Nyesom Wike is no one to speak a trifle. Forget about his amateur line distinguishing pressmen and journalists. In spite of his tendency to humour, he is a serious man. Reacting to the reports of the G-5 and their endorsement, he made a remark about Atiku Abubakar, the PDP flag bearer meeting with governors in his home in Dubai. Who did he meet with? This drew a reaction from Femi Fani-Kayode over the hobgoblin of a northern hegemony and a Fulani taking over from a Fulani. My reporting shows that APC governors are intact but a certain governor in the north I will not name now is the turncoat. He is not even in a position to sway his state to Atiku. That is the irony of it all. It shows a thing about the Adamawa chieftain. Rather than woo his party governors, or what we might call low-hanging fruit, he is trying to climb the tree for the myth of tantalus, the elusive fruit. He has left the sturdy Governor Udom Emmanuel to do the yeoman’s job of parleying with the aggrieved governors, including Wike and Ortom. Atiku should, at least, bow and embrace his governors and follow Gov. Emmanuel’s path. He wouldn’t. It is still a mystery why Ayu should pay him more than five governors. It is a weird math. One minus five.

The Labour Party must be showing us what it means not to be stingy this season. We just read that its Taraba State chairperson has been shown the door, if for a while, for stealing money. She didn’t show a stingy finger. A whopping N21 million out of the coffers. Before that, we know what Doyin Okupe is doing with his Ogun State fellows who said he was too stingy in keeping the money in his pocket when they were supposed to give them to million man marchers. To buy a crowd, you don’t want a stingy guy. Okupe, they say, was not stingy to himself. They want to give him to boot. Even before that, there was the national youth leader who went digital and was robbing the party’s threshing floor until they floored him and sent him packing. Everyone has their version of being stingy, including their leader and presidential candidate who, as governor, kept his stingy hand in an offshore account.

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There is enough “stingy” to go round for labourers.

He is a man of certain height, a certain past, and a certain career and with a certain idea of a certain country. He is a warrior even when there is no war. A soldier in the eyes of some civilians, a civilian in the eyes of some soldiers. The definition of his uniform is anything but uniform because even that is in the eye of the beholder. Sometimes, his tune is regarded as at war with his tunic, and his tunic with his tune. It is part of the enigma of the person.

His life comes to a boil when his country collapses under interloping soldiers. Unlike his mates who would cow under and even embrace the rape and rapine of the times, he takes them on. He is a man who never cowers to the jail man. He knows what it is   to be gaoled.

The soldiers make the city and country crawl under the fierce rhythms of their jackboots, the syncopating roar of their martial voice, the loss of democratic favours. They impose a new weather system of fear and trembling. Some of his fellow men have become courtiers in a contrived inner sanctum of quislings, new blue-bloods when it is blues for the country.

When others remain, he would rather die with a lion’s mane or find another shelter from where to wage a fight.

They are after him. His own class and the class of the invading army mark him as a wanted man. If they get him, he not only returns to jail. He is a dead man, like others at home operating under ground, issuing out journalism and whispering to ominous caucuses. He has little time to consult with friends and family before he flees. A big war hero says he carries his country’s pride in that aircraft of escape.

In the words of the poet, T.S. Eliot, a hard time he has of it. With him at the helm, in London, with his fellow rebels, he has to organise.  They have become refugees for national rebirth. The homeland invokes sacrifice. With a few men, they operate like a band of brothers. They are a grain of mustard seed. Courage multiplies little supplies into a surplus. Their voices, though few and puny, wax into arsenal. Love makes a few people growl into a battalion. Alienation knits them like a commonwealth. It is like the words of Isaiah: “A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong nation.” God and time hasten it.

He enjoys local cover, if not much of a resource. He organises a radio station with regular broadcasts where the people at home know they are only lonely but not alone.

Since, he, as leader, is a wanted man, he imbibes a rebel’s guile. He needs to be alive for the cause and the caucuses.

One of those he is in touch with is a well-known world literary figure, who would one day pay homage to his political soldiery.

In the end, though, he and his colleagues prevail. There might have been some turncoats among them, but he returns home a hero. Not everyone thinks so. He comes into a high office, and later becomes in charge.

He is seen as a fellow to dread and to love, a divisive figure. He helps to reorganise the politics of the country, refine its agenda, save its major city in a time of economic crisis. He invests and ferment political reforms, challenging some of the royals of the old order, the mensch of the old mess.

He is stubborn, and very quickly creates a tendency in the political elite. He is regarded as a reference point in governance. He handles crises and survives the far left and from the far right.

But so is the way of his life that those who love him band behind him and those who hate him want him dead. They have plotted his assassination. He seems there is never a time in his political life that he is not in a sort of storm. When he veers right, they say left is better. Some love the love of him. Some love the hate of him.

Some hate him so much that they forget the very reason why he is hated. Some have devoted inks of bile to him. Some say openly that they wish him dead. Even if he dies, they will say the beast is dead but his poison lives on. They would want to recalibrate Christ and say they want to kill the flesh and would not be satisfied until they kill the spirit, too. In their writings, his opponents pour invectives like lifeblood. Some who were for him would turn away from him and devote their lives to opposing him until they turn to his side again with more powerful fervour.

He is the only one in his drama, and he seems not to invite his worshippers to fanaticism or his haters to savagery. He is like an artwork of a famous artist whose light comes from within the work itself. This man creates the frame of reference of his interlocutors. He sets the context and they respond. He is never fazed though, like the mystic in Salman Rushdie’s Midnights Children who never feels anything, including a venomous snakebite.

The man I write about here is not Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. His name is Charles de Gaulle, often regarded as the French man not only of the 20th century, but of all time, followed in the last poll conducted as 14 points ahead of the little general, Napoleon Bonaparte.  Andre Malraux, the great novelist and friend of the French avatar, wrote after De Gaulle’s death that he is a man of today and the day after tomorrow and a man of yesterday and the day after yesterday. In his latest book, Leadership, Henry Kissinger describes him as a man who invented the idea of ‘grandeur’ for France.

I used the phrase division of labour to characterise what is blowing into a crisis in the Labour Party where the mercurial Doyin Okupe, the candidate’s director general, is sparring with a faction of the party. The bone of contention is that no one knows who is the greedy dog. Okupe says he is innocent. Others say he cracked a femur. They want to extract his molars and incisors. I had tweeted that this was a division of labour. More importantly, it counters the LP candidate’s assertion of the dignity of labour. It does not dignify labour to scramble for leftovers.

In these days when some contrarian persons are demonising the so-called Muslim-Muslim ticket and are saying Christians loathe an anti-Christian ticket, they are all welcoming the LP man to church conventions with applause. What point are the big bishops and pastors making? That we should privilege Christians over the Muslims and other non-Christians? Do these men know their Bible? Is it their version of the crusades and holy war?

In churches, they herald him like the Nigerian version of Jesus Christ the super star.

It would have made sense if the LP man can go to imams and also attend mosques and allow them to worship with him. He will then be a hypocrite in public, not only in private, for campaigning in both church and mosque. He is not interested in such dilemma. He would rather craft a platform of bigots than pretend a cooperative ethos.

Have they taken the time to ask questions about whether this man is a true Christian or if he wants to, in the words of Apostle Peter, make merchandise of them? Did they ask whether he divided Catholics against Anglicans when he was governor? Did they ask whether he ever attended Pentecostal conventions when he was not looking for their votes? Are they pretending he is not campaigning in the guise of shouting hallelujah in their churches? Are they hearing the voice of the holy spirit around his bended knees on their altars?

Why has he suddenly become a man who moves from house of God to house of God. He is campaigning, or is it the bishops and priests themselves that are campaigning vicariously through him?

Is this not a Christianisation agenda of Nigeria that the LP man is fronting? What does he want the Muslims to think, or even the discerning Christians who have seen through him and the political clerics who desecrate their suits of worship? Did he not attend the church of a bishop who once said they should vote their faith against the electoral law?

The LP candidate is probably like some of the bishops who have not answered, like the candidate, why he has offshore accounts in his name with his children’s names as well? Why will the LP candidate not be accepted as a kindred spirit among such men of God?

This is actually the division of labour. In a smaller script, it is a division of labour within the LP. In the wider canvas, it is the division of labour in which Christians are on one side and Muslims and other non-Christians are on another side. This is an ominous, self-conscious division of the country by these clerics.

If they know the Bible, they would know that James in the Bible frowns against special treatment to people who come in their midst. They do so to governors, presidents and others as though it is a political ground. According to the Bible, we are all one and equal in Christ Jesus. Did Jesus not say the servant is not greater than the master and the master is not greater than the servant. The Bible says let the wheat and the tares dwell together, not choke each other. They preach disharmony in the society in the name of growing their flocks. Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this world? Did they see that text?  They know the text but deny the context. This is an age of Pharisees and false prophets.

Part of the division of labour is when he inspires otherwise intelligent men and women of the east who know him well but would rather forget their intelligence and deny what they know about the LP candidate. They inspire the Yoruba adage, Omo wa ni. Eje ‘ose. (He is our son, let him get it.) They cannot write one full-page essay on his time as governor and even give themselves a pass mark. It is an ethnic division of labour.

It seemed like yesterday when Lagos youth invented the chant. Sanwo eko! The streets throbbed as a moment of affection morphed into a momentum of change. Not many knew him. Not many had ever seen him, even though the fellow had been one of the technicians of an evolving city.

He had just earned his nomination as frontman of his party. He had been around. He was there on creation day in the party as it started to reengineer the state. He had hands in the new architecture, in renewing the environment, in how the folks moved from point A to point B, in braiding the roads and remaking the homes, in pushing the frontiers of vision, in breathing anew a city going down to the dungs. He belonged to the trust, to a family born not of flesh of blood but a creed of dreams. Gov. Babajide Sanwo-Olu – the BOS of Lagos – was one of the courtiers of the new vision.

By that nomination, he was merely being asked to walk all the way to the front row. It was time to bow his head, wear the crown and preen.

Since then, he has had no need for introduction. He has waxed into the BOS of Lagos. He, a skinny, tall and folksy man. He, a voice perpetually boyish. He of understated energy. He who has combined the will to work and the will to feel.

But it was a four-year of defining events. To chaperon Lagos is to master a fate. Any day can be an epoch. In a city of over 20 million persons, where area boy contends with royal, where the billionaire must amble along as a collaborator with a mechanic, Lagos is not just a city and state, it is the cornucopia of Nigeria. All ethnicities thrive, the Igbo, the Fulani, the Birom, the Urhobo, the Efik, the Ibibio. They all meet the Yoruba. Even among the Yoruba, there is a theatre of variance and harmony. It is whirlpool. Yet, it is the job of the chief executive to rise above cant and tribe and show all can dwell together in peace. He has to entrench a big tent.

When the chants ushered him into the limelight followed by an emphatic win both at the primary and the election, few expected a disease was crawling in the shadows, a set of savage police officers would set off the city into a boil, that a city intersection would provoke a maelstrom of international puzzle, that a panel would engender discordant voices, that he would become a youth messenger, scurrying from state house to Abuja state house. Yet, few would have known how much mettle he would command at every turn.

Few expected that they had another name in the offing for him. That he would assume a title of martial resonance when a disease named after a year would distort or refashion everyone’s face. Covid-19, though, did not distort the handsome architecture of the face. But hearts and lungs heaved and expired. Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu became known as Incident commander, but he never amassed soldiers or battalions but confronted millions upon millions of an army no one saw but shot down lives and shut down the city.

He showed himself a leader not of the state alone. The nation looked up to him as the helmsman of the nation’s significant state to subdue the invading soldiers. It was one of the extraordinary moments of leadership in the nation’s history, at a time when the White House – the world’s landlord – tenanted a fraud.

That had hardly died down when the state broke down. Youth rebelled and it was the rage that followed police officers who did not see an error in extorting the young at gunpoint and ATMs. It began like a revolutionary hour before it collapsed into a city of miscreants. Patrimonies like buses and precious buildings, including this newspaper, were torched. An innocent police officer became a vision of horror as they gouged his eyes. It was a failure of a generation, when the sublime young reminded one of a line in William Wordsworth’s famous line: “Bliss it was that dawn to be alive/ to be young was very heaven.” They could not get a hold of their dream and it crumbled. It was not the beginning that mattered. As Tocqueville wrote, “In a revolution as in a novel, the most difficult part to invent is the end.”

Partisan noise crowded out the main issues. And an international news outlet joined in professional naivety to project a bogus narrative about Lekki and the dead some called massacre. They invoked the spectre to turn down the word and invoke a distorted semiotic. It was like a United States founding father, Samuel Adams, who accused England of fomenting a massacre when five people died at an incident. Those who wanted to demonise the Brits found an ally in the rabble-rouser. Historians mock him today, including in the latest book by one of the best biographers of the moment. Stacy Schiff’s book is titled The Revolutionary.

Gov. Sanwo-Olu cruised through the storm. That is the mettle of the BOS of Lagos. In spite of all these, he has shown himself a man of projects. This was showcased in a photo exhibition by ace photographer Dayo Adedayo in Lagos recently.

Whether it was schools or roads or hospitals, Adedayo displayed them for the records and for the eyes. It is a sweep of achievements in less than four calendar years. Going from photo to photo is like moving from time to time, a kaleidoscope of colours. The power of the eyes cannot be underestimated. You cannot deny Akintan Junior Grammar School or the boats at the jetty or sprawl of Ibeshe Housing Estate, one of several such feats, noting that Governor Sanwo-Olu has surpassed the feat of the great Jakande in that department. Novelist Joseph Conrad said the first job of the writer is to make the reader see. As they say, seeing is believing. In his classic, The Prince, Nicolo Machiavelli wrote: “Men in general judge by their eyes rather than by their hands; because everyone is in a position to watch, few come in a close position to touch with you.” Lagos takes for granted the first task of government. He was governor when the bandits reigned and reined in the country. Even southwest neighbours. Lagos remained an oasis of peace.

Yet he is one of the connected chief executives in the country. He is governor but also very human. His buga moves are part of the signature of the man.

It was not the dance that drove him to Teslim Balogun Stadium last Saturday to seek a second term, but the march of his stewardship. Yet he is not done. The world awaits the redline and blue line trains. He has done well, and he whets the appetite…