The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Insecurity: Violence defying ideas

    Insecurity: Violence defying ideas

    The year ended the way it began. We can take one of the icons of violence; that is, Zamfara State. The state of gold and dust, of death and potential plenty, a wild, wild place on the Nigerian earth.

    A few days to new year, bandits stormed and they prowled from house to house, seeking the living to be the dead. And they identified targets, fished them out and shot them dead. The lucky ones they manhandled and bundled away as kidnap victims. Women limped away with them as trophies, a district head as a prize among others whose fates in the month or even year, or even forever we may never know.

    It is on that note we look at the nation in 2022 as security takes centre stage in a year that promises to be turbulent on another front: party politics. It promises to be a year of nomination more than rumination.

    What will the year look like? Shall we find resolution and strategy? For the past few years, the federal government claimed it had resolution. The resolution came in the form of official prattle and rhetorical bluster. They said they had control. But bluster did not bust the enemies. There was a rhythm of silence and explosion. At one time, after the President, Muhammadu Buhari, had changed his service chiefs after relentless clamour, a sense of optimism replaced fear.

    But respite came despite evidence of nothing concrete on the ground. So, the respite might just have been that the evil was at rest like murmuring fat cat and refreshing and re-strategising. Then they came in big bursts of disasters. We started to see some states in deep trouble. We saw Zamfara, and then Kaduna and then Katsina. The normal fear was Borno and Yobe corridors. But while the violence in that region seemed to normalise in routine tragedies, new vicious excitements erupted in those states.

    One question that was asked at the beginning, and was never answered as the year ended, was why the federal government has not mentioned the culprits, the sponsors. Why have the lords of violence with deep pockets not fished out of their pockets of hiding places? They were obviously hiding in plain sights. The government named three groups, Jama’at Nasr al-Islam Wal Muslimin (JNIM), Islamic and

    Muslim Support Group (GSIM) and ISGS. It was a charade of an announcement. If they were groups what were the names of the people behind them. Where were the arrests. The sponsors cannot behind in the pall of groups. They are humans with loads of cash.

    Wealthy men by definition cannot hide. They live in splendour. They nest in mansions. They travel not alone but in retinues of glamour. Their bank accounts cannot flaunt themselves in home vaults alone. Even if they do, they are also tangible. Big bales of cash, whether in the official innards of banks or in their homes, cannot hide. So, why are these men still walking around while they are in remote corners, and they press buttons of slaughter and killings.

    But the bandits did something that analysts tried to come to terms with. Were we seeing a new mutation, whereby the zealots of mayhem where now transmuting into secular plunder? Were those who swore in the name of the Almighty, those who said they did all the burning of markets, slashing of throats, shooting down of army aircraft, and the bonfire of mosques and churches, were they now forswearing their God and turning to mammon? Were we seeing the death of their spirit and the rebirth of their flesh?

    Read Also: Insecurity in Imo politically-motivated -Eze Imo

    So, the army of the ragtag nature had now become fodder to bandits. They joined the those who began as gold hounds and kidnappers of humans as gold dust, and they made a wild business of it. Schools became soft targets. In Niger State, in Kaduna state and Zamfara state, the boys and girls were easy pickings.

    In looking to the new year as strategy, the federal government has to look for ways of either rejigging old strategies or starting with new ones. The old ones did not get much traction. One of them was the assault on cellular networks. Some northern states, including Katsina, decided to shut down the networks. They believed that once the hoodlums did not talk with each other, they could not map plans of assault. But it did not work. The violence still happened, and school children were still ferreted away. District heads still disappeared and

    damsels as trophies were still falling. The strategy was counterproductive. The state also shut down certain highways, and that shut down commerce as markets were immobilised. That also did not work.

    The networks had to be restored. No one knows how much was lost. There was even fear that the collapse of commerce could breed a defection from the law-abiding persons to the ranks of the hoodlums.

    The state also employed an appeasement policy. Governor Aminu Masari, who had wailed in public over scarcity of policemen in the state, tried to woo the gangs with free housing and market stalls. The hoodlums couls be normalised when they lived among sane people. How naïve. They were living among the, before they left. They were making millions in single raids in their peripatetic lifestyles. A governor proposed to hem them in with little pickings. It was no temptation and the governor had to drop that.

    Of course, shutting down schools was no strategy. It was a surrender. It meant that Boko Haram was achieving its philosophy. Kaduna, Niger and even Sokoto had to shut down some schools. Sokoto came with a good idea of ensuring that boarding schools operated as day schools close to the wards’ homes. This eliminated soft targets like the Chibok or Dapchi girls.

    operated as day schools close to the wards’ homes. This eliminated soft targets like the Chibok or Dapchi girls. That was a good strategy but it could not be an enduring formula because boarding schools were an essential part of developing social skills and the communal spirits of education.

    The federal government changed its service chiefs. They thought that was a solution. But the idea of change of service chiefs was advanced as a decision that would come with a change of strategy. We did not see much in the year. Except that the foot soldiers put more of their sweat and brawn on the line. The argument is that if the foot soldiers were fighting harder, it was because their leaders were more inspired. We saw this in the fight against Boko Haram in the northeast, and progress is believed to have happened on that front.

    But a sense that where victory happened was pyrrhic has renewed the sense of despair that we have not found the formula to end the insurgency. The inflow of warriors from Islamic State also called ISWAP has complicated hopes and thinking as to how to tackle it. As the year drew to an end, rocket fired into Maiduguri, an otherwise safe haven, raising the spectre of a vulnerabilities where strength was believed to be projected.

    We have always thought as a nation that spending more would overwhelm the enemies. We bought Tocarno jet fighters for the are lightweight and easy to manoeuvre and could strafe the bandits into silence. The result so far has been mixed. There is still time to find out whether we shall have joy from their skies.

    One big area of hope was actually in the southwest. Governor Rotimi Akeredolu of Ondo state has spearheaded the Amotekun onslaught on hoodlums. His convoy collided with the men and rolled through. Many of the kidnappers have been intersected and stopped. It is a measure of will and coordination. He tackled the federal government over forest reserves with ultimatum, and it is cheerful to recall his fortitude. His actions have revealed that the problem of the region was not only herdsmen but also ritual murderers.

    Even as the year ended, a place as far off as Sokoto started to moot the idea of vigilantes in the mould of Amotekun to slay the head of bandit dragon. The new year opens but few new ideas hover on the horizon. Optimism is still subdued just like a year ago.

  • Buhari’s shadow

    Buhari’s shadow

    Very few who are familiar with Abubakar Malami will doubt that he is a cocky man. He is a sort ofTunde  Idiagbon, a shadow of Muhammadu Buhari. He hardly smiles in public. He has a stern mien, and speaks in even tones. His eyes sometimes peep into a soulless heart. He detonates but does not emote. Unlike Idiagbon, he wears no uniforms. However, his web of power is a subtle cult. It is like a spider’s malignant design. More powerful than the Ilorin-born soldier. Malami is an attorney-general, Idiagbon a general. But the soldier had no attorney. He was a one-faced warrior. Malami is both attorney and a predator of justice. That is fatal. He speaks to the president. The president agrees. He does not need to be right. He has to bring his sophistry as an artist of persuasion. The shadow is more powerful than the man.

    In a sense, he is the chief mocker of the commander-in-chief. He probably laughs to himself, “once I tell him in a certain way, and project both sides of the issue and pretend I don’t belong in either, he will fall to the side I gently nudge him to.” He tries it. It works. It happens again and again. He has done it quite a few times. Whether it is about herdsmen, or NDDC, or the debt fight with governors. He skews the law and the president acquiesces. So, why not with the electoral law? Hence, they go to him who want to win, and he calculates where to pitch his tent.

    Malami, whether we admit it or not, is Nigeria’s most powerful man. He is the giant in Aso Rock, not the president. Russian writer Anton Chekhov said a giant should not use his power like a giant. The shadow is scarier than the man. Malami does not use the giant status for good. He knows how to flatter the man’s secret hopes.

    It is just like English man Thomas Cromwell who made his king Henry VIII into a marionette, and he became the throne beside the throne, a skein recreated to its psychological detail in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall.

    Even those on Malami’s side who admire him do not like him. The governors, for example. They exchanged barbs barely a month ago over debts and deals. Now, the same governors have hidden under his many-layered skirt-like Anna Bronski, the wife of an arsonist who loved the skirts and grandmother of the anarchist Okar in what some critics believe is the best novel of the 20th century, the tragi-comic tale The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass.

    So, the firestorm over direct primaries became a joy of foes. It reflects the drifts and quicksand of our political class. They embrace and race away, they hug and huff, and loyalties are as constant as the weather. The governors wanted indirect primaries. It was not a philosophical quest for them. It was a gladiatorial contest. They are desperadoes of survival. They want to pick their successors. The want to go to the senate. They want to remain puppeteers. They want to continue as monarchs of democracy. The system, though called a democracy, must continue as a ruse on their own account.

    This is not the place to quibble over patches of the president’s infelicitous prose like the phrase “implications on.” But to say that the argument was specious, and insincere. The notion that direct primaries contradict freedom of choice is elitist. Who is making the choice? The party members, or the governors and a few wheel horses?

    I recall the story of a former governor, now a minister, who did not like an unconscious quip by a house of representative member. He decided he would not return to the house. The fellow has not up till today. It was the whim of a man to decide who will represent a whole people. The fellow wanted a chance to beg. It never happened.

    Those who say we should not go the direct route because it is too expensive are mere hypocrites. Where don’t we spend money? The general elections are vast, and they still spend money. I would rather we spend and get the right people than turn this democracy into a cult of a few men. We also forget that the Nigerian voter is getting wiser. They are learning to collect without being collected. They take your money and vote elsewhere. We are seeing it in the major polls already. The Anambra Governor poll reflected how many, especially in the APC and PDP, wanted money badly but wanted their Chukwuma Soludo more badly. We remember the iconic woman who turned down an offer. That is how democracy is brewed. Soludo won, in spite of money. We have to dare, and risk the democratic enterprise with the people rather than stay safe with governors. The president voted safety over venture. It is the coy option.

    Ekiti Governor Kayode Fayemi did not speak truth to his hut when he said the governors are not afraid of direct primaries. We know the options are not that open. The other position that the people do not decide but they are influenced is correct. Democracy is a game of influences. Each side must make its case. Democracy absorbs influences in pockets around a constituency. Whoever wants to be nominated as governor must work hard across the board. He must meet the power centres who have great influence in their communities. The power centres are often trusted. They feel the pulse and project their demands and interests through these big men. That is what, for want of a better word, we call structure. Democracy is egalitarian when big men channel the fears and hopes of the common folks. It is not always perfect. The big men are not always good men. But they are the best we have and they are not always in charge. They also have to win or be defeated. The power to represent is one of the cardinal uncertainties of democracy. The fear is how do we define popular? Who is popular? How does the powerful man in a democracy become an autocrat?

    That is what many theorists are debating in the wake of the rise of despots like Trump and Erdogan. Hitler was a product of democracy. It is not perfect, but it is the best means of popular persuasion known to man. So, ideas like direct primary are its own way of refining it for the people.

    Is it an irony that a man who rose on the waves of Talakawas decided to pen his approval against the spirit of the Talakawa? The feudal lords who did not like Buhari’s rising will now benefit from his anti-talakawa signature. If it was so right to avoid corruption and expense, why not propose the general elections to be a platform of choices that could also occlude mass elections? After all, democracy started that way. In the United States, it started as a system of rich white men. Men like John Adams believed that majority should not vote. They are too foolish. Philosopher J.S. Mill described the majority as foolish. Former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli wanted votes to be weighed like fish in the market. Some people’s votes are bigger than a thousand men. That negates the American creed that “all men are created equal.”

    The president through his Malami has cancelled for a generation a chance for the people to take back their democracy. It is a stab at equality. If the president were running for another term, I doubt if he would have taken that route.

    This is no system by the people. Jefferson lamented that democracy only worked on election day. Not even so yet in Nigeria. Revolutions started because the people wanted to overthrow a greedy elite. In the collapse of the French Revolution, some Bonapartists, including Abbey Sieyes, coined the phrase: “Power from above, confidence from below.” It is what some have phrased in latin, “Pars imperans, Pars subdita” (some to rule, some to obey). This is in contrast with the revolutionary in the days of the 20th century Russian ferment who proclaimed, “if the system does not change from the top to the bottom, then it must change from the bottom to the top.”

    This rather is a democracy of obedience.

     

  • Memoirs and memory

    Memoirs and memory

    I regard it a gift to swamp oneself in an old man’s autobiography. Also any book from a person in his twilight years. A lifetime’s insight comes in bold relief. Just like former United States secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who at 98 just co-wrote a work of prophetic fear, The Age of AI. The man had nudged us with a polemical earthquake titled: World Order.

    “When I was young, I didn’t have the experience,” goes the Chinese proverb. “But when I was old, I didn’t have the strength.” Yet Bisi Akande has dispensed a memoir of pain and paean. Though old, his work is a tribute to memory. At age 82, when recall falters, Akande has launched a pageant of names and episodes.

    In his memoir, Far Away and Long Ago, W.H. Hudson writes about scenes that “are painted by memory in bright, unfading colours.” One can pick out Soyinka’s Ake and recently Anietie Usen’s Village Boy – though a piece of auto-fiction – as examples of bringing memory to the service of a tale.

    But political memoirs are a mnemonic idiosyncrasy. They unmask the flashes and foibles of a generation and the evolving colours of the human landscape. They are nothing if not gossipy, an eavesdropper’s delight – amebo in a grand scale. They also are a rumination of the human condition.

    No surprise then that My Participations should excite a flap. Not worries too that Ayo Adebanjo should rage and play real estate manager in his 90’s. He only concentrates on the charge that Asiwaju Bola Tinubu “helped build” a house for him, according to Akande. To help build implied he probably used something of his resources, too. But he didn’t need all that public accounting. That goes into the territory that literary critics and philosophers call the absurd.

    But since he did, he should have gone the whole hog to hug fact with fact, block to block, naira for Naira, with receipts. How much did it cost him to sell the houses? And match that with how much it cost him to build His Lekki mansion.  You can sell five houses and they might fall short of the cost of a new home in a highbrow area. In this age of unreceipted gifts, it is easy to deny who gave and who received.

    No word yet on the CofO. If not, he should say thank you. Or where are the receipt and bank draft to testify he paid. Did he build the mansion on nothing?

    Also angry is his governor successor Olagunsoye Oyinlola. He charged Akande with corruption because Akande accused him. He did not address the N377 million padding he allegedly signed, and he did not say how much of the N800 million he deployed to renovate a presidential lodge into a government house. Could Alani Akinrinade clear the air? Oyinlola asserted that Olusegun Obasanjo loved Akande, so why did he oust him in 2003. Or was it love as guilt?

    Add the pact between Tinubu and Candidate Buhari. Akande wrote: “In April 2014, I was in Abuja when Buhari called me and asked me to persuade Bola to run with him. Governor Masari was the one who came to call me. When I followed him into Buhari’s private lobby, Bola Tinubu was already seated there. So, when Buhari tabled the matter, I cautioned them that this must not get beyond the four of us. ‘How could we be talking of a running mate when he had not secured the ticket.’” If nobody can deny that episode, the story is sealed.

    It is a biography of a man who trudged his way up life’s arduous ladder with resigned cheer. He virtually never wanted anything in life that came his way. All he did was work hard. He wanted to be a mechanic but he finished his primary education. He became teacher. He never wanted to work in oil and gas, he landed a job at British Petroleum and rose to senior executive. Against his wishes, he became Bola Ige’s secretary to government, earning less than a third of BP emoluments. He recommended someone else to be deputy governor. He was basking in a chieftaincy title ceremony when the state House of Assembly announced his elevation, an honour within an honour in one day. A royal and democrat in one day. He was frogmarched to get governor nomination that Adebanjo was plotting to upturn. He chaired national parties four times without seeking any.

    Yet two events stand out for this essayist. One was his years in Buhari’s gulag. Politicians’ savage treatment. Soldiers wanted confession before evidence. He reeled out a roll call of big names humiliated. Former vice president, Alex Ekwueme “wept bitterly.” He called how the military wanted him to confess and failed to coerce others to nail him. It was like a script out of kafka.

    His experience draws an eerie parallel with his younger days.  A kangaroo court by some thieving politicians ambushed him to confess guilt for saying some councillors were on the take. A strapping fellow suddenly emerged after they pronounced him guilty. They had almost unleashed a poisoned whip on him. The fellow held Akande’s hand and walked him out daring anyone to touch him. The military, another kangaroo, did same against him. In both instances, a big man erupted. IBB’s coup set the stage for his release after about three years. But Akande curiously barely mentioned Buhari’s name. The culprit was Idiagbon.

    Bola Ige accused the same Adebanjo in Awo’s house as traitor, with his friend Olaniwun Ajayi, his fellow traveller, for conspiring with the soldiers against him. The same Olaniwun Ajayi,  who, in Akande’s telling, walked the author aside from an Ibadan event and said, “That Tinubu is a bad boy. He gave Ayo Adebanjo C of O, and he didn’t give me.” But the former Lagos governor handed him one, an old one showing he had had one but didn’t know.

    The other episode was how Obj conned the Southwest governors. Akande paints a feline Obj, playing a baby in distress seeking his kinsmen’s rescue. The same Obj who had insisted on standing to beg the folks, including Pa Adesanya, did the opposite when he had outfoxed them. In Otta, he kept them waiting for hours and arrived in the contempt of a pair of shots and flimsy shirt. Instead of standing, he sat on the floor and railed abuses. Adebanjo had earlier been beside Pa Adesanya serenading Obj. But when Obj swept the elections, except Lagos, Adebanjo accused the governors of working for Obj. The Owu chief, according to Akande, withdrew N1.4 billion to browbeat southwest governors. He spent N400 million in Osun State plus a detachment of 150 anti-riot police men. But Akande added that the Afenifere leadership was also divided.

    He accused Adebanjo of negating the party members when they agreed for Ige to accept Obj’s cabinet offer, yet he accepted Obj’s job without consulting the party leaders. He also objected to Segun Osoba accepting Daily Times M.D. job, yet he asked Aremo to use that platform to campaign for a road for Bisi Onabanjo. These are more far-reaching issues Adebanjo should address. I laughed at the irony that Omisore gave him Richard Nixon’s book on impeachment. Later, the lawmakers preferred an uncompromising Akande to an Omisore, who could hound them if he succeeded the author. He was the one impeached.

    Ooni Sijuade came in for a beating as contract monger. He said he would save Akande from impeachment if he acceded to a deal. Akande saved $295 million because he resisted the monarch’s overtures. The telling thing about Ige murder was how Obj retired every police officers investigating it.

    Akande paid attention to details but the book lacks close-eyed editing, and words like “vaunting ambition” should have been spotted. The use of ‘begat’ is somewhat amusing for its quaintness. Some repetitions engendered structural muddle. Yet his immersion in Yoruba history edifies. My Participations is more than a book. It is a document, especially from a Southwest perspective and moments of national illumination.

     

    Lagos chef

    To make a good meal, you have to be a good chef. The BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu demonstrated the culinary side of governance at the maiden Lagos State Food Festival at Victoria Island. Clad in black Apron, he tackled Stir fried rice, his hand on the ladle turning onions, smoked fish, mixed granules of bonga fish and crayfish, pepper and sundry seasonings. Ingredients wailed into delicacies under a blue-flamed stove. It was outdoor cooking, showing transparency. Those who ate testified that the chef did a chiefly job with Big Brother’s White Money who was beside him as the pot sizzled. He showed his salivating guests that it takes many ingredients for good governance just like roads, healthcare, good schools and food on the table.

  • The tortoise

    The tortoise

    Baba Akande, as those close to him call him with near adoration, took the public by surprise. Yours truly did not know of the book until a week to the presentation when Dare Babarinsa, the publisher and writer with a historical temperament, intimated me of the coming storm and eventually gifted me with a copy.

    As a slow and earnest reader, I ploughed into the volume, a writing of spare, unvarnished prose but abundant content, surfing with history and tumbling with names of high and low profiles, and overflowing with incidents. But the real review will come soon on this page, but this essayist was as happy to attend the coming-out party of the glorious story of one of the most consequential figures of Nigeria’s contemporary political history.

    At Eko Hotel, the visages and agbadas and babaringas materialised. The caps, too, the smiles, some faces bearing daggers, others supine and worshipful. Hugs and handshakes could hardly disguise the wily and the bold. Enter governors and ministers from north and south. Enter President Buhari with his train. Enter Asiwaju Tinubu bedecked with his familiar cap and glasses. Enter, of course, Bisi Akande, the day’s top shot, unveiling his lips with a vintage supernova smile, unveiling his lips to a galaxy of white teeth.

    As the day wore on, there was a man who was both tortoise and elephant. He was a tortoise because he was there but he was not there. A tortoise is never absent in any African folktale and so was this man. Tortoise, sly, manipulative, fell and ferocious, animates all African tales just as the fellow has been in our country’s modern history. He was, in consequence, the elephant in the room. He is the Owu chief, the man from Ota, a former president, Olusegun Obasanjo. I wonder if he was invited and decided to remain ensconced in the secure Bastille of his Ota home, the same way a tortoise hides its head in the rampart of its shell.

    But there whether from the lips of President Buhari, from gangling Kashim Imam, from Bisi Akande himself and the Jagaban, and even the perspicacious reviewer Segun Ayobolu, this newspaper’s editor at large, Obasanjo was in the dock.

    He was prosecuted. He was cross examined, heckled and damned. He walked to Golgotha and descended to Hades. He was jailed and convicted. He was the sufferer of an inquisition and guillotine. His head was lopped off there in spirit and in Ota in the flesh. In either place, he felt the severity of the judgement. It was justice without a defence attorney, without a plea of guilt. There was no tear for him, no acclamation. He went from the dock to the place of the damned.

    Kashim Imam reported that he was with OBj when the former president decided to sweep out progressives in an electoral gale across the southwest. He said Obj thought Akande was such a good man, but he removed him anyway. Only Lagos was spared, or shall we say only Lagos was impregnable, a thing that earned the candidate and governor, Bola Tinubu, the praise of “the last man standing.” Imam warned Obj not to come near Lagos, because the man would resist and burn everywhere. A coward does not fight when he knows disaster beckons.

    The president’s speech was so heartfelt and rippled with humour and it humanised him in ways few ever see him. He called what happened “an electoral massacre,” a clear innuendo at those who fished for the word to justify a fiction. He said a “steadfast Tinubu” escaped it. This was the sentiment of the day. But if he was steadfast, how could he escape? To escape is to flee, to be weak and vulnerable. Obviously, it was OBJ himself who escaped a disgrace on the streets of Lagos. A steadfast person would triumph, not escape. The writing missed the philosophical nuance of that episode of Nigerian history.

    There was another miss. When Reviewer Ayobolu adverted to Baba Akande’s suffering in Jail at the collapse of the Second Republic, there was an elephant in the room. He did not say, out of courtesy, that the man who jailed Akande was in our midst: President Buhari himself. There were hushed murmurs in parts of the hall. It was a paradox of the day, but it also shows how a mistake at one time can be a mea culpa at another. Akande was in the gulag for about three years, and went through unprintable hardship, at one time sleeping in a “pond of dirt” at the jail house in Ibadan. But the review is coming.

    The paradox remains that the same Buhari nods to a quote from the book in which Baba Akande says he never asked nor took bribe from anyone in his life. Yet, that was the reason he did not see daylight in three years. It is a personage like Akande, who exposes the brutish chicaneries of that age of guns and sleight, of decrees and deceit.

    Many are reading the book now, and already the tremors are shaking the political earth. Ayo Adebanjo, who I berated in this column  as a phony progressive and who enlisted some columnists to come after me, a Teflon penman that I am, came up for quite some beating in the book. Ditto Olaniwun Ajayi and a line of political never-do-wells. Adebanjo says he wants to read the book first. I await his rebuttal of the C of O gratis and free home Tinubu built for him, a man he has made a career of assailing. Tom Ikimi has also said he is writing his own book. We await the prose and his reasons for denying.

    Also some have started revisionism of history that happened before our eyes, especially what Baba Akande wrote about how Prof. Yemi Osinbajo emerged. Some are fighting hard to make the vice president look like a familiar figure and national heavyweight before he was nominated. Did he not emerge out of Tinubu’s shadow at Asiwaju’s initiative? How could Buhari just pick him when he knew next to nothing about the law professor and former attorney general under Tinubu as Lagos governor? Some journalists should be careful about turning apocrypha into facts and parroting the drivel from the mischief tongues of unfledged politicians, especially tendentious play with facts. Even he, Osinbajo, confessed that Tinubu nominated him. The mongers of this fiction are privileging that narrative to detract from the more obvious one: The breach of faith of candidate Buhari as Akande narrated. Having emerged, he could not stand his ground as a man of faith to a pact he himself had anointed with his lips and witnesses. It was a lapse of integrity.

    More issues will emerge, and the book, titled: My Participations, is instructive by his title. He implies he took part and was a part of the maelstrom of events. it hinted at his passivity in the concourse of Nigerian history. It underlines a humble man, who had been a deputy governor, confronted the military, was a governor, became a party chairman of four political parties. His humility, his lack of guile as Ayobolu called him, makes his revelations and bird’s-eye view of the train of history very credible. Anyone who would defy or debunk had better come with facts, or chew their cud in ignominious silence and shame. When the chips are down, Participations may be not only a redoubt of modern history, but perhaps one of the best works of his generation.

    Eleyinmi comes to Lagos

     

    This time he showed his hands. Eleyinmi never did that because he always had something to conceal. But Eleyinmi, who we know as Bukola Saraki and former senate president by stealth, came to Lagos to embrace a group that calls itself “Lagos4Lagos,”an amorphous epithet and grammatically meaningless.  But it was Saraki, who was rejected and run over by the Otoge train in Kwara State who is seeking authenticity in Lagos. He, Eleyinmi, who has crisis of political identity, is coming to seek identity with an amoebic nonentity in Lagos. The man who is seen as a northerner when he is in the south and a southerner when he is in the north and whose family home is in dispute even in Ilorin. He wants to make an identity in Lagos.

     

  • The people’s side

    The people’s side

    A certain candidate made a pact with his followers. They were to queue up on election day behind him. He fantasised an extravagance of enthusiasm. A long, sinuous tribe of men and women, body after body, smile after smile, party card after party card, chants after flattering chants. They snaked audaciously onto the street, spilled onto alleys and front yards, obstructing traffic, enraging opponents and advertising him as the man of the people. His victory a technicality, a matter of hours.

    He arrived, his agbada, starchy and voluminous, dwarfed him in its splash and brilliance. He stood in front and waited for his supporters. But the line beside him got longer and longer, and behind him shorter and shorter. What he wished for himself was fulfilling for his opponent. His supporters, looking away from him, cheered behind his rival.

    Then, he yelled in primal despair in Yoruba, Eyin enia mi da? Translation: “Where are my people.” It was a cheerless moment baffled, he shrank away, his puny frame disappearing inside his agbada like a tortoise head inside the shell. It was the sort of democracy that separated farts from facts, hope from pretenders and democracy from a band of oligarchs, the people from their big men.

    That is the campaign that House speaker Femi Gbajabiamila began. The House passed it and the Senate, an unlikely place for such a volcanic roar, also appended its name. Now, history beckons the president, and all await his all-important flourish of signature.

    It is the open primary. It signals an open democracy. It is a Trojan hand against the Trojans of democracy. It is a vote against the vole-face of politicians, against filthy lucre. It is for kin against kingpin, the manipulator. It is an opportunity for the people.

    Whether the people will cede this great hope and sell themselves is yet to be seen. The opponents have been the governors. It has been on the surface a battle between the lawmakers and the executives. Ironically, we expect the executive, the president of the republic, to decide he is on the people’s side.

    The governors say they want the indirect option because it is less expensive; it is simpler; less chaotic. We should get order and not collapse the system by handing them to the people. This sort of position has also been modified by those who fear chaos, who suspect the tyranny of the centre. They say each party should determine what they want. The party in power cannot impose a system on all.

    Lobbies are hushing in the corridors of power. Governors are lending their advice. The president is lending his ears. Even INEC wants the open option. We cannot deny that the proponents of indirect primary have their ideas. They may be right about chaos. They may be right about simple. They may be right about parties deciding their strategic destinies. But they deny the simple fact: the people ultimately should decide how our democracy works. Not a few men. We have been running a democracy of few men, oligarchy overshadowing what Lincoln calls a government of the people by the people for the people.

    We want order, but not the order of a clique. We want cheap but not at the expense of the people. We want parties to decide their destinies, but this is about the destiny of our democracy, not a group. After all, the lawmakers are elected by the people. They are deciding as the people’s parliament.

    Again, if we give them to the parties to decide, the governors will hijack it, and the system will go back to its default stronghold of a few men. I am not an advocate of systems over men. Systems are slaves of the wiles and cunning of men. Yet we need systems. We need to make them elude the shenanigans of hectoring men of power and money as possible. Hence, we must seek the better option. We have had it before; the open primary, that is. And it has worked. What is the fear? It is the fear of the people. If we don’t have it now, we won’t in a generation.

    It is possible for big men to rethink their strategy, to hoodwink the people, and pay as many voters as they can. But we saw from the Anambra model that people can decide to reject money. The vote and cook soup model may work in parts. But that should be our next phase of battle. Politicians will now learn to develop how to woo and wink rather than hoodwink. We shall learn how to make the crowds sane and not cow them. It is the people’s hour. The United States has increasingly yielded to the direct option. Only a few states, less than four of the 50 states, still tinker with the direct. Even at that, it is not the sort we have here. There is a collegial temperament to the picking of delegates.

    In the early days of U.S. politics, politicians planted entertainment spots on the way to the polls. Up to the 20th century, presidents and governors taxed government workers to finance elections. They have transcended such corruptions. This is a country that fought to fashion a monument of a constitution, and when they were done, a swaggering Benjamin Franklin strode out. Journalists asked what document they had made: “A republic, if you can keep it,” he said. So, what we want is the people’s republic, fashioned not for the strong but to make the weak strong, give ownership to the farmer and mechanic, and bring the topflight business mogul to the logic of the masses. It will pedestal choice over fiat.

    It is a legacy hour for the president. It will birth a new republic inside a republic. The French have had five republics, but within each republic, they have enshrined principles and practices worthy of new constitutions. That is what the direct primacy will do. It will reengineer the people’s will. The father of democracy, Cleisthenes, was resisted by what historians call the era of the Tyranny. But the people reinstated him, and he gave us what political scientists call Athenian democracy.  Historian Herodotus wrote that Cleisthenes was “the man who introduced the tribes and the democracy.” Our constitution has brought a semblance of order. But we want the people’s order, and that is democracy.

    Some philosophers have said the Greek model will not work and even did not work as well as it is propagated. Hannah Arendt, in her The Human Condition, has lamented the disconnect between leaders and crowds. Some other thinkers have opined that the death of the industrial world has banished the crowds that labour movements enacted. But the social media has reinvented them, like the EndSars protest that the youths bungled for failure of leadership.

    But all systems are imperfect. Let us tweak it. Even the American constitution continues to bow to amendments. Let us improve it and make the direct primary into a sacrament of our republican practice.

     

     A new weather in Jos

    •Lalong

    After the hoopla and near paralysis, the Plateau State House of Assembly has reopened. The sacking of the former speaker Ayuba Abok is now behind the parliament. Abok, an APC fellow, had hung the parliament by taking two APC lawmakers with him. The PDP had nine members while the APC had 14, and that made the tally an ominous draw at 12 apiece. But one of Abok’s fellow traveller Phillip Dasun, who was Abok’s PR maven has come back to roost in APC. He is not getting the prodigal son treatment after a way in the wild. The other one, Henry Longs, unfortunately passed away in the cauldron of the crisis. A tear for him! May his soul rest in peace. They had tried to fest while Plateau fell to pieces. The same assembly has passed Governor Simon Lalong’s budget, and are working on other legislations. The last time they sat about 18 persons, PDP and APC, were present.

    Plateau has been a tinderbox, and politicians ought to beware of curdling an ethno-religious tension into a cauldron. That is what some have done within the party and the PDP. The former governor, who is in a cold war with another general Jeremiah Useni, is stoking the flames. All because of 2023.

    Abok lit the tinder when the issue of financial autonomy for state assemblies gave him powers and some complained that they were not part of the new dispensation. The y saw opaque everywhere. Hence the plot to remove him. Using a few people to remove him was not the way to go, and Governor Lalong, who suffered similar fate, has not associated with it.

    Nonetheless the new speaker Yakubu Sanda, is now in charge, and he has the duty to steer the ship out of stormy seas.

    Plateau is mini-Nigeria, and peace and order are pre-conditions for development. Politicians both in APC and PDP should always bear that in mind. The crises have been boiling for a few decades, and no one has the right to rip the scab in order to score in politics.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Baba Suwe’s vigil

    Baba Suwe’s vigil

    Nothing is funnier than the plot of a comic and his poop. Not even the poop of a pope could have popped any more laugh than Baba Suwe’s. But it was a laugh with an itch, with a niche.

    The man died and we still can’t boast a hearty laugh. His was a funeral with a spectre of the sh*t, a faecal ghost.

    I recall one of his TV acts, when he went into a deal and he spoke in a parody of his Ibadan neighbours. “Fity-fity, no seating.” Fifty-fifty, he meant to say, no cheating. But the man, Babatunde Omidina,63, expired a cheated man.

    He dedicated his life to the thespian laugh. But we laughed in vain. Laugh without gain.

    All of that started when he was travelling out of the country in 2013. The scan said he had something in his body interior. Something like drugs. The NDLEA arrested him. The headlines spilled blood. Comedian Baba Suwe arrested over drugs. The imagination set itself free. The slim, simple man with little stomach, bearing illegal substances. Why? He wanted to be rich? He made our homes rich with guffaws, tickled our ribs, wet our eyes. Why Baba Suwe? Why, Baba Suwe?

    The man had been condemned. No courts necessary. It was an archetype of Nollywood deviance. They looked large. But had no money. They had to live large. So, if Baba Suwe was innocent, many were not ready to give him a humour of a chance. If what he bore like a tumour was not revealed, he had to be separated from it.

    So, in his cell, it was time to confirm. Not to investigate. But then he did not stool in time. The officials hated a biological dillydallying. But he would have no ease until he eased himself.

    It was not only a wait for the poop, but for the test results. The nation was in a poop vigil, a toilet watch. Baba Suwe was not on television or on stage. He was fulfilling Shakespeare’s words that the world is a stage. The stage was beyond our eyes. No one saw him in cell except those assigned to see him. No one saw him crouch and out the bowel contents. No passage for the public to see the passage of the thing. It was in the mind. The public imagination was the playwright. They concocted him sighing, silent, sitting, moping, eating, drinking, farting, pooping, frowzy. They didn’t see poop but they pooh-poohed him.

    After nine tries in eight days, a dramatic disappointment. Excreta without evidence. Execrable! They saw nothing. But they would not release him. If the scan said it was there, so what happened? Was he not supposed to let it out? Such things were not supposed to give much problem. They wrapped them in little bags and swallowed. So, if swallowed, they were supposed to be in only one place, the stomach. To remove it, you either puked or defecated.

    The scientist ought to believe the evidence of the scan more than eyes. But that pertained to invisible things, to microbes, to viruses, like those things that run in the body in the name of Covid-19 that no eye can see. But drugs in a bag? Habba!

    If it burst, Baba Suwe would have been no more. Is that not how it works. But rather than ask, is it not the misreading of the equipment by our scientists? Like the doctors who said the wife of a prominent Nigerian – name withheld – had pneumonia three times and treated her to no avail. The same body went to the United Kingdom and it turned out to be Parkinson’s Disease and was healed there. Or was it not a prominent hospital here that said the great Gani Fawehinmi had malaria until it was too late?

    So, if the scan was contradicted by other evidence, why not let him go?

    But the poop vigil turned into a superstitious watch. The man had taken some magic herb. It was there, like the language of the Bible: “Thou shall not see me and live.” So, no scientist had the eye of understanding to peer the substance still hidden in plain sight. People said he was guilty. They just didn’t have the evidence. In good time, the charms would expire, and the man would be exposed when the ball of cocaine or heroin or whatever would materialise to the open gaze.

    Read Also: Baba Suwe: Curtain falls on comedy icon

    A nation of illiterates now encouraged the NDLEA to nurture their doubts.  If the society and the media had banded on the side of truth and inquiry, maybe it would be a different story. But the man was left. Science subdued, superstition and a credulous people conspired to let official impunity reign. That explains how we believe without questions. The Renaissance era in Europe was born to rid the society that believed without inquiry. They invented witches, made bonfire of innocents, slaughtered ugly old women, went to war on rumours. Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, emblematised that pathology. Americans elected trump on lies. The “red scare” in the 1950’s, also called McCarthyism, was an era when Americans, high and low, saw communists where there were patriots. It’s not here alone, not today alone.

    Data and facts are turned upside down and the people follow.  We are seeing it today. We can empanel fiction as verities. Fela warned, If you dey follow follow, make you open eye. Many bow to pastors. Murder for politicians. Queries are a sacrilege. “A wonderful and terrible thing is committed in the land, the prophets prophesy falsely and the priests bear rule by their means. And my people love to have it so,” wept Prophet Jeremiah.

    Even the courts are not immune. The NDLEA got court injunction to continue to hold him. The Beckettian wait continued. For them, no faeces, no peace. They surrendered after 25 clueless poops. In Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett had two infinite waits. Critics said, “nothing happens, twice” as against “nothing happens twice.” The coma explains the difference in Baba Suwe, NDLEA was waiting for sh*t to happen. They were the metaphor of the filth itself: official failure, scientific incompetence, judicial capitulation, mass hysteria.

    They were feeding him when he could feed himself at home. Sheltered him when he had a better roof. They tarred him with disgrace on a spotless fame. Bound him instead of letting him fly Air France. He became the greedy artiste. The hypocrite. The role model exposed.

    When he left, he was alone. No highflier came to his rescue. He remained a hanged man. Damned man. Everything fell apart: his career, his fortunes, his peace, his name.

    A free man, he sued and got N25 million. A million for every poop. That was judicial humour we all missed. It is Fela’s “expensive sh*t.” But an appeal court upended it. The matter remains unresolved.

    He fell ill, and only then did a few help him. But the pain never died, and in the end, Baba Suwe gave up the ghost. He still had a lot to offer, and wanted to do a movie on his ordeal. On his deathbed, he might have said like Socrates, “We owe a cock to Asclepius. Do not forget to pay him.” Or shall we say, we owe a cock of apology to Baba Suwe, now is the time to pay. The federal government should do that homage to his ghost. Or else, he will haunt us with his ill humour.

    He died having much to offer. He left us like a crippled eagle eyeing the sky.

    Nurturing hope

    Governor Udom EmmanuelFor some, it looked like a fluke. A state government taking over the skies. Now, Ibom Air is ramping up to become an elite airline in the country. When it had three aircraft, doubts were nurtured. It improved to five, and then in the midst of COVID-19, it soared to seven. Two weeks ago, it signed in collaboration with Airbus, to acquire 10 aircraft to raise its profile to 17 for the Nigerian airspace. It is one of the major doings of Governor Udom Emmanuel of Akwa Ibom State. On land and in the air, he is defining the quality of legacy with the legacy of quality. No wonder, he was awarded African Regional Journal as one of 100 inspiring individuals in Africa. At the Raddidon Blu Hotel and Convention Centre in Kigali, he was conferred along with such stalwarts as our own Okonjo-Iweala, Prof. PLO Lumumba (well-known Kenya corruption czar) and goal scorer Mohammed Salah of Egypt. Gov. Emmanuel has shown you don’t need the vanity of a cymbal for the world to see your virtues.

  • Time for literacy

    Time for literacy

    It is normal to be hasty. It is human to be nasty. It all shows that, as a species, we can always be feisty. But then our facts should be hefty and not sacrifice reality. Justice is more important than sentiment.

    That is the range of emotions that have attended the leak or supposed leak of the EndSARS report.

    Prior to the submission of the report, Lekki has become a metaphor for questions and answers as to what is a truth and what is a lie, what does the eye know, or what does the ear understand. Everyone seems to know what evidence is, and even lawyers have looked at proof in different lights.

    Once the panel gave its findings to the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the social media surfed with what some say is a leak. One of the panelists, the mercurial Ebun Adegboruwa, could not contain himself. He said he had the report and virtually warned the government to beware. He would release it.

    So, two things are clear. One, no one is sure what the true report is until it is officially released. Two, many citizens have all concluded they have it, and have jumped to conclusion.

    Commentators and television hosts have turned a purportedly leaked document into a sacred writ of the happenings at Lekki Toll gate. Even they have not read it through.

    When the newspapers reported the document, we saw discrepancies. A newspaper said 11 died, and others said nine.

    From the rage and frothing on the internet, it is obvious that a vast majority of those either spouting obscenities or pursing praise have not as much as gone beyond the highlights purportedly packaged by the panel. Matters like this call for sobriety.

    Since the state government says it will release the reports in a white paper, it behoves all to wait for that. Even at that, a white paper is not sacrosanct, it can be questioned and litigated. But it is hasty to jump to conclusion on a document that no one can verify, and which even if leaked, the coward who did it sent out an unsigned specimen, or has not been able to come out to say he or she did it.

    Yet if we were to examine the leaked copy, it has not advertised the panel as a panoply of popes. First, one of the panelists should not have been there. He is Adegboruwa. As a senior advocate of Nigeria, he knows that he dilegitimised himself on two fronts. He was a perennially absent member of the group. Two, he has been a constant agitator on the Lekki Toll gate matter, and that makes his presence a conflict of interest and a moral faux pas. Lawyer Abiodun Owonikoko and a few others drew attention to this.

    Three, what was his point in warning the state government that freely appointed him to the panel not to interfere. Did he not know that even as a SAN he ought to have waited till the white paper before saying a word? Did he not understand the importance of official oaths? Would it not have conferred a better dignity if he waited till the white paper saw the light of day? We know that the he is bright man, and with his bowtie and upright carriage, he has done a lot to merit the appellation of SAN. He should keep that image bolt upright.

    But if we are to assume that the document in circulation is an authentic one, I wonder why there are contradictions not worthy of a baby lawyer with a second-class lower degree. If the same report says so several people died, why did page 288 say, “The evidence of the pathologist Prof. Obafunwa that only three of the bodies that they conducted post mortem examination on were from Lekki and only one had gunshot injury and this was not debunked. We deem it credible as the contrary was not presented before the panel.” Is that the sort of report you expect from a panel with a SAN, and that otherwise brilliant gems in society have described as one of our best showings in panel findings?

    If you list casualties, you should also show how, when, who saw it. So, if the panel lists 48 victims as casualties of Lekki toll gate, all its names should be verified. So, why was it that one Nathaniel Solomon named as deceased has turned out to be a living, breathing being? The 10th person on the list, a certain Japhet, was shown to have been killed at Ajah. The seventh on the list, Mabel Nnaji fell by pellets. Does it mean the panel did not do the basic research well to ascertain that military guns do not spit pellets.

    I pity one ASP Ayodele Olabode, who was the only police officer proved to be assigned to the toll gate that night, even though the panel purportedly says a team of officers were there and shot sporadically. The report said someone died of police bullets. The report does not adduce any evidence or name a name. Again, it might be true that ambulances were prevented from going to the scene at Lekki, but a credible report should at least tell us what vehicles, and what persons were in the ambulances with names. They at least should be at the panel to testify. Nothing of that sort is in the so-called document in circulation. There are more and more contradictions and assertions of febrile impulses. Imagination upends facts.

    Given the presence of the wise men and women on the panel, I have good reason to believe that they did not write the report in circulation. It lacks empathy, and detracts from the language of detached dignity and syntactic solemnity you require on a subject in which deaths and fiery pathos have crippled the land.

    What we see is a prose of agitation and tendentious approach to evidence.  Although this is not a panel to show the plight of the police, it should have noted with some feeling the devastation that the police suffered.

    It was because the police lost control of the city that the army came. But it was no excuse for them to turn violent. I still believe that whoever ordered the shooting ought to be punished, and hence I wonder why the chief of army staff was rewarded with an ambassadorial posting and the man who worked for him in Lagos was just promoted. The optics is horrible. It is robbing the masses to pay blood. If only one person died from their presence, it is enough tragedy. His or her bell tolls for us all. It is no time to quibble over whether it was a massacre. If a person died, it is brutal enough. Lai Mohammed should not, in his indiscretion, have crowed about a “massacre without bodies.” Many, including the panel, reverted to sentimentalise the meaning of the word, even “in context,” it refers to wiping out a mass of people. Like we saw in Odi and Zaki biam. Yet, the cold-blooded killing of a family of five can, also in context, be called a massacre. History cannot forget the slaughter of 14 Romanov family members in Russia. Yet that resort to sanguinary language should not becloud the fact that real people died. Not just in Lekki but across the state. A panel should, given the significance of the matter, be sober and not run riot on facts.

    If that document is true with all its discrepancies and speculative bloodthirst, then we have a problem in this country.

    That for me is why we should urge everyone to read the full document in circulation and try to make sense or nonsense of it. We cannot be a nation of cookie-cutters alone, or sound bites or short takes. Matters like this call for reflection, rigour and sobriety. It is then we can wait for the white paper, and take the matter from there. We do not want a nation that will go the route of the Ebony magazine saga during the Tai Solarin era. A few people hoodwinkedthe  masses to turn a rumour  into facts.

    This is not a time for reading in a hurry. That is not the definition of literacy. It is reading and understanding. They should follow the guidance of Francis Bacon while urging us to read. “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested…some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

    A document of about 300 pages can pass for a book, and many who have concluded before reading, should read it and determine for themselves whether it is worth digesting.

  • Boom of Anambra orchestra

    Boom of Anambra orchestra

    With Charles Chukwuma Soludo’s win, it’s all over but the whining. It is second time the rhyme in Anambra State, and the second act as a governor. The first in charge, as CBN chief, of the money of the people. In the next act, he will preside over the people of the money – in his state. He will walk the fine line of reconciling how to figure the people and people the figures.

    His first coming was by appointment, the second by election. One man’s fiat, the multitude’s choice. He has come full circle. He is, to quote the novelist Tom Wolfe, a man in full.

    As he prepares to govern, he will see himself as a schizophrenic gift, part bureaucrat, part politician, two worlds in a soul to deliver stewardship to the people. He sought the office years ago against a man he now pounced by proxy: Peter Obi. Obi ruled the roost as the helmsman of All Progressive Grand Alliance, (APGA) the only party that has one state and has remained impregnable. Anambra is APGA state of mind.

    When Obi lost to Obiano, also by proxy, this essayist described him as a statesman without a state. The comment drew dissonant uproar from his fold. Now slain twice, the feminine-voiced gladiator is now stale. He will do well to fold his tail in peace.

    But his story is different from Andy Uba, the man who came with the blessing of the ruling party of the centre. He is a reticent, soft-spoken, sometimes sullen swordsman without a shield. Uba attracted attention in the debate by characterising himself as Soludo’s benefactor. He claimed to have given him his first appellation of governor. Of the CBN, that is. I thought Soludo would have lunged back at him. He should have praised Uba for acknowledging his sterling resume. If it was a marker of Soludo’s brilliance and competence, Uba bowed to his credentials then. It would be worth his while now to bow again to the same credentials for Anambra governor.

    Well, after the polls, and his poor showing in the third class, Uba made a drama of congratulating him before he saw the light and then swivelled. He now impugns the victory that sent him crashing like humpty-dumpty. His candidacy died, and was set for burial. But like the bereaved relative in the Booker-winning novel The Promise by Damon Galgut, Uba is asking the morticians to open the casket to be sure it is the corpse of his candidacy. When it is open, it is reeking with putrescence. Its features are so disfigured that he cannot recognise the body in the box. He is promising himself it is not he who lost; it was Uba who won. He probably is getting ready to go to court. He will feather lawyerly leeches to impersonate Christ and invoke Lazarus in his corpse of a candidacy. He awaits a prophecy from the priest of ascendancy, Father Mbaka, as a prelude to a court anointing. He should perish the thought. The opportunism that exploited maggoty technicalities to torpedo a sitting governor in Imo State does not exist here.

    The people, not the courts, own this democracy. Not a cabal of wigged men with slander in their tongues for the wishes of the people. As for Mbaka who has converted the pulpit to a stage for deception, he prophesied in an audio recording now virile that the angels of heaven had abandoned Soludo, and he stood no chance to win. Prophet Isaiah has God’s word for him: “Who foils the lies of false prophets and makes fools of diviners…” Jeremiah warned, “He that has my word, let him speak it faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat?” The weeping prophet wept for Mbaka. He says men like Mbaka spew the imaginations of their own hearts. With the crown beside Soludo, what is the prophet saying in his morning mass?

    The Anambra poll is a triumph of democracy, but also a cautionary tale. It is a warning to Kalu and his men that ‘Biafra’ is possible within a revamped Nigeria. The nation cries for nations within the nation to realise themselves. It is also a warning that we cannot run a democracy forever that thrives on ten or 12 percent voting strength. If some elders spoke to IPOB to cool its revolvers during the polling day, it is no excuse for triumphalism in Abuja. It calls for humility. As Churchill thrummed, “in victory, magnanimity.” As attorney general Abubakar Malami has hinted, there is room for political solution. Not now any gruff voice of a winner. It is an opportunity no one should let go. Same applies to Igboho. This is an window for statesmen, not carpet baggers.

    We all know the nation as it is constituted cannot be sustained. We need democracy for its parts, a control of its culture and resources and its pride. The centre cannot hold until the parts hold their own. As the apostle of liberty, J.S. Mill noted, democracy cannot thrive when one group chokes another. Many groups feel so in Nigeria, those screaming as well as those whose voices grumble beneath the rafters. A pride of identity is as important as how to grow beans and cook it for the dinner table.

    INEC made its point in the end, but BVAS also needs a second act. Anambra was a dress rehearsal but it was a poor fashion show until the wardrobe was made over. INEC chairman, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, ever sober and methodical, must be holding meetings and turning his techies to tweak and rejig the portals. They must now anticipate and eliminate glitches.

    Soludo comes at a time the meaning of his name resonates: follow peace. At a victory rally, he must feel that from his father, who stood beside him, from the grinning and proud old man who gave him that name. Just like any part of Nigeria, he will have to translate his name into reality. Udo Udo Udo is a worthy refrain for the hour. He may start with his voice. He has a deep bass and I once told him that he might one day consider a stint in broadcasting when he is done with governance and politics. He will be, as he mounts the throne, the voice of the state. With his deep, rich philtre, he is the boom of Anambra orchestra.

    He is one of the most qualified men to run for governor in Nigeria’s history. Not because of his first class alone, but it counts. Not because he knows figures alone, but it counts. Not because of his experience, that is a plus. Not also because he was CBN governor alone. Not because he has run and knows how to lose and win, including tweaking the Nigeria currency. Not because he has the emotional stamina and subtlety. But because he has all these, and the hour summons his genius to revive a state of tremendous potential. In a meeting with him years ago, he said three cities showed financial money flow from his experience as CBN boss: Onitsha was one of them. His acumen beckons that wherewithal.

    In Touch wishes the “boom of Anambra orchestra” good luck.

     

    A workhorse at home

    •Fashola

    While some lawmakers were up in arms, the work was already done. The trojan of works, Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN), did not have to exchange rhetoric for rhetoric. He replied with digital missile. They said he had no plans for the over 5000 homes built across 34 states in the federation. They said they were rotting away. He did not want to hand them over. They did even commend him for getting the job done first. They did not even make their investigation before their frothy effusions. On Friday, he unveiled a portal for all Nigerians who seek homes. They can go to the portal and sign up for bungalows, one, two or three-bedroom apartments. Payments are gradual, so it is different from housing units where you have to fall dizzy merely by hearing the prize. This is not like the tens or hundreds of millions that characterise housing units by shylock builders, land speculators and contractors. A home of your own is a proprietary feature of democracy. It entitles you to say, as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s inspired phrase, “You have a right to be here.”

    The journey for homes-for-all is a long one in a nation pursuing 200 million souls. But programmes like this turn steps into strides. The lawmakers should learn not to scream when all they can do is inquire. Our elders say if you have a roof over your head, the rest is relatively easy.

     

     

  • Tower of rubble

    Tower of rubble

    He strode into the high-rise with the superfine dignity of a billionaire builder, father of four, husband, friend of many, child of prophecy, international explorer, a former hustler turned refined hustler, a former retailer of suits and shoes, a former habitue of the low-slung neighbourhoods of Lagos, a dynamo in health and hope.

    But he left among ruins. He was a ruin himself, his whole body’s clock at an end. He was lifeless as the rods and blocks that were, not long ago, a showcase of magnificence and snob.

    Those who saw the 21-storey heft and now see the surviving two could not do so with the impudence of a hat on the head. The hat or cap doffs by dropping off without a curtsy or the obliging hand of the wearer.

    It was the character of artificial catastrophe. It intrudes for blood, like a slinking lion. It does not always warn like a tornado or hurricane. Nature, with all its Luciferian majesty, would often temporise before making everything temporary on its path. Conrad calls it “the unthinking might of nature.” Yet, it seems to think before it devours. But what man builds erupts, like an electric shock, a car crash or aircraft explosion or a building swooshing down on Gerrard Road Ikoyi. Or the 12-storey crash in Florida in June, or fire storms in England, etc.

    That was the feat and fate of Femi Osibona before death caught him. He went home before he built his dream home. He left the block and made a turn. He held a meeting with another man who made a turn. Bob Oseni, a United States resident, also like Osibona, rose in the humble ambience of Lagos before his father clasped him. Both futures ended when they made the turn. Death stalked. They got stuck, forever. Just like Emily Dickinson’s poem: “Because I could not stop for death/ He kindly stopped for me/ The carriage held but just ourselves/ And immortality.”

    What if it happened after he had left? A superstitious nation would have crucified him. He went there for the final rite of sacrifice. The dead died for him so he could prosper more. Some had even started such grumbles before the emergency workers rescued him from the rubble. They would add: he shouted hallelujah in his closet.

    But if the tower fell without him, how would he have lived? A life of absolution, trying every day to atone for the dead souls? Film star Alec Baldwin faces it today after his gun liquidated a person on set. That was the desperation of Lord Jim, in Joseph Conrad’s epic novel, who surrendered his life to redemptive heroism for failing to save pilgrims on a ship. Or Addison Graves in the Booker Prize-nominated novel, The Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead, about a captain who saved himself and his twins instead of dying with others on deck.

    With Osibona gone, no one can allude to a demoniac soul. We saw him on the deck dancing with others in near ecstasy in a church service. If he survived, his detractors would call that church service his rite of sacrifice, his dance a deathly romp.

    He was no stranger to high-rises. He  did it in England, South Africa, United States. The tiff over whether it was 15 floors or 21 draws one back to his interview with the ebullient TVC Business news anchor Tolu Ogunjobi when he referred to two projects where the British regulators documented an extra floor than he applied for.  In that interview, he came across as a man of good intention and ambition, and referred to his relations with the Lagos State government. He said the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, facilitated his work so long as they conformed to the law. So, he did not come across with the air of a man who cuts corners.

    On LASBCA boss Gbolahan Oki, my investigation showed that he gave an interview to the News Agency of Nigeria, and was trying to deny when his bosses asked him why he misled the public. He denied he gave such an interview until NAN managing director said they had him on tape. He was suspended afterwards. Deputy Governor Femi Hamzat, not known for flimsy talk, clarified that 21 floors was approved. Many documents are flying around. The internet installs its own reality, conjuring voices, pictures and videos. A distorted universe of names suffuses the air. VP Osinbajo effused a spirited rebuttal. We cannot rely on unauthenticated material. Journalism beckons and thrives on rigour, not impulse. Not the rants of social media rats.

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    Governor Sanwo-Olu cut short his trip abroad and promptly set up a panel to investigate the matter. We ought to await the result, rather than burst into a claptrap of tattle tales based on ill-digested rumours, speculations and half-truths. Osibona had easy access to Lagos officials. It did not take much hassle to apply and secure 21 storeys.

    Yet a question remains: what were the materials used for the building, and did Osibona hire the right people? Did anyone cut corners? Did he and his officials  take some precautions for granted? Did the officials monitor?

    Nigeria abhors standards. A house of otherwise great architecture yields paint tone uneven, the eaves unaligned, the doors breathing out sawdust, the toilet emitting noisome odours, the wiring propagating sparks, etc. A marvel becomes a whited sepulchre.

    Little errors like that are ingredients of blood and tears.  We saw My Pikin and its death trails. Dora Akunyili was an avenging angel of standards mowing down corporations, gangsters of fakes and titans of cozenage. JAMB Registrar Professor Is-Haq Oloyede lamented in an interview with me on TVC that the worst culprits of exam fraud and certificates are the parents. We poohpooh integrity, even in pursuing the rule of law like the raid on the home of a Supreme Court justice, Mary Odili. The attorney-general’s tongue wobbles in self-defence.

    Lagos was a spectre of funereal ache as dead after dead, over 40, came out of a mighty ruin. What shall we say of the survivors, about nine, the one who just walked out, the lawyer who could not meet the duo of Osibona and Oseni and who must worship his flat tyre, or the fellow who escaped a swooping elevator by an inch? What of the assistant waiting to wed, or the family members wailing outside even as they heard anguished voices wailing inside the rubble?

    One can wonder about high-rises, especially in a place like Ikoyi where single houses yield for phallic structures as species of capitalism. It’s three Cs are cars, condos and credit cards. We are making condos without credit.  We sully its temple: we pay cash. But we cannot escape the high-rises. The fallen structure must rise again, or we surrender. Osibona might have erred but he left a legacy of towers. A structure must rise out of the ashes. Just as Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest: “Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea-change/ Into something rich and strange.” Shakespeare invented the phrase sea-change. Here we call a scene-change. Or else we will make Osibona’s legacy that of Ibsen’s play The Master Builder about a man so obsessed with building a tower that he crashed to his death after climbing it.

    We did not want November 1. But let not the tragedy be in vain. So, we must make sure it never reoccurs. Let’s move forward with great housing projects for rich and poor. The BOS of Lagos has the sane head to push us beyond this sad day.

     

    Somebody is lamenting

    A certain fellow bearing the name Simon Imobo-Tswan writing for PDP chairman Iyorchia Ayu responded to last week’s column, New Crown, New Clown, and made me giggle a little. I would not take issues with him over his rambles over PDP’s graces and my assertion that Ayu’s new ideas were to glamorise PDP’s disaster in power. And that Ayu, after his June 12 outing, went underground, an exhausted soul dredged up from the basement by Atiku and co.

    What concerns this essayist is not that the fellow applauded The Nation for a trophy haul of nominations and awards. But he said he did not see this essayist on the list. What a pity. He still wishes me well, it seems. He wishes me to return to competing after moving on. He has no pity on others who crave same honour. He wants me to outshine and suffocate them with more awards? I am not that selfish. In that sense, I am retiree like Ayu, except that I write not to compete as Ayu is doing, but to enlighten. The fellow speaks of my “great reputation.” Then he should remember, as a communications specialist, that Sam Omatseye has more than half a dozen NMMA awards and nominations. I would also not want him and Ayu to worry when DAME rolls its awards soon and I am absent. I have won about the same nominations and awards. I have the icing on the cake as Honorary fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters as well as National Productivity Order of Merit. This column enlightens many, and nettles many. Jesus came for the rising and falling of many.  You don’t need vain endorsements to be good. I don’t need awards for validation. After all, Conrad or Achebe never won the Nobel.

  • New crown, new clown?

    New crown, new clown?

    For most attendees, a party convention has the air of Christmas. It is the political equivalent of a cultural vanity. The cars come, the honks flare, the men and women arrive in flourish. The big men? They are a different breed. They are the peacocks of the ritual.

    They don’t come; they arrive. They don’t talk; they orate. They don’t walk; they stride. They would not laugh. Even though they smile, it is set apart from the common run. The followers grin from ear to ear. They are the lickspittle crowd. But their boss’ face shines with a supernova quality.

    Even the buses don’t glide onto the arena, they are heralded. Not the whir of the engine, although that carries its mythical halo. It is the name embossed on it, the picture of the big man, in agbada or babaringa, looking stately, imperious. For instance, when Saraki’s bus announced its presence, it told the world, it was not about the man. It was about his movement. And what is it? It is called Sarakiyya.

    Did we not hear of one an era ago, one from a now subdued peacock in Kano, called Kwankwansiyya? If he has been deflated, he has revolutionised a way of naming a movement. He deposited a precedent. Except that we do not know in concrete terms what Eleyinmi meant by Sarakiyya or his progenitor in nomenclature in naming. A legacy without a lore. But it is poetic, and what is politics if not the effect, the bravura feeling, the flair. Exit Kwankwanso. Enter Saraki. Sarakiyya northernises his image. Is that the idea?

    In the United States, or even in Britain or France, the party convention challenges the brain. In Nigeria, it challenges two things: vanity and pocket. Our parties do not gather to idealise the country, to nudge it from its torpor. The party convention is the open square for spoils.

    Who will be the chairman? Who will rally around that presidential candidate? Who will be the Judas with the cash, the exchequer of the vanity? Who will be also the Judas that will flee over filthy lucre and enact a political Golgotha?

    It is part of the menu. But we do not see things that will rejoice the intellect, make the event into a sort of church of reverie or reverence for the motherland. We don’t muse but are amused instead. Some dance, some fume, a few are just looking for a way to feed their families, and this breed fills the crowd. Stomach infrastructure.

    The PDP convention succeeded in that light. It had picked its chairman, and turned its former leader, Uche Secondus, in a rigmarole of court visits, hoping without hope to spoil the party. He floundered. The new man on the block is Iyorchia Ayu, a former senate president during the June 12 era who managed to succeed only in going underground. Atiku has now ripped him like a scab from a historical wound of June 12.

    Now, he was crowned after a palace intrigue in which the Adamawa chieftain, desperate like an Alsatian dog about to rip up a cage, looks forward to perhaps his last try at the big job. Ayu will have to prove that he is no Atiku stooge, unless the man is compelled to play high jump to another party. Atiku has been the fair-weather sailor of his generation. His emergence raised the question about zoning.

    Atiku and others want fairness because fairness works for them, and that is left with the people. But the choice of Ayu for party chairman challenges the other party, the APC. It seems the choice of the Northcentral for the party leader is justice to a region often regarded as the foot mat of ambition, especially by the north.

    It is the navel of the country. While the PDP chose the Northcentral  as a cynical move to actuate individual ambition, the APC also has an opportunity to push the region for its party leader and chair. The choice of Northcentral , not necessarily Ayu, makes sense for the PDP. Some regions must enjoy being part of the polity.

    If the APC looks elsewhere it will be a cynical venture. For instance, all the state governors, except for Benue State, are in the APC bag. Whether Plateau or Adamawa or Nasarawa, they are in the hands of the ruling party. Even Benue State Governor was elected on the APC ticket until the blend of a herder’s crisis and personal ambition, especially because Ortom was already failing as governor, moved him away. He exploited the centre’s bungling of the herder’s nightmare to orchestrate his heroism. Buhari gifted him with a platform to reboot his profile. APC has stalwarts , including former Nasarawa State Governor, Tanko Al Makura, who carry the charisma and experience for that stance.

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    The PDP therefore has shown the way for the party chairman, and if the APC fails, it will give the region a reason to look elsewhere in 2023.

    The PDP has therefore challenged the geo-political conscience of its foes. This is how cynical politics confers justice. None of the parties may be looking to feather the region with a crown. But the Northcentral, for the first time, is going to enjoy that brand because of what others see as the need to foster their presidential ambitions.

    The PDP convention did not end without some battles, though. The former governor of Osun State, Olagunsoye Oyinlola duelled in vain for the Southwest party leader as national deputy chairman.  He lost to Taofeek Arapaja. It is an irony of a former deputy beating a former governor. The woman fighter for the same position in the north fell to a man, a reminder that Nigeria, nay the PDP, is still as patriarchal as they come. Beijing conference of yore still stalks the land. But the most fascinating statement of all was Ayu assertion: “We will move ahead to develop this country. We did it before. We are doing it again.”

    That statement has no rigour, no learning, and no promise. A party chairman cannot glamorise a historical disaster, a failed past. PDP was swept out because it failed. He should have spoken of a rejigged PDP, a new craft of ideas. Sorry, Ayu. Are you for real? Or his will be a new crown on a geriatric head, or on a clown.

     

    Diezani’s Bra

     

    Diezani-Alison-Madueke
    Diezani-Alison-Madueke

    Few think it. No, many imagine it. Her bra, on or off. For a woman whose brand keeps shifting bragging rights, her bra will be hard to change.

    Former oil minister Diezani Alison-Madueke will not leave us alone. We pitied a photo of her pruned-down cancer image. We heard of her job in the Caribbean. And, who can forget her visage giving a virtual airhead talk to young people as a model. Since leaving office, she has gone full circle in the public eye. Pain. Gain. Vain.

    We first wept with her, or pretended to weep with her on Ore highway as works minister. She was the pretty, naïve lady of performance.

    When she left office, former Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole said John Kerry told him and others on Buhari’s visit to Obama that the woman had about six billion dollars stashed away in the U.S. banks.

    Now some say part of it was to decorate her globular torso. A bosom that conquered boys when she was young and played cow, entrapping and suckling babies. Her boudoir is now bouquet for every eye.

    With her bra up for auction, it reads like a surreal work of fiction, like something out of Genet, or Beckett or Ionesco. Imagine the day the bras go on the block, and we see men and women line up to name their bids and nip their libidos. It will make a complete picture to frame in the background. A big photo of the woman or the video of her striding about in her glorious gusto as a minister.

    She failed her fellow women and society. Feminists like Betty Friedan, Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Caddy Stanton wanted men to view them outside their physical charms. Decades ago, in New York, some women created what was called “Freedom Trash Can.” They tossed away emblems of femininity like makeup, girdles, corsets, false eyelashes, hairsprays, and yes, especially bras. Some designated them “the bra-burning feminists.” They were protesting a Miss America pageant for making women just about looks. Such a phenom inspired Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Edible Woman.

    When the US nationalists were duelling Britain and asked fellow citizens to shun their imports, Benjamin Franklin arrived home to see his wife with trinkets, necklaces and other jewels from England, and he exclaimed, “Alas it is by the luxury and vanity of women that empires decay.” He might have exaggerated but not with Diezani’s bra. It has tossed the internet into a storm of permutations as to their cost. She has company – Imedla Marcos, Maria Antionette,travelling Fergie, Princess Anne, Herod’s wife, et al.

    She was not covering her breasts. Her chest was a tenant to an ornament that can tar roads, build schools and buy millions in baby formula for starving families.

    It has been a bad few weeks for women. While one does not know how to bare it all in a cruise, another does not know what to wear or how. What a country.