No one can doubt that Akwa Ibom Governor Udom Emmanuel would want to celebrate his 56th birthday without fanfare, especially in the aftermath of his presidential run. He is a man of Christian conscience and one of the sterling performers of this era with all he has done in about eight years of his stewardship to trsnaform Akwa Ibom. As he stamps his legacy, In Touch wishes him a happy birthday.
When Chief Bisi Akande wrote is memoirs, “My Participation,” parts of it raked up dust, and this essayist called it the book of the year. One of the storms derived from his claim that Chief Bola Ige tarred both Ayo Adebanjo and Olaniwun Ajayi as traitors at the home of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. Adebanjo and his followers went to town to call Baba Akande a liar. I was one of the few who stuck to the elder statesman’s veracity. A confirmation has come from an unlikely source. In his new memoirs, The Road Never Forgets, Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi writes that he and his wife, Sade, were witnesses to the event, and he recounts in vivid and dramatic detail what happened during a dinner at the chief’s Ikenne residence.
Ige had just left jail, and paid a visit to Awo. Awo asked him to join them for dinner when he sighted both men. “Uncle Bola looked across the table, and as he sighted some of the seated guests… he stiffened himself up in anger and refused the offer of a seat from Chief Awolowo…he bellowed and screamed relentlessly! “My Leader, I would not sit down with you for dinner with these (pointing across the table) traitors! No. I would not do that. These are traitors, My Leader. They should not be here with you.” The words exploded on and on in the book. Although Ogunbiyi does not name them, he does not deny it was they on my television interview. Adebanjo, over to you chief.
The contrast between them cannot be more stark.
One is a systems man, until now a dapper figure in western suits. Akwete does it these days. The other forswears formality, even his smile threatens the peace like an overcast sky. He does not wear western suits, but he is always outfitted like a soldier even though in his Igbo attire.
Other than cutting a dapper figure, Chukwuwma Soludo is a man of figures. But Nnamdi Kanu is morphing into a sort of figurine in the souls of his followers. One has the guttural eloquence of a broadcaster. The other a soothing but seductive note of a rabble rouser. One nurtures the vote. The other tortures it.
But when both of them appeared at a photo op not too long ago, it was obvious that the helmsman of Anambra State, Dr. Soludo, rose early to the familiar Mohammedan refrain. If Kanu does not go to Anambra government, Anambra government would go to Kanu. So did the state chief executive visit the detainee.
A contrast, again. The detainee was the chief detention officer of Anambra State, in fact the Southeast region. Down in Abuja, in the wordless silence of his detention room, his region quakes for him. In his name, blood is shed, clerics kidnapped, Monday is quiet, the bushes night and day crawl with marauders, loved ones mourn, loved ones die.
But the governor came in peace, and he extracted the right words from Kanu, a rare smile from the lips of the usually sullen folk hero. When this essayist asked the governor how it went. He said it went well. Kanu said he never ordered the stay-at-home order, never asked for the sanguinary spasms, never called for kidnaps and ransoms.
I asked the governor, is the IPOB chief not playing humble because he is de-toothed by the state? The governor said he was no clairvoyant. He could not read the mind of the man. He was, like myself, being a faithful reporter. He might have reeled out the English bard: “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” But the heart of man, to quote the prophet of tears, is “desperately wicked, who can know it?” Soludo is not God “who searches the heart. I try the reins.” The Anambra governor has no such lofty, divine self-congratulations. He is no officer in Saint Augustine’s City of God.
One hundred days down the line, the Anambra State governor understands his first task as the chief executive of a state of entrepreneurial brio. For there to be commerce, he needs to have peace. He needed the trip to Abuja. With it, he could not only delegitimise the violence of his streets, he got the anointing for it. From the lips of the man by whom they swore and slaughtered. Soludo does not have to rely on official rhetoric alone. His voice, a boom of the Anambra orchestra, is backed by Kanu’s consent.
Only a few days ago, he affirmed that it was for most part a matter of criminals on the rampage. The state unearthed some criminal lair, but what did they find? Not materials of political subversion, or revolutionary tract. Nothing on Half the yellow sun, or invocation of Adichie absorbing novel of the war. They clutched a book of gory accounting, not the sort Soludo saw while crunching the figures of the nation as a governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria. The book had records of names of kidnap victims, how much they menaced out of their frightened pockets, how they disbursed. It was the accountancy of the hood, of the blood.
Soludo has taken the war to them, but he knows it is a necessary distraction. He has set many goals, and the criminals have to be out of the way.
He wants to set the energies of the thinker to work. He thinks of Nnewi and Onitsha, and I drew his attention to the need to reach the state’s potential. He once told me and a few editors about a decade ago on how he lamented why Anambra can be elite in entrepreneurs and out of reckoning in internally generated revenue.
This is one of the issues the so-called OBidients have not asked their hero. He was there for eight years, but he is busy encouraging false narratives about his financial prowess, or lack of it. When the Soludo government clarified the figures of his so-called investment, they kept mum on it but continued with glorifying lies and more lies. They need to follow how the work is being done by the former CBN chief.
That is one of the cardinal sights of the man in the saddle. The way he puts it, he wants to set the tone for the markets to modernise. But he must put the right institutions in place, raise the stakes of the environment, and of course secure the peace. He reminds me that it is not just the Onitsha-Nnewi duopoly that is at stake. There are many areas of dynamism to unleash, and he is at work.
It is not just in making the business arena good, but connecting the state to the world, using its airports on its way to commissioning for that purpose, and leveraging its connectedness to the north, south and west. It chimes with his inaugural speech assertion to bring Anambra to the world and the world to Anambra.
It is a heady task, and he has been at it since he inaugurated a high-powered committee headed by the inimitable Oby Ezekwesili that included such iconic names as Pat Utomi and Olisa Agbakoba.
As I noted in an earlier piece, few are as prepared for public office as Gov. Soludo. He has shown the spirit in his first 100 days. There are quite of few more hundred days, and we watch his acts unfold.
Obiozor, Okowa and Dubai bed
If you read the lamentation of Ohanaeze leader, Professor George Obiozor over the political plight of the Igbo, you would think he was sincere. Yet, was he not the fellow who congratulated the traitor of the South, Ifeanyi Okowa, over his pick by another traitor of the South Abubakar Atiku? In a congratulatory message signed on his behalf, he described Okowa as a “detribalised patriot, purveyor of morals and poster personality.” Anyway, the man is recuperating in his Dubai bed, and it might be that the cloudy and soporific effects of medication may be interfering with his interaction with reality. Maybe I should grant him that excuse until he utters another jeremiad out of de-medicated soul.
I wonder what Walter Onnoghen is thinking now. The former chief justice could not duck. He was docked and dumped. His charge was simple. Twice he fell foul of the law. The executive branch did not want him. They rustled a ruse within the rules to nail him. His guilt was in breach of not declaring his account. It was without excuse.
The government did not pursue the matter with sense of justice, but out of vendetta. A kangaroo affair to defeat a guilty man. They had justice in their hands, but chose the gangster path. A desperation of injustice. He was wrong, though he was wronged. Many believed he was a victim of a cabal. He created the excuse for the ruse, and they found a way within the rule of law to flush him out of the temple of justice.
How do you excuse a sinner even if he was sent to perdition the wrong way? That was the story of Onnoghen, the chief man of law who fell because the law bit him the wrong way.
Now we have a different story of the same skein. The new chief justice of Nigeria, Tanko Muhammad, who benefited from the intrigues to oust Onnoghen, is in the eye of a storm. He does not see it that way. But is he feeling more than a little aplomb? What is he relying on to be so smug?
Fourteen justices, men and women, who are supposed to be models of justice in the land, are accusing Muhammad of funny games with the pocketbook. They say Muhammad is living with two standards, one for himself, and the other with the other justices. He flies abroad, in luxury and retinue, for vacation. The others are supposed to abide here in obodo Naija, sulking and developing arthritic hands writing long, interminable judgments. He gives them Tokunbo cars while his own SUV purrs with new engines. They have to ration diesel for the big temple of justice to operate, or else there will be no hearing, or no work. The justices cannot go out for courses. They cannot enjoy diesel at home, et al. The justices have been turned into a new version of aluta, old men and women screaming their own versions of “we shall overcome” in the silence of their chambers.
Rather than allow the matter to simmer and die, it has become a public ridicule, a cause celebre. The CJN has no apology. Rather, he issued a warning. He was teaching his fellow men on the bench to maintain decorum, and not expose the squalor of the temple to the sunlight of ignominy. It is a serious matter. I have spoken with three senior advocates of Nigeria since last week over the matter, and two of them said they were part of the top lawyers seeking solutions to the quagmire. They described the scandal as a mess. They did not see an easy way out of the matter.
The chief justice was rationing material for the others and splurging on himself. It reminds one of what Greek playwright Sophocles wrote, “Thou shall not ration justice.”
When the CJN said the justices should not have made the matter public, he spoke ex cathedra. But the cathedral was already broken. It is a sort of murder in the cathedral.
Before the fourteen rose to a joint statement, all other avenues must have failed. The CJN must have acted with monarchical disdain to them. He must have treated them like serfs, like little boys and girls who ought to be happy with what they are getting.
In my interview with Professor Itse Sagay, (the fourth SAN I spoke with), for TVC breakfast show, a new dimension was unearthed. He saw the CJN’s sense of entitled contempt. He also saw that even the fourteen are not all that innocent. He noted that our house of justice has become filth central. He drew my attention to some of the stories making the rounds of justices on the take for judgment. He even noted, like a disappointed father, that some of the justices are his former students, and they had voted for corruption by not even picking his calls because his stance against the evil into which they have turned the temple of justice.
I also worry, as I indicated to Prof. Sagay, that the CJN may take advantage of this to expose his fellow benchers and blackmail may meet blackmail to unveil the rot of the system. Tanko may now be the cobra with the back on the wall and striking back with venoms of rage. The fourteen may find out they might have kept quiet and sulked in silence. But maybe this turn of events is the dialectical inevitability to bringing the house of justice to justice.
But what is intriguing is that we are not seeing any of the Onnoghen intrigue playing out from the executive branch. The Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami hinted that the can of worms awaited any audit of the NJC. For now, it is all empty rhetoric. As Prof Sagay noted, it is within his power as the chief law officer to overhaul the judiciary. Yet, a big mess has overtaken the hall of justice, and the man steeped in the filth is still a specimen of swagger. Blaise Paschal once wrote, “Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.” We saw the latter in the case of Onnoghen. We expect the former in the case of Tanko Muhammad.
Or else, we shall have a bipolar eye for justice in the land. So, what is bad for Onnoghen is not bad for Tanko. It will be a bad precedent. The offence of Onnoghen is that he did not declare his own money. The offence of Muhammad, as the fourteen justices are claiming, is that he has not declared the people’s money. One is personal fraud; the other is collective fraud. One wronged the country by wronging himself. The other is wronging the country by allegedly defrauding the court.
This issue has brought to the fore the need to separate the chief justice from the National Judicial Council (NJC). Justices should not be involved with finances. They should focus on judiciary, not fiduciary. Sagay asserted that English law that we imitate has such distinction.
The Supreme Court is the top tier of appeal. In one of Achebe’s novels, No Longer At Ease, a truck inscribed, “God’s case, no appeal.” The Supreme Court owns that here on earth. But if correction, to paraphrase Shakespeare, lies in the hand that committed wrong, to whom shall we complain?
Malami and his men played such a pivotal role in unseating Onnoghen. Is he going to look the other way as Tanko huffs and puffs? Is it one justice for Onnoghen and another justice to Tanko. It may not, in the end, just be a Tanko and Onnoghen issue, it is a cry for Nigerian justice.
In the end, Bashir Machina has prevailed over Senate President Ahmad Lawan.
It is a real irony that the man who had it for the taking went after what he had no chance of taking. No, he will have neither senate nor presidency.
It is a triumph for the rule of law. It calls to mind the Greek myth that has gained currency as deus ex machina, which literally means a god in a machine.
In simple terms, it means a miracle. Lawan was the one hoping for dues ex machina, even after his name was submitted by his party chairman. The law prevailed.
Machina was there to take his own miracle. You cannot take machina from Machina.
The miracle, the deus ex machina, belongs to the man who bears the name.
Ifeanyi Okowa hosted the meeting as a hero of the south. Atiku Abubakar hoisted him as his super aide or VP choice. By that, he made his Asaba summit of southern governors a zero for his region. And Atiku was happy to rub the southern nose in it.
The Delta State governor conned his governor colleagues. He was not a man of his words. He was not a man of his people. He coiffed the meaning of patriot in his own fashion. He has thus been called a traitor by bodies representing the two major southern groups as well as minorities.
He says he is not a traitor. His words recall the expression of Richard Nixon when the American president wallowed in the WaterGate scandal. Nixon protested, “I am not a crook.” Those words fitted his crooked mouth. America groaned. Nixon resigned as impeachment waves roared towards His White House.
So, Okowa said: “I am not a traitor.” I can say, “Governor, smile while you say that.” He was laughing at himself. When Nyesom Wike said southern governors betrayed him, we know Okowa was one of them. Delta delegates voted Atiku, not his south-south neighbour. Okowa said he was following party principle. He implies party trumps country. He would have been a victim in a Greek play, like Euripides’ Iphigenia. He is not Mark Twain’s patriot. The American novelist wrote, “In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave and hated and scorned. When the cause succeeds, the timid join him, for them it costs nothing to be a patriot.”
That is Okowa. He does not have conviction, except it is convenient. Whatever the party says is supreme, even if party parts with country. That is the definition of opportunism. So, it was not party principle when he opened his port and portal to his fellow state executives. He was preening when Atiku announced him.
His pick was also an act of Atiku’s opportunism. One, both of them are fair-weather folks. Atiku has been a perennial dissembler in politics. He is the ultimate sufferer of a wandering disease called sokugo of Cyprian Ekwensi’s novel, Burning Grass. He is wandering in the desert of political desire, seeking the plum of fortune he can devour. Atiku knows no home because his ambition is his shelter. He likes playing coquette, and he who does that ends a harlot.
Okowa is no different. He has betrayed his mentor in Delta politics. Ibori, while in jail, swore by Okowa as Uduaghan’s successor, contrary to advice that Okowa could not be trusted. From the ambience of Downing Street, he rallied his party for a Judas. After his PDP consultations, the party zoned the guber slot to the Urhobo, and they picked David Edevbie. Even the influential Urhobo People’s Union, endorsed Edevwie. Okowa had other ideas. He stamped his feet behind Sheriff Oborevwori, the speaker. He did not only do that. He threw his weight against the ambition of Ibori’s daughter who wanted to run for a legislative seat. He also pulled Uduaghan’s daughter, first into the treachery of his trust, and then allowed her to fail in her bid to run also for a legislative seat. Ibori’s daughter’s bid first stalemated and a runoff favoured her, presumably as a soft-landing for the godfather’s pride. Okowa’s daughter, who is a senior fellow in his advisory cupboard, sailed through the electoral calm water, also as a legislator.
He and his aides are saying Ibori is not in ill humour with him. Why has Ibori not congratulated his guber pick, or congratulated him over his VP pick. He is going into battle with a divided house. Remember, the same Atiku was known to have betrayed Ibori as well when he was in trouble with the Jonathan administration before he was clobbered into jail. It is not as if Atiku did it because he is a saint, or he lives in the sanctum of the Almighty. Okowa bonds with his mentor’s traitor. He preens like the new royal of Delta politics, like a prince of imperial blood and brood.
Two, Atiku’s quest for Nigeria’s top seat screams with hypocrisy. Did he not say he wanted to leave the seat of president open to all without zoning? Yet, when he grabbed the seat, he now thinks the vice president should be zoned. One fairness does not beget another. He cast zoning in his own image.
It may be said that he did not pick Wike because there is no love lost between the Adamawa adventurer and the humourist of Rivers politics. Wike made Atiku tremble when he backed Tambuwal against him in 2014. Atiku did not like it when he heard party men describe PDP as “Wike Inc.” He must have likened the Ikwere man as VP as a hot fire burning him, a coal pot, from beneath. But why pick a man who is a traitor. That is understandable since they are kindred spirits. But apart from betraying the south and the state, he has to answer a question as to why the state believes he was a poor specimen of a governor in two terms. It is even more shabby that, in his twilight on the throne, he has borrowed N175 billion in the name of development. He has to answer why such a haul? Anything can be acquired in the name of projects. But the state and EFCC ought to monitor how the money is spent? We should know what is left of the money after the guber race and presidential campaigns. And of course, after he leaves office. Many in the state worry that he secured the money with a promise to the Speaker Oborevwori that he is covered. Atiku is also believed to have embraced it as a war chest for his quest for ASO ROCK.
With the Okowa pick, the southeast has finally lost out in the PDP sweepstakes. They had no eyes in the APC story, in spite of Ogbonnaya Onu’s jeremiad as though power is handed anyone without work. Onu indicted himself on the APC podium. He confessed he failed as a party hierarch. He could not bring his region to the party. His region did not even vote for their candidates. He showed he had no muscle to endear and mobilise in the east. He was his people’s paperweight.
Atiku thought Okowa is an Igbo pick. He was fooled by the name Ifeanyi. But he is not even the real Igbo of Asaba axis. Again, the Ika people of Agbor do not regard themselves as kinsmen of southeast Igbo. They are proud as Ika. Just like the Ikwerre. The southeast Igbo see them as diluted – if not deleted – versions of themselves. And they resent it. They may have a history but only when it is time to gain something do some opportunists like Okowa claim to be Igbo. After all, on what side were the Ika during the civil war. They fought on the federal side. Ojukwu in one of his civil war speeches spoke of his dream to bring some of the Igbo-speaking groups into Biafra. He did not ask if those people thought the same. It’s like saying New Zealand citizens are English, or Americans are English. Or equating French Quebecois as the same as French citizens in Macron’s France. Or the French Belgium should enter France without visa. In its assimilation policy, Charles de Gaulle made West African citizens who joined the Free French movement to think they are French citizens. They fought for their conquerors who were also German conquests. The subject of a subject, like being a tenant of a tenant. The fact that bia in Agbor means ‘come’ in Igbo does not mean when one says bia the other will come.
As the campaign beckons, Atiku the Sukogu and Okowa the Judas will set out on a train of like minds.
Last week, I titled my front-page piece, Tinubu Comes Home. It was a home-coming as metaphor.
It bore the reverberations of his own Trojan War for democracy, his fights and sleights, his soldiery ending as generalship in the June 12 saga of heroics and blood.
Asiwaju Bola Tinubu arrived in Lagos after his Abuja feat at Eagle Square, and this home-coming to Lagos is both metaphor and fact. Abuja was where the struggle crystalised with Abiola’s apotheosis.
Lagos was the Shakespearean Phillipi, where the battle saw smoke and blood, where heroes were separated from the pretenders.
In Lagos, he also returned after his work in Europe and America and started the trip to outstrip the military Pharisees of democracy, the autocrats in agbada. Lagos was where he fought for votes to count, where he duelled so-called titans to the dust, wrested the west from the hawks, from state to state, where he patented his genius as governor and, like a father, gave birth to transformational work across the west up to Edo.
He did the work, ruffled the brow of false men and the world saw it. He has come to that Lagos like a commander coming home after the battle is won. Asiwaju was like Douglass MacArthur, who returned in a flush of hurrahs after his exploits in the Second World War.
The American hero roared on the august hall of the United States Congress, “Old soldiers never die.” This soldier is fittingly name Jagaban as a chief and chiefly onomatopoeically.
He, unlike the American, is however set for the next phase of battle.
They wanted to shred the list but it ended a watershed for democracy. Some said it was down to seven, down to three. A frenzy in Abuja air. Other aspirants broke out in arms. Lawan as consensus turned out a con. Eventually, they let a thousand flowers bloom. In the pageant, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu emerged the fairest of them all. In his sunshine, quite a few flowers faded and drooped. Some others had a little bloom, and no more.
We all saw it as man and wife, at Eagle Square, walked hand in hand, like a re-enactment of a new couple on the aisle. Decked in blue, the duo’s walk resembled what the French call tableau vivant. Tinubu in solemn stride beside Senator Oluremi Tinubu. Cameras clicked, the sun in full throttle, the air benign. Of course, party members’ eyes gazed, bloodshot from hours of voting and waiting without sleep; some teary with joy. Victory enriched insomnia.
The walk was not just a parade, but a parable. He had been at the walk for a long time, and he had survived many ambushes, many manoeuvres, many a Judas kiss. But victory often is the calm after the storm of war.
What we saw at the last hour was the Nigerian story from the APC northern governors. Their scheme to give the president to the south is without precedent in Nigerian history. It is honour of patriots. They contrasted with the PDP who conflated fairness with hegemony, and browbeat the party’s south to yield to subservience in the name of democracy. Theirs is democratic servitude.
The northern governors’ decision also marked a Fulani-Yoruba synergy unknown to history. There was no war, no Solagberu example of the 19th century. No 1840. It was a handshake across the desert.
This came from the work of Asiwaju himself. He had been at it for long, working peace and harmony with the north. His heroes did not have the genius. Awo, with all his majesty, could not step across the chasm of suspicion. His wisdom, ascetic piety and ideology did not melt the northern heart. M.K.O. Abiola had humour and money, and had made many friends. He won the street on June 12, but could not enter their power sanctum. Asiwaju brought this watershed, and it was possible because President Muhammadu Buhari was able to rein in the rabble. He was because it was time, and because the person was right. Cometh the hero, cometh the hour. Tinubu was the ultimate in trust: he built the human connection. During the Cold War, President Richard Nixon asserted that human connection was more important than rhetoric and weapons race. He invited Brezhnev and Mao home, as friends rather than foes. They signed entente and opened the world to China. Tinubu understands we are human first before we are anything else.
It is not always a guarantee, but a work in progress. Where he had trouble was inside. Vice President Yemi Osinbajo as candidate was an example of a naïve man, a victim of burlesque theatre. A Malvolio in Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night. We saw that even when he mounted the podium at Eagle Square. A fawning crowd cheered him. He, too, smiling, basked in the confetti of flattery. That moment summarised his whole candidacy. But it was not the flattery but treachery. Some commentators have wielded the Bible and political theory in vain in his defence. Some quoted Joseph, who became bigger than his brothers. But Joseph was loyal to his brothers. They betrayed him, and God vindicated him. He turned his eye away from his master’s wife and hence he rose to be the second in command. Joseph betrayed not; he was betrayed.
Others say he had a right to run. No one denied that. There is right. There is decency. Even the Bible says, some things are lawful but they may not be expedient. This generation must learn to understand the meaning of loyalty. Many don’t and want to distort scripture to touch the unclean thing. There is a reason Lucifer and Judas are no favorites in scripture. I also think that prophesy has a role in this saga. Some saw a future that didn’t exist. Pastors must be wary. They deceive many politicians and imbue them with the Malvolio complex, a delusion of grandeur. Hence Jeremiah wailed, “He that hath a dream let him tell a dream.. they are imaginations of their hearts.” He also said, “the prophets prophesy false and the priests bear rule by their means and my people love to have it so.” They flatter aspirants by turning fantasy into prophesy.
Some of them, not just Osinbajo, were baboons waiting for Buhari’s boon. Vampires around Buhari were merchants. They hoodwinked aspirants that Buhari wanted them. The fools released money. They are too ashamed to go public. If the story is told, it will make for a great farce on stage. There was a certain fellow who boasted that Osinbajo was the cabal’s darling. He capered in his wounded prose. He should have known that he was selling Osinbajo as a stooge of the cabal. His professorial mind was not subtle enough to know he had made a mess of his case, even to whom he was cringing.
In Yoruba land, there is a word called Omoluabi, and hardly any word has its exact meaning. For want of a better translation, it means a good soul without guile. Yoruba treasure it because it has become, through their history, their major weakness. As an Itsekiri man, I watch it in our history since we descend from the Yoruba, just separated by water. Our forbears crossed over, especially from the Ijebu and Ondo areas. My great grandmother was from Ife. So I remember the role that Dore Numa played in giving away the redoubtable Nana to the British. We have over the ages watched out for the Numas in our midst. The Yoruba have had it a number of times. When Afonja broke ranks. In Old Oyo palace intrigues, like Basorun Gaa’s. In the Yoruba Wars. In the Solagberu and Onikoyi episode. In the Akintola quagmire. Even in the June 12 story, when even a monarch became a conscript. In his recent book, The Road Never Forgets, Yemi Ogunbiyi writes of how a general wanted him to spend a million dollars to sell June 12 annulment to the world. He said no, but another Yoruba fell for the moral bait.
Many who watch or read Soyinka’s Death and The King’s Horseman should note that Elesin Oba is loyal to his king until it is time to fulfil his pact. He loves life more. That kernel of betrayal dramatized by our best playwright is also a cautionary tale to his people. I know of no literary critic of Yoruba extraction, or any kind, who has drawn this ethno-psychological point. Few have seen Akintola or even the 19th century quislings in the poetic drama. It’s an act of vainglory to say it is democracy at work. There is decency before the vote. The mass of the tribe often vote for Omoluabi. That is the redeeming light.
Hence, I say, anyone who saw Osinbajo as right has a Judas in his heart. When I asked him how he handled the stories of brothers undercutting him, Tinubu replied, “I am taking a geometric approach to it. The fastest route between two points is a straight line. I won’t be distracted.” His was, in a sense, a Pythagorean triumph. Pythagoras was not only a math genius but he also reconciled it with his philosophy of life.
At last, it is time to heal, as Abraham Lincoln said after he won the civil war, “With malice toward none and charity to all…time to bind the…wounds.” Another battle, he knows, beckons.
The search for APC vice presidential candidate has whipped up more tension than necessary. CAN says no Muslim-Muslim ticket. I wonder where CAN is getting its wisdom. Were they in Nigeria when Gowon was number one and Wayne was number two and Ejoor was number three? Did they not know that Buhari and Idiagbon were both Fulani. When in the past seven years they cried over herdsmen spree of blood, did they hold Osinbajo, the vice president, to account? It was Buhari they blamed.
The president, not the vice, is the custodian of the ticket. Asiwaju Bola Tinubu is two for the price of one. He is Muslim, his wife, Senator Oluremi, is Christian, and a pastor for that matter. Was Tinubu not the first to turn Lagos schools to the missionaries? Did anyone cry that he was Muslim? The major annual church event in that state, where Pastor Adeboye and others preside, was his baby when he was governor. it’s been on up till today. It is rhetoric of deceit to call it Muslim-Muslim ticket. It is a human-human ticket, or a Nigerian-Nigerian or pan-Nigerian ticket. When the APC men cried against pairing him with Buhari in 2015, it was not because he is Muslim, it was a ruse to deny him the ticket. This is realpolitik for APC. They have to decide whether they want to do the “proper” thing and lose, or do the bold thing and win. It is a Machiavellian imperative. The option is in the winds.
For those calling for a Christian running mate, remember Tinubu’s life mate is Christian.
As he picked his party’s presidential ticket, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu never directly invoked M.K.O Abiola in the raptures of his acceptance speech. He did not need the rhetoric or ritual of a priestess to do it. No witch of Endor necessary, nor the enchanting words of Orestes and Electra in Aeschylus’ Greek play, Libation Bearers.
Abiola haunted the place himself, first at night and the following daylight. He was there in physique and in spirit. He hovered over the square. He was there at the arrivals of guests and delegates. He was the chief of the caravan, unseen but in full martyr’s regalia.
He was there when the crowds cheered, when the votes were cast, when President Muhammadu Buhari spoke and the contestants perorated, priding themselves on their credentials and begging for votes. M.K.O. was the main credential.
The All Progressives Congress (APC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) held their special conventions to pick their presidents at different Abuja locations – APC at Eagles Square, PDP at the MoshoodAbiola Stadium in Abuja. Both events happened virtually on the eve of June 12, a day that testifies to a struggle for democracy and the will of the Nigerian people.
But it is on record that one party respected the man who shed his blood and other treasures for that cause, and the other held its nose as though Abiola and his martyrdom were a sty. PDP had presidents that said no to June 12 as a monument and even harbinger of this republic: Olusegun Obasanjo, Umar Yar’Adua, Goodluck Jonathan. Obasanjo began by subverting it with a calendar. June 12 was no democracy day. It had to be May 29. He wrestled the dead without data but with a date, both as intra-ethnic rivalry, a martial ego and a lie to history. Yar’adua with bad health and little democratic credentials was too remote to touch it. Jonathan resisted and pursued false symbolisms, looking at it as a war of tribal and partisan grudges rather than statesman’s duty. For 16 years, Abiola’s ghost screamed in the confines of a grave. Yet, when the party held its special primary and hoisted AtikuAbubakar, Abiola’s ghost frowned from twilight to night. They were inhabiting his house but did not build it.
Until Buhari came, an unlikely soldier whose first stage in history was to banish democrats. He it was who started the journey, embraced the man and his past, ghost and man on the same stage. Hence June 12 became a holiday, and our Democracy Day. Even though alive, a new legacy banished Obj’s to the sepulchre.
But when Tinubu held up the party flag at the convention, it was an apotheosis of sorts. Tinubu was a soldier of democracy, who fought, fell and rose again. He fought with words, beginning as a senator when he saw the senate as a platform to twit power, to lay bare the hypocrisies of a Babangida administration that spoke democracy but spiked it. He fought in Lagos, was pursued, was locked up, fled, anticipated the soldiers and moved to Europe and the United States. He rallied the troops. He, a technocrat and accountant, became a voice and artillery for a cause.
He came to fight when Abacha died and opportunists wanted glory where they did not invest. He returned, and he fought another war: to save democracy from democrats.
The PDP was the big party, his Alliance for Democracy became his new military tank. All votes must count. Soldiers should be out of the way. No electoral heist. He won to be a governor of Lagos, but his Southwest was under a thraldom of a soldier in the mask of a republican. He was alone, fighting and amassing new troops to redefine and reinvigorate a new era.
He won state after state, deploying law and street, and the nuances of a judiciary. In the end, he became the brain and mobiliser of a new coalition, the most successful in Nigeria’s history, for its sweep and its little time. It routed perhaps the most formidable political machine in Nigerian history, the PDP.
When he sought to be the APC flag bearer but he had to fight to get it. He did not seek it as an entitled titan, not as a father but an applicant. When resisted, he fought as a democrat even within his own political home. It is the spirit of a democratic warrior that triumphed when, even his rivals stood down in homage to his brio, pluck and strategy, his chemistry of human touch and thinking.
Kudos also to President Buhari who resisted the overtures of those who wanted anointing, as though democracy were another contraption of autocracy. He unlocked Abiola out of his grave, enshrined him with a date and a reign. The emergence of Tinubu as the party’s flag bearer was Abiola standing guard not far from a place where a stadium is named after him and for a process for which he gave up the ghost.
When he rose from the meeting with governors, everyone understood him, or they thought they did. President Buhari wants to pick his successor, and so went the universal word. The same man who foreswore imposition, foresaw fairness, who said his successor was not “my problem.” He even said it with a cheerful sneer.
At the party convention, he extolled the democratic process. That night before his party men, the former general snapped off his epaulets, defrocked himself of any martial air, dissolved his pedigree of decrees, parted with his image as patriarch. In his babanriga and offbeat mien, he glowed as a republican. No money politics. Poohpooh unpopular persons. No bullies, no coercion. It was a scenario out of George Washington or Lincoln.
That contrasted, as many read it, with the semiotics of his offering before state executives. Did he change his mind? Was he acting with the furtive manoeuvre of a soldier, lulling the foe into snore before the onslaught? Had he evolved? Did he wake up into an epiphany, a realisation that the presidency was too important a matter to be left in the hands of the rabble called democracy.
Then his spokesman, Femi Adesina, retorted, in a sense telling everyone they did not understand their English enough. The man never mentioned zoning, never lipped out the word consensus, never said he was changing his position about the supremacy of the process over a hectoring big man. We had entered another familiar terrain: The grammar of politics.
What was the offending or offensive line? The president send: “I want to solicit the reciprocity and support of the governors and other stakeholders in picking my successor.” If you look at the sentence critically, Adesina was right. He was soliciting, but he did not say he was soliciting for his own benefit. It might be for the governors and other stakeholders. The phrase “the reciprocity and support of the governors and other stakeholders” could mean he wanted those two bodies to work together to pick “my successor.” He would just be in the shadows. So, “I want to solicit” did not mean he wanted to pick the successor. Many might have read it without regard to the words reciprocity, governors and other stakeholders. They merely read it this way: I want to solicit your support in picking my successor.” Even at that, it might also mean he wants them to follow his guide lines in picking his successor, not that he wants to identify his successor.
There is an ambiguity in the sentence. But why did the president allow a claptrap of interpretive anarchy before Adesina intervened. Was the president, known for taciturn indifference, gloating over the buzz. Or did he think it was more of a fuss before he asked his spokesman to “clarify”?
Was it actually a misinterpretation, or an afterthought? Did the president’s men agree with the widespread interpretation and became embarrassed and looked for an escape route? The syntactic tension gave rise to any reading. If anyone wanted to read it to mean he wanted to pick his successor himself, there is enough meat in the sentence to bite one’s teeth into. The language of dubious humility, “I want to solicit” could also imply a subtle threat. That is, “I want to pick my successor, I am Buhari, even if I beg I am not begging.” It is proud humility. Or subtle blackmail.
In the grammar of politics, obscurity is often a virtue. You revel in different interpretations, and you look for the one that works and take advantage of it. It is about perception, and the sentence probably is not there. It is the reader who appropriates it. It is called hermeneutics. Or reader-response theory. Just like Socrates said we know nothing and our senses deceive us, the philosopher George Berkeley argued reality only resides in our senses in a theory of empiricism to end all empiricisms. This view is used today in media studies, where what we see or hear or read is seen as a matter of where we stand. It is called selective exposure when we select what we want to see or read. It is called selective retention, in which we decide what we want to remember or retain in our minds. So, if two persons watch another person, A may remember the voice and B the skin colour. The critical one is selective perception, in which we decide what perspective we absorb. So, in Buhari’s speech many decided to say he wanted to pick his successor because it adheres to an image of him as a general and his position in picking the party chairman.
Harold Laski, author of the Grammar of Politics, wrote “they think differently who live differently.” Was this the case with the Buhari sentence, or did they decide to change course having discovered a way of escape? We may never know. What is clear is that the speechwriter was either working out a script of mischief or was incompetent. If mischief, then shame on the person. If incompetent, well, it embarrassed his master.
When Buhari met with the aspirants Saturday night, some expected him to point his fingers at the man. But he surprised those who thought he had a northern hobgoblin of agenda. He said the south, like the northern governors. He has carved the image, in some quarters, of a modern-day Mazzini, the 19th century Italian firebrand who conjoined nationalist fervour with tribe and God. so, could it be that everyone has misread him, or is he, in the Yoruba proverb, about to conjure a bird out of his pocket. That leads to another grammar of politics: the semiotics of body language. Is there a last-minute nod, or wink, or motion? We heard Garba Shehu befuddle the ear by singing a different song from what those who attended said. Is it a perception issue? We are watching.
In another grammar of politics, the words of Asiwaju were called outburst by those who did not like him, and insult by those who wanted a wedge between him and the president. They failed an important part of literary analysis: context. Many who raged did not understand even the Yoruba language, and deliberate distortion among those who did. The use of “eleyi” could be benevolent as from a patriarch or friend, or adversarial. Language is flexible and must always be handled in context. Even the Bible – God’s best gift to man – translations and exegesis have led to crisis of meanings over the ages, from trinity to transubstantiation. These same people did not bother to wonder how Tinubu could stomach for years all the barbs and conspiracies and gang-ups against him and about his role in this administration and its birth. They did not wonder at the facts. Did he lie? If he said without him no APC, was he right. Others worked very hard but after the foetus entered the womb. Facts are insults when an audience shops for error. He did not insult the president. Even Abdulahi Adamu, who ranted as though the president was a divine monarch, misinterpreted Tinubu. He did not say Buhari was in tears when he visited him. That is tendentious.
Anyway, Buhari rose above all that on Saturday, given the semiotics of their interactions. He knew the heart of Tinubu if his detractors were fishing in troubled waters. He also knows, as a party man and veteran of election battles, that his best soldier against Atiku the presidential perambulator, is Tinubu. He will not stand in his way.
The picture destroys anything in the heart. Children, mothers and fathers expiring in their place of comfort and succour. As George Lamming wrote, “something startles where I thought I was safest.” They left home in their Sunday best as families, as friends and as a community under God. They were slaughtered by bloodthirsty mischief of sub-humans who are no more than instruments from hell. On the bandits, if it is to yell, ears are torn. If it’s to shed tears, the ocean is full. If it is to spend money, we have done it. For that reason, Amotekun was created. Yet, these marauders came as molten magma from the hell to set ablaze people who did nothing wrong but to bear a different ethnic name and serve a different God.
Ondo State is one of those places where surveillance and Amotekun have shown impressive records. Hence they targeted Gov. Rotimi Akeredolu’s hometown. His voice did not spare them, so his policies. But, as they say in security, you only have to be wrong once for such a tragedy as that to happen. A prelate was whisked away for N100 million in the southeast. They are the same sort of savages. It still boils down to the fact that states cannot stop the morons until the centre flushes them out of the bushes. We know where they are but we don’t go there. The federal government has made them sacred killers, the bushes their sanctuaries. They are too sacred to die even if they slaughter us in our sacred places. They are too murderous to be ruffled. We have acquiesced in their savagery. When T.S. Eliot wrote his play, Murder in the Cathedral, he had no idea of Owo where the house of God became an abattoir of human souls. Murder is in our midst. When next shall we see its bloody eye?
It is the way of the race. Just as Apostle Paul says, all run but only one receives the prize. But what prize? At what price? The view is now rife that the PDP ticket, in the words of Paul again, was a corruptible prize. For Paul, only the prize of heaven is without blemish. Even the UEFA Champions final was not going to share its glory with two finalists. Liverpool was not too far from the Madrid crown. It sniffed it but snuffed out after 90 minutes. Winning is not always about the fiery player but about the goals. As the good book says, the battle is not always for the strong. Time and chance bestow the jewel.
So, it was for Abubakar Atiku. The Adamawa chieftain beat the field, in spite of the husky uproar of Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike. Before the primary, three big names bowed out. Sokoto State’s Aminu Tambuwal conceded charmingly to Atiku. Obi and Hayatu-Deen walked away, the former from the party, the latter from the race. Both cited an unfair contest. Obi cried that he was dumping the party. But it was the party that dumped him. The light-voiced fellow was pretending late in the game as though he did not know the rules of the game. He knew it was a contest of war chests. He signed up early. He wanted to war according to what Hayatu-Deen called obscene monetisation. He was mobilised to monetise. He then compared his war chest with his rivals. He discovered that, chest for chest, he had no cheers. He withdrew because he had no chest for the war. Suddenly he waxed into a righteous man who would not touch an unclean thing. Shakespeare said conscience has made a coward of men. Money turned Obi into a man of conscience. Not because he was too upright to fight but because he was facing a certain catastrophe.
Hayatu-Deen was only naïve, fighting a contest of war chests on television and billboards when the spears and arrows of dollars flew about in the entrails of the grass roots. Atiku and Wike were constipating the delegates with their “materiel” of war.
So, to Apostle Paul again, Atiku won a corruptible prize, a dollarised victory. It was a bazaar of democracy, and what a bizarre duel. A democracy of the money men. Money and politics have never turned more obscene than the story of the PDP presidential primary. This is the price for a fraught delegates system, where a few handpicked fellows of less than a thousand decided for a major party to contest to govern over 200 million.
The open primary was tossed aside, and Speaker Gbajabiamila was a big voice for open and direct primaries. He evangelised its virtue as the gateway out of a democracy of vipers. But it was handed over to the plutocrats. We have made the political bed, and we must lie and snore on it. Maybe in another cycle, we will do well.
One thing is clear: PDP has overthrown zoning. By picking Atiku, the southern governors’ pact to uphold southern ticket has turned out a fatuous jamboree. Those who say Atiku’s win was a nod for the northeast are mistaken. Atiku is Fulani. If it is a northeast prize, then it should go to the Kanuri who fill that landscape from Borno to a big chunk of Jigawa. To present Atiku is to ‘Fulanise’ the northeast and cast swine before Kanuri pearls. The Kanuri will not appreciate that insolence.
So, Atiku is a northern pick, not a northeast choice. It is a triumph of a selfish candidacy. Atiku has privileged his private fantasy over a fraternal nation. In his victory speech Saturday night, he said he aims to unify Nigeria. His mere candidacy defeats that idea. He was laughing at the south, at the Kanuri and his fair-minded Fulani folks, at the Igbo, Yoruba, Afemai, Kalabari, et al. He has soured the national palate. All those who want the country to feel like one people will be sorely disappointed. He is Machiavellian in the sorriest way ever. Here is a man, in moments of intellectual vainglory, who drew the sword for true federalism and restructuring.
But the battle is set for the APC. Some have said the best way to counter him is to pick another person from the northeast. That will be a surrender to PDP poohpoohing of zoning. Again, you don’t play your opponent’s game, or else you admit he is better. Some have pointed Ahmed Lawan’s way because he comes from Yobe State, and the northeast. But that is a bad strategy. He comes from the northeast but northeast has not come to him. Even in his Yobe State, he does not have command the political jugular. He is not even Kanuri, but hails from the Bade tribe, a small group in Yobe. Nothing wrong with that, except that he has not transcended it. He has not been able to rise above his insular appeal in his senatorial district.
The APC can only battle Atiku with a person who has the contacts and appeal of a nationalist. That person is not the vice president either. Yemi Osinbajo has been campaigning with modest energy, and all he claims as strength is that he served under Buhari for seven years and he acted for some weeks. He has not drawn out any vision, or clarity of ideas other than an empty air of rhetoric. He has alienated the Muslims, especially in the north, and has shown himself incapable of breaking free of his RCCG cocoon. He was cut out of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s cloth, but now wants to declare himself as the fashion designer. At the burial of one of Napoleon’s descendants, the writer Victor Hugo wrote, “Just because we had Napoleon Le Grand (The great), do we have to have Napoleon Le Petite (The small)?” Even he could not handle Tinubu’s welfare ideas the administration appropriated and Buhari fired him from that task. He left him to shepherd the economy whose currency is now the north of 600 Naira to a dollar.
Nor is Jonathan an option. His choice is to make the presidency go back north after another four years because he cannot seek re-election if he becomes president again.
The only option is to have a Tinubu as the candidate. It promises to be a gladiatorial contest. Even if Atiku won the ticket with money, you must give his plaudits. He did not enter the fray yesterday. He has been at it for decades, from under Yar-Adua’s shadow. He has become his own man with is own money, and structure across the country. He is a big name to fight in the national sweepstakes. He has contacts. He has people who swear by him. Forget that he has been the harlot of Nigerian politics, without a core of values other than the vanity of attaining political power. He has been able to show a muscle no one can ignore.
Other than Tinubu, APC has no one near Atiku’s prowess. The others are baboons waiting for a boon of anointing. Tinubu knows him well. In one of Atiku’s ashewo bus stops, he sought and clinched presidential ticket in Tinubu’s party. He knows Tinubu is a tough cookie to crack. Tinubu knows business more than he does. He has done it for himself. He has done it for Lagos, the model for all states who want to plough out of economic doldrums. Both even belonged to the Yar’adua group of yore. They both have grown to be different men of stature.
But APC knows Tinubu has an edge. Tinubu has been across the country, and has made contacts that outmatch Atiku region for region, tribe for tribe. In the field of ideas, Tinubu is original. Atiku has nothing but to ape popular tropes. Both have troops, but Tinubu has a heftier one. Tinubu has strategised to defeat Atiku. Atiku has no such record against him. With Atiku’s victory in PDP, half the battlefield is opened. The other half is in the offing.
The option for APC is whether they want to win with Tinubu, or lose without him. Do they want to fight a lion with a domestic cat or a bigger lion? It’s a battle of pound for pound and guile for guile. It will be a thriller. A week from now will prove it.