host’s wife as though cuckolding the host. A day after the jollity, he engineered the man’s overthrow from elected office. He choreographed a constitutional conference and torpedoed it. OBJ set up two corruption agencies as the godfather who bribed lawmakers with N50 million each. He had his own phrases. He manufactured “do or die” politics. Where was his holy spirit when assassins shot down foe after foe? He was the one who often evoked God but played Mephistophelian theatre. His intimates accused him of incest, and son kept a wife away from him.

    But OBJ came in the news again because he sought to be the man of the new year. He, as he often loved to do, wrote a letter. In picking the LP candidate as his endorsee, he ambushed the word mentee. He does not sully words alone. He is like Fyodor Karamazov of novelist Dostoyevsky’s tome, The Brothers Karamazov. He is the old man who soils everything he touches. That also is OBJ. he calls himself a mentor. When did it start? Even the LP guy cannot even track it. Maybe he was unaware of the mentorship. Not when OBJ  was the kingpin of kidnapping in Anambra State. Ngige, a governor, turned into a limp hostage of official bandits. Who was the “banditeer?” Was he not the same man who clipped the LP man from Anambra mandate as an APGA nominee? Is that mentoring or evil monitoring? If it is, then we know the kind of candidate he is pushing: a bandit candidate? Even the LP man will not be so proud as to associate with the man who kidnapped, muzzled and even overthrew people in his state, and for a while made Anambra State into a target of the east wind. Remember, the east wind in the Bible howled and bustled with locusts and plagues and deaths. When his government gave Chinua Achebe a national award, the bard threw it out of the window and cited the bastardisation of his home state. Read part of Achebe’s response: “I have watched particularly the chaos in my own state of Anambra where a small clique of renegades, openly boasting its connections in high places, seems determined to turn my homeland into a bankrupt and lawless fiefdom. I am appalled by the brazenness of this clique and the silence, if not connivance, of the Presidency.” Achebe will not be proud to see that a candidate from his home state who was purloined of his democratic right is hobnobbing with him.

    But OBJ does not care. And he loves the hysteria around him. He is a bored old man in search of new excitement, like a juvenile out of school. But what is more fascinating in this narrative is his perennial fear of his own people. He is afraid of anyone with a Yoruba blood who asserts any form of popularity. Unless he is under his shadow until he chokes him. He did it in his letter writing. In a new book, The Letterman, Mojeed Musikilu, unveils OBJ’s epistolary wars. He may be a letterman, but he is no man of letters. He often fought with his kinsmen. He did not want Awo to be president. He fought against MKO. He conned and frustrated Bola Ige. Now, he sees Tinubu as a big and present danger.

    He endorsed the LP man, not out of love or principle, but out of what the Yoruba call etanu, or what my folks in Warri call jiga belle. It means malice, but a special type of hatred, silent, sly, malignant. Jigger, called jiga in pidgin English, is a variety of bugs that hides inside toes when one steps into a puddle and you have to cut the skin to scoop it out. That is the sort of malice he abhors. He has a mind of puddle hosting jiggers. OBJ has jiggers inside the belly of his soul. It is a deep-seated pain in OBJ when a kinsman wants to be great. He loves “a kinsman in trouble,” apologies to Achebe, when he bears ambition he despises. He wants to be the only man from the Yoruba race to have been president. OBJ, therefore, sees Tinubu as a mortal threat. It is what the Yoruba also designate as Kenimani complex. It literally means let my neighbour not have it. I am the only one who should have. He hates his folks enough to make them foe. This contrasts with the Omoluabi syndrome.

    It does not matter to him that his endorsements have failed over the decades. He is a chameleon who makes a foe of endorsement today into a friend of endorsement tomorrow. Since he abolished history from schools, he thinks he has inflicted the nation with amnesia. We cannot forget that he called Atiku a thief before he endorsed him and before he started calling him a thief again. He cheated the LP man before he started making him his John the Baptist. He wants us to forget our history, so he can be our fabulist. OBJ is a confidence man, like the character in Herman Melville’s novel, Confidence-men. He tries to fit into the shrubbery by assuming the colour green. But he is green in the eye. He is envious of his younger ones. That is a dangerous thing to do to a coming generation.

    Was it not the same Owu chief as military head of state who had a dialogue with a fellow tribesman who pointed out geopolitical injustice under his watch? He called in Yar’adua and he fired General Olutoye hours afterwards. OBJ has not denied it. Maybe he has a grouse against his ethnic group. He wrote his book My Command as revenge rather than as history. Hence, Alabi Isama’s A Tragedy of History announced its R.I.P. with dozens of countervailing evidence. OBJ’s war memoir is now no more than an artefact of mendacity.

    OBJ grapples with what psychologists call the fear of gratitude. He does that even to his own people in the Southwest. He needs to be grateful for what Yoruba have done for him. He needs to be grateful for education, for breeding, for a career in the army, and for becoming head of state and president. He rose on their backs even when he did not like them. The rest of the country voted for him even when the Southwest did not because he was a Yoruba man. It was seen as Yoruba’s emilokan moment then. He defeated a fellow Yoruba man, Olu Falae, but he got it because he was Yoruba. He rode on Abiola’s back, the same man he campaigned against over June 12. The same Abiola, who had prostrated to Soyinka to beg the Nobel Laureate to stop campaigning against OBJ’s ambition to be scribe of the United Nations. How grateful OBJ is.

    We can see how bitter he was. He is not happy that even when he was head of state, his kinsmen did not regard him as the Yoruba leader. He has not even said thank you to General Alani Akinrinade, who worked Biafran surrender when he was in a wild goose chase in Igboland. Maybe he was paralysed by anxieties and intimations about his roots in that part of the world when he took over as commander of Third Marine Commando from the legendary Adekunle.

    He may be envious of his fellow tribesmen. It is his right. But neither of his PHD’s is of any righteous value. He often loses in his ward during elections, so the Yorubas have been telling him that for a long time. They are singing to him the words of the bard Ebenezer Obey, Ma gbe keke e lo/ a’o ba e sere mo. – Go away with your bike, we are no longer playing with you.

  • Pele’s trophy

    Pele’s trophy

    Both are foot impresarios. With it, one gives many a black eye. The other kicks a storm of ecstasy. Later on in life, Muhammed Ali meets Pele. Pele kisses Ali on the cheek. Both have moved from laurel into lore. Ali no longer jousted in the ring. Pele’s three world cup trophies lie in his Brazilian vault.

    One best sportsman is hugging another best sportsman. It is in a stadium in the United States after Pele has dazzled as a player of the New York Cosmos. Ali is spectator. Pele is spectacle. Two special men meet. In his humour, Ali concedes defeat: “Football is the most beautiful game,” he says. But he has his own minute of triumphal vainglory. “But I am more beautiful than you.” Witnesses do not document Pele’s response. He is not a colourful hero outside the field of play. Ali is a thespian as much as a boxer.

    Hence, until disease crippled him, Ali was a factor of social conscience in the 20th century. He was perhaps the best name in the field as the best in his sport. Pele, who died at 82, was, at best, a bland hero in that arena.

    We love him for what he did, and the trajectory of his biography. He was born in a favela, a ghetto named after a plant that irritated the skin. He died wealthy but grew up in a slum where his inaugural contact with football was to engage rolled-up socks or a grapefruit. His father, his hero, could not afford even a rubber ball. Like Ali, he would bear his famous name later in life. Ali snatched his name from a faith and world historic-figure. Pele’s was from a mistake. He mispronounced a player’s name known as Bile. His myth-making began as a mistake just as his first world cup appearance in 1958 came as a substitution. From then, he became an institution.

    He became a song and rhythm of the game. He became also an aesthetic cause. He would become a cause celebre later. From age 15, he turned the soccer field into a pedal for his medals, into a performance arena. He curled passes, made dribble runs, patented the bicycle kick, discombobulated star defenders, made aerial magic of his headers, and remains the best scorer in the game over three decades after he hung his golden boot.

    He might be the best footballer ever, but his heroics as a black man in world of inequality has presented him as uncomfortable to fight. He thought it was not his style or his obligation to stand for a cause like Ali. Rather he became a sort of ancestor to such other big-name blacks as Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan,  who have waxed silent in the face of tyranny. When Woods began his great career, he sought an audience with Jordan, and the basketball star, who defied nature in his flights and dunks, advised Woods to steer clear of politics. Business abhorred controversy. So, while blacks suffocated in a racist coven, Woods and Jordan soared in ads and celebrity. They were cheered by whites and blacks alike. Blacks accepted them as models of what they could be. Whites thrilled to their exploits. When Woods was asked to comment on his silence, he said, “I am a golfer, not a politician.”

    Pele rose to fame in a world in turmoil. It was in the years of colonial fights and nationalist elan. It was in the age of civil rights, of Martin Luther King Jr, the ravages of dictators and youth rebellion. It was the beginning of television when reels of Pele’s acts kept eyes wet with wonder. His voice never rose for justice.

    Rather Pele allowed his country’s dictator to exploit his image in adverts and proudly appeared with him on television and in the press. He never reminded the world of his favela origin, of his days of want. His country did not allow him to play in Europe after they crowned him a national treasure.

    But Pele had a theory about his silence. He believed being the best player ever was enough cause in itself. Anyone who saw him knew he was black. That one virtue gave glory to the black race. It evangelised black potential and prowess.

    Pele might be right there. No two persons have the same temperament. Some are retiring like him and a few others. Others may punch and howl against wrong. But this essayist cannot excuse such silence. Pele was, at one time, the most famous person in the world. He might have turned easily into a sort of Mandela of justice. He did not have to exercise the pugilist poetry of Ali. An old Mandela gave us the grandeur of objection. Pele met Mandela. The first time he went to South Africa he suffered a racism. He vowed never to return there until apartheid fell.

    His fame gave him access to wealth and the top tier of society and he became sports minister when he campaigned for more blacks in office. His voice was more of a whisper when the world demanded a roar.

    Like Woods and Jordan, Pele rose at a time the western world was changing its attitude of dealing with blacks as entertainment. Blacks even in the US had opportunity in sports and they now could pay to make them laugh and swoon. In a racist remark in the 1990’s, they described blacks as creatures of natural rhythm. This was a redrawing of the past when blacks were exhibition of a savage nature. Historians hid this until a book on Belgian colonial past came to light about two decades ago. The book, titled: King Leopold’s Ghost by Adam Hochschild, recounted the primitive era, among other things, of the age of the Belgian dictator in his treatment of Congolese. He brought hundreds of enslaved blacks to his country and put them in a cage for whites to look at. They were designated as human zoos. They laughed and even threw bananas at them. This was not restricted to Belgium. It was in London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Philadelphia – known as the city of brotherly love – and California. And more. Billions of whites attended such zoos.

    What we have today is a stylized version of the athlete as a spectacle of fun. That is why the athlete must convert it into a cause for equality or justice or it will all be a selfish waste. This story must admit that not all whites accepted the dehumanization as a fact. Some protested but the voices were muted. It was one of the supremacist antics of history. If they accepted that blacks were no more than monkeys in a zoo, why would they be allowed to do well as doctors or lawyers or parents or family members? I recall a friend of mine at a function in the US who introduced me to other Caucasians and he wanted them to understand that I was intelligent and not like others stereotyped as sportsmen. He quipped, “although he is tall, he is not a basketball player.” He didn’t mean it out of malice but that is how the culture has imbibed such malignant tropes.

    Russia had a story of a man of Cameroonian origin who became a darling in the court of Peter the Great.  He even became a general of no mean stripe. He was the grandfather of great writer Alexander Pushkin who always wanted the world to know he was a black man. He wrote a novel, titled: The Moor of Peter the Great, about a black man who was so good-looking every woman wanted him. He did not like them because they wanted him for being a black man, not because of his soul. He hated being a curiosity, a spectacle. The book was a tribute to his grandfather. Pushkin’s moor was like Pele or Jordan, who also had women, especially of the white race, swoon over them. But the writer, often described as the father of Russian literature, did not finish the novel because he died in a duel of a woman.

    Solomon in the Bible had such experience. He wrote, “Look not upon me because I am black and comely.” Did it inspire Solomon’s flirtation and acquisition of the biggest harem in history? Did he try to prove his humanity among the races and assert his blackness? Was his blackness a cause played out in eroticism, as a contrast to Pushkin’s character? Was that the case with Tiger Woods’ adulterous scandal? All his women were white. Ditto Pele. We can rest assured though that Pele the star is different from Pele the god of Hawain mythology who turned into an old woman and disappeared. Our Pele is a soccer god.

    Pele contrasts with Ali because Ali saw himself as they saw a trophy and dumped it in a river. Pele clutched his trophy as a pearl. Ali wanted mettle over medal. Pele died a trophy. Maybe it works well for him to be a soccer purist unsullied by a cause.