In pre-modern times, the road was no thoroughfare. It is what we call a bush path – sinuous, dusty, often tranquil with the scent of earth and trees on the cargo of soft winds. On it, women broke water, baby cries stirred birds, farmers trudged under heavy yams, preys strutted out of hunter’s sight, hunters crouched for the kill, kings crouched over nubile who crossed their paths.

But it was also the theatre of war, bearing arms and warriors in the shadows of shrubs. Okonkwo beheaded Ikemefuna, Nana’s Itsekiri blockaded the British, horses neighed to death in Osogbo of 1840. The bush path was romance and tragedy.  But, apart from Fafunwa’s gnomes and blood spill, it invoked traveller as reveller.

“You must set forth at dawn,” Soyinka sang to the wayfarer, “I promise marvels of the holy hour.”

That was for pristine times by comparison.

With no cars or fuel, those in villages inhale that air today bleakly. City people look backward to it with nostalgic envy. We may say it was the good old days.

Today, whether in the village or in the city, the road enjoys no odes. We have neither the great ride nor great trek. The last time a great walk made news involved hundreds of boys in bush paths, trekking and eking out a living under the command of hooded fanatics on the outskirts of Katsina. The great journey, on road or air, does not happen. We have sneak journeys, where you hope that going to destination does not obviate destiny. Whenever you arrive, it is the great survival, or great escape.

In Soyinka’s play, The Road, it is “flat in treachery and deceit.” Soyinka did not write about Okada. But again, because he presents the road as myth and metaphor, the bard foresees today. The mystery of the road, as an odyssey of tragedy, as the province of ogun, has now become the place of pain.

Road became centre piece last week. The BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu stepped in with a bang. Okada riders cannot have their way in key areas in the state. Just like in Soyinka’s The Road, the mask is off. No more the impunity of boys on bikes. No more the traffic subverts, the ones who dictate where the centre of the road is, who hug highways and clog streets, who turn express ways to the way to express lawlessness; men with heads filled with only air, cant and uncanny talent for violence. As I wrote in a poem, the bike/ is not a ride/ but a way to die.

On one of its major arteries, we witnessed a man, called David Imoh, who passed on over a dispute on a bike. The row between two became a metaphor for a nation unable to move without bloodshed. He is often inappropriately described as sound engineer as though he has no name. it happened not long after the Deborah Emmanuel tragedy in Sokoto. A nation calls itself a democracy but enacts laws on blasphemy. Yet, what was more painful about Emmanuel’s roasting was that a crowd was instantly called to the scene. In Bauchi, most of the people who haunted a so-called blasphemer were easily recruited because they had no jobs. If they were busy in an office or absorbed in homework, they would have no urgency for bloodthirst. That is the danger that Governor Sanwo-Olu wants to avert.

The issue of Okada is not new. Many commuters in the city kick when we say the bike is not the modern way to move. It is seen as elitist, words from a bored, smug airconditioned class out of touch with the mass. But it is more than that. The catalyst of the Imoh agony may now send the message home.

The riders of Okada are mostly not Nigerians, and most of them have no respect for law and order, and they belong to the class of marauders that have made the north prostrate with blood and death.

The other unknown is, who are those who have no bikes but who moon about on street sides or straggle at night like loafers? The other day on traffic, I witnessed three red-blooded boys, who were playfully harassing a few females inside a car. The furrows of their faces could turn to frowns from smiles, from cynical to maniacal. If the bike could be lethal, what of a mass of them? We have seen that the bike ought to be banned in parts of the north. Hoodlums see it as their cruise missile, or warhead. They ride it to burn down edifices, mow down churches and mosques, kidnap hundreds as in the Abuja-Kaduna train wreck. A market known as Alaba Rago was raided for weapons, and what horror finds.

The matter is being ethnicised. It is about safety, not tribe. The leaders of the Hausa community begged and blackmailed simultaneously, saying they would caution them and that they are a block vote. That cannot draw water. It is not about votes. We have to be alive first before we can cast our votes. Why did they not chasten their folks before the ban?

What we also need to address is the immigration policy. Where are the documents of most of those riders and their friends who have no bikes? Many of them do not speak the Nigerian Fulani or Hausa. Forget the inanity of the Bauchi governor who said we should open our borders for them.  We have to decide whether we are a country first or a region first. If we are not a country first, why do we have a constitution?

The best way to handle these fellows is to isolate them, just like in the western countries where those who cannot show that they are legal are shown the way out.

Okada also is a hospital nightmare. Broken bones, limp and limbless citizens are all over hospitals in the state, especially Igbobi. The alternative may not be easy. But it can be done. The seven-seater Korope, a bus that is now filling the streets can replace Okada. They don’t run fast enough for a militant’s dare. And they cannot slide and hide. They reach any part of town, like the buses of the days before Okada. Apart from state government’s intervention, individuals are beginning to see it as a worthwhile investment. Banning Okada will cause some hardship and a sense of loss. But better to be alive than to live under the shadow of fear. Some cities have banned it, like in  Akwa Ibom, and citizens have adapted. It will take some enduring, but if we keep our eyes on the goal, Lagos will triumph.

Poet Niyi Osundare writes that the “road never forgets,” but we can enshrine its memories, its bad ones, and move on.

 

When Adeleke farts

He was addressing a rally in what should have been a holy attire. What came out of Ademola Adeleke had no holy mission before his adoring followers. His lips violated his white cap and white tunic.

He was in his element as a political never-do-well. He did not tell his people he wanted to change their lives in education or health care, or he was going to lift the profile of governance from the vanity of his owambe dance. He went venal with world currencies.

You might have thought he wanted to say something that would ennoble a human soul when, with a mien of casual self-righteousness, he yelled in Yoruba, “E ni su-uru,” that is, “be patient and listen to me.” Rather, he farted from his lips. “It is not just Naira,” he emitted, dismissing the local currency as if the beating it has received from Uncle Mefi’s CBN was not enough.

He was going for the kill. He was going global to spend dollar, pounds and Euros in the upcoming governorship polls where he will try to fight the gentle but redoubtable records of a performer in Governor Gboyega Oyetola. He wore a pair of dark goggles like a Mafiosi revving the partisan conscience of his inner circle. He had the swagger of a loser spoiling for another disaster.

The people want his money, not his dance. Or maybe they will enjoy the prancing spectacle of his elderly waist onstage. Maybe Davido, who echoed his “fire for fire,” could strum his uncle into another alawada fiesta. But when it comes to who will make decisions for Osun lives, let his swagger begone.

It is no comedy matter, no time to insult the stock exchange. He cannot turn a serious election into an Obi Cubana show. Even that fellow saw my chiding, and has started to do good charity. Learn, Senator Adeleke, learn!

I have always despised those who call him “her excellency.” No one is masculine like Peter Obi. Look at his intense eyes, carriage, stride and sometimes visceral smile. His vocal output may be light, but a warrior underlies its deceptive effeminacy. The gifted ear can filter the man from the female sigh.

But that is the former governor of Anambra State. He abides his own contradiction. See, for instance, the story of his encounter with a journalist when he Anambra helmsman. He wanted to insert a newspaper ad and he turned not the aloof, superior state chief executive. Rather, he became a sort of broker. He negotiated advert commission with the journalist on behalf of the state. He had to save money for development. For him, to be frugal was a canon. You may even say cannon.

That scenario haunted me until the story that few know or want to know about the former Anambra chieftain and now megaphonic presidential hopeful. It occurred in 2009, and he was Anambra State’s number citizen. The story goes thus. The governor had an office at 7, Aerodrome Avenue, Apapa, and he had instructed an aide and one or two others to deposit about N250 million there.

Someone in his inner circle was probably not happy with Obi. So, the police followed a tipoff and top cop Marvel Akpoyibo – remember him? Former CP and DIG? – organised his men and intercepted the vehicle headed to Obi’s office. The matter roiled Obi, cut short a trip, put together some media men to hush the story.

But some reporters craved it like shark sniffing blood because it was a pip of a story. Under Akpoyibo, the report landed in the office of the inspector general of police. PDP top brass cried. Olisa Metuh berated the state house of assembly for hiding their tails behind their cowardly backs, implying that the rubberstamp legislators had sold their souls to the puritan Obi. They yelled impeachment. PDP thought the time was ripe to cut down the APGA mango. Even Obi’s party disowned him on the scandal. But the man would not go. Mango would not go. Obi glowed lush, round and proud on Anambra’s tree.

The IG and those after him have not released the report, and no house member has had the courage to browbeat the fellow. In 2013, Olisa Okechuckwu of the APC reopened the wound, and asked the police to unearth the findings. He worried because Obiano, his account officer, was taking over from him.

No dice. The soft-voiced merchant was more warrior than his macho pursuers. He wrestled them to the floor. Men with throats of bass, soprano and treble could only tremble before Obi’s audacity, or what novelist Joseph Conrad calls the “bravado of guilt.” Just wonder how charmed Obi is. Many are calling him to be president but they are not asking for N250 million in 2009 value of the sum.

I envy the man. When he was running as Atiku’s deputy, tv hostess Kadaria Ahmed asked him why he invested Anambra money in his family business. With a rueful smile, Obi did not deny but put on a toga of righteousness. He did it for the good of Anambra, not for his family. No one capered over that act of impunity and audacious corruption. How did he do it without due process. How come billions of naira left the state coffers without question or alarm in the system?

Then when off-shore scandal broke last year, his name came up again, lodging money abroad while governor? Then we recalled that he owned the biggest mall in Abuja, which unfortunately fell to tongues of fire. Reports say it was built when he was in office. Who is asking him those questions?

Indeed, the Bible says blessed are those whose sins are covered. It may be that Obi is God’s son, because King David applauds those, like him, “whose sin the Lord does not count against him and in whose spirit is not deceit.”

But I am not sure of the deceit part with Peter Obi. He may even be a version of the Biblical Peter the rock. He is the man who says he loves to be frugal, but opens state coffers into his company’s account.

And again, he says he was a great governor. I will not be unfair to him. I will say he was a good governor, which in Nigerian history does not mean much. He appropriated what Ngige and his predecessor Mbadinuju did into his museum of achievements. What a clever man. I envy him for that. The blessing of the former is taken by the latter. Obi must know his Bible well. Never mind the roads Obi did in an age of concrete were mere laterite, only surface deep and washed away by the generous malignancy of Anambra floods.

Some say, his great achievement was bequeathing N75 billion. What a claim. In a state that still had debts at that time. I think his view of money is to keep rather than do. But the task of governor is to do. We don’t hail a father for having a lot of money but for doing a lot of good. He was miserly to the state, magnificent to himself. No one expects a person to save money when there are lots of schools to build and lots of hospitals, et al. The man has what I call “pouch economy,” like those our beloved mothers who keep their pouches beneath their navels and hide money there. They don’t have grand designs for the money. It’s security. you can call it “Ogbele economy.” Former Katsina state governor and president Umar Yar’Adua did same in Katsina. It is what was called pound foolish. Money for money’s sake, or a sort of ‘financialism.’

If as governor he did not leave a grand vision that endures, then we may be looking at the hype called Obi. Onitsha, Nnewi, et al, make billions by the day, yet when he was governor, he could not wax that to tax. But he left those markets to operate a 20th century fashion when a 21st century beckoned. That is the vision for the new governor. Obi thinks like a trader, not statesman or visionary. A friend of mine calls it Obi-nomincs.

I understand why the southeast clutches at Obi, because they want the president this time. But the east must learn to earn from our geo-politics. In politics, we don’t always get what we deserve but we get what results from how we play clock and men. The southeast has not forged alliances with the other zones. They have miscalculated with tensions and alienations. When a Kanu inspires home support in one breath, and the same supporters of secession want to be president, the matter becomes complicated. You cannot say, “To your tents O Israel,” in one voice, and “Support us to lead you,” in another. It has no rhyme or rhythm. Politics is the art of the possible. It’s time to play a politics of realism in the southeast. It may be right to co-opt than coerce, but it is even more profitable to cooperate than co-opt. See how Sinn Fein saw margin was error, and now are on the verge of getting first minister for Northern Ireland.

That is an issue for the Igbo to chew. Even at that, an Obi as frontline candidate is a broken proposition.

 

Akintola’s children

This essayist did not expect to be hailed in some quarters with hallelujah chorus for last week’s column. As a colleague noted last week, if you prick a child, it must squeak, or else you worry if it is normal. A writer is nothing if not straight from the heart. Some became hysterical, and a certain errand boy called me and sounded half drunk, half in drug, and I cut him off on the phone before he wrote some drivel unworthy of civilised publication. Just then, I saw that the southwest was still agog with presidential wannabes, a story that makes me realise Chief Ladoke Akintola, husband of Faderera, is so fertile as to still have sons in Yorubaland. The libido of treachery. Those who, when they wanted something, bowed at his home day and night, reported there like school children, flattered him, ate his food, laughed with him, wallowed in his riches, schemed with him, won his trust, gossiped about other associates, alienated him with lies and insinuations from those who meant well, plotted with reptilian souls. This essayist is witness. They are now saying they are equal or even better because the man put fortune at their disposal. It reminds me of the old Oyo Empire and a fellow known as Bashorun Gaa – or Gaha – who genuflected daily at the palace while plotting to bring down the throne. Historians and biographers need to tell us more about Yoruba history, and men like Akintola, (and Afonja and co) as well as Gaa, an ancestor who ended tragically but whose ploys, subterfuges and plots as well as the death and rise of Oyo invoke German philosopher Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return. They hypostasised what Greek historiographers called the cycle of time and history.

 

 

 

 

Mefi unveiled

Godwin Emefiele has defied all laws, economics and decencies to declare for president. I don’t want to dwell on it, as in the past, that forced his minions to buy a full-page newspaper advert to attack me. For now, leave the legality to the courts and political process.

I just want to think math here. Who are the farmers who bought the form? Shall we know them by name? I ask because, his farm theory and practice have not given Nigeria enough rice for profit. Rice is far more costly now than when he became CBN chief. Most of the rice consumed come from smuggled goons. Where did they make enough profit to cobble together N100 million to buy a form? It means they make billions of Naira. Even Mefi will laugh at that. A seller will give out excess only from profits. That’s basic math and common sense.

He needs to confess just as Malami did about the vehicles. We don’t have customers of his rice, so where is the profit?

His rice pyramid has turned out to be white (rice) elephant. Hence, I am asking, who are those shadowy rice merchants who make profit without sale, and sale without a produce, produce without a market. That must be Mefi-nomics.

 

After hiding under the shadows of his votaries, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo took off his veil. On the ordinary level, it was the unveiling of his ambition for the number one post. But for others, including this essayist, he did not just unfurl a dream. He cracked the calabash.

He was, by that singular act, challenging his mentor to a duel.

For some of us who did not believe it was true, the announcement was a theatre as a giddy act because it began as a furtive play. His ambition, that is. Then he decided to hit the jugular. He said it in no unshaken terms.

But he knew Asiwaju Bola Tinubu was running when he declared. He knew Asiwaju was interested when he was a commissioner under him. He knew Asiwaju Tinubu was interested when he nominated him – Osinbajo – for vice president. Never mind the mendacities Osinbajo – the man of God – has allowed to fester that Tinubu did not nominate him. I don’t know if Osinbajo can, as a man of God, go to the pulpit and, in the words of the Psalmist, “swear (it) to his own hurt and change not.”

So, in the sphere of knowledge, he knew that Tinubu was eyeing the post, and intended to run once Buhari’s time had run its course. That explains why he did not say it out loud. No doubt, he had a right to any position as a citizen of the republic. But there is right and there is decency.

If he intended to run, why did he not go to his leader and say, “I know you want this position. But, you see, I have been where you put me in the past six or seven years, and I want it. I know it’s your dream. I have seen some things, eaten some things, touched some things and done some things and I believe I should give it a shot.”

But rather than avail himself the class and panache of this dialogue, he amassed his team, and they pointed the pistol.

Poor indeed that they started challenging Tinubu’s supporters in public spaces, leading to turf wars. In all these, he kept a silence. A silence that was full of bows and arrows. It was the way of the coward.

But the first narrative he encouraged was that he did not come out of Tinubu’s benevolence. If he did, why would he hold on to a ballast of an independent man? So, he let the lie to bloat that Tinubu had no hand in making him vice president. Bisi Akande, the elder who had words of praise for him as brilliant lawyer, also narrated how his journey began to that royal perch. Osinbajo never responded, not a thing. Now, he edits Tinubu out of the story, and says it was Rauf Aregbesola and Ibikunle Amosun, who took him to then candidate Buhari. Who were these two men in the APC top brass in 2014? Aregbesola was Osun governor, and he was influential only because he held Asiwaju’s coattail. Ditto Amosun, who was Buhari’s toady. They were not in the high flame of the politicking. They were followers. So, if they took Osinbajo to Buhari, then someone sent them. In his Participations, Bisi Akande narrated how it happened.

Even Osinbajo’s own account is perfidious. He forgets that he once acknowledged Tinubu when the times were insipid in the past. Fibbing, in this regard, is not Christian. But he has been caught in a lie. Again, the fact that two intermediate party leaders took him to Buhari underwrites Osinbajo’s status  and stature then. No one knew him on a national scale. He could not have even run for senate without help, or even house of representatives.

He barnstormed his home state of Ogun recently. He knows he could not have even run for a post then without help from Lagos. He was no factor even in his home state when he was executing Tinubu’s audacious vision for justice in Lagos. Now, he acts as though he is the legitimacy of Ogun State. With his relative obscurity, he knows he was no factor in 2014, and today he is vice president. He has forgotten his obscurity, and he thinks that it is convenient to forget Tinubu so he can assert his own ambition. Hence the narrative of ingratitude.

He did or could not confront Tinubu with his ambition because he did not have the courage to do it. He is battling with what historians and psychologists have designated as the fear of gratitude. It means I can’t acknowledge those who made me a success because it will diminish my stature and accomplishments. Since ancient times, especially in Rome, according to Edward Gibbon’s classic, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. A certain emperor killed all those who knew him when he was a slave. The historian and philosopher Tacitus wrote: “Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit because gratitude is a burden and revenge a pleasure.”

It is narratives like this that are yoking him to the Akintola saga in the First Republic. In spite of revisionists, Akintola remains a Yoruba quisling. He was first a hypocrite before he became a traitor.  He wanted to play incorruptible by arguing with Awo about party members’ role and activities in government as though he did not know before he became premier. It is that hypocrisy that bound him with enemies outside who pissed inside the house.

In obvious reaction to my last week’s parable, the vice president said it would be a betrayal for him not to run for office. You betray anyone with whom you have a pact, either moral or legal. Does he have a pact with Nigeria that once you serve as assistant to the president you must serve as president. He spoke it with an air of inevitability. No one has a pact to run for president. A right? Yes. A pact? Nada.

He owes loyalty to where he comes from, not where he wants to go. And when he became vice president, he even discharged, as a task, a vision that Tinubu suggested to the administration, especially school feeding. Tinubu’s idea: I hope they won’t dispute that either.  The job was taken out of his ken and given to a new minister who is yet to explain to the public and the children how two billion Naira was spent to feed kids who were at home during Covid lockdown. The idea came out of Tinubu’s cook book, but the chef failed the palate. So, for a man who says he will continue Buhari’s legacy (still a question mark), he could not even execute Tinubu’s idea, just a little of his vast array of vision.

By elevating to Nigeria above a group, he was guilty of Samuel Johnson’s words: “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” Every rise in politics begins from a cell. To move on, you have to always negotiate with that cell or you sell out. In Greek mythology, dramatized by playwright Euripides, a man sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia for country. But his heart is not in the right place. A wasted tragedy.

Osinbajo’s assertion that he owes no one any debt reminds me of Buhari’s inaugural speech in which he said, “I belong to everybody and  I belong to nobody.” That never happens in politics anywhere. It was even plagiarised. An old man, the greatest French man in the 20th century Charles de Gaulle. He uttered it in May 1958. Neither Buhari nor his speechwriter has said sorry to that French man’s grave. It was intellectual corruption. In using the phrase that he owes no one any debt, he was battling with his conscience. Some are asking, if he could do this to the man who helped him, who else can he not do this to? They might see him as a “Man dressed in a little brief authority,” as Shakespeare says.

He probably ate a forbidden fruit. Maybe he gobbled the king’s meat, and how palatable it was. Daniel in the Bible rejected the king’s meat. He thought it would defile him. But Osinbajo might like the morsel. In A Man of the people, a novel about politics of this sort, Chinua Achebe asks impishly, who will spit out a morsel of meat that good fortune put in his mouth? Achebe knew, like Daniel, that it is an unclean thing. Maybe it is that gastronomic temptation that is troubling our vice president.

 

ALAAFIN’S SONG

Alaafin is gone. What a waste. The man was stately, proud and imperious. My first encounter with him confirmed my view from afar off as a Nigerian definition of the enlightened monarch. It was at my book presentation on  Governor Abiola Ajimobi. Alaafin Adeyemi spoke smoothly, and i recall him stride into the moorlands of international history and diplomacy, alluding to Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. A fan of In Touch, we spoke sparingly but unforgettably, and he once said, “Sam, you are very important to me.” I spoke to him last on his last birthday and promise to interview him on my TV show. I feel a personal loss. The Urhobo say, oto riemu ( the earth eats great things). Roman leader Pericles wrote in a funeral oration, “The earth is a sepulchre of famous men.”

But when he died, the social media was more interested in his wives and women, the elder’s libido and many conquests. it gobbled a lion’s share of our editorial board’s time. I observed that perhaps social media has made sex an obsession of the modern imagination. Maybe. But it has always been in the culture. Hence we had Sigmund Freud, who turned civilisation into a matter of romps and orgasms, whether for a priest or an emperor. Rome and Greece had erotic tyrants like Caligula and Commodus. Kingdoms went to war over a woman’s beauty. The history of the Church of England rose partly after the allure of a woman’s flesh. The Trojan War shed its blood over Helen. Even today, Putin and his lover is a part script in the evolving Ukraine war.  A British MP resigned for ogling porn in the Commons. Thinkers have written seminal works, like Herbert Mercuse’s Eros and civilisation. Soyinka knows a thing or two about old men besting younger men in tackling pulchritude when he wrote his immortal A lion and the jewel. So, we should stop the swoon over the old man’s grave.

 

Even he who appoints him as one of his chief apostles cannot stop an about-face. He is the Lord of lords and King of kings. Yet, when it’s time to pick his man of treasury, he settles for a man of treachery.

When Judas assumes that office, he is not like Peter the Rock. The world must want to know his answer to the question that Peter, son of Barjona, gives for the ages. The question is, “What do people say that I am?” We might also have flipped it for Judas. Who is Judas?

Judas is a sly, obtrusive disciple. In one one of three times he speaks for the records, he berates a woman who splashes his lord’s feet with a special ointment. He envies his maker, so he loathes such an ornament on the lord. He wants it on the poor. It is one of the enduring episodes of perfidy in all scripture. The other times are no less etched on his memory of about-face: when he asks Jesus if he is the traitor and another when he returns the 30 pieces of silver. The worst, though, is wordless, a kiss. A semiotic silence.

Jesus sees through his false grandeur. He lashes out at the artificiality of his peroration. The man does not care for the poor. He does not care for anyone other than himself.

Jesus says the poor will always be with us, a prophesy that has defeated some of the best statecraft from age to age, through the Pericles of Athens, the Caesars of Rome, through the philosophical magnificence of the Enlightenment age, the honour rolls and ruins of the French Revolution, the 19th century reforms of Britain, the fantasies of the American century. Not the 20th century heroes – Churchill, Lenin, De Gaulle, Mandela, Awolowo, FD Roosevelt, Ghandi. Not the most heroic of systems, the fortitude of ideas from Ricardo to Marx, the abattoirs of wars and the temples of peace have made the poor vanish. But even Jesus brings his gospel for the poor.

Judas is a hypocrite. But Jesus comes short of saying it to his chief accountant. He does not need to say it. He already knows the hour is coming. But not many in the fold know Judas to be such a menace of the pirouette.

So, when he says one of them is going to betray him, some of them are aghast. Judas knows that Jesus knows. But he does not care anymore. He might have changed his mind after all the noise about his coming treachery. He might have said “I can’t challenge the man who makes me.” The man who takes me from the miry clay to the gravelly way to the marble palace.

But in spite of widespread knowledge, he is quiet, plotting and plodding. He is on his way. He is going to do it anyway. Does Jeremiah not say before that, “the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked?” And he asks, “Who can know it? I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins.”

It is another question why he chooses him and put him on that high perch?

After all, even the father in heaven chooses the most beautiful of the angels, Lucifer, as a mighty one of the cherubim. The devil betrays and turns all his work not only upside down but sets off a rebellion against the Almighty.

So, it gives the father in heaven many moments of unhappiness. Lucifer is a snake when not a lion or when not on the mountains tempting the Lord with bread. It is he who Peter describes as a roaring lion, but Apostle James says it is a lion that can be resisted because it has no destination. It merely wanders. Unlike the Lion of the tribe of Judah. There are lions and there are lions. So, it is not so much that the Judas of heaven, just as the Judas on earth, can be beaten. It is that he has happened at all.

When Jesus tells him that the poor will always be with us, he is also implying that the earth will always have Judas. But the Judas on earth like Lucifer in heaven does not care that they embarrass the master. They love the idea. Many years later, Macbeth’s acts of Shakespeare’s play will be called a vaulting ambition, and the poet John Milton rekindles the idea in his opus, Paradise Lost. That is because Lucifer, just like Judas, has no repentant heart. In Milton’s epic, Satan is a gorgeous rebel, and he swears, “All good to me is lost; Evil, be now my Good: by thee at least Divided Empire with heaven’s king I hold.”

In spite of his conviction, Jesus does not take him away from his position as the financial director. He is loving the position he is given. And rather than get humble, he waxes puffy. He colludes with his master’s foes. He accepts any inducement, and he is known as bowing to 30 pieces of silver. In today’s money, it is no more than 500 dollars.

It does not matter to him that the Lord is lamenting the perfidy. He says, “I am exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death.” He also sees other little acts of lack of faith. The other apostles cannot say their prayers with him. They sleep when their eyes of understanding should be awake. He climbs the mountain, and asks his father to let the cup pass. The father says nothing. His own temptation is going to come and go. That of the father, from the great Satan who morphs from Lucifer, is still tormenting the world. In fact, in one account of the Gospel, it is the Devil who “entered into Judas.” Here the heavenly treachery conjoins with the earthly one.

He also says, the son of man goes as it is written of him, but woe to him by whom he goes. There is no betrayal without camouflage. He works with the Pharisees and other enemies, and hands him over to the way of Golgotha. While Judas commits suicide, master Jesus, ever the lord, rises. It’s like the words of Julius Caesar. “The things that threatened me never looked but on my back; when they shall see the face of Caesar, they are vanished.”

But what many will remember is not only that Judas knows that everyone knows he will betray but he does not rethink and renew his loyalty. He plays the part of another parable, a man known as Brutus who is egged on by his mother to tempt Caesar. Caesar makes him into a trusted adviser and rising star in Rome. But he, too, ends in infamy.

No one, however, forgets the kiss. It is an open one. Not like the kiss of affection in Russian writer Anton Chekhov’s short story of that title, where a person swoons, wonders and wanders about for the Romeo who kisses her in a party. Judas’s own is not a party. It is, in a parabolic sense, a prelude to a beheading, however futile. Judas kiss is a perversion. It is murder cloaked as love, a tender act as signal, as giveaway of the identity of the master. He is setting up the one who sets him up. It is a kiss that will attract a hiss for generation to come. One thing, though. Judas is better than many, even today, who come after him because, at least, he shows remorse before hanging himself.

A SECOND COMING

We don’t need to remember that he did it. It remembers us. That he stood for all when the world was crumbling under a disease. Great leadership shines out of a cauldron of crisis, the blue flame of a fire. Bill Clinton regretted that he did not have a crisis like 9/11 to confront in his boring era of prosperity and peace. Hence scandal stalked him as an odd sort of spice.

No one asks for a time of misery as an opportunity to excel. A great leader basks in crisis but does not summon it. What is the point of leaders if not great challenges? We saw Covid-19. The world trembled. The BOS of Lagos saw and conquered. He also showed the way even when the centre quaked and looked for direction. Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu did it. His other accomplishments are big in themselves, but they seem small because he did the first thing first: he saved our city. So all the roads, the educational ideas and strides, the healthcare work, housing, the economic reforms including gigantic projects on agriculture, all look puny by comparison. In his novel, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad writes, “our strengths are accidents arising out of the weaknesses of others.” Covid-19 was not planned, but it was bigger than anything. Great leaders excel in war, disease or economic depression. Covid-19 chose the BOS. The BOS smoked it. If we did not live, if Lagos descended into a China, or Italy, there will be lament instead of roads, mass graves instead of homes and school yards, tears instead of bridges.

No wonder, it was the Lagos State Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) that first gave its nod for his second term. Others followed. Recently, the Governance Advisory Council (GAC) in Lagos threw its august weight for another term for the slim, boyish, energetic man, the governor with a folksy air and face of casual charisma at the helm in Lagos. It’s indeed a second coming as a glorious truth.

Just after the Appeal Court reinstated Ebonyi State Governor David Umahi, my memory woke up to our lack of memory. Just last December, three judges fell under the gavel of the Nigerian Judicial Council (NJC). The reason was simple: They were judicial adventurers. They gave us a paradox:  The judge as a guilty party.

They were guilty of what has become a maggot of this republic. It is the case of what we now know as judges of courts of coordinate jurisdiction.

They have disgraced in public the time-worn principle of equality. Because the law says they are equal, each of them wanted to act like George Orwell’s Animal Farm. So one judge wants to prove that they are more equal than the others. It created the sort of stalemate that the great scientist, Albert Einstein, said of our species: “Before God, we are all equally wise, and equally foolish.” With such stalemates, equality becomes a stalemate instead of a virtue or even a source of right. Each judge is equally foolish, and equally wise. One cancels the other.

Each judge is trying to universalise their jurisdiction. My jurisdiction is better than yours. Here Hobbes takes over Locke, and equality is defenestrated.

We saw the same recently when a court ruled that Umahi should vacate his seat as governor. Another court of equal power elsewhere in the country, ruled that Umahi could remain in power. It is the vulgar version of what we called “two fighting” as kids. In this case, it is adult delinquency.

Two courts, one in Abuja, the other in the southeast, ruled on behalf of the same judiciary, the same republic, the same law. But they gave us two verdicts, two justices. It mocks the idea of one law, one judiciary and one nation.

That explains why the NJC, in a slap on the wrist, barred three judges from ever being elevated to the Court of Appeal under you and above you at the Supreme Court. It is a slap on the wrist, hence the courts defied your authority and that of the NJC by doing the same in the case of Governor Umahi. Given the verdict in the Appeal Court to throw it out, it is still around to do the merry-go-round in a few days in the case concerning Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River and legislators. The matter has already been adjudicated and resolved in a higher court. So, why is the nation going through the dark comedy of waiting for a judge to sit and decide when a higher court has told us what the matter is. That is why I call it a merry-go-round. It is like the masquerade in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart who has danced himself lame before the main dance. He cannot dance again. The concert is over. Should anyone buy tickets, invite loved ones to the party or buy that new dress and drape the neck with the choice perfume? Only to learn later that the dancer is nowhere?

Your Appeal Court ruled that the power to remove governors should not be subjected to the whim of court verdicts. They are officers of state. We have seen for too long where courts decide on behalf of millions of the electorate. Many observers have seen this as another form of oligarchy, a system sponsored by well-feathered politicians and anointed by justices. It’s called courtocracy. Justices are now under scrutiny because of this.

It is now common knowledge that judges are believed to be on the take. We have justice, we have purchases. It is the oligarchy of politicians and judges. It obliterates the people. It makes votes null and void, and consecrates the principle of a few strong men over the egalitarian ethos of democracy.

“Defection of elected executives is not novel in our political system but their removal must be in accordance with the constitution. The defection might appear immoral but they have freedom of association,” said Justice J.O.K. Oyewole.

Those who sued did not win an election, and they want to reap where they did not sow. Not only in Ebonyi but also in Cross River. Let the people, not the courts, decide. That is how to deepen democracy.

We have seen a few cases where the popular choice is overthrown over technicalities. As the philosopher Blaise Paschal noted, “Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful must be just.” The cases against Umahi and Ayade have sought to conflate power with justice.

The issue of defection is a fraught affair in Nigerian politics. It could never happen in the United States or even in France. Such systems have political parties borne out of ideas, not men. Ours is the opposite. If a Joe Biden wants to join the Republican Party, he will not even be welcome unless he recants his convictions in public. He may have to renounce big taxes, abortion rights and gun prohibition. We have no such canons in our politics. Anyone can defect and waltzed into the open arms of the other. Hence, there is no difference between the political parties.

Let our politics develop its political doctrines, and that will put paid to bickering and quibbles over whether there is a right condition or not for defection. Anyone can concoct a crisis, and one man’s peace maybe another man’s turmoil.

Hence the politicians have turned the courts into Shoprite, and shop for the right judges and judgments.  Verdicts are now goods and services, like the big round orange on the left counter. We are commodifying justice.

When two judges give two verdicts, we recall the mockery of Solomonic justice of splitting the baby. But when the baby, like verdicts, are two, the baby dies. No justice comes. Neither parent, nor judge is happy. It is a funeral instead of a naming ceremony.

I hope you will respond appropriately.

Sincerely.

 

Kill-joy on Abuja-Kaduna Express

I still don’t understand the debate going on over the approval of transport minister’s proposal for a surveillance system? What is wrong if the company has only eight naira and not over N80 million  as turnover? Is that a reason to reject it? What was the position of the Bureau of Public Enterprises, which was supposed to approve it before FEC? How much did Steve Jobs have or Bill Gates before they launched world-historic technologies. Gates a school dropout, Jobs a garage habitue. Did they prove that the technology was half-baked? Or is it because it is Nigerian? If the minister’s idea was half-baked, so is that enough reason to leave the matter in abeyance and wait like helpless kittens for the coming of the devourer? Why not set a deadline for it. Rotimi Amaechi said the FEC meeting took place when the Naira was about N400 to a dollar. So, it did not happen last week. What was the FEC doing about fast-tracking the matter? If Amaechi brought the wrong firm, is security in his hands alone? It is a collective failure of government, because we had enough signs that they were going to attack. They did and we, including the military, were caught napping. The issue of train security is not about surveillance alone.

It shows a lack of instinct for decision making, a massive failure not only of our intelligence but of planning. We set up the trains, but no security guarantees before launching. We don’t have security men, fully armed and ready to squelch any attack. General Alabi Isama says in his memoirs, Tragedy of Victory, that in the 1960’s he earned accolades in the Congo when he installed soldiers in the first coach and last coach of the train and put on ice the repeated attacks on the trains. We have aircraft faraway, not nimble enough for the criminals.The hoodlums on motorcycle escaped in a time of fuel scarcity. How long can fuel sustain a motorcycle? And yet we could not capture them? Was it not time to have helicopter gunships stations in strategic points along the corridor? The train tragedy on Abuja-Kaduna railway was a poison-fly on the nation’s ointment. See the story of the doctor about to flee? Look at what might have happened to the Obi of Onitsha? What embarrassment!

We can’t erase security threat by replacing a highway with another, a Kaduna-Abuja road with a train. We have a highway and another way, both are not the ways of holiness but death.

Hence Asiwaju Tinubu reflected the instinct of a statesman and leader by cancelling his 70th birthday. To continue would lack empathy and would be peeing on the grave of compatriots.

It shows what a killjoy bad governance can be.

 

When people go into politics, they don’t enter it as a profession. In that case, they want to excel in competence alone. They join clubs as a social amenity, to put up their legs and crease their faces with a smile. We go into a church or a mosque, only with a view to peer the afterlife from the here and now. They go to war, to slay the foe, cut down a leg, pierce a heart, burn a sacred place. They clasp families to their bosom.

But many go into politics for all these, and more. The good politician must espouse competence. Aristotle prescribes that men must join politics only after excelling in their professions.

They go to church as Christian the same way you go to the mosque, and vice versa. Compromise is virtue. They see it as a club, where they joke and quaff a glass or bottles. They also see it as ‘us against them,’ a la political parties and other groupings, including feline cults. Politics takes on the air of worship, as though their mission is heaven on earth. Remember Nkrumah’s political kingdom. Ditto Zik. They invoke messiahs or new dawns, or even nirvanas. And, of course, they even work together as though they were born of the same father and mother, until they meet another group with whom they act as though the former brothers and sisters ought to be abandoned for another set of siblings who were born of the same father and mother.

So, politics is faith without reverence, family without blood and bones, profession where competence is only a fraction. It is club where you plot while pouring out a drink or wolfing down pounded yam, remember OBJ and Okadigbo. A theatre of war and play.

So, how do you make a friend in that quicksand? That is what I reflect as Bola Ahmed Tinubu turns 70. He is the political friend’s friend. He knows how to make a friend. It is because he does not know how to make a foe. Or shall we say, he knows how to make a foe unlike any man. He who sees himself as a foe is only waiting to be a friend. Or he is a friend who turns a foe. When a foe, he is plotting to be a friend again.

Rather than see the foe, he sees opportunity. He knows that everyman has a virtue. Like Jesus and the harlot who was about to be stoned to death. No one has the right to stone anyone because we are all human. Anyone can repent and bring his virtue to the cause.

What is that cause? Democracy, a progressive chapter, an army of transforming the society. So, he is not like Harry Truman, who loathed betrayals in Washington. He quipped, “if you want a friend, buy a dog.” Tinubu buys time.

But for that quality, Nigeria will not have Lagos as the governance model. He has competence and vision. Hence he pioneered privatising power, revolutionised IGR into a fortress of economic growth sought after by the Governors Forum. Again, Lagos as the refuge of most states in spite of the death and violence across the country? As a Muslim, he handed over schools to missions.  He introduced the big new year Christian service in the state.

Humans are the great resource. Without men, what is the place of vision? He has an eye for talent, so he surrounds himself with the best. That made Lagos the state among states. He brought that acumen to the national stage. With the APC, he effected almost single-handedly the most successful and vast political coalition in the nation’s history.

Few have focused on the fact that he has friends outside of politics. Where is the time to look back and mix with that friend he has had from childhood? Politics is all-consuming. If not, we should see him in public more with his friend with whom he followed a popular Nigerian musician on a southwest tour. They had no money to return to Lagos. So, they hung on to the back of a truck that almost cost them their lives. But you don’t see him in public with him. You see him with the political associates because politics is not a job at Mobil from where you go to the Island Club after closing hours. He wakes up to the associates in the morning and sleeps after goodnight to them. Who did we see with Awo if not Rewane, or Jakande, or in the good times, Enahoro? You never saw Lincoln’s best friend Joshua Fry Speed in public, the man who read out chapters from books to his best friend in his younger days. Or Lindeman and Lord Beaverbrook with Churchill when he was daring Hitler and serenading us with orations. Or Strobe Talbott with Bill Clinton who made breakfast for him at Oxford – not even when he hired him as assistant secretary of state. Or even Oliver Tambo with Mandela even when they were both in the trenches together.

So, political family trumps every other. Wives suffer. Children groan.A politician once told me the story of his daughter who stayed awake at home after midnight till he returned. She had a cheeky proposal. She wanted to book an appointment to see daddy.

The vocation is faith, army, family, club, et al, and becomes the breath of life. It is your clothes. Hence, friends have tended to be more intense for a man like Tinubu because he has to have many of them. Because the bigger the politician, the bigger the circle. And who is bigger than he in Nigerian politics since 1999?

Hence, he accommodates turncoats. He makes enemies even when he is not aware of them because he has to juggle indulgences, tasks and positions. I remember a fellow who complained that he was removed from a certain perch, and his bitterness was directed at Tinubu. I asked Tinubu. He was aware, but he said, “He’s a good man.” He told me it was another group that edged the man out. It was not his choice. He had to yield because of the larger interest of balancing interests in the sweepstakes of governance and politics. The fellow knew that a leader must take the blame even when he is innocent. Some have left because he replaced them with others who did not to have, and they felt let down. It is a delicate game.

It happens often. He has to balance, and it will never be just all the time. He will only have to try harder. Ironically, some who are favoured also turn against him after tasting the “forbidden fruit.”

Sometimes when a person returns, he prioritises him over those who have been “home” – Tinubu himself has admitted that privately. I discussed it with a friend, and he referred to the prodigal son. The father threw a party for the one who left. What of the good children at home? Even Jesus said, when a sheep strays, he would leave the other 11 to save the lone one astray, so there will be “one sheep, one shepherd.”

He walks a tightrope. Yet those who leave tend to come back. He does not fight with hate, although with malice. Waziri in the second republic spoke of politics without bitterness. Tinubu lays no claim to sainthood. He fights with malice, but of a peculiar sort. It is not quite like Apostle Paul’s admonition: “In malice be children, but in understanding be men.” He does not exercise his malice with bitterness but as a store of facts. There is no word in English to define his sort of grudge. He uses it to fight you when it is necessary, but also to embrace you when it is necessary. In this regard, he exercises his gift as a great judge of talent, but not always astute as a judge of character. Even then, Lucifer was the most beautiful of the angels. And Christ chose Judas, not just as apostle but as treasurer. Apostles become apostates, too. Awo lamented Enahoro till he died. There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. Ambition is a terrible thing when it afflicts a person. Churchill’s friend Beaverbrook once said, “A person with a will to power can’t make friends.”

But Tinubu likes friends. Hence some who cynically leave always know a party awaits their return like the prodigal son. Does it pain him when men he made turn against him? I asked him about it when I wondered how he handles such matters. He said, “If it pains you that they behave like this, how do you expect me to feel.” Is it the lawyer that he insisted he must be included in as many cases? Or the one who abused him many times, yet he came to his rescue when his health collapsed?

He is like what French writer Andre Malraux wrote: “If you abandon a certain number of deputes or if they abandon you, that is…an incident. If you abandon an idea, that is not an incident, it is a suicide.”

Tinubu looks beyond incidents to the goal.

 

If you did not see the letterhead, you might think it came from a political party. A PDP, or APC, or APGA could not have penned the directive more elegantly. It had no mystical air. You did not see the ghost of the holy spirit, or the balm of the word. It was a felicitous tone for the political battlefield. But a general overseer, not a general, was behind the call to battle. The signee was not important. A pastor can sign a PDP letter, or a bishop an APC memo. The wall of partition has for long been torn between the spiritual and temporal in the life of politics.

But never before have we seen, in the country, that a church would set up a directorate of politics as the Redeemed Christian Church of God has done. It is even hard for this essayist to accept it. When I first saw it, I chalked it up to internet provocateurs seeking to throw dirt on the altar. But in Nigeria, fiction has become so real that even the magical sort popularised in Latin America is tame in the Nigerian experience. In faraway Colombia, novelist Garcia Marquez must have squeaked in his grave last week at the sound of Bianca’s queenly palms in Awka. The mighty writer’s ghost surely rose to see how a mighty slap made mincemeat of his genre.

It was not RCCG alone. For emphasis, the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria joined RCCG in the call for such a directorate.

My first instinct was the contradiction. If PFN espoused the idea, were they calling for each church to support their candidate, so that we have, say a Winner’s candidate at loggerheads with an RCCG candidate? If you read the RCCG letter, it was a call specifically for a Redeemed candidate. Their hierarchy of politics was from the zone to area to parish. It looks like a political party from national to state, to local government area to ward. The spirit is learning from the letter. The word taking a cue from the world.

Or are they implying that if each Pentecostal church has a candidate, they will organise their own version of a primary? Who will vote? Will it be the church with the largest vote, or it will be based on the pastor with the biggest dose of the holy spirit? How will they determine it? If it is the church numbers, maybe it will be a nod to the Catholics. But if the Pentecostals believe they are more authentic than the old church, we shall have even more exquisite mess. So even at that, will they yield to the mega churches? Does the Bible judge by numbers or by faith? Are they going to “cast lots” as in when Matthias emerged to replace Judas? That will be an interesting scenario, and I would want to know the umpire? In the case of Mattias, Bible scholars still quibble whether the expression meant voting in the electoral sense, or simply communing with God for answers, since no opponent was named in the story. Whatever the scenario, I fear the prospects of how historians described a Polish parliament in the medieval age: A “divinely ordained confusion.”

It is obvious these guys did not go to the altar to seek from God before jumping into the public arena. Do I oppose Christians going into politics? No. The church as an institution? I say no. Christ said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, then will my servants fight that I be not taken by the Jews. Now is my kingdom not of hence.”

The mistake of the church is that it has become too rooted in the material obsession and forgotten its heavenly mission. Hence, they are more interested in numbers instead of members, whole money instead of holy mourning, joy in things rather than joy in the spirit. Some have quoted phrases like “occupy till I come,” or “give to Caesar what is Caesars.” What did Jesus occupy on earth? Certainly not political power. He didn’t seek it. He evangelised. He tended the broken hearted, and inspired the poor. Rather our church is more interested in ephemerals: wealth, healing, earthly glory. They are good, but secondary. They preach those things as though primary. What did Jesus give to Caesar, was it power? No. he spoke of “giving” not “taking.”

The reference to the age of kings in the Old Testament and the kings in Israel as an excuse is an error. A mistake of context and texts. That was before Jesus came. Israel was a prefigure of the church as a people of God against gentiles. In political power, they tended to fail like David, who stumbled and Solomon after him and many more. The kingdom broke in two and mired in wars. Prophets like Elijah and Elisha chastened them. Theocracy stumbled. The priestly order cautioned them. Not time yet for the kingdom. Even many a prophet erred, like Jonah, Nehemiah, et al. When Christ came, Jews were no longer privileged, and “the gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world.” Not the kingdom of this world. Paul said the world belongs to the devil, “the god of this world.” It was because of this that Christ said, “let the wheat and tares dwell together until the day of harvest.”

In a politically fragile country like Nigeria with religious suspicion, are they not aware that it is a combustible step? They forget we have Muslims in this country, even in larger numbers. What if they decide on a Muslim candidate? Shall we now turn our politics into a theocratic slugfest, war of faiths? Jesus said, “I send you as lambs among wolves, be ye wise as a serpent but harmless as a dove.” Even in the U.S where the Christian Right pushes its agenda, it didn’t, until Trump, come out this brazenly. They know they can’t do it alone, so they work quietly with Wall Street, capitalists and gun advocates in what Nixon enunciated as the southern strategy: God, guns and Gays.

Religious leaders should concentrate to set the values in the society rather than play up sectarian differences. If they succeed, they will have a righteous nation by osmosis, rather than a Maccabean revolution. The church will do well to pursue values and not valorise factions or persons of their faith. The best candidate is not always a Christian, but a Nigerian. Again, they should unleash battles against drug addiction, corruption, moral laxity, kidnapping, cultism. They do less of these. They should chide governors who fail rather than supine co-ops and photo-ops.

It is all right for individuals to pursue causes. William Wilberforce detonated slavery. Mary Slessor conjoined twins with culture. Not glorifying wealth as though the poor are sinners. Seek ye first the kingdom, not wealth or earthly vanity.

The churches ought to be careful. The spirit is more important than things. What the PFN and RCCG are doing reveal what the French writer and playwright, Charles Peguy wrote: “All begins as mystique and ends as politique.”

We don’t want religious war. We seek the holy of holies, not hurly-burly.

 

Soludo takes flight

It was not only a sartorial stamp, but the charisma of his macho presence. He made a political regalia of his Akwete top and trousers, red cap and his glowing dark skin, and you could not miss the voice: The boom of the Anambra orchestra. No leader, perhaps since Tafawa Balewa, will lead with the rare philtre of his vocal gift. No broadcaster, but he will dwarf any electronic larynx evangelising his own programmes. imagine an Ikenna Ndaguba, Ernest Okonkwo or Kevin Ejiofor on the throne. But he has more.

Chukwuma Soludo, at last, mounted the throne as governor of Anambra State. He does so with a mighty credential hardly matched by any in any office. The former CBN chief now becomes a chief servant of one of Nigeria’s top entrepreneurial states. He calls his people an itinerant tribe. He is beckoning them home, like the existential philosopher Heidegger who says home is the object of all quests.

His speech was a promise but a restraint, an embrace but a caution, a flight but a crawl, a dream inside a pragmatic vision, soars but saunters, at once revolutionary and conservative.

Unmistakable is his avowal of an ideology called Pan African market progressivism. It brings the market impulse for popular good. Goods for the good of all. It reflects a man with a mission, and aware of the watch-eye of posterity. He spoke with zest and detail. He wants to transform many things. For commercial brio, to praise and challenge Nnewi and Onitsha duopoly, and stir the people to trust and taxes. For politics, to create a cooperative society by dimming the tides of violence and enlisting the renegade forces of IPOB, criminality and ESN to a band of brothers. Culture will brandish standards and locally made goods in a high-tech context to bring “Anambra to the world and the world to Anambra.” To bring plenty through a frugal style. All under the umbrella of an ideology at once indigenous and universal. It was delivered in a tone at once sober and optimistic, but putting off celebration until the job is done.

For optics, no one could forget his reference to Innoson as his official car, and all meals and clothes and shoes within Anambra confines. He has presented the agenda. After the people, Anambra big wigs, led by the inimitable Oby Ezekwesili, anointed him.

He has whetted the appetite. His gunpowder is dry. The eagle is looking at the sky. He has fluttered his wings. Now in flight. Lookout.

I thought the issue of Mefi or CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele, should enjoy a revisit when media speculated he was hopping on the plane to London. Was he going to plead for the ramrod leader to browbeat Senate to assent to his electoral request? Or was he going to tell the president, he was preparing his exit into the tumble of presidential race? He does not know how to boast, or unclasp a showy character. Mefi has always been humble. That seems about to change, though. To run for the big post of the land is no mean ambition. He should remember though the words of the clown called Feste in Shakespeare’s play of mistaken identity and oversized ego, Twelfth Night: “By swaggering I could never thrive.” The big, bumbling clown Malvolio fell mightily with a foul and rickety lust when a few courtiers deceived him he was good enough to be the master’s lover. Beware, Mefi, of ambition.

I depart from my practice and publish some of the responses from high and low to my essay, “Mefi’s Orchestra.” Enjoy!

Hmn, Big Sam. I had wanted to say: “No comment” because you’ve said everything, but there’s a question I’ve been asking with no one to provide an answer. Who does due diligence on those who become CBN governors in Nigeria?

I gave up on this one when the news leaked that during PDP’s so-called “Convention” that made Jonathan the party’s Presidential candidate for a second term, loads of Naira cash were converted into Dollars under the supervision of Emefiele and taken to the Convention center where each delegate went home with $10,000. The question then was: Is the dollar Nigeria’s official curreny of exchange? To cap the ridicule, Jonathan was the sole candidate, no opponent.

Now, the dollar is exchanging for almost N600 and nobody is telling us what we are buying with our reserves that has turned our own currency into tissue paper to be used in the toilets.

Another question is: Why have neither the President nor the NASS called him to explain the noise surrounding his personage of recent? As you said, he’s not just an ordinary Nigerian, he occupies one of the most sensitive positions in the land.

Lastly, where are the noisy CSOs, especially SERAP, which know the location of all the courts in Nigeria? Where are the nosy SANs who like to play the legal game by their own rules? Why have everybody gone quiet? Are we all that damaged? Enjoy your evening, Big Sam. By Olu Adebayo, veteran journalist

“It’s Buhari’s fault that this Mefi is retained to continue to foist his incompetence to afflict our dear Naira. If Mefi won’t resign to squarely face his ambition to preside over the country which finances he has turned iniquitous, he will be borrowing a leaf of indiscretion from Mesu Eleyinmi (apology, Sam) who tried unsuccessfully to strategise himself to Nigerian presidency while wearing the epaulettes of senate presidency.” By Morufu Smith

“Just finished your Article “ Mefi’s Orchestra “. Thanks for the beautiful piece. We truly must weep for Nigeria. Had to contemplate that after total destruction of the value in naira, Mefi will contemplate ever running for President.  I ask, to do what? To end whatever left of rational hope, I suppose? But herein lies the tragedy of Nigeria. this type as leader.”

Tunji Abayomi, Lawyer, statesman

Sam, gud day and compliments. I have just finished reading your ‘In Touch’ of yesterday March 28. Appointment of Emefiele as Governor of CBN is, in the first place, really an embarrassment to this nation. Here is a man who ran Zenith Bank as Chief Executive for years during which the largest money-laundering business in Nigeria went through his bank. What do we expect from him? His re-appointment for 2nd term was indeed a deliberate dishonour to the banking industry and, by extension, a disservice to Nigeria. He has now come out in his true colours: BIG UNREPENTANT…

Olorunfunmi Basorun, former deputy director of CBN, technocrat, politician

“Mr. Omatseye, They read In Touch and the next day his media people started calling him Mefy. You exposed them. Maybe they are jealous that you were the first to identify him by his nickname in public. All they did was to anglicize the spelling by ending it with the letter Y. Colonial mentality. You even tried to make it local and indigenous by ending it with an i.” Abubakar Ringim, Kano

“Dear Sam, it is not hard to know where the so-called supporters club is emanating. If you read a certain newspaper and watch a certain television station, you will know that it is the work of some who are making easy fortune from the beguiled banker. I hope in the process they do not stretch their kleptomaniac fingers too far into the Nigerian vault. They are dealing with the guard to our treasures.” – Ufuoma, from Warri

“What intrigued me is the reference to private jets. Once I read it online, I gasped. I waited for him or his people to refute the report. Silence here means consent. I wonder what is going on. Is this man really running? If so, he needs to reveal where he is getting the support from, who are these media people behind him, are they wayfarers who want to milk him dry. Is Mefi so naïve that he would allow them to lead him by the nose by dashing media entrepreneurs who know nothing other than to hoodwink a man who never knew a thing in politics all his life? Haba!” Nwachukwu, Owerri

“Some people say some sleek men in agbada in the presidency working with some in the media are encouraging him. A believe there is a racket around the president that is going about making a fortune over this matter. They lie to the fellows that the president wants them to run, and then they believe and dry up their cisterns in the process. They are clever men. IBB did it to quite a few his time, like Abel Ubeku. I wish I could be in on the deal.” Anonymous.

“Few realise that a Mefi presidency means only one term for the south. He comes from south-south and Jonathan has had its first term. It is a plot of the north to encircle the south in the politics of zoning. It is fair game for them, using the ever-bowing Mefi as a tool,” Justus Okechuckwu.

“I still saw the picture of Mefi bowing like a minion to an oligarch. I almost choked on my pounded yam when my son showed it to me. How does he feel about the picture? Does his family not tell him his foes will flaunt it about when or if he declares to run?” Nnanna Agwu

“Hello Sam, now that the senate has decided not to sign Buhari’s request to rewrite the electoral bill, is Mefi now thinking about writing his handover notes?” Abu Abbas.

“Dear In Touch, A morning news programme that does not say anything salutary about Buhari suddenly started praising the Rice Pyramid in Abuja. I wondered what changed? Now I know why Mefi is the only Teflon in the Buhari crowd for the TV station. He is their favoured son. Hence they promote him. Is he part of the nameless group that has no recognizable figure in the public domain?” Bayo Awojobi

“Keep throwing your elegant salvos,” Efe Enakome.

 

APC movie

THE APC turmoil is no comfort for PDP, which is also in its own tempest of intrigues. Mai Mala Buni, too coy to govern at home, did not seize the chance of his fall from head of the Chinese company-sounding caretaker committee to return to his governor chair in Yobe. He seems to have clawed – or shall I say, fawned – his way back because of an INEC technicality. I might have said I don’t see why Buhari cannot re-tweak the March 26th date to meet the electoral body’s 21-day deadline. But Ramadan beckons, and that gives the party little room for convention given INEC’s primary deadline. That was Buni’s scheme to install a fait accompli for the convention so as to shoe in a presidential candidate of his choice. He wants to be clever by half. Eyes are on him. He is a subvert, not a democrat. A trigger of chaos, a reptilian schemer, an ideological cretin, fomenting a dedicated insanity in the party process.  Governor Sani Bello sedated the storm. A return to Buni is like clutching a cat’s paw. Anyway, the decision to remove Buni and still fix March 26 without heeding the law attests to the topsy-turvy ideas that Buhari’s advisers give him, especially his attorney general whose heart swirls with mischief. Buhari picked them, so he has to abide their quicksand.

If Buni returns with rottweiler Akpanudoedehe, it foretells a big cockfight between El- Rufai’s 19 and the remaining four who back the rogue leaders of the Chinese-sounding committee. I believe there are factions even within the 19, and it will only unravel in the coming weeks and months. It is a movie on the move. Enjoy!