Some say they can’t vote for him because he is ill. But it’s because he makes them ill at ease. They tremble at the compass of his mind and the stature of his legacy. With affectionate defiance on Saturday night, he asked the Kano business community, “Do I look like someone who is sick to you?” He then pointed his finger to his skull, and quipped, “It’s because I am smarter than all of them.” He permitted himself a little swagger.

Asiwaju Bola Tinubu was still floating on the after-waves of ideas at the Arewa Consultative Forum. All who attended attested to his magisterial performance. Not the hegemonic effluvia of Atiku or the incantatory void of Obi. Asiwaju left the place with food for the Nigerian thought when he tackled the question of climate change.

The images of “church rat” and “poisoned holy communion” ruffled quite a few cassocks and their political hangers-on. They mistook it for a cannon against the canon. They claimed he had breached the holy of holies. He was turning the scriptures upside down. How could the holy communion be poisoned? It is holy, and so Tinubu had touched the unclean thing.

They were invoking Christ where he did not invite them. But Christ told them, “I never knew you.” They saw visions without eyes of understanding. The blind leading the blind.

For those who know the Bible, even the holy communion can kill. Hence Apostle Paul said, those who are not worthy should not take it or they will die. So, if we look at what the Catholics call the Eucharist, it is like poison to a defiled soul. The sinner who goes to the bowl with malice takes a poisoned chalice, ditto the adulterous appetite. They may swallow sweet poison. It is a holy death.

The communion then can also stand for purity, including the men of the altar. If prophets can lie and sully the word of God, so can they dispense a poisoned holy communion. It is all within us as humans, whether pastor or laity, to abide by the word. A pure holy communion is no guarantee. It depends on both laity and pastor. A compromised pulpit poisons the communion. A sinful laity courts damnation. Hence Jesus said, when the blind leads the blind, BOTH shall fall into the ditch. Jesus knew this, so he warned of the distinction between his bread and wine and the manna in the wilderness. Those who ate manna in the wilderness later died. His own will give eternal life. So, it is not about the holy communion but who poisoned it and who agreed to eat it. Tinubu says it is the west who added the killing vial. The church rat should not die for the sins of a wayward priest. The west is the priest.

Partisans who know little scripture aped the lead of these vain ecclesiastics. Beware of false prophets.

But what Tinubu was doing had nothing to do with holy matters. But he is asking if we are ready for the manna of the wilderness or the bread of life. He borrowed them as metaphors to show that we are stewards of God’s earth, but we are not subjects but sovereigns as Nigerians. The metaphor of poison is not new. We have the metaphor of poisoned chalice, poison mercury, poison oak, or Poison Ivy. Some are biological and they can, with imagination, become metaphors that picture human experience.

The poisoned holy communion here is the compromised climate or earth. We are the church rat, the innocents who would live but are confronted by the prospect of poison. But what shall we do? We are not compelled, according to Tinubu, to eat the white man’s poison. The world was pristine before the whites began pillaging it. But in doing so, they became rich.

Now, they are affecting climate remorse, and want the whole world, including us, to save the earth from the devastation of industrial man.

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But in making their prosperity, they created an unequal world. They enjoy, we toil. Now, says Tinubu, we need to develop and go through the path they followed, so we too can enjoy. But they say no. The world is fragile. It faces apocalypse. No problem, says Tinubu, we can see it ourselves. We want to be rich, too. If they want us not to follow their path, if they don’t want us to burn fuel as they did, attack the ozone layer as they did, let flood wreck us and our rivers and ponds run dry as we are experiencing, let them pay us.  If not, we shall, as church rats, do what we shall and allow the holy communion – the earth – remain a poison. The earth is ours and we all can either perish together or save it together. Know that the church rat is there when the congregation is at home. On Sundays, the poisoned holy communion can kill the whole church with all of them dressed in fancy clothes and stuffed with billionaire offerings. All, both church rat and cassock man, will die. It’s like a terrorist that lobs in a bomb during mass.

Tinubu was exposing western hypocrisy. They have, in the words of poet Alexander Pope, raped the lock. It cannot easily be restored to its original beauty. This is not the first time Tinubu has mused on this issue. It is a call to climate and environmental nationalism. What the west is doing is climate imperialism.

We all want a good earth. But let us enjoy it equally. The west has been at odds with China over this. Premier Xi is saying what Tinubu is saying. Let us all be rich. They wasted our earth to make them rich. Tinubu knows the value of saving the earth. Before this era of flood fury, Lagos had it decades ago, and Tinubu, as Lagos State governor, confronted the Obj administration that splurged N4 billion a year to pour sands on the Bar Beach. It was a patchwork, not a solution. The thing was eating up Victoria Island like termites. Tinubu developed an idea to turn disaster into prosperity. Today, that swath of earth known as Eko Atlantic makes more money than many states put together. Even the United States is building its biggest embassy on the Eko Atlantic.

But the west must allow us do it on our own terms. This is no colonial era. When the west started with the industrial revolution, they did not prioritise saving the planet. William Wordsworth, known as the high priest of nature, wrote: “The world is too much with us; late and soon,/

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;/Little we see in Nature that is ours;/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”

What Tinubu has done is to stake an idea for economic prosperity and diplomatic tour de force in one phrase. Shakespeare says, “brevity is the soul of wit.”

This is the third lie of the west. The first was what is known as the Treaty of Westphalia at the end of the Thirty Years War. It was the genesis of international rule of law. The agreement was to recognize all nations as equal and no one should invade another without cause. It is still a fraught issue as Henry Kissinger tackles the subject in his book, World Order. The same Europe did not even recognize other continents, like African kingdoms, as sovereign. It led to the second lie: they invaded African kingdoms, and raided for slaves to build the prosperity of the west. They couched us as savages and societies without civilization. It justified the invasion. Even the Church of England said we had no soul. Yet they sent us the Mary Slessors.

What they are doing now by asking us to abide by climate change is the same they did when they started industrialism. It was then they knew slavery was inhuman. They stopped it for cynical reasons. To quote again my late teacher, Professor Tunji Oloruntimehin: “The abolition of slave trade was an act of enlightened self-interest by the Europeans to give the Africans a new role in the international economic system.” Again, they decided to give us our nations, according to their lights. They jumbled peoples together without symmetry of culture and history. Yet, there was no concept of Europe until about the 5th century as the Roman Empire began its decline, and savage tribes invade each other like the Germanic tribes. The west is like the gang leader who becomes a priest because he needs quiet to enjoy his loot.

Climate change is their new apology. They can pay us if we insist, says Tinubu. In the US today, farmers are paid not to farm. The food will waste, so they get paid to do nothing beyond the nation’s capacity. They did not hurt the American farmer. But they hurt us for centuries and this may be Asiwaju’s way of asking for reparations while we heal the earth. As Shakespeare wrote in his play of international intrigue, Antony and Cleopatra, we can make “fancy outwork nature.”

That is Tinubu’s conundrum, a laconic riddle that we expect only from the lips of a genius. He is financial expert but he has used language that turns professors of literature into their altar.

    We can see why they fear Tinubu, and so hate him. He is the one asking the right questions.

Last week, the nation had a lesson in optics. Or, shall we say, in optical illusion. What we see is important, but we know is better. But what do we know from all the optical histrionics around the APC presidential candidate when he flew to London?

The social media turned into a challenge in eyesight. They said Asiwaju Bola Tinubu was dead. They said, he was on catheter, his bald head shining beneath a benevolent nurse trying to raise him from his bed. She might even, in the eyes of the czars of human sight, be raising him from the dead. They said he had cancelled his campaign. He had turned over his campaign to his deputy. APC no longer had a candidate.

They quoted Reuters, the great news agency, for authenticity. Phone calls rang. Some media outfits limped in searching for facts. No basic journalism rules. They did not question but voted with their silence.

Nor was fact going to win out in certain circles. Bayo Onanuga, Tinubu’s spokesperson, revealed the optical delusion and mischief of the manipulators of human sight. They stuck to their bald vision. The bald was bigger in size than Tinubu’s bald. His paunch was bigger than Tinubu’s.  His face, broader and younger, was made from another tissue of DNA.

So, when the candidate responded with his own optical matter, the drama cruised to another scene. He was on a gym bicycle. But they say he was not on a gym bicycle, or he was on a gym bicycle but it was not last weekend. It was many years ago when he had good health. It was him riding a Fan Milk cart. Fan Milk must thank the APC candidate for an unsolicited online sway and gain. They milked Tinubu for mischief. The company must be in a milky way of profit.

A newspaper that had once gloated over his health situation responded with a dramatic headline: “Tinubu roars back.” Even then, it turned from a visual matter to an audio script. His voice also hummed in the video of another gym shot. Tinubu became a universal man of many Hollywood parts. He was in fainting fit, he was still as a corpse at the back of a bike, in a truck, etc. They made morbidity into a joke at a human being’s expense.

Then he seemed to be turning the joke on them. He appeared in a suit, a dapper guy like a CEO or diplomat. Then later, he turned out with two children, a boy and girl bubbling with the solicitude of their grandfather.

The London trip was over. The spry fellow materialised here in Nigeria, at the airport, in a blazer, his face afire with smiles as he hugged Kashim Shettima, Simon Lalong, Adams Oshiomhole, et al. At the end, mischief bowed to the chief. He won out with the sheer physical vitality of his swagger.

This whole issue began even before he had a knee surgery. Then he had it. They wished him a cripple when he had it. Ironically, when the vice president – bless his soul – had a similar surgery, they prayed for him. When Tinubu returned from his surgery, they lingered with malignant doubts. In their eyes, he was still not fit to run for president. They did not say Osinbajo was not fit to continue as Nigeria’s number two citizen. Talk about pharisaic morality.

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He ran for APC ticket. He did not sit at home. He was around, in the air and on the road. He even undertook a night ride from Sokoto to Zamfara, where he inspected the arboreal serenity of the northern backwoods. He was on television all the way. He even boasted in one of the states about his physical prowess in visiting every part. Not once did he falter. Not once did he faint. But prejudice must see what it must see.

Hence, they would turn the visual brio into infirmity. Some have said he should show his medical records. We should have a special medical council to reveal candidates’ health. I wonder in what planet they are inhabiting. If they cannot believe the facts of their eyes, is it the report of a shadowy committee? Those who hate Tinubu need no evidence to hate him. They just need him alive. Even if he dies, they will regret it. It would echo the lines of poet Walt Whitman, “My enemy is dead. A man divine like myself is dead.” When Nixon left office, he quipped, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” But he was still alive for kicking.

Those in the vanguard of Tinubu fake news are actually southerners who do not want to have a Yoruba candidate to support for 2023, especially if that candidate is one Bola Tinubu. They have been in the rear guard of anti-Buhari vitriol, especially because of his hegemonic policies. How could they live with a PDP that has hoisted a Fulani candidate in Atiku? To resolve their moral crisis, they saw a candidate, and viola! they found a hero. He is supposed to save them from hegemonic crisis. So they made common cause with the ethnic renegades who formed his core followers.

Such persons will not hear that he was mediocre as governor, that he divided tribe and faith under his watch, even repatriated non-indigenes, that he lies about what he achieved, that he fattens on statistical apocrypha, that he built a company while in office with one of our biggest supermarket. Even now that he is soliciting funds from his followers, no one remembers they regarded him as the no shishi candidate who is now milking them for chin chin. They won’t ask him to submit his offshore account. Let him make a sacrifice for his country. No. He must turn it into another entrepreneurial bombshell.

His followers, even those who call themselves intellectuals, would question every Tinubu claim, every ounce of success and doubt every evidence or even if he ever governed Lagos. Maybe Lagos is a myth like Atlantis. A newspaper reported his Chicago qualification. In spite of that, they are calling the university hoping to hear what they want to hear. As far as he is concerned, whatever he says, whatever he does, does not need the test of facts, but the poison of a cynic. They forget they have PHDs, or are professors. They are like the crowd in the Acts of Apostle, that “stopped their ears and charged forward.” Or Asahel, the soldier who looked neither right or left. It is one of the most potent stories in the Bible that few of our so-called prosperity and healing-obsessed clerics will never mine. A columnist who took him to Golgotha as chief executive is now his choirmaster. Another one who wrote a book to gospelise a sectional president has fraudulently tweaked the book and title for him. What a shame!

The protest against Tinubu is not about his health, or his ideas. It is about fear, not fact. But that other candidate’s followers and intellectuals so-called would not subject the man to facts, because it is not about what we want as a nation but who we should hate. It is not about him. It is against the man in Bourdillon. Many of them, in south-south and southeast, love Lagos but will not credit him. It is what psychologists call the fear of gratitude. They will not ask of their own states what they demand of Lagos.

In his crowds, we see less love than opprobrium. It is what Elias Canetti, the writer of Crowds and Power, attributes to religions that cry over a slain god. The Nobel laureate sees the crowds as originating from a “religion of lament.” He attributes it to faiths like Christianity. But critics have elaborated them to even secular crowds. Just as we are seeing today. Lament as a pathway to salvation.

As the campaigns warm up, let us follow what the Bible says, to prove all things and hold fast to that which is good. Not the twist of facts for tendentious mischief, like Bertrand Russell warned when he defined philosophy. He wrote that a square table can be looked at from a different angle and make us conclude that “there is no table after all.”

Henry Kissinger wrote a book titled: The Age of AI, and lamented how human nature, facts and civilisation are in crisis. Those who can read should pick up a copy. The 99-year-old set the world thinking. Maybe the czars of human eyesight can learn from this.  It’s one thing to see, and another to know and then another to understand. In the words of poet Shelley, we need the power to imagine what we know.

 

Someone said the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide sanwo-Olu, is on holiday, and I wonder what he meant. Some people need lessons in English language.

Of course, he is on holiday, and had time to look at the payroll, and rejig it and decide that he is raising workers’ pay.

When states cannot even pay what they have. It is only when you are robust and cruising, and crossing your I’s and T’s that you can raise salaries. As I noted at the TVC Breakfast show, whoever says it is for campaign purpose should raise his own salaries, too.

He worked hard to give himself the right to raise it. A farmer feeds his family on the fatness of the harvest. If it is cynical, wont every governor love to be this cynical? This is not to say he was cynical. But for those who claim it, let them come with their answer.

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He is Fruitful enough to earn the plaudits to be cynical. What a blessing. He is on holiday and he received 21st century trains that will transform not only the landscape of the city but redefine how we move. This is train acquired without borrowing. I don’t want to acknowledge who said it.

This column chooses those who deserve to be named. This fellow does not.

Governor Sanwo-Olu, keep being on holiday and changing things, while they wallow in hollow baits.

It is no easy thing to be named Iyiorcha Ayu. The man is still trying to free himself from the charge that he obtained a tip of a billion naira. The man is too dumbstruck to utter a word. He must be fretting over Nyesom Wike’s threat to escalate the revelation. And then, the escalation blew up from within. Ayu may have collected, but the alleged N1 billion in Lagos has turned out to be a tip of the iceberg.

A purse of about N10 billion suddenly evaporated. Haba! The spokesperson said it was to house its bigwigs. But how do you give money to a person who does not know why he got it? Then those persons kept the money and were already fantasising how to spend it, when they realised they had to refund. Only after this newspaper had revealed the truth as a wind blows open the hind feathers of a mother hen. Is this PDP’s DNA?

Can we forget what happened during Jonathan? When the national security adviser understood that the security of the pockets was a prime assignment of his fellows, and billions starting moving around, even the media was not spared the hurricane of free cash. Ayu is ONSA part two. Is that why Wike wants Ayu fired? If he can collect a princely sum, why can’t others collect measly cash? As measly as N28 million. What is good for Ayu is cooing for others in the party. Now, not many will be so heroic to refund. The party bigwigs need housing, eh?

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Indeed, they need to buy some of the houses the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu is building for first-time home owners in the city and the ones the trojan of works, Babatunde Fashola (SAN) has completed in parts of the country. They need to abandon their rented huts first.

We cannot have our big men remain homeless, not when there are billions wasting away in the party vault. Forget the masses, if we don’t house those who own houses in Ikoyi and Maitama, what example of prosperity shall we bequeath to the common folks? Maybe they want to live among the masses, and apply for three bed-room bungalows instead of the fifty-room complexes that no one occupies, since the kids are away in the west anyway.

Don’t tell me that some have converted some of the money to dollars and pounds and some of their kids are already shopping in Manhattan and Champs Elysees in Paris. Perish the thought.

 

 

As the campaigns begin, we should look outside. The world elite is failing this generation. Hence our candidates ought to learn, and voters ought to guard their PVCs. It is an age without vision or example. Its heroes are pigmy, its ideas a soap bubble, and its malice large. Conscience has retreated to tribe and tent, and crowds worship to disguise their worry. Faith has swapped temples when it has not swamped it. The leaders, though puny at heart, have lifted themselves above the earth like some Roman emperors, including Commodus and Julius Caesar. They are becoming gods in human flesh.

This is not a time to wish our leaders to travel. When they are not lounging at home, they are in an airport lounge. As the campaigns hoot off, I would have asked them to hop across the world and observe one great tragedy: this is an age of poor leaders.

The big nations are stumbling like humpty dumpty. This is happening both in the west and east. Just last week, Great Britain’s new prime minister Liz Truss came back to earth after bidding the queen farewell to heaven. And what a crash. It may defer her own crash, but not so the pound, her ratings, the mortgage crisis, and the fear the former great colonial metropolis faces an economic apocalypse. A woman voted in by less than two percent of the country developed a blueprint that is giving the country the blues. It’s Truss without trust. Her predecessor made a bravado of cunning. He got caught, and it ruffled him like his crown of hair.

The US is in the after-glow worm of Trump’s imperial sway, a man that turned barbarism into a virtue of state policy, and he is being cheered with animal glee. He lies to lie again, cheats with a smirk, bullies like a right and hates like an article of faith. Even a man who may be called a little Trump, known as Ron DeSantis, is turning imitation into a savage art. Recently, this governor of Florida lied to immigrants and dumped them in a no-man’s-land. It’s a small reminder of the Middle Passage of the slavery era.

In Brazil, we have an ex-soldier, Jair Bolsonaro, a fuddy-duddy as hoodlum on the throne and he is seeking a second term. He, too, is aping Trump, trying to raise bullying into the status of statecraft. The polls, I hope, are what they promise: a shellacking for him. He defied Covid leading to many deaths, damaged the economy and its green earth, turned a blind eye to corruption, and swaggered as though he owned the country.

In China, Premier Xi Jinping mismanaged COVID-19 pandemic and wanted to profit by it when it prostrated the rest of the world. He is shutting town after town and its soaring economy is unable to flap a nimble wing. He is turning his hubris on Taiwan and ratcheting up global tension of superpower fear with the United States.

Of course, we have Vladimir Putin, who has what I call Caligula complex, combining paranoia with megalomania. His troops have fallen flat in Ukraine, and David is now gloating over a big, lumbering Goliath.

The tragedy is not that these leaders rule without a clue. It is that they have a tribe of followers. They cheer. They rant. They abuse others who are not of their type, race or party. They line behind their leader without questioning.  Their leaders lie, they believe them. When they are used to believing lies, they too becoming like their leaders. They start lying, too, with the face of a hyena. We are witnessing that already here in Nigeria.  Stats are wrong. Economic analyses are wrong. Data is concocted. We cannot blame them for their ignorance. The level of education has fallen. It has also affected their ability to see with their eyes. The followers name fictions as people. People’s faces are not their faces. Someone’s son is not someone’s son. We should not blame the Maker for their lack of good sight. Maybe they have stayed in the sun for too long, or some form of malnourishment has affected their capacity for visual accuracy. We must do something about making fish available in our diet to enrich them with the right vitamins, so some do not see a short man and call him a giant, or see Hamzats in the wrong places, or think one bald man they know must be any bald man in a picture, especially in a hospital with a white woman. Their bad sights make them fulfil Shakespeare’s mockery in a question, “But are not some whole that we want to make sick?”

We need bold vision, not bald vision.

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They have no ideology or game plan. hen they do, it is about tossing the other guy, impoverishing the weak, and enthroning a set of people to the agony of others. Putin is in a desperate condition. He called a sham poll in a region to annex cities he knows he cannot defend. He wants to scare the Ukrainians on pain of nuclear blast. That is a coward’s line. They are turning upside down the point of playwright Jean Paul Sartre that “hell is other people.”

We must look for people who have done things. Those who cannot be fly-by-night. Those who do not lie about their past and their followers have no clue what is true or not but are hiding behind him to pursue a furtive agenda.

If we had a Putin, we have also a Zelensky, a man who has a clear vision on how to win a war for the people. Not a rabble rouser who knows that he has followers like the ladies in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. During a parade, some women hail Caesar with such zest that a mutineer called Casca says, “If Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less.” Trump said similar things about his supporters. It’s like Jesus’ caution about blind leaders leading the blind into a ditch.

This election should be about reason, not wild sentiment.

Travel may not help our leaders if they go abroad and see the puny leaders on the world stage. We may consider one of the wisest men who ever lived and regarded as the father of modern philosophy. Immanuel Kant, that is. His eye never spied past sixty miles of his village his whole life.

Another writer, the tempestuous Emile Zola of the Dreyfus case, said, “Nothing develops intelligence like travel.” He knew about that. He fattened on exile even as he churned out a 21-novel series on one family. We had an Ajala, who scanned the earth but had no other story to tell us than that he scanned the earth.

So, travel is neither good nor bad. It is not the body that travels but the mind. Some travel, as they read books, to confirm their lies or absorb new landscapes of ideas. It may not be true after all, as Nobel Laureate Olga Takarczuk wrote in her novel Flights, that “barbarians don’t travel.”

Let our leaders’ minds travel with vision.

History, as a course of study, haunts every day. We witness this awful theatre when a leader goofs, when the county hurtles to a fiery point, when a governor fumbles, when a political party stumbles. It mocks and weeps every moment. But even history mocks us when we look at it and do not see. It is the big, bright blindness, like walking into a galaxy and unable to pick out an object with our eyes.

I also celebrate the Lagos State Governor, the BOS, Babajide Sanwo-Olu for bringing back history studies in Lagos.

I therefore dedicate today, as a graduate of history at Ife, to all my history teachers, beginning from high school. Although I remember one Mr. Faturoti at Methodist Primary School, Ibadan, who first gave us a poignant hint about the study of the past, about the imperial absurdity of Mungo Park, who claimed to discover River Niger while all the local fishermen and travellers, from generation to generation, did not know they had a river they fished from and a canoe that splashed on its waves from place to place.

I recall three history teachers at Government College, Ughelli, who immersed us in the cunning, comedy and tragedy of the past. The first was Emeka Anyaoku, no relation of the Commonwealth leader. I recall him, wielding our history book, authored by Ifeka and Stride, and striding from side to side, speaking rhythmically about the Old Oyo and Kanem Borno empires, and spicing it with humour, wit and anecdotes, including a dose here and there of pidgin English. His foray into pidgin emphasised his insistence on flawless writing. Kudos to him. Two prepared us for WASCE. The first was Eshareturi, a smallish, charismatic man whose elocution seemed bred in Buckingham Palace. He taught us 18th and 19th century West Africa History, and loved the dissections, play of heroes and villains, the chemistry of forces, the climaxes. I recall when he spoke about the formation of Sierra Leone and Liberia. He then distilled a point, rose from his desk and said, “Let us call it the humanitarian factor.” He wrote it on the blackboard in his cursive style. It was from him we first learned of Lord Mansfield and his judgment of 1772 that put paid to slavery on English soil. I doff my hat.

Teacher Edenya was our last teacher. Short and spry, he never sat down until our last class session answering our questions before the exam. He and Eshareturi marked WAEC exams. He apparently smoked and ate quite a few kola nuts. His right hand was shaped like one wielding a cigarette and his lips always smacked as though simultaneously enjoying and getting rid of the last taste of the fruit. His poppysmic became a mainstay of his rhetoric. Edenya was a master of the past. I can hear him now swaying from window to window, reeling out story after story. I recall especially his narrative of the Niger Delta city states, Dappa Pepple House, the drama of the boy king, the impudence of trade and colonial seed. I recall his story about the anarchy and nation building of the Yoruba Wars, the so-called Benin Massacre, his clarification of Islam being the “official majority” of the Sokoto Caliphate. Those who did not insert the word official in their essays were penalised. While Dan Fodio prevailed, the vast majority of the people were still not Muslim. I bow to him!

Next stop Ife: how many can I recall. First was Femi Omosini, dashing with a rhetorical fluidity. The Cambridge graduate did not hold notes, but he dictated for a full hour about the social and intellectual history of Europe. It was a mellifluous feast. Hear him: “By the 16th century therefore, feudalism had declined, and the philosophy of monarchical centralisation started to give way to that of feudal local independence.” Enjoy again: “The pope had become extremely worldly. He wined and dined with secular authorities and he bargained openly for the expansion of papal territories.” And again, “The Holy Roman Empire became neither holy nor Roman.” All of this without a note pad in his hands. I salute you sir.

The next was Olomola, a fiery teacher with lots of quotes in his head. He would for instance tell us of the Jukun kingdom, and he said historian Margery Perham, who had heard of the exploits of the Kwororofa, expected to see the magnificence of an empire. But when she visited it, she found goats walking beside huts under a hot sun, and “she said, quote, an exaggerated glory. End quote.” He prefaced every quote by saying ‘quote’ and ended every quote by saying ‘end quote.’ I feel blessed to quote you.

Of course, I cannot forget A.A. Akinjogbin, a paternal figure in class, who loved to teach history as though telling it to his children.  We read him in secondary school with Adu Boahen. He had a soft voice and paid attention to detail as he broke open the era of slavery in African society and urged us not to over-glorify our past while holding the west’s feet to the fire. But black slaves had rights, he always emphasised. He showed how Africa and Europe were at a certain time on the same level technologically and economically. So, enamoured of him was I that I sponsored essay competitions in his memory at Ife. May your glory flower on.

I quoted B. Oloruntimehin last week. Always in his French suit, he taught with a sort of sardonic flourish, and we learned not only history but historiography from him. He freed us from received narratives. For instance, why do we call the British rule indirect when they were responsible for the major disruption in the societies. Just because they placed rulers in charge was not indirect since they took orders from the British. It is like saying the CEO of a company rules the company indirectly because he has sales and personnel managers. I was to read later in life that the English had imposed it on the Irish during the reign of James I.  It is the rhetoric of deceit. It is such turn of mind that made him tell us that “The abolition of slave trade was an act of enlightened self-interest by the Europeans to give the Africans a new role in the international economic system.” Bouquets on your casket.

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Professor Richard Olaniyan opened America to me, and it was such a marvel to attend his class. He spoke with such energy unveiling the dynamics of the Americas, the majesty, flaws and humanism of its founding fathers. Such names as Jefferson, Washington, Patrick Henry, Madison, Adams, et al, came alive, and made me fan of its history. Eternal gratitude, sir.

I end these tributes with Professor Anjorin, who unveiled 20th century world history. The world wars, Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, the savagery of a century and its embalmed heroes enchanted his class. He was such an avuncular fellow, if even fatherly. Once I challenged him on a point and my fellow students whispered that “Sam is trying to challenge Baba.” My naivety paid off. He appreciated my petulance of a curiosity. He did me no harm. His harm was exaggerated by his students. He was a gentleman.

We should learn from the past. It teaches us to bring memory to the salvation of the moment. We are seeing its deficiency today. When Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike said Atiku turned his back on Jonathan because he said it was the north’s turn, it was only recent memory. Yet few remember. So some of us also are reminding peripatetic Atiku how pathetic that his party corralled it for the north in 2019, and no southern candidate ran for it. Now, he acts as though it never happened. If we recalled history, Ayu would not even run for any party office since all his resume is about how he was fired from office to office. Now, he is facing another firing. He seems in love with it, especially if we add the charge that he got N1 billion  largesse for doing nothing. The firing hanging over his head has not put him in the frame of mind to rebut the allegation from the scratchy voice of the Rivers man. He needs to clear the air. If not, EFCC should let us know if it was in pounds or dollars, so we know how our currency is going downhill.

It is this lack of history that made some to forget that a certain candidate was a governor for eight years with nothing to show. They forget that the one that has something to show they want to deny. Hence, Shakespeare in his play The Tempest, mocked such people who “make a sinner of memory to credit a lie.” We need to salvage our memory. If we cannot remember what happened just five years ago, or 20 years ago, how can we know when “the rain started to beat us?” And how to get dry?  It is the jolt of the past. It is the same thing that led some of us to forget that our wealth made the British crown a marvel. The marvel was our forebears who the British cudgelled to death. In the queen, we hailed our tyrants. Like the character, also in The Tempest, who says, “How fine my master is.”

It is because of our lack of history that we ask people what they want to do instead what they have done as election guide. Rather than resume, we stress “presum-e.” Presumption must not derive from assumptions but from facts. Contempt for facts is driving PDP into factions. Few recall that while history is repeating itself in PDP, it is denying another history. The New PDP arose in a similar storm that reinforced APC. What we have is an N-PDP without a split, a faction without dismemberment.

As the campaign starts, we should embrace history. Not to follow those revisionists who exposed a hypocrite yesterday but have now espoused him and banded together only because they hail from the same tent. It is about resume first before “presum-e.”

The was not just a woman, but high-born. Above that, she was a royal. Not just a royal but a blue-blood on a peacock throne. More than that, she was the queen of England. And being that, she was the first queen of the world.

But since Queen Elizabeth II passed on, so many other hearts have stopped. Low and high in society from beggar to chief. So many tears and eulogies that only their families, locals and hospitals shed and hear. They are, however, puny tragedies tucked inside the sackcloth for the queen. Even in death, Queen Elizabeth II flogs the commoner. As Shakespeare wrote, “When beggars die, there are no comets seen. The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

The whole world is paying what many call respects. When the mourners say it, their faces tremble and their voices swoon, and it comes across more like veneration. If you look at the pilgrimages, the long queues, solemn and patient, it is not just respect, not just veneration, but adoration. It is her worshipful majesty. They are not just there to say good night to their queen. It is as though it is a religious rite, not a moment for obsequies, but a time to bow and mumble words, private like a prayer. Even reporters are calling it vigil, as though an evocation of the women waiting for the Lord Jesus to reawaken.

When was the last time anyone gathered like that for a god, or for a spirit from on high?  In the words of Russian poet Mayakovsky “There is no one more alive” today than the queen. The Russian poet penned those lines for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, when the whole of Russia quaked over the passing of their revolutionary.

When I saw the Elizabethan pilgrimages, Mayakovsky’s poem came vaguely to mind. I had last read it in 1989 when I was a reporter with the African Concord. I read only an extract quoted at the end of a big tome of a biography on the Russian avatar. I quickly searched for it in my library. No dice. Someone again must have filched it away. Google rescued it.

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The poet objected to deifying his hero. Just like this essayist does today even as her last journey begins from the blush of dawn.

In Africa, we have made gods out of men and women. In Yorubaland, we know of the fiery Ogun and Sango, of Yemoja, et al. They live as legends but die as gods. People saw Awo in the moon. In Europe though, legends cannot transform into deities. They are too materialist for that, even if they follow celebrities like worshippers without the mystical. They secularise the sacred like in Achebe’s Arrow of God. As Mayakovsky writes, “no sagas, no epics, no myths/ all extinct.”

Yet, the West still elevates the woman and want to deprive us of the chance to humanise her.  They want to defang her of all sins. It is like a scene in Aristophanes play, The Acharnians when a pacifist takes all the parphenalia of Euripides’ tragic plays, including the rags. So the playwright is no longer a man of tragedy. He is free of all sins. But  we remember though that Queen Elizabeth was of the Windsor stock, that she was the second Elizabeth on the throne, that she rode on a carriage of gold that can cure poverty, if liquidated, in parts of the world, that her family made us die or scream as slaves in their plantation, that she mounted a handsome wealth based on black blood and treasure. Our red blood rarefied her blue.

She never apologised for her forbears and our forbearance. Nor do we want apologies. She loved the Commonwealth, especially the games. It was the classic mea culpa of England, a tranquiliser to dull us to the tyrannies of colonialism. We play together, win medals together and even cherish the illusion of beating their athletes. What a revenge, eh? There is a well in Badagry that local chiefs made for the whites so our ancestors drank from it before their journey of no return. Any slaves who slaked a thirst with the water forgot their pain and forswore any protest against the white man’s savagery. Anyone can visit it today. The BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu has remodelled the whole museum, an awakening that we should take our history seriously. The Badagry well of meekness is like the Commonwealth, a lie of an institution to salve the white conscience, like Mary Slessor teaching us love our twins after her folks exploited Christ to subvert our harmonies.

Count me out of the obsequies. She was a nice woman, but not nice enough for me. She was stately, polished and exuded grandeur. Our ancestors guaranteed her a life of the debonair. She presided over enough wealth to be nice. She might have asked the kingdom to give them back, in substantial amount into a trust but not to the thieving African governments. The Commonwealth could turn the trust to build roads, schools, scholarships, hospitals and create business opportunities. That is the only pardon we want. Not the meretricious glory of an obsequy. Not the pageant of dignitaries she received every other day to soothe her conscience. This soothing of conscience has been here for long. My teacher of blessed memory, Professor B. O. Oloruntimehin stated that, “the abolition of slave trade was an act of enlightened self-interest by the Europeans to give the Africans a new role in the international economic system.” They didn’t abolish it as penance but as a cynical overhaul of international commerce. We now gave them raw materials for their industrial magnificence. After all, they sent the missionaries to help them continue slavery with a godly face, so as to soften the negroes to conform. Joseph Conrad called them “messengers of the might within the land, bearers of the spark from the sacred fire…” in his fraught classic Heart of Darkness.

Their writers did same their own mea culpa, including the elegant Jane Austen in her novels Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. In fact, Mansfield Park was a tribute to the Chief Justice Mansfield, who ruled in 1772 against continuing slavery on English soil. Charlotte Bronte also haunts us with the slave woman’s cry from the attic in her novel Jane Eyre, a visceral decibel that inspired another novel, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.

They can celebrate Elizabeth but they should remember M.K.O. Abiola,  who saw through the haughty mist and called for reparations. The royals have money they can never spend. Royal ethics forbids any conspicuous consumption or the owambe vanity. They just watch their money grow, while the source of their abundance suffers. No excuse for our bad leadership over the years. But what is our is ours. Barclays Bank apologised. The Church of England has apologised for encouraging the rape and rapine of slavery by saying blacks had no soul. Yet, they encouraged missionaries like Slessor to teach the gospel. To win souls that didn’t exist? What hypocrisy.

So, while what Mayakovsky describes as “the honeyed incense of homage and publicity” goes on, they should not blind us to her essential humanity and the whited sepulchre of the monarchy.

Atiku Abubakar wanted to divert attention from the turmoil within by gathering some media men and business interests in Lagos. Agenda: his manifesto. I thought he had something sudden, something disruptive to offer. The most amusing was his pledge to unify Nigeria. Of course, the nation has turned into a camp of many tents. “To your tents Oh tribes” is a refrain that rends our souls. But who to do that? Atiku? A man who cannot bring his party together? A physician that cannot heal himself? His candidacy has thrown the party into a chaos of cards. In his visit to Oyo State governor Seyi Makinde, he brandished the party law as more important than the removal of Ayu as chairman. He did not know there was a party law when he collapsed zoning for his personal ambition before the primaries. The nomadic politician is playing Pharisee conveniently and the bravado of guilt. He is now a man of law and not of men. What a performance. Any way, it seems peace is an illusion now. Wike and his party, no pun intended, will cohabit with Atiku in a bed of thorns.

His pledge for MSMEs sounds sound but it is neither original nor grounded in rigour. What are the monetarist and/or fiscal underpinnings to this policy? What philosophy other than to just dole out money? His federalism idea he aped from his days with the progressives. He wants to be the imitator who wants to claim the original. Not so fast.

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The difference between men like him and his labouring friend is that they want to sell themselves based on what they want to do. The APC candidate is a double barrel. He is selling his candidacy on what he has done as a testimonial for what he can do. Worlds apart from his peers.

Hence some could not fault a recent documentary on Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. Rather they screamed, ululated, and howled like the night owl over fantasies of his personality. Did he revolutionise Lagos financing, did he change the security architecture, did he make the Eko Atlantic into a modern city out of a looming environmental disaster, Does the Eko Atlantic alone not make more wealth that many states put together including Adamawa and Anambra, did he clean up the environment, did he create LAMATA, BRT, LASTMA, did he set the agenda for the trains that are about to cruise through the city, thanks to Gov. Sanwo-Olu, did he make men, etc.? As a prophet in the Bible said, if you don’t have anything to controvert what you have heard, hold your peace.