Category: Sam Omatseye

A very generation has a knack for throwing up men like Nyesom Wike. Without him, we will yawn and yearn like disappointed moviegoers. He has all the ingredients of a movie star. He can make you laugh, smile, gripe, curse, keel over your seat in either praise or rage. He at once can play comedian and Doctor Death. When he makes you laugh, you will take an inventory of your ribs after the quake. When he drives you into temper, you will clasp your blood pressure monitor. You want to hug and choke him at the same time.

When you want to watch a video clip, you are tempted to get a glass of beer or fruit wine and a doughnut. It is entertainment without charges. But then, you know the man is not joking, and that is why he tickles some and taunts others. He is not like a few comedians we have had in the past. Not like the man in Benue, who lay down on the floor in supine veneration. Not like acts like Fayose and his neck brace. Not like the fellow who fainted over money charges in the national assembly. Not like Barkin Zuwo’s appropriation of government house for government money. Those were one-and-ashy moments. The episodes popped and expired.  Samuel Ortom might have competed but his act looks opportunistic and corny. Hence, he would rather befriend the master than be one. Recently, Ortom turned spiritual over Wike on Atiku and retreated into a holy of holies before coming out for air.

We had men like K.O. Mbadiwe, but even he was more for effect than substance. He had no executive power, no brawn on street and boardroom. Other than that, K.O. was Ok. Wike is a quintessence of humour and action, and a lot more.

We are seeing that now in his PDP and Atiku Abubakar. The man is not happy but somehow he finds a way to amuse. And annoy. Even his silence was like a thriller after the man complained of unrequited love at the PDP primary. Many wanted to hear more. And see more. He said nothing. He did silence. Nothing, happened. Nothing became substance. The theatre moved from the actor to the audience. It was not the Rivers State governor who took over the stage. It was a blend of what the German playwright Bertolt Brecht called alienation effect and Ola Rotimi’s concept of theatre as religious ecstasy or Aristotelian catharsis. But no ecstasy came, and the alienation was not even clear-cut. It was his foes and allies playing and saying. Wike was angry. Wike was leaving the party. Wike was in Honolulu. Wike was already working with the APC.

Then we saw the man materialise at the Port Harcourt airport, and the egg broke. He was trim. Not the Wike of old who combined big girth with big tongue. He looked healthy and earthy, his goggle dark with omen, his gait straight and rhythmic. He had a roughneck dignity, at once a fighter and peacemaker, being something of each. Then he spoke. His scratchy voice and defiant mien emphasised the sobriety of the hour.

He lashed out, and Atiku became a butt of his fury. We knew that all was not well with the PDP because all was not well with Wike. We now saw that it was a duel of brothers. Atiku had granted an interview in which he implied that Wike could not deliver. That he preferred Okowa, who bludgeoned over N200 billion from a moronic state house of assembly without a debate. The same man who is leaving the state without an enduring legacy other than few roads of no consequential power for quality of life in the state. The man whose party members are running because fire is gutting the rooftops. The same who asked his men to abandon a gentlemen’s pact that the president must come from the south. He played quisling to his region for a mess of vice-presidential porridge.

Atiku did not know how to speak. He dented the man rather than amend. He did not help matters when he said later that his party would win without Wike. Yet at last, they broke the ice. Both men met. Breaking the ice does not mean the parts of the ice will melt. If the temperature is still low, the men will still live with glaciers in their hearts.

Some say Wike was acting out of self-interest. Others say he was acting out of principle. There is always self-interest in principle and principle in self-interest. The matter is sometimes reduced to fighting egos. That is possible. But Wike has given the party conditions. One big sore thumb may be the resignation of Iyorchia Ayu as chairman, a man who has always been fired from any job he had since he was senate president. Is he about to be fired as a septuagenarian? But Wike also complained that the party was too north heavy, including its Board of Trustees. One would wonder how a party that cannot keep a pact with itself keep a pact with a nation. It was that lack of faith that led Atiku to win the party slot against its zoning policy. Atiku has always been a man seeking the sweet pie anywhere he sniffs it.

Wike also was part angry because he was the southern Christian candidate close enough to win. He blamed Sokoto State Governor Aminu Tambuwal less than his southern colleagues who made it possible for Tambuwal to give the decisive vote. As political historians from Taciturn to Gibbons have shown, the outsider cannot get you if the insider does not pave the way. In his The Prince, Machiavelli said the outside powers invade and thrive because insiders sell out.

The Christian Association of Nigeria did not see their hypocrisy when they fought for a Christian Vice president from the north in the APC when Wike, as a southern Christian for President, was rigged out by his fellow southern Christian delegates. They wanted to be the bottom instead of the top unlike Moses’ prophetic injunction in the book of Deuteronomy. CAN should spend more time reading the Bible and inspiring their folks to holiness than touching the unclean thing.

The party must make peace with Wike. If they say it is his personal ambition, he has a right to it and a right to fume for being abandoned at his opportune hour. That is where principle meets interests. Don’t forget that many benefitted from him, and they used to call PDP Wike Inc. He was aware of this when he dismissed Tantalus-chasing Edo PDP chieftains as “tax collectors.”

It is time not for tuneless bray at the man. They should, in the words of Greek playwright Euripides in his play Alcestis make him a herdsman in their pastures, “piping to your flocks over the sloping hills tunes to stir their hearts to wedlock.” However, I don’t see any wedlock in the offing. I see more of the defiance of the wedlock of the gods, apology to playwright Zulu Sofola. The best scenario is odd propriety of a cold war, an air of adversarial politeness. Novelist Sembene Ousmane calls it “the perfidy of words and the hypocrisy of rivals. Wike has dared them by asking the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu and Tambuwal’s foe, Aliyu Wammako to inaugurate projects in his state. It is a grudge match.

The two major parties now have their campaign councils, and we seem set for the battle of the elephants. The choice of Simon Lalong pits against Seyi Makinde as the possible point man. Lalong’s choice embraces competence, but it also points to an assuaging of the Christian thirst in the north. Where is Babachir Lawal? Where is Yakubu Dogara? They wanted vice president and lost it and then lost their heads. They now have neither VP nor DG. They created a phantom body, Northern APC Christians that is neither known to law or even the APC. Where is their registration certificate? Where are their meeting minutes? It was opportunism. Lalong has track record of democratic battles. He was speaker of the State House Assembly when he and his colleagues duelled Obasanjo to the death to uphold the constitution against the days of presidential bully. He also dethroned two generals. In his first bid he faced an Air commodore, that is David Jang. In his second term bid, he trounced General Jerry Useni, who has switched his jeremiad to Jang where they are fighting to be party lord. The Plateau State PDP is going to battle with a divided House, thanks to the martial prowess of a lawyer named Lalong. Makinde, and some say Oyinlola, will be trying to win in a southwest where Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has a commanding presence.

The choice of Festus Keyamo, Dele Alake, et al will be against Dino Melaye and Daniel Bwala. It is a battle between a clinical, cerebral, hard-hitting lawyer against a fighting comedian, if sometimes in love with barbarian hubris. Keyamo beats him. Bwala is amusing as someone who is like his master Atiku swinging from party to party looking for the elusive sweet pie. He left APC when he was defending the party before his sudden about-face. Like his master, he is playing politics without roots.

It is a quiet onslaught against the enemy at the door. In these days of stealth attacks and the rage of bandits, the great unknown is the identity. If we can trace where you buy and where you  work, we can catch you when you strike. Hence we cannot underestimate what the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, is doing by introducing a smart card that will mark every Lagosian with an ID. It is not a dumb one like the type we now have with the federal. This one codifies your activity and doings in such a way that you are integrated into the system.

It is billed as documenting your daily lives and interaction with government and public services, but it also creates a community that shields us while keeping tabs of the others, especially those on the fringes. It also covers the gamut of financial services and mobility. It is the beginning of a revolution of security, if sustained. It is a potent intelligence against the thief and burglar of our peace. It is pathway to modernity.

As Lagos has always being the pioneer of ideas in the polity, I hope this prescient innovation spreads and we can learn from it and reap as a nation.

From the effusions of the Christian Association of Nigeria, you would think we are living in a theocracy. They want to subvert Nigeria into God’s Own Country, a spoof of the United States’ self-congratulatory appropriation of the term. These self-styled Christian soldiers want to make this country a Bible belt without following the Bible scent. Nobody sent them from heaven.

They throw dirt. They reinvent hell. They make monsters of fellow mortals. They look askance at those who are not of our faith. They have, in their rhetoric and acts, created their own versions of Saint Augustine’s City of God.

Yet even the old bard of God did not espouse bigotry. Augustine never extoled a world where non-believers had no airings or hearing. This is what we have seen in their outcry over the Tinubu-Shettima ticket. But we are witnessing their wet dreams of a Christian inquisition. They want to crucify Tinubu or hang Shettima at the stakes. They are evincing the sort of racial rage of America’s Jim Crow era when whites ritualised the execution of black men after church. They go to church, chant hallelujah and amen, then go outside to ogle bullets as they dissolve black lives in blood and tears. For them, it is like a matinee, or family barbecue, grilled in the indignant coal dust of white fire.

They forget that Nigeria is a secular state. Nigeria is not a Christian state. It is neither a Muslim state. So, skewing the Christian pulpit to impugn a political party flirts with the law. They are not supposed to endorse a party, or desecrate another as they are doing. A pastor violates the law when he asks his folks to vote one party against another.

Of course, we cannot live as hostages in this world. So as Christians, we must engage. But not acting as bare-faced partisans. The law is not ambiguous on it. As lawyer Jiti Ogunye notes, some CAN members are flying in the face of the law. At the TVC Breakfast show last week, I warned that CAN can be sued for breaking the law and inciting Nigerians on the basis of religion. The Electoral Law says, in section 97 (1) that “A candidate, person or association who engages in campaigning or broadcasting based on religious, tribal or sectional reason for the purpose of promoting or opposing a particular party or the election of a particular candidate, commits an offence under this Act and is liable on conviction…”

It anoints the separation of church and state. CAN has fallen foul of this. They should refrain from a faecal stain in our communal pool. The Christian does not make enemies but follows peace with all men. Jesus gave us enough examples. Look at the Samaritan woman. Jacob’s well is an enduring metaphor of betrothal, but with Jesus it is outreach between the Jew and non-Jew, and the miracles that come out of it. Paul advances it by saying a person is a “Jew inwardly,” and not by appearance. Abraham’s children, Paul said, are not by blood but by faith. We are neither Jew nor Greek, but one. He opens the Christian arm. It’s not a call to arms. Hence Christ said let the wheat and tares dwell together. Jesus himself said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, then will my servants fight.”

What CAN does is the opposite. They make the Muslim a devil. By their hysteria, CAN is bonding the Muslims. Rather CAN should follow the Psalmist advice: “How good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.”

CAN is pharisaic. When the PDP chose a northern Muslim over a southern Christian, they said nothing. They were dead from the neck up. They also kept mum on the geo-political injustice. Now, they would rather have a northern Christian as number two, than a southern Christian as president and number one. So, they ignored Wike, a southern Christian, when a Muslim pooh-poohed him. But they are crying like hyenas for a northern Christian to play second fiddle. CAN is discriminating against the southern Christian. That is why CAN is described as the political wing of the PDP.

Other than defying the law, they are defiling the solemn oath of Christ. What they should do is to pursue the higher virtues of love, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. They should preach against corruption, lies and hypocrisy. Such agenda aims at Saint Augustine’s bull’s eye of the City of God. America’s Christian Right advances their own platforms, sometimes simplified as God, guns and gays. They have sullied the scriptures with their culture. German Christian Democratic Party furthers conservative policies but never carry the bible or cross the campaign grounds. Angela Merkel never quoted the Bible in public and was more open to Muslim immigrants than many of our CAN behemoths.

CAN should ape Moses who leaned over to learn from his in-law Jethro, a non-Jew, on how to govern.

The 30 men of God who attended Shettima’s unveiling as vice president is no big deal. Some tarnish them as mechanics, carpenters, et al. The media, without investigation, fell into the mania. Have they identified one after the other and said, Bishop so-and-so, is not a bishop but runs a mechanic workshop at Mushin? No such rigour. The media ignored the unveiling of the unveiling at the event. That is, Shettima’s adopted son Paul Ojukwu. None can say Paul is no Christian. No Biafran can deny the name Ojukwu. Name a southern Christian governor who can huff over adopting a northern Muslim he met at a shop, saw his talent, adopted him, sponsored him to acquire a bachelor’s degree, two master’s degrees and is placing him on the cusp of a PHD? Who can boast a cross-pollinated feat such as Shettima’s? many self-pollinate. CAN may see it as contamination because they have not commented yet.

CAN must learn to follow Christ and touch souls rather than torch crisis. CAN should move from the hustings to the Bible and research the sons of Issachar, who aligned with the right leaders because they read, like Christ enjoined later, the signs of the times. They knew David would be king before others.

I doff my heart to a true professional, Mike Awoyinfa, who just turned 70. Men like him are rare in a profession.

He has brought a revolutionary flair to his trade. He literally gave us a new journalism when he became editor of Weekend Concord. He injected an edgy, vibrant tone to news. He is unmatched in headline casting, giving it a joyous magnificence.

Whoever saw Mike’s headline can compare it to a box of candies. He knows how to make something out of nothing in news and he does not fear to humble the powerful.

In this age of bigotry, his best friend, an Igbo, was the blessed Dimgba Igwe, a man who was a twin to him and lived next door until death snatched the great Dimgba.

Mike is a great human being, a soulful columnist, a man of letters.

May he continue to flourish.

In an interview last week, PDP presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar made himself an open Pharisee when he said he did not like a Muslim in the north to be on the APC ticket.

Who is he to talk about fairness or balancing? If he wanted fairness, why did he rig a southern Christian out of the ticket out of ambition? But for a mockery of balancing, he would not be the PDP flag-bearer.

He rigged the system in his own favour and enlisted a southern quisling like Ifeanyi Okowa to rid a southern candidate like Wike. He is a stranger to principles, except to parrot dead-eyed ideas and hop like a whore from party to party.

He lied on television, saying he didn’t support Tinubu in their earlier incarnation in AC  because of Muslim-Muslim ticket. He thinks we have no memory that he envied Kingibe when he paired with Abiola.

Atiku lobbied in vain to be on a Muslim-Muslim ticket. Even his anaemic rebuttal of Tinubu’s onslaught ran shy of the topic. He didn’t get the slot from MKO. He should deny and let all those, including witnesses like reporters and politicians, expose his tendentious lies. The ghost of Shehu Yar’Adua, who nominated him will choke his night sleep.

He wanted to soar as a historian and intellectual but goofed big time. His interviewers could not correct him that Abraham Lincoln didn’t fail any bid for U.S. president. Atiku also showed himself a dubious public servant when he paired with Yar-Adua to set up a business when still a customs officer. He might have been fired if it can be done retroactively. So, he flunked his history, flunked morality test, tumbled to the ground in the world of ideas. And he wants to be president? He should ask Okowa how he secured his rubberstamp assembly to get him N270 billion loan without any reading or legislative scrutiny. What governor! What morons of an assembly! No due process. Nothing in the interview provoked anyone to deep thought or messianic hope about our country. Maybe he did not get the right questions, but he, for sure, did not give a good answer for Nigerians about jobs, power, peace and coexistence. He cannot even balance his party now with governors not willing to campaign for him. He cannot even walk to Wike’s door and expect the hoarse dramatist not to yell him out of the neighbourhood.

Atiku is still the old Atiku, without originality. He needs to intoxicate us with audacity. Rather, he sterilised the hour he was on air. He has done little in his biography to inspire. Even his interview did not redeem him.  The time will come in the coming weeks and months to dissect this man who is making himself a desperado without desiderata.

Unless we love the truth, we cannot know it,” Blaise Paschal.

Some have mounted a firewall against the truth about Kashim Shettima. They may hear the fact, but they go deaf. When they see it, they go blind. Like Prophet Daniel, when they read it, they don’t understand. When they feel, they become like Apostle Paul’s prophesy about this age and men whose consciences have been pierced with a hot iron.

The SSS under an adversarial Jonathan government reported in 2012 that the militant Kabiru Sokoto came to Government House to kidnap Shettima’s children. He failed. Shettima was the governor of Borno then and he ferreted his children out of sight. If he was part of them, why did they want his kids? They attacked his convoy. Boko Haram leader Shekau named him among their wanted men. All of these made headlines.

In another instance, I unearthed a footage from a 2017 interview I had with him in Eko Hotel when I interrogated him on the Christians under his watch. No one knew this day would come when his tolerance will endure bigoted scrutiny. The footage is now viral. In it, he confirmed the testimonies of the Borno CAN chairman, Mohammed. Boko Haram torched churches to ashes. Shettima rebuilt. Sixteen of them rose out of the ruins. He had Christian perm secs and commissioners, an Igbo and Urhobo men as advisers. All of these were firsts in Borno history, virginal in the north. He sent the state pastors on pilgrimage, and devoted special funds for displaced Christians. His personal chef was a man named Peter, from Cross River, and he followed him to his home in Abuja. He trains his children. This could be testimonies of a Christian governor, but how many governors who profess Christ have this pious fortitude, or anything close to his empathy. He paid the Christians personal visits.

They want to give him a bad name in order to hang him. In their obsession with what they call Muslim-Muslim ticket, they are not peering his soul but his robe. Yet in their Bibles, Jesus says “Judge not according to appearance. Judge righteous judgment.”

The outcry over his candidacy is all about hypocrisy. See Edo State, for instance, a minority Muslim population thrives. Yet, it has Christian governor, deputy. No tears seen. There is no southern state without a Muslim minority, no matter how little. The noise by men like Babachir Lawal about a Christian minority in the north is self-serving. Some of the clerics have no justice in their churches. They fleece their followers, kiss the skies with their private jets, lap in mansions abroad and cocoon off-shore accounts as well as investments in blue-chip companies flush with tithes and offerings. Hence, Apostle Peter warned the flocks that they will make “merchandise of you.” They have become priests of politics instead of shepherds of erring souls.

If they cared about the country, why did they not make a heckle over PDP’s choice of a northern presidential candidate and party chairman? Is that also not a show of injustice? Is that not defiance of balance?

Those who dismiss the 1993 Abiola-Kingibe ticket have a negative mindset. They invoke the demons of our past rather than the angels. If it worked then, why should it not work now? When we recall that even in this country a Muslim prime minister and deputy were Muslims in the First Republic, a Yakubu Gowon, Admiral Wey and David Ejoor were Christians or that Buhari and Idiagbon were Fulani Muslims, they point to the fragile ethno-religious tension of today as if we never had it in those years. As if we never had Zango-Kataf, or we never had Maitatsine, or OIC.

We cannot live outside our past. Great nations borrow from their great ages and invoke them for a renaissance. The age of Renaissance was about that, a fervour to rake Europe out of a straitjacket of bigotry and warfare. The Renaissance gave us The Christian Reformation with Martin Luther, Calvin, et al. The founding fathers of the United States also burrowed the democracy of the Greek age. Men like Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams revived their visions and wrote newspaper articles under pseudonyms of the Greek philosophers. Today, their leaders whip up the air of their greats like Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt. It is the value of history. We do not take an oedipal view of history by killing our fathers. We filter their virtues. The Sophocles’ Greek tragedy adapted by Ola Rotimi for our circumstance only tells us that we can only run away from our past at our own peril. Soren Kierkegaard, the existential philosopher who was enamoured of Christian faith, noted that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forward.” As American writer William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner was following a tradition of time concepts that harks back to men like Plato, Saint Augustine and even the French philosophes. That’s how all things become new. Time is what or when you make it. Soyinka tapped into it in his essay, When Is A Nation.

We have to decide whether we want a country where the confession of the faith will not matter except the content of their character and quality of their vision. It is not strange to us, not revolutionary. We only need to dredge it up and enjoy. If we had a Gowon-Wey combo, we can have Christian-Christian. If we had Buhari-Idiagbon, we can have Muslim-Muslim. When that happens, it will not be described as such, but as a Nigerian-Nigerian ticket. That is how I began that narrative a few weeks ago. We gave birth to prejudice by skewing and skewering us with the foul term. It is sometimes called rhetoric of discourse, a term coined from Michel Foucault.  Was it not in this country, in Jos, where Christians and Muslims celebrated Sallah and Christmas together as godsend? Not long ago, we had a debate over sukuk loan and Islamic banking, and Christian bigots opened spigots of prejudice. They spoke of Islamisation. Today, do their pastors not drive tithe-powered posh cars through highways designated Sukuk-funded roads? Did the road lead them to perdition? The top Israeli novelist, A. B. Yehoshua, in his work Mr. Mani, unveils a comedic scene where a Jewish woman on an emergency ends up in an Arab hospital in Jerusalem and an awkward scene of a Muslim treating a Jew ensues. They have the same human bodies and systems.

Part of this hysteria is to divert attention from the Atiku-Okowa crisis where even at their Osun rally we saw no Wike, Makinde, Ikpeazu or Ortom. Turning the heat on the Muslim-Muslim ticket will not wipe Wike away, or the scandal of Okowa as an unpopular imposition. As Shakespeare warned, truth sunk into the earth shall sprout again. Again, Apostle Paul said, we can do nothing against the truth but for the truth.

As I noted, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu made the choice of Shettima, and rather than interrogate the former Borno governor, they are feeding fat on poison. They should look at his cosmopolitanism, a man schooled in Borno, did his master’s degree in Ibadan, his Youth service in Calabar, worked in Kaduna and spent years as a bank manager in Lagos. The man who caused quite a stir when, as governor, he brought some of his exco members  to a place around Onigbongbo, Maryland, Lagos where he ate his favorite mama put delicacies like amala.

When the north yielded to a southern president, the south threw up Tinubu. Why would anyone want to pick the north choice for them? Some have said it is a cold-eyed choice because of the numbers. That line forgets that if we want a majority to anoint a minority, we do it by persuasion, not fiat. The northern Christians ought to play the game of persuading the overwhelming northern Muslim majority to embrace a Christian candidate. That is the way of democracy. The majority can vote a minority. We saw that in the choice of Obama. The blacks did not have the numbers. Whites voted the black man the most powerful person in the world. Today, if Kemi Badenoch makes it as the British premier, it will not come from minority black parliamentarians. Even now, as one of the top five, she made it by dint of whites.  Front runner Rishi Sunak is not white either. The northern minorities must play the politics of accommodation, not entitled intimidation. In the military era, the army brass accepted Gowon as head of state, even if his Angas tribe could not fill a room of officer corps. In Nigeria, some states have majority tribes, but they institute zoning formulas that embrace the smaller tribes. How did Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, a minority Itsekiri, emerge as Delta State Governor, or Godswill Akpabio of minority Anang clinch the top post in spite of the majority Ibibio. Northern Christians have models within and outside the country.

While the hubbub over Muslim-Muslim roils, few have asked what the streets of Kano, or Sokoto or Maiduguri want. The southern elite, ever sick of elitist self-love, want to bully the majority north on who should represent them.

They also forget that Tinubu himself may have chosen a Muslim running mate, but his life mate and wife, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, is a Christian and a pastor.  Who can beat that! Was he not the one who instituted a Christian worship every year in the state, and the first to turn over schools to Christian missionaries and plied his executive council with loads of Christians, including the most prominent Christian in Nigerian government today! Chikena!

He spins, he rolls, he turns his head, his fingers flick around his face as though fanning his sweaty brow. But he is at once unwieldy and agile, a bulky frame gasping for exercise. He is not a great dancer. The exertion is more impresario than a quest for physical wellbeing. But a dancer he is. His fame, like his frame, does not come from his mastery of the art. He is known for his cumbersome choreography than as a senator, but it is because he is a senator that people know him as a dancer.

It is part patrician pretension, part campaign stunt. He also comes from money, and it is also because he comes from money that he is a senator. His dance routines benefit ultimately from his family’s high perch. Otherwise, he would have become a mere old man, a fuddy-duddy embarrassing his ebi, his family tree in every social outing. He demeans that high society with his vulgar moves. You don’t twerk your ponderous flesh in the public glare. A family patriarch distorting their patrimony.

Shall we be grateful that a third-rate dancer entertains as though he is first-rate because he comes from what in these parts come across as first-rate money?

But what we cannot thank him for is that Senator Ademola Adeleke thinks he can dance his way into the government house. Comedy in the form of choreography is laying claim to the throne. But it is not in the tradition of African royalty for the court jester to lift his gifts as regal entitlement. No one hires a jester as heir.

By seeking to govern, he wants to capsize comedy into a sober art. But governance does not mix with vanity. A society will miss it if it tries such odd chemistry. It is for that reason that, even in Yoruba culture and history, we have not seen comedy in the palace except as comic relief. In a new Yoruba translation of Femi Osofisan’s novel Kolera Kolej, Professor Leke Adeeko raises the dual concerns in the tribe. He identifies them as ere (play) and eto (order). Order must take precedence over play, even as play takes its pride of place. That theme shines through in the novel that spoofs a community that has to regain its rhythm in an atmosphere of plague and shame in the search of a new name.

But  Senator Adeleke miss play for order and order for play, which is the tragi-comic order of his campaign.

Jesters appear across the continent of Africa. They are in the palace but not of the palace. In some palaces, they play roles of oral historians, griots, cautionary poets and what Yoruba call the oriki. Some of them pulse the palace with great drum rolls.

What Adeleke dreams is to tarnish the royal yard. As senator, if we remember him as a dancer, what shall we know him for as governor in terms of legacy? He would throb the whole palace into a thespian ground. We have not heard him speak with high emotion about education, the state of infrastructure, turning Osun into a 21st century highway of tech. He does not flirt with ideas. He twerks rather with the flesh. He is a sort of infantile enthusiast seeking a shop of chocolates. If he gets there, he could collapse into a sort of diabetic emergency. Is it for nothing that Elesin in Soyinka’s play, Death and the King’s Horseman, is not able to fulfil his self-sacrifice because flesh tugs superior to spirit?

It is not here alone. We are witnessing in Great Britain how a comedian managed to get to the throne in Boris Johnson. His hair, neither buoyant nor bouffant, was a wrong crown for the post but right for a clown. He amused. He saw his job more as a sort of cynical play in which he could outplay others as the official buffoon. Last week, the crown caught up with the clown. “There are many terrible things,” wrote the Greek playwright Sophocles, “but there is nothing more terrible than man.” There is nothing more terrible than men like Johnson, who do not know the compartment between comedy and gravity. In the end, gravity prevails, and the farce unveiled.

Adeleke is trying to joust with a man like Governor Gboyega Oyetola. Oyetola has danced in public. He has sung. He does not twerk, though. Neither does he propel his flesh to public vanity. That is the difference. There is a dance and there is a dance. There is sublime dance. There is vain dance. Oyetola has done many things to place him high and above the common run of men like Adeleke. Oyetola is not in vain dance when he makes education between 18 and 21 percent of the budget, when he reclaims land belonging to schools from land grabbers, when he keeps faith with pensioners after an era of bad faith, when he introduces smart school initiatives, when he enshrines Amotekun into law, or abolishes darkness with the Light Up Osun project. Or it in the field of health when vulnerable citizens get close to N500 million on a health scheme.

That is the dance we want in governance. Not the heavy sway of an aging man who is envying his own youth long gone.  Was he not the one that added another spasm of laughter when he boasted he would lard the campaigns with world currencies from dollar to pounds to Euros. He would also oblige with Naira to show how much of a patriot his pocket has always been. He has  no moments to ruminate about poverty and how to expand the frontiers of vision for a state of teeming population like Osun.

Osun will not flatter him the way the British did to Prime Minister Johnson. His hair was metaphor for the wrong crown. Many have mused over President Zelensky of Ukraine. He had a career as a comedian. But he did not run as a comedian. But Adeleke is a natural comedian, of the burlesque type. He cannot help it but run as a comedian. As for Boris Johnson and Zelensky, the British voted in a hero but had a comedian while the Ukrainians voted a comedian but had a hero. For Adeleke, we are having a comedian who, like a leopard’s skin, will always remain a laughingstock in spite of himself.

In Ola Rotimi’s play, Ovonramwen Nogbaisi, his character Uzazakpo is a comedian who always plays moral foil to a fumbling king. We have had such as far back to the Roman Empire. But even that role of restraint is not even the type that Adeleke can play. There is no sober in his humour. He is what playwright Samuel Becket calls Risus Purus, a laugh laughing at itself in his work Endgame. If the senator were of such fibre, we might have seen it in his output as an opposition leader. He was neither leader, not a real opposition. Dance is not strong emough to oppose ideas. Rather than caution, he wiggles the waist. What a waste!

So the Osun people know the serious from the farce. Even before the election, it is obvious he will not only be crestafallen, but his will be a clownfall.

The news came in while this column was done, but I squeeze my support of Kashim Shettima as the only vice-presidential pick of the parties who can be president. He is a man of knowledge and accomplishment, of courage and integrity, of loyalty and energy. A trusted and trustworthy fellow, articulate, a breeder of men who has never succumbed to cant or bigotry. Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has again shown he sees a good talent when he picks them and he picks a good talent when he sees them. Those who have followed Shettima as governor, senator and a warrior during the APC primary campaigns will only know that all those cries about Muslim-Muslim ticket is a red herring, away from the staunch beauty of a platform of doers, of the Tinubu-Shettima double barrel. More to come…