During the Iraq war, I collided with some of my American students over its raison d’etre. Nationalist fervour trumped common sense among them when I contended that President George W. Bush and his cabinet had not shown Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Some loathed me; I toasted the facts. They joined the mass fury of the public and lapped like cat the tendentious milk of White House’s propaganda.

One of my students vacated the class to Baghdad’s smoky streets. A year later, quite a few of them accosted me to tender their apologies for tarring me as a hater of their country. The fog may have cleared, but the dead could not knock their way out of their caskets. Day after day, the tv screen treated a sad country to picture after picture of boys who had petered out over the apocrypha of their leaders.  The surreal apparition tanked Bush’s rating, but the man remained defiant and impregnable. Few remember the boys today. I don’t know if my student, a ruddy and eager youth, survived the inferno. In the words of the poet, W.H. Auden, “Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course.”

I contemplate that as I view footages of Ukraine streets. Whole buildings tarred black by mortar, whole families in peril, whole families perished, whole day treks in snow and fear, mothers and daughters on the run, the aged lumber along like a minute old calf, a nuclear plant bonfire, a scenic street tranquilised by an armoured tank, a baby asleep as rockets whistle past.

The story comes home. Nigerians run against death, and also against prejudice. Some have arrived home, leaving a wreck behind, their surviving self being the remnant wreck. They have their pieces to repair. All of this because of a geo-political game gone awry. Vladimir Putin, the villain of the century so far pitted against Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the hero of the century so far.

Even if Putin is wronged, he has no excuse to wrong the nationals, humans who hold no guns or grudges.

Some Nigerians project lies. One, that NATO had an agreement not to expand. Two, so he had a right to invade. I would like anyone to tender that agreement signed by NATO. When the Soviet Union was about to crumble, Russian Mikhail Gorbachev, signed no deal to forbid NATO to expand. In 2014, here was Gorbachev’s words: “Not a single Eastern European country raised the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in 1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either.”

At the Visegrad Declaration, Poland, Hungary and then Czechoslovakia, sought guarantee to join the European security system. In 1993, President Boris Yeltsin wrote President Bill Clinton that, “Any possible integration of east European countries into NATO will not automatically lead to the alliance turning against Russia.”

A certain entente knitted US and Russia. The US inspected their nuclear weapons and signed a deal with Russia that Ukraine got rid of its nuclear weapons so long as Russia guaranteed its independence and sovereignty. If Ukraine had those weapons, Putin would not be flexing its muscles.

Just as U.S. was an imperial bully in Iraq, so is Putin. He is revising history as a pretext to pulverise Ukraine. America will not satisfy Putin’s sanguinary thirst. They are sacrificing Ukraine to make it the graveyard of Russia’s economy.

NATO can be blamed for expanding. But blame Russia first who cannot endear itself to its old subjects. All NATO members are by choice. Putin is trying to force another nation to love him. Love does not come by fiat. If not, he would not want need all that weapons and get all that resistance. Not Crimea, or Estonia, nor Moldovia, or Georgia want Russia. Putin sees them as pigmy nations. He may conquer the land, but not the soul. American learned that in Iraq. As novelist George Elliot noted, “Power finds it place in lack of power.” The former Soviet bloc countries sought embrace with NATO. Russia is the jilted bully.

If America has gone so far with NATO, Russia cannot roll back the clock. It is called Realpolitik, a term enunciated by German writer Ludwig von Rochau and popularised by such men as Bismarck, Kissinger, Kennan and Lee Kwan Yew.

Rather than think of clever ways to undo the NATO swagger, he is hectoring the innocent. Putin sulks in his saturnine throne. He distorts power like his forbears: Stalin, Brezhnev. Charles de Gaulle, himself a lover of coercive powers, says this of Stalin: “This is not the domination of a party, nor of a class, but that of a single man. It is not a regime of the people. It is against the nature of man. We will have them on our hands for a hundred years.” How prophetic of the stiff-necked general.

But the man of the hour is Zelenskyy. There have been fewer men like him in history. Not de Gaulle, who had to plant himself in London to growl over the airwaves, or Churchill who had America over his shoulders. Not Mandela ensconced in a jail. He is not seeking shelter. He is fighting for the soul of his country. Not a warmonger, he forbids “a legend of 300 Spartans. I want peace.” He tells America, “I want ammunition; not a ride.” Like the great French play, Le Cid by Pierre Corneille, that decries the shame of dying without having fought.

He is that sort of leader we want in Nigeria. Not one who has not seen struggle, who has not faced the loom and danger of a tyrant’s whip. Not one who has not abandoned family and friends to lay down his life for freedom and democracy. We want a man with sacrifice and spirit of Zelenskyy in 2023. Not those who have only known air-conditioners and fried rice and private jets.

Zelenskyy also united his people. More than economic revival, the first task of Nigeria’s leader in 2023 is to unite us. To play down tribal fealty or fanatical faith, and clasp everyone to one bosom. That is why Zelenskyy is the hero of our times, a direct opposite of Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov’s novel of an anti-hero.

 

It’s the Lord’s doing

As the Bible shows, patience is a long virtue. The God’s Kingdom Society hit the news on a Salem note in the investiture of Brother Felix Ekundayo Adedokun as its president, the first since the fraught era of Emmanuel Aighalua and, before then, the Trojan of the word E.T. Otomewo.

Adedokun is an exponent of the word, sober, self-possessed with flair and intellectual aura, a dynamo behind the microphone. He comes in to cement a time of peace in the church that once tumbled through high tides of ego and clique. He crested his own stormy waters when some thought he was sandwiched between two factions because his wife was daughter of the suave Benjamin Tietie who led a breakaway. He maintained a sangfroid, staying in the church with his wife and children. His focus was on God, not man. He might have followed Christ’s words, “By your patience possess you your soul.” Today, he is president. I can only say, it is the Lord’s doing. The vice president, Tariola Ekisowei, another stalwart, was my senior by three classes in Government College, Ughelli. But I never knew him in that light until we were out of school. I knew him as the quiet senior unstirred by others who bullied their juniors. He only bullied on the football field as a sleek defender whose two loping legs cautioned any feisty dribbler. Benedict Hart, the secretary general, I knew as a reporter in The Guardian and I never knew, too, that he could view the vineyard from the newsroom window. The treasurer, Olufemi Akinwale, we grew up in our late teens together in Lagos. A calm, well-adjusted person who loved IICC Shooting Stars, but I also never envisioned him in the ministry. What a delight to watch him preach with knowledge and presence as he expounds a Bible text after another. Theophilus Iwoh, of course, was on course, following his father’s footstep. Iwoh is a controlled preacher with a depth of articulation. The choirmaster general, Timothy Esimagbele, continues to amaze me with his fluid fingers on the piano.

The investiture was conducted by Brother Joel Solupeju, a spry old man who is now the chairman of the Assembly of the Lord’s Ministry Elders – a mouthful. Known before as Olusola, he was my spiritual father for all of my youth in Ibadan, up till my undergraduate years in Ife. He broke down texts and clarified queries for me, especially when I had private storms and existential anxieties about the authenticity of the faith. So grateful he still kicks as a soldier of Christ, a term I first heard from him. I should note that Adedokun, Iwoh, Akinwale and Esimagbele are chips off the old block. They follow their father’s haloes. E.A. Adedokun, an executive minister, cast an avuncular shadow on the church with his humour and institutional memory. M. O. Iwoh headed the executive board. Michael Akinwale joined over a decade after he thought his application had been forgotten. He and his son are a type of Joseph and Jesus, the carpenter birthing a preacher. Jonathan Esimagbele, the publicity secretary and one-time choirmaster general, was my father’s best friend.

With Adedokun in the saddle, I believe the church can now pursue its purpose with greater vigour. He that believes shall not make haste.

 

Rarely does this essayist patronise any rejoinder with his precious prose. But sometimes when a rabbit plays braggart around a big cat, like a white lion, it has itself to blame for being a quick and easy snack.

So, when I wrote a piece, Here we go, last week, it was just to let the CBN governor understand that eyes are on him. He should quickly rebuke the interlopers of our public space with his posters. Or, if he supports them, he should withdraw his tail, resign his office and leave the nation’s Naira and kobo enterprise to those who are not paying visits to printing presses. we don’t want to see his faces on walls and electric poles. He is a CBN governor, not a model. He is not even a model of a CBN governor. To that later.

But rather than follow the path of honour, the CBN’s shadow men were sent on another errand.

They came in the name of the Coalition of Civil Society Groups. In their first outing, they named no names. They hid under Emefiele’s friends. I might have thought they would say, Mefi’s friends, because that is what his coterie of wasps who call themselves his friends call him in intimate moments, especially when they are in the “contractual” mood and gusto. Well, I called them amorphous, so they took the bait and announced themselves under a series of names. These so-called groups are also names without recognition. I would want to see pictures behind those names and a track record of the so-called groups and whether they can boast any profile of benefits to even their neighbours. I teased them out last week. They took the bait. They are exposed, if not completely.

There are of course names behind those names. They should be bold enough to lift their veils. Or else we can as well call them the Game Boys of the media, the media equivalent of the Yahoo Plus. They are the ones pushing him around newspaper and television, and evangelising his glories as the Nigerian genius of money.

All of this we will put to rest if Mefi can allow his dumb profile to expire, and talk. Mefi is too shy. Mefi is afraid. Mefi allows others to talk for him.  Mefi is waiting for God. Mefi is communing with the Holy Spirit. Or Mefi is pining for Buhari after his Jumaat prayers. Mefi must be messy.

In their rejoinder, the so-called coalition wrote that Mefi ‘knows nothing about the posters.” Mefi must be in a different country. It’s at the airport and his work routes in Lagos and Abuja. Are they implying that the good old boss who oversees our money suddenly turned blind? He does not read? Now that he read my column, has he still remained blind? They contradict that by saying he is too busy to “throw stones at every dog that barks at him.” Or maybe they are saying he is blind, but he hears those who bark. Thank God for ears! Even at that, he knows, if not from his eyes but his ears.

They accuse me of “malevolent intention,” of being “preposterous,” of malice, of lacking good faith and good conscience. To borrow the words of the French novelist Flaubert, they lack sentimental education. They need a few lessons in emotional intelligence. There is a book of that name. It is called Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. From the way they write, they don’t seem to read much. But I can afford them a copy if they seek enlightenment. I will ignore their canine metaphor or what literary critics call intentional fallacy. They are also guilty of affective fallacy. Not today for such theories.

The real malevolence issues from them because all I ask for decency. The lack of decency of a CBN governor simultaneously running for president and enjoying the epaulettes of office is the same lack of decency in the expletives in  their advertorial diatribes. They are entitled to their own adjectives and nouns. So am I.

But who is this Godwin Emefiele? Who is this man who has rented a bandwagon, and whose orchestra ministers no grace to the ears nor is it a beauty to behold?

He is the CBN governor who they are hoodwinking into a messiah. A man who became CBN chief under Ebele Jonathan. He was in charge of the CBN after the colourful Sanusi left to become a Kano monarch in a major career fiasco. Mefi is the one whose central bank enabled Jonathan and his men to compromise our vaults, where hauls and hauls of Naira were moved around, especially in the Otuoke chieftain’s attempt to come back to power. It was on his watch that all the loot for which Buhari’s EFFC got angry fell, and it pursued the femme fatale and oil minister Diezani Allison- Madueke, when Sambo Dasuki went berserk with billions distributed not only among party mavens but also to game boys.

Was it not the same Emefiele, who bowed to the kabiyesis of power with file in hand like a school boy of JSS one? But before then, after the Jonathan misadventure, was he not lobbying not to be fired? He became a good boy after they retained him in his cosy apex office rather than to nest and rest in his Agbor redoubt in retirement. With such relief, can you blame him for bowing obsequiously to any oligarch in sight?

Then he took over, and the first victim was the first child he should chaperon: the naira. Only last week, the IMF wrote that the Nigerian currency drops by 10.6 percent annually. He has also become what economists call an activist CBN governor. His hand is in every pie, agriculture, education, aviation, textiles, power, health, entertainment. He wants to be like Leonardo Dan Vinci, but he is jack of all trade and master of none.

He is said to have overstretched the borrowing limit of the bank, but economists can always justify that for political reasons. But let’s see what he has done with all his interventions. The naira is limping like a dog. That is the dog he should pay attention to. In agriculture, we saw an exhibition of a rice pyramid. It was a mockery of Nigerian hunger. While glorifying rice, the cost of the same commodity has doubled since he became CBN chief. The pyramid is as high as the cost for anyone. Again, he claims we do not import rice. Officially yes. But he should go to the borders in the night, and witness trailers after trailers of rice streaming through. Go to the mama puts and dinner tables, and you will know that Nigerians don’t import rice but eat imported rice. What a paradox. What meretricious glory. His Anchor Borrower programme has no anchor with the people, and it is yielding nothing, so we are just borrowing from the future. He puts his hand in power, we grope in the dark; in textile, we clothe in pain, where are the textile booms of old? In farming, we famish; In education, where is the fruit in schools? In entertainment, no one is dancing.

Some economists have cavilled at activist CBN governors. It is a new war between what they call New Keynesians and New Classicists, the former being in Mefi’s camp. But Keynesians want to lead the economy by the nose. No problem for me, but lead right. The Classicists descend from Adam Smith and Ricardo. But our Mefi has not done right by Maynard Keynes. Look at CACOVID and the mess – that word again – he made of it. Billions that I want the CBN to account for. The people turned poorer for it rather than turn that money into profitable use, it became a sort of contractor’s delight. His men are hiding under the camaraderie of cowardice because the real men goading him cannot reveal themselves. This man is a victim of a racket but does not know yet until his eyes of understanding will be open. Too late then. He should also deny reports of three private jets making the rounds.

In spite of these failings, Mefi can run for president. But he cannot have his cake and take it. Even the new electoral law signed by Buhari forbids appointees from running while in office. He just should follow the honour path, resign and let’s tackle his messy legacy. Or he should remain and we, as Nigerians say, “will manage him like that” until his tour is over.

 

Wrong, Isa, wrong!

Who on God’s earth does Isa Bayero think he is? In what century does he think we are living in? Maybe he thinks this is the age of Uthman Dan Fodio, a feudal epoch where a prince can ride roughshod on any mortal. He says he is a pilot and flew a few presidents. Congratulations. But the age of pilots, he should know, came after the age of the divine rights of kings. He is here but living in the age of caves. Not in the 21st century. Otherwise he won’t insist that an airline about to taxi should stop for about an hour because a person wants to fly. It is not an emirate airline with a small e. It is not Feudal Air or Royal Skies. It is Airpeace and those on board were not royalists but republicans. I don’t know what presidents he flew, but I guess they were not democrats.

Bayero said Airpeace Chairman Allen Onyema should apologise? What royal impunity? The Kano throne has a history of better dignity than that. I am sure Onyema will not apologise or travel to Kano to bow for an offence committed against him. It is Isa, who should wrap his tail around him. We abide in a democracy and not in a kingdom.

In those days as a child, I was enamoured of The Jeffersons, an upbeat sitcom to upend the narrative of the black as a race of the poor. George Jefferson, as the family patriarch, was a superfly and boastful man in well-cut suits and exaggerated gait. He never let anyone forget he was swathed in riches. He carried his braggadocio to the extent of propagating his peccadilloes as a gift. In an episode, he played down his ulcer until a friend spoke of it as familiar pride of the rich. Then he held up his head and quipped, “I get my ulcer all the time.”

Sometimes it is the pathology of some humans to toast their own illnesses, to boast their frailties into graces. Nations have honoured their own collective coughs and sneezes. Nazi Germans saw Jew hatred and slaughter as acts of worship. In his novel of Nazi Germany called Tin Drum, Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass paints his character Oskar with his drums of hysteria like a fanatic of worship.

Or northern Nigeria in the 1960’s when Igbos and other minorities became mincemeat of irate bands, the chants and pursuits became like a force of Heaven. This also goes for political parties. In Europe, we have seen political parties rally like a tenet of faith behind xenophobia and against Islam. In Trump America, many whites turned against minorities, crowds exhaling with catharsis. Mass apoplexy was like a revolution. So, sickness can be bad, but it is worse when the sick does not know it. Sickness within sickness.

That is APC’s diagnosis. I don’t think I have heard anyone call the party sick. Its kind of sickness is family dysfunction.

The party acted without a convention. It is like holding a birthday party without a venue, date or celebrant. It did not see its rot until it hit a rut. When it was clear it could not do without a convention, it decided to adopt IBB’s Maradona style. It said it would hold a convention in late last year and reneged. Then it picked a month, this one. It picked no date and venue, but notified INEC. It was like an invitation card to an in-law to a wedding without a date or venue or even the bride and groom. When it decided to fix a date, it did not state a venue. When it decided on it, it was then it dawned on the caretaker committee, it should have procedures and processes. It is like the Harold Pinter play, The Birthday Party that critics have described as a “comedy of menace.” In the play, nothing is certain, not time, not place, not identity, not even language. That is what we are seeing with the sick party of Nigeria.

They fixed a day for the party, which is February 26th. News have it that it tried to persuade the president to change the date. Even before that, it called for aspirants to buy nomination forms. But as a party chieftain and Ondo State Governor, Rotimi Akeredolu, explained to my TV show, it was an invitation to chaos. How do you call for nomination without zoning the offices? So, if the party chairmanship is zoned to the North central eventually what happens to those who buy forms from the Southeast or Northwest or Southwest? It is hugging anarchy.

A new controversy is swirling with the caretaker committee, whose name reads like a Chinese company, that lawmakers should be disenfranchised in the convention. What is its reason? It would not say? It is a ploy to cancel some voters, to wage war against a section of the party. It does not believe in democracy. It believes in internecine conflicts. It wants brothers to fight against brothers. It is an extension of the battle between some governors and lawmakers. It wants to make governors the monarchs of the party politics. It is a monarchisation of the APC. To legalise anything, they first regalise it. The governors are the royals, and they must control things by first aggregating their interests. Even at that, they are one or not, and they are not sure that they have control. So, they are looking for the party chairmen to conspire to postpone the convention. As I suggested to Governor Akeredolu, it seems Governor Buni and his cohorts want to railroad the party into postponing. They want not to be ready, so they would be forced to put off the convention. Buni wants to provide the president and others with a fait accompli.

Buni and his cohorts are not explaining to anyone why they cannot decide to hold a convention. They want to act like the Nigerian Judicial Commission. They want to be the judge in their own cause. Their first instinct is to sit tight and preside over the convention and elections. This way they would choreograph the proceedings and hand-pick their men. Their intention is to turn the presidential primaries into a fait accompli. They want a consensus. They are unhappy that the lawmakers did not play plaint. The electoral bill does not want consensus. Buhari seems reluctant to sign because Buni and his men are trying with Malami to twist the old man’s head.

With a flourish of a smile, the president told Channels Television that his successor is not his business. That is an ostentation of indifference. Malami and company, which includes Buni, are funnelling their subversive thoughts to the president’s medulla oblongata. Buhari knows that if Buni fails, it will be largely a presidential disaster because he put Buni there and Buhari, not Buni, is the head of the APC.

The president ought to ask the head of the China-sounding committee and his attorney-general what they are afraid of. Or is it who they are afraid of? Why can’t the party act as a democracy instead of cabal of intrigues. This is the first time that holding a party convention has become a quagmire, an act of desperation. When it is not a quagmire, it is a rigmarole, when not a rigmarole, it is in a standstill, when it is a standstill it is in danger of being like Lot’s wife: a pillar of salt. May hot rain not swoop on it.

Buni has been AWOL from his state as governor. When he goes there, he could be called, “His Excellency, the visiting governor.” He is domiciled in Abuja. Yet, he has succeeded neither in reconciling the party nor doing his first task of setting the stage for a convention. It is what, in soccer terms, is described as losing both home and away matches. This scenario is making the family dysfunction a peculiar APC disease. As novelist Leo Tolstoy wrote, “All families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” in the opening of his novel, Anna Karenina.

Buni and his cohorts may not be familiar with the words of Ernst Junger, one of the top German thinkers of the 20th century, “Health is good. The disease can sometimes be even better. Illnesses are questions, they are also tasks, even honours. It all depends on how one notes them.” In the top miracle of the Old testament, a man resurrects after his body touches Elisha’s corpse. He became a celebrity dead. What does APC want, a final death or a resurrection or illness as an epaulette, a badge of honour?

 

Here we go

An abuse of office is going on with Godwin Emefiele. His so-called committee of friends failed to protect the CBN governor. Rallies are around town. Posters are everywhere. He is still mum. If he wants to run for president, he should resign his office. He should not hide under pieties about God or Muhammadu Buhari.

He wants to have his dollar and pounds in one transaction. He should either run and resign, or stop an amorphous group from trumpeting an ambition for a man whose only image outside of banking is a kneeling posture to some oligarchs.

It is an abuse of office to enable a shadowy crowd of friends fretting in public over questions of the CBN chief who is stumbling to segue from a technocrat to a democrat. The so-called committee of friends was a shadow show.

It was a limp exhibition, whose prose called for better editing. Emefiele has a spokesman officially. That is the only voice that counts, not a camaraderie of cowardice hiding under a coterie of friends.

Few Nigerians, especially the Yoruba, know that there is a potent as well as parabolic dynamic between Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola and the great Hubert Ogunde. It is not only where art hugs life, but where politics gleans nutrients from the past. It is the intersection of history and histrionics.

The stories of the fall of the First Republic, the maelstrom of the Western Region, the nation’s collapse under the soldier’s boot and the sanguinary flow of fratricide in the civil war energise the 1960’s. But they are no more instructive than how the political biography of the premier of the Western Region weds the great bard of the west. But the bed is defiled.

The episode connecting them is not only that life confronts art, but drama plays out within drama.

Ignorance about what this essayist is about to relate reflects two things. One, we have left our study of history behind but it haunts us nonetheless. Two, our reading habits have taken an almost fatal beating. Other than tick tock, Instagram, Facebook and twitter, we are a largely illiterate breed. One author records this story more than others, and she is Professor Ebun Clark, in her book, Hubert Ogunde: The Making of the Nigerian Theatre, published in the 1970’s. She is a warrior of the arts, pioneer professor of theatre in Nigeria and wife of legendary poet and playwright J.P. Clark.

Akintola was a colourful man, beginning from his face of many marks. His tongue emitted acerbic, subversive, if inventive wit. He became premier and turned his back on his mentor and leader Awolowo. He opened a wilderness of gnomes, mongrels and beasts in Yoruba body politic. He turned against Awo’s rich and verdant field of dreams of greens and ark of robust tree barks. He invoked Mr. Quisling in Northern Europe and Vichy’s Petain in France. He pissed in the common pond when he broke away from the Action Group and set up his own party, the Nigerian National Democratic Party. The party entered into a wedding with the northern NPC. As a counterpunch to the Egbe Omo Oduduwa from which the AG sprouted, he founded a mimic wraith called the Egbe Omo Olofin. To help launch it, his party invited the Ogunde Theatre Party to dramatise a folksong, Yoruba Ronu, which incidentally was the watchword of Akintola’s new party. Clark reprints the letter inviting him inspired by Chief H.O. Davies, one of the fellow defectors with Akintola.

Ogunde obliged, and dramatised the song by relating the story of a king, Fiwajoye betrayed by his deputy Yeye-Iloba, who imprisoned him with two of his senior chiefs. The usurper tyrannised over his people who eventually killed him. Fiwajoye was released from prison and restored to the throne. The kingdom returned to its tranquil plenty.

Ogunde’s was an invocation of the Yoruba crisis of the 19th century. Field marshal Afonja had colluded with a Fulani known as Alimi, and that Fulani exploited the division among the Yoruba to launch a jihad in the west. In Ogunde’s contemporary rendition, Fiwajoye was Awolowo, who was then in prison, and Yeye-Iloba was Akintola. It prophesied Akintola’s end. Artists can be seers, just like Achebe’s A Man of The People predicted the end of the republic.

The play did not find humour with the premier. He rose in the middle of the performance with some of his associates and left. But the majority of the audience remained and thrilled to its nuances, innuendoes and projectiles. It reflected the perfidy of Akintola, and how out of sync he was with the Yoruba street.

Yoruba Ronu means Yoruba think. While Akintola meant to appropriate that phrase to rally the tribe against Awo, Ogunde launched it as a theatrical missile. It landed straight in Akintola’s traitorous heart. It was a supreme paradox.  What he designed as a hook became his noose.

Still out of humour, Akintola’s government banned Ogunde’s theatre from performing in all of the Western Region. In fact, he was about to perform in Ilesa when the police stanched the effort, igniting a riot in the city. The government described Ogunde as “dangerous to the good government of Western Nigeria.” The order was signed by G.O. Ejiwunmi, secretary to the Premier and Executive Council. It urged the federal government to do same. Zik, the president, ignored him. Zik, for good measure, had collaborated immensely with Ogunde to cauterise colonial laws and thraldom. Few count Ogunde as a major nationalist, but it is another lapse of our historiography.

The media rallied to Ogunde’s cause. The Daily Times condemned it. And Zik’s West African Pilot unleashed a fiery editorial that took apart Akintola government as a byword for authoritarian impulses – my phrasing. This diatribe at Akintola’s act against his tribesman gained traction in the country. The Pilot mocked him by imagining the British government banning the rollicking rock icon of the 1960’s, The Beatles. The paper predicted: “The road to ruin is often smooth. Those who travel it pay the fare. The people at Ibadan may feel on top of the world. Let us allow ourselves the role of soothsayers. We tell them to beware and fear tomorrow! They should fear the people’s ire.”

Like Pharaoh, it hardened Akintola’s heart. He extended the ban to his music, dance, records, and he forbade them to be heard in public places as well as on radio and television. Only in Lagos could he perform. His collaborators in the centre did not stop the song. Akintola was afflicted by what I call the Okonkwo syndrome based on Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. The literary critique Killam described it as insistent fatality, just like King Oedipus, who saw death and strode defiantly on the path of perdition. Hitler gave speeches about the past of wars as meaningless savagery but he ignited a world war that lighted him up in flames.

Ogunde’s fellow artistes backed him, including Kola Ogunmola and Duro Ladipo. It disembowelled his pocket and tested his integrity as an artist. But he did not falter. Rather, he dug in. He swiped back with the play, Otiti koro, which means truth is bitter. He began the play with the lines: We do not kill a dog because it barks/ And we do not kill a ram because it butts…

For about two years, Ogunde cooed in the cooler. In 1966, however, the army kicked and Akintola fell. The new governor, Lt. Col. Adekunle Fajuyi, within nine days of receiving Ogunde’s plea, lifted the ban. In July 1966, he performed Yoruba Ronu at the British Council Hall in Ibadan to all and personages, one of them Chief Obafemi Awolowo. It was art as revenge. Another irony. Ogunde was in prison professionally, Awo was physically and politically gaoled. That day, in songs and dances and rhetoric and acts for the theatre, both had their victory lap. They put to the grave a chapter of infamy. A new curtain had opened in the West.

 

Holy whore

 

It was a parable in finance when the Trojan of works, Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) unveiled a cheque of N210 billion from the Sukuk funds. This is the third of the tranches. It is naira, not Islam. It might have come from a Muslim ideology about money.  But we are spending islam. We are enjoying it. Sometimes we forget that the idea of Sukuk forbids exorbitant exploitation. Modern funding is shylocky. We also forget that the Bible chides those who give their money away in usury. In this light, the protestant ethic has overshadowed the tenets of both holy books. Can I hear Max Weber squirming in his German grave?

If you go across the country, you will see roads Sukuk funded. I don’t see any order banning non-Muslims from plying. In some parts of the country, Christians apply their tyres predominantly on such sukuk-funded asphalt. This is the country the Naira proselytises for us. It recognises nor faith nor tribe nor place. It abhors none. It is a sublime harlot, a holy whore. In an age when some would enact a holy war, victory belongs to this holy whore of filthy lucre. You are all welcome whether you say amen or amin, or you foreswear Allah or Jehovah, and pride man over divinity, or spirits over flesh and blood.

I wonder how much we can get out of Sukuk and do away with the vampiric loans from China. They come with headaches and fear and a false sense of luxury. But I am not learned enough in international finance to make judgement yet as to whether we can thrive if we can forgo China shylocks for Sukuk. I am going to research. But, meanwhile, over to the Trojan and the work that N210 billion will do. A lot is being done, and a lot of roads left to do. Optimists see the cup half full, pessimists half empty. As the poet Lord Tennyson writes, “Though much is taken, much abides.” Nigeria is a vast swath, we can take it one kilometre at a time. That is what the Trojan is doing…

 

One was a tycoon, the other a titan of an octopus. One was a friend of soldiers who stung back like a nemesis. The other was a lackey who ended up a tool. One was an extrovert who stuttered with bonhomie and humour. He laughed often, backslapped often, goofed lovably. The other, slow of manner, was never wedded to public cheer. The one had a big heart that channelled a large philanthropic purse. One wanted to be president. The other consecrated his betrayal. His only quote to memory was uttered with morose dignity on television. It was to the effect that he did not want to spoil anyone’s fun. Such a cavalier putdown.

For paradox, Chief Moshood Abiola and Chief Ernest Shonekan were kinsmen, but they were not keen on each other. Shonekan, lauded in the past few weeks by many after his recent passing, was a Yoruba man who became a puppeteer to pop the dream of his fellow Egba man. The consequence was that, if he did not want to spoil anyone’s fun, the spoils went to another Egba man who was regarded as a spoiled former soldier and opportunist, rejected by his own people. The Owu chief, too, as a soldier had anointed a mathematical thieving of a presidency in the 1970’s. The former was twelve two-third. The latter was June 12. They were both 12 nights, a la Shakespeare.

The narrative of the duo, Abiola and Shonekan, should be a cautionary story for the Yoruba in this season. It was the fight for the presidency of 1993. Abiola, not a flawless hero, but human enough to be loved, won a presidential race. A soldier annulled it. Many regarded him as an imperialist front-liner and a dispenser of cynical cash. But heroes are no saints. As Bertolt Brecht wrote, “No one’s virtue is complete/ the great Galileo loved to eat.” Christ made Paul, the murderer who wasted his church, an apostle and hero. The Old Testament sanctified David, who cuckolded his fighting man. Churchill never abandoned his alcohol. Jefferson, who immortalised the line “all men are created equal” spirited away with a slave girl. Shaka the Zulu loved Noliwe to death.

The story of Shonekan is not just a biography of an ethnic weakling, but one who could not see he was mobilised to puncture his people’s ego. When he was appointed to head the interim government by IBB, he thought he had a big job. But it made his people look small. His people, however, would not go down. First they mocked him and called him head of Ijoba fidi he. They kept a dry powder and fiery spirit. The fight for Abiola’s legitimacy was an onslaught for the Southwest, if a legitimate campaign for fairness and democracy in the country. The wheel horses in the dust and duel were his kinsmen. Many died. Some fled abroad. There were others from the East, the North, and the South-south. Outside the West were men like Ebitu Ukiwe, and of course, the martyr Alfred Rewane, who volunteered his means against the mean soldiers.

Shonekan was drafted to pacify his people. He accepted against the grain of a republican verve and nerve in the land. What we know today as NADECO rose from the moral failure of men like him. They picked him to delegitimise the right of his own people. That is his legacy, not his towering image as the head of UAC, or the perennial bard of military budgets.

He was like General Petain, who led the infamous Vichy government that signed away the French ego in an armistice with Nazi Germany. Those who did not cohabit with the army and Shonekan were like Charles de Gaulle, another general, also flawed. But he left Paris to England to fight to restore the dignity of France, or what he called “a certain idea of France.” Those who rejected Shonekan wanted a certain idea of Nigeria, but beginning with a certain idea of Yorubaland. Such a fight did not start with June 12. History embedded it at the Battle of Osogbo in the 19th century. But even that battle was not without its quislings and moral failures. The race triumphed at a cost.

There was no platform to serenade a traitor as head of Yorubaland. Again, the battlefield was too ill-defined as well as the race. It was not even named then as Yoruba as we know them today.

The 20th century is a different ball game. We saw that with Awolowo, perhaps the greatest Yoruba man since Oduduwa, the Churchill of Agodi When unproven charges led him to court, and even to gaol, it was the goal of his persecutors to invent Shonekan’s ancestor. That time it was not business man. History is never so open and shut. It was a jurist, the man Sodeinde Sowemimo. In his verdict, he confessed “my hands are tied.” Awo delivered an allocutus without circumlocution, a statement for posterity.

It was clear in both cases. Someone inside was a tool to cow his own people. There is a familiar proverb that the ant that eats up the herb resides inside. That is also the story of empires that decay. The rot starts within. Even in wars, it is never easy to conquer even a small army with cohesion and vigour. It is hard to say, as Bisi Akande posits in his My Participations, if and when Yorubaland could have fallen had they united against the British. Akande’s view may be a fancy of patriotism, but he is on to something. The intrepid Nana of Itsekiriland stunned British to a standstill with a cohesive force. The white men had to return to the island for a special force because they could not break the blockade.

When Abraham Lincoln answered questions about the longevity of the American system, he did not fear the outside force. He warned against division with the political elite. American democracy palpitates daily with Lincoln’s prophetic fears.

While many praise Shonekan today, they should not forget that his doings happened a generation after the treachery against Awo and the tribe. And about a decade after Obj brooked Akinjide and another Southwest justice, Atanda Fatai Williams, to certify a fraud. Both Sowemimo and Shonekan, both Egba men, both with great intellectual mind, opened their hearts and minds while the race’s torchbearers fell into a dark night. So was Williams, a Lagosian. They did not remember Chinua Achebe’s proverb, “A kinsman in trouble had to be saved, not blamed; anger against a brother was felt in the flesh, not in the bone.”

As we enter a third generation, and 2023, we from outside the Southwest watch again, and hope that the tribe does not collapse for the third time under the undercurrent of forces of oedipal rebellion. We hope anger against a brother this time will not go deep into the marrow.

 

By Rail for Onosode

I was invited to speak in Ibadan to a modest audience on a seminar on a new book on Gamaliel Onosode, the technocrat nonpareil titled: Classicus. It was penned by famous playwright, poet and essayist Femi Osofisan.  The venue was The Booksellers. But I decided to travel by rail, to experience the new infrastructure. It was indeed a jolly ride. The train chugged through the entrails and underbelly of the city of Lagos, and through the rural and urban sights, the drowsy beauty of heaths and open land, the lone huts as well as the benevolent skylines. The journey took about two and half hours, with stops in Agege, Abeokuta, et al. Not a bullet train, but its pleasure and joy surmount any hurry. Many youngsters are patronising, in spite of little publicity. The snag though was that on arriving at Ibadan, one had to walk into dirt roads, my shoes bathed in dust because the road was untarred between the terminus and carpark. I confronted the minister, Rotimi Amaechi on this, but he said it was out his hands. He said he had asked the Oyo State governor twice to make the land available to construct a road to link the express. But Makinde is yet to oblige. Even those who would not give Buhari that credit should try it. It is an immense legacy.

Just as the book I went to speak on. The moderator was Olakunbi Olasope, a classics professor at the University of Ibadan. The other speaker was the University of Ibadan former registrar, Tayo Ikotun. Onosode’s life, tracked from his childhood and schools in Government College Ughelli and University of Ibadan, gives enchanting insights into the times of the man, his father and their unique marriage, his faith and miracles, and why he is known as Mister Incorruptible, a man that was straight-laced and found, to his hurt, he was not cut out for the politics of cunning and subterfuge. More compelling was that the man, often known in his western suits and for his stern exterior, was a joy of warmth in his private life, who burst to tears when, as pro-chancellor of U.I., he visited Mrs. Tayo Ikotun, who was bed-ridden.

‘To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved,” George MacDonald.’

Some commentaries in the past two weeks about why some Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s associates are looking the other way have reminded me of childhood. As a little boy, my father Moses was lost in the ecstasy of My Early life, Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s autobiography. Every evening while he clutched and read that cannon of book, he belched out his praises like a soulful incantation, like a man in a rally of one. “Awo,” he would say in reverie in his white singlet presiding over his Niger Delta wrapper presiding over his bare, light-skinned feet.

In the twilit veranda of our Ibadan flat at Oke-Ado, he would tell me, for lack of a mature audience, that Awo was a man without fear and of principle. The other thing that fascinated him was Awo’s single-minded resolve to scale any odd on his way to enlightenment and formal education. Awo’s main virtue, in my father’s closeted eulogy, was courage. My father, who would rather fall than faint in his belief, saw himself in Awo.

As Parents do, Moses Omatseye planted a seed in his son without knowing it. Decades later as a history student at Ife, his name rose to reckoning in our forays into Nigerian history. It was there I learned he was a besieged genius and methodical mind with a deeper glue to history and philosophy and he unrolled a template for Nigerian development that has haunted his nation like Banquo’s ghost even decades after his passing.

The snag for me was that he lived among judases, and I wanted to know why. I wanted to know why some wanted to march him to Golgotha when he cleared a path to light. So, in my final essay, I decided to write on the western region crisis. In a long holiday, I secured access to the Daily Times library. I travelled in time on the pages of the paper, day after day, as the western region descended from worry into war, how associates were parting ways with the man who had already tenanted his genius in the west.

Political scientists like Dudley, Kenpost and Sklar, wrote lucidly about the Awo years. I still believe his life, especially the brio and quicksand of his engagements, is still underwritten. He did not write enough of his life and political times. Poet Odia Ofeimun has tantalised us for years about an opus. Just as Ojukwu teased us in vain.

What still remains to be written, I think, is the ideological and psycho-history of those years. It will also be good to see a novel or play or epic poem of his years. Then we shall understand that Awo’s life mirrored the eternal treachery of Nigerian politics. Many left him, and they are big names in our history even today. The list is almost endless. Not just Akintola with his theatrical wife Faderera. Not just Ayo Rosiji, ines. We knew names like Adisa Akinloye, Gabriel Akin-Deko, Remi Fani-Kayode, Sikiru Shitta-Bey, Lamidi Adedibu, Busari Adelakun, S.G. Ikoku, Philip Umeadi, Anthony Enahoro, Arthur Prest, Oduola Osuntokun, to mention a few.

I wanted to know if it was because Awo veered from his principle. I saw no such evidence. When the Action Group was formed, he enunciated the ideology. It was democratic socialism, and he engrained them in programmes that we know today. All those who left him said they left him based on principle. That, I have found out, is the most bastardised word in Nigerian political history. All those men, including F.R.A. Williams, who played reconciler in the heady days of the 1962 crisis, also left. Some left when they thought the path no longer led to nirvana. Some left much later. All of them said they left because of principle. But we know that Awo never changed his skin. He was the leopard of ideas. They were the amoeba. They changed by conjuring the word principle, and they glowed under its false light. That shows two things about Tinubu and politics. One, defection does not make the defected guilty. Two, the defector has to show that he or she is acting on principle. The principle is not the choice to leave, but the clarity of why. Principle becomes a platform for phonies. That was not Awo’s headache. It is not Tinubu’s headache. Neither Awo nor Tinubu changed. If they claim he did, they owe the public an essay on the reasons based on facts. When Judas left Jesus, he did not say Jesus compromised. He wanted his 30 pieces of silver.

Winston Churchill was in Liberal and Conservatives parties at different times. That was because he was a liberal who had imperialist fantasies. He articulated his contradictions. Life abides it. But it must be known. Hence, he said, “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.” Awo quoted that line during the carpet crossing in the west. We need to see an ingenious explanation for cutting and running. The alternative is to keep silence.

It is clear from Awo’s defectors that they never believed in the ideology in the first place. They may have acted with sanctimony in their own sanctuary then, or holy in their own folly. But we know it was because of ego in English and what the Igbo call ego. Both ‘egos’ conjoined in the guise of principle. Stomach infrastructure is not only for the poor. There are different levels: infrastructure for the rich and the poor.

No one should mistake service for servitude, or vice versa. Neither should anyone see sacrifice as sacrilege because service comes with some sort of sacrifice. At certain points in our lives we must serve but we should not become traitors in order to get along. The Latin phrase Et tu, means “you too” in the famous Shakespearean play, Julius Caesar. Brutus canonised ambition over loyalty. In Yoruba, the word etutu means sacrifice. Etutu should never get to sacrilege or servitude, but it should not lead to Shakespearean Et tu. In his play, Death and the King’s Horseman, Soyinka’s horseman would not forgo sensual bliss to die with his master, even though that was the agreement. When Etutu fails, it becomes et tu. Devotion waxes into betrayal. I recommend Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son, where the most trusted James Carker ends in tatters after a lifetime of trust and devotion.

We saw the same thing in the M.K.O. Abiola saga. Some who thought Abiola could not stand up to Abacha were disappointed. Some played Judas and decided to stay with Abacha and they were demystified, including the late Lateef Jakande, Ebenezer Babatope, Olu Onagoruwa and Iyorchia Ayu. Ayu is the one who has gotten a new life, a man fired twice as cabinet minister, once under the soldiers and then after under a soldier masquerading himself as a democrat.

They were worse than Judas. They were like the 30 pieces of silver, which neither the taker nor the giver wanted. But they have been hanged, like Judas.

The casualty is often the facts. It is important, as we enter a political season, that we trade on facts. We should hang nobody on a lie. A big lie was exploded at the weekend by Segun Ayobolu, so we should not turn fiction into a vehicle for hate.

It is clear many do not understand Nigerian history, not just the history of a century ago. I mean history of just 10 years ago. Hence, I wrote my piece last week titled: A Lagos original, about what happened under our very eyes and many people across the country and the world responded with genuine surprise at the facts.

When persons rise under the shadow of one man and turn against him, they mouth principle, but they forget they had principle when he fed and clothed them and made them shine to the neighbours. Now that they have grown, they remember he had mouth odour, his shoes are dirty and does not know how to dance.

From those who left Awo, we know they did not belong. They were wayfarers. None of them propagated the AG idea till they died. A man like Enahoro stunned many. But in his twilight, he had an ideological epiphany. He abandoned those he left Awo for. If Awo were alive in the democracy ferment of the 1990’s, they might have worked together under the sultry roof of the progressives. The same way, some who left Tinubu have returned with the glory of prodigal sons.

Some of them who worked for Nigeria’s democracy must remember those who fought and who didn’t. Tinubu, for instance, never forgets. Few know that, on his initiative and arrangement, Abiola’s wives are taken care of up till today since the husband died, even if one of the children can raise hairs on the airwaves as though the former Lagos State governor was a pariah to the family. Few know that when Abiola’s Concord Newspapers ran into financial peril, the company wanted to sell its generator to keep afloat. Tinubu, as governor, offered to buy the generator for the state’s water corporation for over N30 million then. Some of the family members balked and stamped caveat emptor on the property. Lagos State Environment Commissioner Tunji Bello, then the newspaper’s editor, can testify to this. A newspaper with an equivalent of that sum today may be hoisting hundreds of millions in a grateful purse.

Awo said he did not compromise, if Jesus or Mohammed compromised, they would not have the following around the world. The buzz word should be compromise. So people who evangelise principle should not conflate liberty for personal licence.

Act one. The theatre of Magodo is Karl Marx capsized. A set of stragglers took over a piece of land. They neither paid for it nor inherited it from their fathers. They built there, ate, coquetted and conquered, married and gave in marriages, flexed and feigned flamboyance.

When the day of reckoning came, they begged the soldiers to forgive and make them owners. The soldiers had pity in their eyes and naivety in their souls. They translated surrogates into sovereigns. They documented the penitent into proprietors. From being lawless, they took the rights from their unwitting benefactors. Innocence waxed into impunity.

The commoner overthrew the land. The people, it seemed, had defeated the state. But Marx did not win. Who won were philosophers like Rousseau, Hegel and J.S. Mill, who warned that the people who overthrew the upper class also took on the airs and tyrannies of their former oppressors just like in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Before that, they might have echoed Shakespeare’s line, “That distribution undo excess and each man have enough.” After distribution, they flaunted their excesses.

Go to another place that sounds like Magodo and we have our Act two. It was Maroko, where we call Lekki today. But Maroko had no light, not water, hardly a tarred road. The people occupied it without documents just like Magodo of the 1960’s. They acted as landlords, ate, partied -yours truly attended a party there – bought and sold, married, became fathers and mothers. But this time, the soldiers, including one who loved the word gada as English for culvert, had neither pity nor smile for the stragglers. They were given ultimatum, and the bulldozers came, razed down the properties as settlers raced for their dear lives. None of them can rise up today and ask a court for their right. In the words of the P rophet Nehemiah, they had “no portion, nor right or memorial” in the land.

The peacock class inhabits that place today, and no one calls it Maroko. There is no place called Maroko on the map of Lagos today. Except another rhyme in a maritime place called Makoko where settlers are trying to turn proprietary blackmail into rights.

The two acts and territories evoke the absurdity of the military era. In the first act, they bent the rule of law in favour of the illegal. In the second, they appropriated the rule of law for their friends.

They tell us how fragile the border between law and impunity, between nice and naivety, that there is no such thing as innocent poor, that an error in one time can cost a catastrophe in another, that the rule of law is not always on the side of right, that the constitution can vindicate the unjust, that legal justice does not always confer social justice, that history always haunts us even when we think we have buried it in amnesia.

The Magodo stragglers act recalls the age of colonial scramble where the west conjured the term “effective occupation” to show that any European country that had occupied a territory after a certain period “effectively” owned that land. That was how many territories, including Nigeria, fell under British thraldom.

We saw the impunity when attorney-general Abubakar Malami and his fellow traveller the inspector general of police Alkali Usman, in the guise of executing a court judgment, turned Magodo Shangisha into a blaze, a place to bulldoze, wield spray paints and padlock. They became the Covid-19 version of a lockdown.

In this case, it is the civilian government under a so-called democratic aegis that is enabling it. It was an embarrassment. The Supreme Court ruled based on document, not on history. It ruled for legal propriety, not for true ownership of the property. But the law, as Thoreau says, never made anyone a whit more just. In executing a court judgment, the police looked away while the judgment creditors unleashed mayhem. Malami is one of the migraines of this democracy. He is supposed to be the blank of the president’s eye. But he is making his boss blind. He is not giving the right advice. It appears we have a charge and bail lawyer as our chief law officer.

When the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu visited the place, he met a recalcitrant police officer who would not heed the chief law officer of the state. It was because he had the confidences of Usman and Malami. Malami issued a statement that he was heeding the Supreme Court. He did not answer the question raised by the Lagos State governor that he had called him and he said he had nothing to do with it. Rather he merely dismissed the governor’s charge. That is the stuff incompetent attorney generals are made of. We have been cursed with such breed. In this republic, except perhaps for Bola Ige, attorney generals have been handmaidens of impunity and superficial distortion of justice.

The IGP has not said anything of worth, if he has said anything at all. His force has benefited the most from Lagos State since 1999. They never account for their budget, and their barracks around the country are an eyesore. Yet a state has devoted tremendous resources for them and they pay back with a gangster logic.

Why was Malami in such zealotry to execute judgment in Lagos when quite a few have been left in the lurch? We did not see such zeal with the El Zakzaky case, or the Dasuki one in spite of the ECOWAS court verdict or the Odili matter.

Some have cavilled at the gentlemanly conduct of the BOS of Lagos. Few know that the deployment of police was an act of impunity to tempt a revenge of impunity. But the Lagos governor did not blink. He showed himself a man of peace and honour. He did not need to do more than expose the big hole in our law and reckless show of power of a few men in the centre who know no difference between rule of law and highhandedness. Some chief executives who are wont to use violence might have turned the story into another chapter of bloodshed. Lagos is too urbane for that. Lagos has always saved the Nigerian state from a reign of violence. It has served as the high tower in this democracy when most of the country, especially the north, wreathes in blood. A Malami or Usman cannot tempt the city into a tempest of bad temper.

And men like Malami would have yelled that the chief law officer of the state had unleashed lawlessness if the governor had exercised power instead of authority. Ondo State Governor also waded in with wisdom, noting that the constitution was making state governors into mere “prefects.” It is so because we don’t have governors who want to pay the centre in its barbarian coin. In Imo State, we saw the police wrest a man from the house of God.

But what the Lagos State governor exposed was our constitutional inadequacy. This was happening when the president rejected, in a television interview, the idea of state police. He has said, and he has been echoed many times by the vice president, that Nigeria as it is presently constituted does not need to be restructured. That is the tragedy that has made the official impunity in Magodo possible.

Rather than follow the path of the gorilla from Malami and Usman, the BOS of Lagos has sat the parties down and they are amicably working out a solution. That is where decency overthrows impunity. If the Supreme Court gave a verdict without memory and justified subterfuge, the BOS has shown that Lagos can still be a refuge of common sense.

 

AB at 60

Those who know him call him simply as AB. My friend turned 60 a few days ago, and it is 60 cheers to a fellow I have known since our days in Ife when we were in the trenches for a mutual friend of ours who ran for the presidency of the inimitable Student’s Union. Always ebullient and brilliant, Asisana Okauru has been an engaging person since we met decades ago. Even in the United States, he was no less. He has always combined an intellectual’s rigour and restless quest with a philanthropic heart always ready to offer a help or a piece of advice and go the extra mile for a neighbour’s comfort. He is an economist, lawyer, information systems analyst, and of course a great and witty conversationalist. He is the director general of the Nigerian Governors Forum. He has also served as pioneer director of the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit. I remember the day he called me in Denver that he had joined IBM as a manager after his scholarship in North Carolina university. With two masters, two other degrees, it is not hard to see why AB is one of the most gifted minds in our country today or anywhere. Happy birthday.

It’s a theatre of the oldies. On one side is a man with a paunchy stature and grey hair and fierce tongue. On the other side is a man with a paunchy stature but without hair but a shifty tongue. One has proclaimed his residency in a departure lounge. On the other side is the fellow who sneers at such a journey because he does not depart from trouble. One is Edwin Clark, the other of course is Olusegun Obasanjo.

The first, Chief E.K Clark, is a nonagenarian with a rebel in his blood while OBJ is, as he claims, an octogenarian with mischief in his eyes. These men fought over oil. But OBJ is the culprit here, trying to play mischief with Niger Delta resources.

The thing with OBJ is that he can say the truth without being truthful. If the constitution says the oil belongs to Nigeria, he forgets to say that if that is true it is because the oil belongs to Niger delta before it belongs to Nigeria. That is the spirit of a republican society, especially one that thrives in a federal state.

But what strikes the essayist is not the debate on hand, which is straightforward. It is the Owu chief’s penchant for war. He is a retired general but he always acts as though he is ducking shrapnel in battlefield trenches. I stated at The Nation’s editorial board last week, even before the Clark battle, that the man has a chip on his shoulders. He did not do well during the civil war, so he is fighting to compensate for his failures and stumbles as a war commander. My comment raised not a few highbrows at the meeting.

He is therefore afflicted with what I call a post-Biafran syndrome. Some say the man led the Third Marine Commando, and he received the surrender note from Biafra. That exactly is why the man feels a sort of whoozy feeling of incompetence. He did not know the war was over. The victor was not aware of his victory. He was away, far away from the conduit of action when men like Alani Akinrinade had browbeaten the rebels to paralysis, when Ojukwu had fled and his assistants were now mouse to the federal forces.

The brew was ready. OBJ was summed to his victory party. As the leader, he snatched the hour of glory. The real blaze and fury of the war was narrated by eye-witness accounts as well as the best book on the war so far, Alabi Isama’s The Tragedy of Victory. They show that the war had been fought and won, the big bear of Biafra had staggered and was falling under Black Scorpion Colonel Benjamin Adekunle. OBJ came to hear its thud and final fall. He did not even see the humpty go down.

Maybe that is why he obliterated the study of history. That is only one of his battles. What is going on in his psyche is a post-Biafran war.

Obj war will not end until he joins Clark in the departure lounge and catches that flight. He is not going to receive another formal surrender. So, he keeps shooting and blazing with rage. Since the real war ended, his has launched a series of ambushes. The main weapon in his arsenal is cunning. The great journalist and essayist, Stanley Macebuh, who was his adviser, described him as “crafty, very crafty.” If the war theorist Carl Von Clausewitz announced that “war is a continuation of politics by other means,” ObJ has the genius of turning it around. Politics, for him, is the continuation of war by other means.

But we have seen this since he returned from Biafra. Did he not do it to general Olutoye? The man had confided in OBJ about ethnic injustice in the army. He exposed him to his northern fellows. It was swansong for Olutoye as a soldier. OBJ defeated him. OBJ has been in this fight against those who hold no gun. Sometimes when he did it with gun-handed fellows like IBB, it was with cunning. He spoke of SAP without human face. Aikhomu paid him back in his sardonic coin, by saying they would have SAP with human leg and hand, etc. He did same to Buhari before IBB swept him out. That was when he was tarred with PHD, pull him down syndrome.

In this Republic, we have a long list of his acts. Simon Kolawole last week became a diarist of his iniquities and inequities. Some of them, though, you cannot hold him legally culpable. That is the enigma of the Teflon man. But was he not the fellow who ate with Okadigbo and danced with his wife and the next day the man was no longer the head of his legislative chamber? Did he not do same to Audu Ogbe as the leader of his party?

When he was president and got rejected by his Yoruba kinsmen at the polls, did he not play the same game of cunning? He is not too proud to stoop, so long as he conquers. He has turned upside down the words of novelist Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace: “It is always better to bow too low than not low enough.” Bisi Akande has demonstrated in this in his book, My Participations, and no one has countered him. Forget the nonagenarian bluster and empty fury of Ayo Adebanjo. Akande narrated how the man begged the Southwest governors not to perform local government polls and also not to endanger his second-term nomination. He stooped to Papa Adesanya, and had Adebanjo with him in his subterfuge. The governors tagged along. When he was done, the governors as well as Adesanya had an appointment with him. He stood them up for hours. When he materialised, it was to mock them. He played his earthy character, sat on the floor in his short, and started to mock. He conned them first, then swept them out of office, except Tinubu in Lagos.

We cannot forget when he was leaving office as president. He gave the country a president and vice president. One was weak in body, the other weak in mind. He wanted to be the only strong man. He was, however, defeated. He never controlled the so-called weak men. He started panting and ranting in his Ota farm until he made a bonfire of his party card.

The Odi and Zaku Biam massacres were evidence of the soldier triumphing over people without arms.

When Jesus met a soldier and told him, “Do violence to no man,” he did not refer to the battlefield. He meant civilians, unarmed persons like the Odi and Zaku Biam residents. Jesus himself said, “The kingdom of God suffers violence…” Old testament bleeds with battles and, of course, Armageddon looms. It is army versus army. OBJ has been doing violence to the vulnerable. He did not have a war story, except the fictions in his My Command, whose RIP was enacted in Isama’s book, a man he orchestrated with a court martial without a gazette.

OBJ still fights. He is unaware that he is scratching the air, has no electoral value today, but huffs about like a statesman. Only a history that lacks psychic perspective can afford him that perch.

 

BOS on his knees

Perhaps, it was the most star-studded new year prayer in Lagos history. In attendance were two former governors and, of course, the host, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the BOS of Lagos. Enter the Jagaban, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the man who started it all 20 years ago, a Muslim who unfurled a Christian tradition. Enter the white-haired Trojan of works, Babatunde Raji Fashola and his wife. Enter Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila. Former deputy governors like Femi Pedro joined the incumbent deputy, Femi Hamzat. Also present was some of the episcopal elite, with Pastor E.A. Adeboye ministering.

Gov. Sanwo-Olu morphed into a pastor governor, crooning holy melodies on his knees in his flowing white agbada. It was a time to showcase some gospel singers like Ayan Jesu and Efe Nathan. We saw some read portions of scripture, although it was clear one of them was not familiar with his Bible of miracles. Few states witness this sort of coming to terms of the past with the present, and it is also a testimony to the temperament of the BOS of Lagos.

He also looked to the new year, a consequential year to deliver on promises, and start a pivotal one: Fourth Mainland bridge. The rail lines are soon to hoot, and a big rice meal is coming with a big rice mill to dwarf all in the west coast of Africa.