During the feisty days of the Yoruba Wars, the tribe had its first main refugee problem. Many kingdoms were forming and unforming, and uniformity was beckoning and fleeing the race. It was chaos as rhythm. A quicksand moment gave birth at once to tyrants and heroes. Aole. Kurunmi. Sodeke. Latoosa. Fabunmi. Ogedengbe.  Men as myths and myths as men. Those who spat fire and those who ate.

But the landmark heritage of the time was the birth of Ibadan, then known as eba odan, and how the phlegm and fiery of the race climbed there as the tower of refuge. It resembles what Jesus said in his prophesy, “let those who live in Judea, flee into the mountains.” If the race brandished the Bible and not Ifa, they might have read and appropriated those lines and dedicated the new town to the Lord on high, like the births of Jerusalem, Samaria, et al.

Ibadan was the Yoruba mountain in that febrile age. They had their abomination of desolation. Gods fell. Shrines caught fire. Kings were toppled. The ancient city of Ife defiled. Oyo found a new home and a new royalty. Ibadan was the city on the hill, embracing kings and republicans in one soul. That was the 19th century.

Today, we have another city, by the sea in fact but on the hill in metaphor: Lagos, without the martial past of Ibadan but a modern warhorse where Awo patented his genius. But the Lagos of today is the city, not just of Yorubaland but of Nigeria. It is Nigeria’s mountain, where all flee. The 19th century was the city of men on horseback, and swords and the short-range guns. This is a century of computers and software, where muscles swap places with another set of sinews: the brain.

Never before has the city sat centre stage in our history. It is here that the best and brightest come, and the worst find treasure for their souls and talent. It is the big elephant that carries on its back a mammoth country and strides without a groan. It holds our history by the strand, and probes the jugular of our future. Here the military rose and fell. Here power has changed hands as money does. We had the revolutionary, the turncoat and the upstart.

In this republic, however, we have had moments when the nation knew it had a brother in Lagos, and hence the present governor recently spoke again about its status.

“I should say that it will actually be unfair to expect the state to bear this heavy burden on its own. It is therefore necessary to give due consideration to all the variables that support our advocacy for a special status.

“The call for a special status for Lagos is not a selfish proposition; it is in the best interest of the country and all Nigerians, for Lagos which accounts for about 20 per cent of the national Gross Domestic Product and about 10 per cent of the nation’s population to continue to prosper.”

He was right. This should be a demand, as the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu has done.  He was not asking for a big portion of the communal feast. He was asking only for a piece of a piece of the pie. He demands Lagos to eat the humble pie. He also calls for tweaking of that Nigerian pie. The federal government should have 34 percent, FCT one percent, states 42 percent, local governments 23 percent, and Lagos one percent.

The reasons are clear. Lagos is the Nigerian lab and lab rat and slab and barn and back and bank and pot and pottery and melting pot and a mosaic and the theatre and stage and the excuse and tower of refuge and destiny and destination.  It is the part that is also the whole, and it may not be the centre but it is the head of the corner.

It is a lab because it is here that all experiments take place. Whether it is starting a business or tweaking our federal system. As Barrister Femi Falana, SAN, has noted Lagos is the beachhead to a federalist duel, using the courts as the touchstone of the constitution. It is therefore the lab rat. Many a rat has died to start an idea. In spite Nyesom Wike’s bluster, he knows his VAT battle is without the needed momentum without the backing of Lagos. Hence Lagos has always been a back and backing. If an idea is good, everyone wants either the Lagos institutional support or its big market. Many states have learned about internally generated revenue from Lagos. They even send their staff members for a private tutor’s class on how to govern fruitfully. It is here that the idea will get its money, to pursue an infrastructure project as well as to start the new business.

That is why Lagos is the pot, where all come to cook and sup. The new graduate, the village recruit, the new entrepreneur, the new artisan, the new artistic genius. He comes here where we had the Ikorodu Boys and the Yaba techie who hosted the Facebook guy.

Before the pot is the pottery, where all bring their ideas together and also have a place for it to seed and bloom. The mechanic has enough cars to fix, as the software engineer as the electrician and the fertiliser plant.

As an excuse, Lagos is a target. When many states fail, they find a place here in Lagos for their many citizens who cannot live and thrive there. They ran to the big city, whose bosom is big.

It is a melting pot like New York or a mosaic like Toronto. Whether an Ijebu or an Itsekiri or a Fulani or an Igbo, everyone has a welcome berth. They make the place in their own image. It is here they intermarry, and intermingle, where the son of an Adebayo can say Ko yo in Edo, and the son of an Okeke can sing Ebenezar Obey with the impunity of a native. I recall my Ife schoolmate Uche Ntinu, who spoke Yoruba so well, it never occurred to me he bore an Igbo name. Just as Ojukwu or Zik. When Ojukwu died, I titled my essay Omo Eko, because the Ikemba was more Lagosian than anyone. Hence, he abandoned a purist Biafra to gamble on taking Lagos. It was the fetal doom of a fatal project.

Those who come to this commercial node also have their own parts of town, where they can be themselves apart from the whole, and become a part of the whole.

It is the theatre and the stage. It is here that Achebe flowered, and Ogunde and it was here that Peter Igho’s talent came to blossom, or P-Square. Or Dora Akunyili. Here Onyeka Onwenu did a duet of voice, if not romance, with the great Sunny Ade. Sam Amuka gave us a journalism as well as Nduka Obaigbena, though both schooled faraway in Government College Ughelli. It was here that Sweet Mother became a national anthem. It was here that both Yoruba and Igbo and Niger Delta fans anointed French soccer star Igwe, without regard to what accent it was. Phyno flourishes here just as our own Ali Baba and Gordons. It is here that James Omokwe has reinvented the Itsekiri history with his Riona drama series.

It is the tower, from where we study the country. It provides the platform. Hence Lagos is the tower of refuge. It is a strong tower where the fearful run into and are safe. With the scourge of bandits and separatists and Boko Haram, Lagos has absorbed many who have nowhere else to go. It’s the firewall of resistance. More people entre Lagos  than almost anywhere else in the world and never return. They come to live and dream, and not to leave. It has more roads to hold and ferry goods to Kanfanchan as to Sokoto. When they bring millet and yam, the city is a barn on the go.

It is because they feel their destiny is in their destination. Once they are here, they feel at home. Those not born in Lagos come here. But once here, they are never more at home than when out of home – in Lagos.

What Lagos needs is encouragement. Let it not work alone. It is time for a cooperative warmth between Lagos and the centre. Not distrust. Oprah Winfrey may have exaggerated it but she was on to something when she said, “One percent doubt is zero percent faith.” Lagos is doing the work as the BOS of Lagos has noted. But it needs faith. One percent more faith is all Lagos needs.

By Sam Omatseye

He is a pot belly as vision, a slob at dinner, a bedwetter at night, a sluggard in sunshine. In spite of his unwieldy gait, he mistakes his shuffle for a flight. He frightens the young, despairs the middle-aged and is a ghastly comic to the old. Snores while lying down, burps on his couch, farts on his feet.

The young see him as geriatric, the worker bestows on him the status of a premature retiree, the retired shut their door when they sniff his scent.

The irony is that the 61-year-old is not a lost cause to the doctor. He puffs to defy his age. He packs a punch between his wrist and shoulder. He is virile enough to contend with a nubile. He does not eat but wolfs and belches afterward with a noise loud enough to startle a poultry. Whether you like it or not, he has a winsome face, dresses as superior to a fop, is proud in a soundless limousine and clucks over his mansion’s window to an ornate neighbourhood.

That cannot be Nigeria? You bet it is. It is a nation that cannot reconcile itself, a nation with a gift and curse simultaneously, where limousines ride over potholes, the cleric’s wit upends the holy writ. Its doctors are some of the best in the world, but they don’t treat Nigerians except the wealthy ones and outside its shores. It has great students who win laurels in big western universities in Canada, United States and Britain. Its best professors pour out local wisdoms to foreign audiences while locals grope for droplets.

They have great athletes that its citizens applaud only on television when they score on turfs they don’t have here at home.

They have great store of crude oil but they are too crude to refine.

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So, as Nigeria marks its birthday, this essayist can only muse on this absurd profile. If you take any topic of our national life, you will behold how a nation is blessed because it is cursed.

As the nation verged on its anniversary, the issue on the top burner was whether the president should come from the north or south. We have never pondered as a nation whether the locale of the president has corralled favour for the regions they come from except their skewed and peculiar appointees and their skewed and peculiar contractors. It never favoured the Yoruba people when the Owu chief was president, neither was Nigeria generally better off for it. When Yar’Adua was president, his tenure was too short for the north to preen. But Jonathan became president, and the beneficiaries were the political and economic royalties from the south-south and southeast. Few major landmarks will celebrate that tenure. Now that Buhari is there, the tribe of talakawa who still swear and drown in his name are just happy he is there. The al-majiri problem still wallows in beggarly bowls and temptations to violence, while the education standard has gone down a few more rungs. But we talk of a fierce and shadowy cabal building a monster sanctuary around their queen bee. So, the battle for zoning has been hijacked by democratic imbeciles.

It is a noble idea corrupted by idols of tribe and belief. Zoning has been for the elite, by the elites in the name of the people. It ought to be for a sense of cooperative peace and trust, until we are able to knit out tents together under a common sky.

When the southern governors came up with the idea that the next president should be a southerner, it was as a matter of course. A routine endorsement. Uncontroversial. Prudent.

But true to the Nigerian spirit, the Northern counterpart fouled it with a no, or what the Soviets called nyet. The ostensible explanation was that it ran counter to the constitution. But let us go down memory lane.

The idea that the presidency should go to the south, especially the southwest, was viewed in 1999 as a sop, or as penance, an atonement for the wrongs of June 12. The democratic moment did not want to stir the indignant pot of soldiers. Even the north bore the torch as messengers of a moral might in their land.

Later, it naturally went north, and Obj became an anointing priest of transition. Tragically, Yar’adua could not conquer his body, so the body politic ticked Jonathan as a doctrine of necessity. It was after Jonathan wanted to run for another term that many said trouble had brewed in the house of consensus. They said, let Yar’adua’s cousins complete what he started. This essayist on this page urged Jonathan to play gentleman and not run, so the north would complete it. But the people voted him, and this column congratulated him in the democratic spirit while expressing my reservation about his competence.

After his first term, he fell to Buhari, and Jonathan played the statesman and left without a whiff of protest. Many hailed him as a statesman. Now that Buhari has done his first term and is wheeling to the lame duck’s hour, why is it a debate as to whether it should go north or south. Those who allowed Buhari to win in the south did not invoke the constitution. They knew the constitution called for anyone to run. It is a paean to equality. That is the main issue with the northern governors’ pharisaic cry. The mouthpiece of the Northern Elders Forum, the leaky and bigoted Hakeem Baba-Ahmed warned the south that if the north gave us a president, then those who didn’t want it should go elsewhere. It means we have irresponsible people speaking for a region. A few other voices, including the upstart El-Rufai, had said it was the south’s turn.

But he raised the decibel of division when he said the north executives gave that warning against southern president because of the offending word “MUST.” The wanted MUST to go. Did they want them to beg for their rights?

I thought it was infantile for a governor or even a group to say they could risk a lofty idea because the other group hurt them with an anaemic word like Must. It is like a little boy saying to his father that he slapped his classmate because he touched him on the shoulder without a permission. Some say it is a warfare against VAT by other means.

The southern governors should go and negotiate over it? Did they have to make a statement in order to ask the southern governors to commune at a table? They have the Governors Forum. Many of them have joined hands, glad-handed, are a phone call apart, party and laugh at and with each other in Abuja. Did they have to make a brinkman’s pettifogging over a matter they could have resolved in an informal manner? Was it not in this country that a northern governor – Ganduje of Kano- married off his daughter to the son of a southwest governor – the late Ajimobi of blessed memory?

What they did by that statement was to ratchet up the tension between the regions. It was puerile and uncalled for, especially when some elements of the NGF had said they wanted a northern party chairman in APC after Adams’ exit.

Now, a new matter has erupted in the PDP. The Ngwuanyi-led zoning committee has assigned party chair up north. Some have said it means the presidential ticket will go down south.  But there are hints that some persons like Atiku want it so bad in the north that they want to capsize convention for private ambition. We face the prospect of chair and president candidate coming from up north.

This is not even the time for such misadventures. In an age when IPOB has paralysed the east and Yoruba Nation is rising in profile, such a move by either party will reinforce suspicions of a master-servant dynamic. Nigeria is too fragile for such hubris and hegemonic fantasies.

Constitutions thrive at the mercies of conventions. They are the invisible hands that hold the law together. It is like gravity keeping the planets in place. We are at a time that we need a cooperative nation, not the notion the lord of lords. Laws cannot even hold America together if its values fail. Laws almost undid it and it hung on one man and one moment when Vice President Mike Pence rose in Congress to endorse Joe Biden as president. If he did otherwise, maybe the greatest country in the world would be in ruins today. And John Adams would have squirmed in his grave over his assertion that “this is a nation of laws and not of men.” It was the tiumph of Edmund Burke’s good men over evil. He ought to read Jesus who noted that the sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath.

That is how fragile laws are.

The French revolutionaries spoke of equalite and liberte. But none of these would make sense without fraternite. If we don’t see ourselves as siblings, the law alone cannot do it for us. Laws enforce, conventions embrace. Laws kill, conventions heal. The letters of the law cannot give life. Conventions are unwritten rules that undergird the law. You cannot get such justice in the court of law, but in the hearts of the people. That was what Apostle Paul meant when he said, Love works no ill against his neighbour, therefore love is the fulfilling of the law. Not judges, not lawyers. Charity is not in documents. It is in circumcising the foreskins of the people’s hearts. That’s fraternite. That’s brotherhood. “Charity never fails.” We should not, in the words of the Psalmist in the Bible, slander our own mother’s sons.

When the U.S. founding fathers finished their convention, reporters asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government they agreed on. “A republic,” he bellowed, “if you can keep it.” But let it be that after the hullaballoo over zoning, we can echo Benjamin Rush after the American convention. He belched out, “It’s done. We have become a nation.” Have we? Or can’t we?

Her name is Adunni, a feisty teen with an upstart tongue and ambition, and all she ever wanted was a way up the rungs of society. Born in a fictional village in the southwest, her dreams choked on the greed of a father who wanted her to marry rather than be happy.

His patriarchal failures and Adunni’s unlikely triumph in escaping to Lagos and turning a life of a modern fief to freedom through education is the breath-taking tale of Abi Dare’s best-selling novel, A girl with a Louding voice. It is the futility of a paternal bargain and the collapse of the hubris of a male-dominated clan.

We cannot but draw parallels between Adunni’s quest and biography with the effort of Lagos State government to target the low-born of public schools with a new educational initiative known as Lagosdigitals.com.

And it does not draw attention only to the poor in Nigeria’s big city. It is a parable of the journey to arrest youth adrift, to give the political elite an opportunity for redemption, and to give the young and restless a platform for personal fulfilment.

It is a news story that has not garnered much play or buzz as yet in the society. It does not hoist a piece of cake or bottle of coke, or throw an owambe party. Such stories are boring because they do not spill blood in an era of bandits in Nigeria. They do not spray money, a la Obi Cubana, Buhari’s son’s wedding or the latest being Tiwa Savage’s farewell gig to her father. The news does not eavesdrop on a celebrity’s bedroom or a salacious night in Big Brother Naija.

It is what news directors describe as development news, but the sort that will make a poor rise, a sick into a full and ruddy being, a city part with its rubbles and peer into a rosy light, its reborn self in the horizon.

The programme will enable teachers to fight distance and distractions, to maul illiteracy through the world wide web. They can plan classes with content and context, set exams, examine the students, interact, rebuke or praise, pay special attention to the needy, mentor the promising, encourage the laggard, monitor the classes.

It is a blessing that the pandemic has gifted us. Covid came to us with death in its wings, and it has won with its many sick and many dead, and its long list of graveyards that best the world wars and even some of the brutal pains of natural disasters. But it has woken in many the desire to redefine space and time, to conquer ignorance without human touch. No tactile doom beset a student and their device. We have seen initiatives to help students learn without tears.

But what the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu is starting is to reach the conventional schools, the ones the rich have abandoned, the ones their house helps and gardeners and drivers send their kids and wards. These are the schools the elite wink at, and send their children to the high and lofty ones, like one in Ikoyi where the cars that pick up their kids after school sessions stop traffic with their Benz, SUVs like Toyota Land cruisers, Lexus. It is decibel honks and line of shiny automobile vanity. They cut off the world of traffic and appropriate the street. If you did not know, you would think the vehicles were there to pick a governor or a high-flying celebrity. This happens every day, Monday to Friday. But they are already celebrities, being children. Celebrities by birth. Anonymity of birth. They have seen salvation before they were baptised into the life. It is obvious the parents compete against each other on whose vehicle is newest and poshest. You just have to pass through Bourdillon in Ikoyi on schooldays at lunch hour.

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The BOS initiative is a programme still in its infancy and it is working with a few corporate partners like Chronicles Software Development Company. Already MTN is powering a pilot wireless scheme with 100 schools.  But its forays into rural Lagos is a capital part.

Education often is seen as an expensive project, and it has been so because the elite want to manipulate knowledge and pass wealth from child to grandchild. But the internet will turn those granddads to ‘grandduds’ as programmes such as Lagosdigitals,com are meant to equalise the rich and poor and cancel the digital divide. They bring girls like the fictional Adunni’s into the limelight. Recently we all looked helpless as a young man who did not attend any highflying school developed a drone. Ignatius Asabor was a lonely genius online, marketing himself, displaying his prowess and waiting in vain for his country to help.

Help came from an unlikely quarter, in northern Europe. A company CEO spotted him, and decided to train him, not physically but online. The same sort of idea that Lagosdigitals.com propagates. But power failure and wimpy internet connection trammelled the sessions yet the Fin and the Nigerian kept faith with each other until they clutched him from here and now he announced his berth in his land of dreams. What a pity for a nation spending billions of niara to import drones to fight terror.

That explains why the programme must be encourage to succeed. We saw that similar programmes with Opon Imon began in Osun State under former governor Rauf Aregbesola. But it ran into a storm. It is the peril of pioneers. The Lagos initative builds on the ardour of nonprifts like Otto Orandoom with his Slum to School zest and CNN hero’s winner Abisoye Ajayi-Akinfolarin incandescence on stilts in Makoko.

But the Lagos one does not seem to take any assumptions, but is devoting resources and care to ensure that Lagos students benefit from it. This is the sort of plan that snags the youth from forest into classroom, and downs guns by empowering their fingers for clicks. Rather than flick their fingers for triggers, they can click their way to respect just on a button on a cell phone.

They will not have to be so idle that they think about whether Fulani needs to graze or a tribe on the plateau whirs with a strange accent. Governor Masari of Katsina State will not have to shut markets and paralyse highways and stop money from changing hands into the wealth of the people.

In the Bible, Daniel prophesied that he read about what was happening in the future, but he did not understand. God told him knowledge shall improve and people shall move to and fro. Overtime, it has been interpreted to mean improvement in horse-drawn carriages, trains, cars, aircraft. Now, it is what Al Gore called the superhighway. That is what will cancel Masari’s highway.

It is what the BOS of Lagos in setting in motion. Technology has given us violence. Its best counterforce, as philosopher Karl Popper propounds, is technology.

This is the way for the youth. They have to read, and learn but it has to be made ready and affordable. “Whoso neglects learning in his youth,” wrote Greek playwright Euripides, “loses the past and is dead forever.”

Malami and NDDC math

Something strange happened last week when I read the headlines that quoted the minister of justice Abubakar Malami as saying that the NDDC received 6 trillion Naira between 2001 and 2019. This was when the audit report was submitted to the federal government. But looking into the figures, the actual fact was more than a little different. In the period under review, the agency received N2.4 trillion while its budgetary estimates amounted 3.3 trillion.

How did our beloved attorney general arrive at N6 trillion? Was he adding 2.4 and 3.3? Even at that, they amounted to N5.7 trillion. But we know that an amount spent and an amount estimated cannot be added together. Rather you would have to subtract.

I don’t believe that the AG had mischief of figures in his brain. He must have fallen into quicksand of numbers. After all, law does not always work with math.

Maybe because he was so angry at the splurge of resources in that agency, he decided to exaggerate. But we are in the business of facts, not permutations.

If we want to discuss wastage in the agency, that is another matter entirely.

The first time I saw Victor Uwaifo perform in the flesh was at the State House in Lagos a few years ago. He did not have the vim and zest of youth. But the talent remained like palm wine in ferment or like slow-burning flame. His tongue unrolled some of his vintage familiars like Joromi and Guitar Boy. And the crowd, ever highbrow and starchy, abandoned its patrician airs and ploughed back to the old days of their youth and loosed themselves like boys and girls in ecstasy. They belted out soulful choruses with the master. But gloom fell as the man departed the microphone.

I was to meet him in person not long after when I addressed the convocation of the Igbinedion University in Okada, and was a guest of former governor Lucky Igbinedion for lunch. Uwaifo had his meal not far from me, and we spoke about his songs, and I contrived the melody of his songs the same way a mechanic worked the threads of a suit. His face always had the light of a boy, the entertainer’s eternal playfulness. He was about 78, and he did not bear any of the crimps of age, not in his steps or voice or even mind. He enjoyed the brio of a 70-year-old, and he seemed in all-round fine fettle.

I told him I wanted to come over to Benin before long to interview him, and he said I should call him, and he would give me a tour of his museum. The project was one of those you cherish and postpone, and you keep postponing because you cherish, and the hope of its spectacle of fulfilment is like a treasure you preserve in a special case in the recesses of your room. The expectation of use never happens but never wanes. But you rejoice in the hope. One day you find out it is no longer there, and it has been purloined by some itchy finger, and you regret that you should have enjoyed your boon while it was around. What seemed solid was, after all, like a soap bubble. When he entered his car and was driven away, I waved. But unbeknownst to me, it was a goodbye more permanent than a wave of the hand.

So death snatched away the icon, death always the sneaky conman.  His death reminds me of the last words of Philosopher Socrates. “I owe a cock to asclepius. Do not forget to pay it.” In my case, it is in reverse. I owed Uwaifo. But I shall never be able to pay him.

Victor Uwaifo was a constant fixture of my boyhood, on television. I looked forward to his show on television because of his guitar. I marvelled at the double-neck instrument, and the way he wielded it on stage. When he performed at the Lagos State House, he did not hold a guitar and he was over 70. But when I first knew the man, he was a boy in his twenties. He held the guitar like a toy, flipped it, tossed it, placed it under his knee, under his shoulders, at the back of his head, he leapt, he sat, he stooped, he bowed. He did all forms of acrobatics while he strummed. I knew that as the melody before I enjoyed the melody. Up till today, I don’t know of any musician, living or dead, who did what he did on stage other than Michael Jackson’s human pyrotechnics.

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I recall the interview he had after his 80th birthday with Channels TV’s Manu Onumonu, and how he related the story of mammy water, the mermaid. His song Guitar Boy derived from an encounter with a mermaid at the Lagos Bar Beach. Among other things, he described the vision of the water spirit as “blinding.” That adjective may allow some to interpret it as a moment of creative illusion, what some pyschologists or literary critics would define as phantasmagoria. But to the artist, it was a rich and unassailable experience. He described the waves in their obstinate surges and his retreat, and before he knew it, the vision was before him.

The music piece, Guitar Boy, was a testimony of his survival of the woman of the sea. “If you see mammy water O/ never, never you run away…” Rather he sang melodies because he snagged the mystic maid.

He was immersed in culture, especially Bini culture, and he was probably the first modern ambassador of the genius of the Edo culture. His song Joromi, which earned him accolades all over the world and gave him his first of many gold disc awards, was rooted in the narrative of a wrestler in this world and in the spirit realm, a sort of Edo rendition of a Jacob trading biceps with his God. The song, full of syncopating rhythms and onomatopoeia, will tell us that before rap, there was Uwaifo.

But what is not told enough is that Uwaifo was a renaissance man. My history teacher at Ife, Professor Femi Omosini, described Leonardo Dan Vinci, as “a veritable jack of all trade and master of many.” So it was with Uwaifo. We forget that he made his car from fibre glass and even drove it to Abuja. His recollection of how he made his first guitar has some of the trappings of the beginning of broadcasting with ropes transformed into instruments of communication. He was a sculptor, or professor of art. He was gloriously welcomed into the Nigerian Academy of Letters

He spoke to those who didn’t understand his language. He introduced the Akwete among others into genres of high life music.

We have great musicians in the country who have left us. We have had the inimitable Rex Lawson, the Abami eda Fela Anikulapo Kuti. We have had I.K Dairo with his paternal shadow over highlife. We had the soothing voice of Comfort Omoge, and the choruses of Christy Essien Igbokwe.  We had the unique charisma of Oliver de Coque. We have had the feisty Bobby Benson. The ringing presences of the griot Dan Maraya Jos. And few more. We have a few elders of throaty grandeur still around. Let us cherish them and clasp them to our bosom and give them all the encomiums they deserve while they are still here to hear. Uwaifo’s life was a melody, but we cannot but feel threnody as he departs us.

Uwaifo has a special place in the pantheon and in our hearts. He now, as a poet once wrote, belongs to the ages.

Making bloodshed a prize

Today’s Jos is not a time for politics but for peace. The recent stories of killings and reprisal do not resolve into harmony with accusations and recriminations. First, we had the story of the deaths of many by slaughter of the Irigwe people. Then they were going to bury their dead. Tension ricocheted into tension when some Fulani were travelling through Jos and met the bloody ire of the mourners. Rather than make peace, some clerics called for reprisals from the Fulani. When the revenge attack happened, the victims were a tribe known as the Anaguta in Jos North. The Anaguta are known to be a hospitable people who have accommodated all, including the Fulani and migrant settlers from the Niger Delta, Southwest and Southeast for decades.  The choice of the bandits to strike that region informs us of the poison that is banditry and the wicked zealots using tribe and religion to shred this nation and the Plateau. There was dispute of a burial ground in the Anaguta area and it was not a Fulani-Anaguta spite but Hausa and Anaguta. The Anaguta said the Hausa had to pay if they extended their apportioned burial site. It led to dispute and clash, and the land was around the University of Jos. The state government helped resolve the disputes and they signed agreement to that effect. The Fulani now attacked as reprisal for the travelling Fulani killed on their way to Ondo State. They wanted to dig a wedge between the Hausa and the Anaguta living in harmony. They saw it as a place to launch reprisal attacks. Thirty-three people have so been confirmed dead. Some believe the killers came from outside the state, possibly from the Bauchi forest. Over to you, DSS.

Some politicians are now pushing bad narrative by linking the violence to the elevation of the Ujah of Anaguta to a first-class chief. That decision was in compliance with a Supreme Court judgment. The verdict came in the years of Jonah Jang as governor but he refused to implement it because he considered it as chipping away at the power and glory of Gbong Gwom Jos. Jang shied away into impunity because Gwom is a fellow Berom tribesman. What Governor Simon Lalong has done is to implement the court order. If the Berom resented it, the law affirmed it, and the Hausa and the Anaguta who live there welcomed it.

Rather than focus on who the killers are, we should not allow ego and tribal entitlement to dwarf common sense and a pursuit of justice.

The governor had set a template for peace that worked for a long time. Now it is believed that the problem between the Fulani and others is being fuelled partly by politicians who would rather play spoiler than push the spoils of peace.

There are too many people taking advantage of the law to stall peace. For instance, as Governor Lalong once said, some arrested suspects are bailed who later maim and murder. The people should work with the governor and not make bloodshed a price.

An Abiola aide and then political editor of Concord Press Tunji Bello, who was beside him in Jos when he won the nomination to run for president on the ticket of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), told me this story, and I concluded that IBB was not going to hand over power to his long-time friend. The betrayal of the heart had occurred. The world awaited the epic episode to expose it.

MKO Abiola wanted to share his victory news with his friend. But the call did not go through. The man knew it was unusual, and he stayed all night trying to reach him. It was not the line of communication that broke down, I remarked to Bello. They had lost a friendship. IBB knew it. Abiola didn’t. His heartbreak was in the offing. MKO, the billionaire publisher, raconteur, philanthropist whose motto was “make a friend a day,” had a nomination and a promise but he had lost an ambition.

I was going to work for him, write for him, and hope against hope for him as a journalist in Concord. But like the protagonist in Samuel Beckett’s play of the absurd, we knew we were Waiting for Godot.

From what he witnessed that night, Bello, who now heads the environment ministry in Lagos State, told me he suspected IBB was not sincere about the transition. And events have now borne us out.

I had written many articles in the newspaper during his transition programmes, and had seen it as what Awolowo described very early as a “fruitless search.”

I was a sort of pariah among the editors in the newspaper before MKO stepped in the ring while I kept railing at the hypocrisy of IBB’s rigmarole. I was writing apostacy. Bello was one person who shared my suspicion. At the end, when it became clear, editor-in-chief Dr. Doyin Abiola said at one editors’ meeting that I was right after all for my consistency.

When the annulment was announced, I had been posted to Abuja to beef up the bureau as managing editor, and Olu Akerele, MKO’s confidante and my predecessor, was working full time with the chief. That morning, Concord State House correspondent, Mohammed Adamu reported to the office early with a sheet of paper. “It is a press release from the Villa,” he announced. I read it. I was shocked, even if I was not surprised. As Samuel Coleridge wrote, “Anticipation is more potent than surprise.” It bore no letterhead and was unsigned. But no press release bore so potent a message in our history as that anonymous poison. My first instinct was to call the editor, the ebullient Nsikak Essien. He knew its import and asked me to call the editor-in-chief. I read the full text to her. Her fury struggled with her calm. She almost blamed the messenger. I understood. She had worked day and night, mind and body for a goal that did not have a soul.

My first impulse was to tell myself even as protests erupted in cities in the south, especially in Lagos, that I saw this coming. IBB was taking advantage of a man he thought he could wrap around his fingers.

IBB had earlier asked Abiola to head a transition committee to oversee the political process. To facilitate its coverage, MKO had asked Dr. Abiola to relocate a special team to Abuja, led by Bello and I was to be his deputy. Suddenly, IBB snapped the idea. Not long after that he collapsed the transition as he had done a few times earlier.

Not long after, a new transition programme flagged off. Abiola secured assurances from IBB of his sincerity, before he threw himself in the ring.

What he did to MKO must quietly gnaw at IBB’s soul. He does not have to admit it. MKO had a hand in the coup that gave him power as military president. So invested was he in the IBB project that in the febrile dawn of the Orkar coup that MKO was monitoring the proceedings on Concord premises and getting ready to flee the country. Once the coup failed, he gathered his family and the nation saw them on NTA as they expressed solidarity with him. But IBB was, in the words of Lord Beaverbrook, another publisher and bosom friend of Winston Churchill, not sentimental about friendship when power was involved. “A man with a will to power,” noted Beaverbrook, “can’t make friends.” Former U.S President Harry Truman said if you want to make a friend in Washington, “buy a dog.”

One time I was in Dr. Abiola’s apartment in the sprawling MKO abode and MKO materialised. We were engaged in political conversation. I was struck with two things. He had a mysterious self-assurance that he would triumph. From what he said about IBB, I recalled the famous Shakespeare quote in Macbeth: “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face. He was a man on whom I built an absolute trust.”

In the Arise interview, he said he never said he was “the evil genius.” It was the cover of Tell magazine, and as Onome Osifo-Whiskey, one of the editors, told me, he was pointing his two hands at his chest when he uttered that quote. That picture was on the cover. He is 80. Maybe he forgot.

But it is no contradiction. Genius is a neutral quality. The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines it as “A person who influences another for good or bad.” Pol pot, Franco, Churchill, Lincoln, Pericles, Caligula were geniuses. And it was Chief Bisi Onabanjo, alias Aiyekoto and former Ogun State governor, who named him Maradona, not the media.

IBB thought he could ride over MKO. He thought the man would just play dead. Some of the easy preys turn out the hunter’s undoing. Before June 12, MKO was a philanthropist, but many saw him as a cynical giver. He spoke about justice, but few believed a contractor who fattened on government contracts. He called himself a democrat, but he dined with military autocrats. Many invested him with an air of a peacock even when he told the story of how he danced for balls of eba to feed his family. Students booed him at Ife. Fela mocked him over ITT. Civil rights activists recoiled from his company. Yet, when it was time to fight the class, he stood as the avenging angel, a traitor to his class. IBB became the bad traitor to the good traitor. That is one irony of June 12.

He said there might be a coup, and an abattoir of bloodshed might have resulted from handing over to MKO.  Some soldiers, like David Mark, who would later head a law chamber, might truncate the process. There were two types of loyal soldiers. We had Colonel Umar, who had said he would die for IBB but on principle. And David Mark, who would do same but in spite of principle. It is the duty of a leader to take decisions, not excuses. History does not glorify excuses. It was his duty to decide whether it was the right thing to do. Nixon wrote in his memoirs that the mark of a leader is to “take tough decisions and carry his associates with him along those decisions”.

Their friendship turned out not the one between Jonathan and David; one sacrificed his life for the other. But more like Campaore on whom Thomas Sankara built his absolute trust. He even confessed that if Campaore plotted against him, he would have no defence. Was it a prophesy or an encouragement? But like MKO, he must have invoked, in his dying moments, Shakespeare’s most popular Latin quote, Et tu Brute.

All hail the Ogiame!

I am no royalist. By upbringing and impulse, I am a republican. But watching the majesty of the Itsekiri tradition as the new Olu of Warri mounted the throne, I could not overstate the magnificence of heritage. Tsola Emiko, son of former king, Atunwase II, is now Atunwase III, in a ceremony of solemn hues and sound. We saw the motif of red, gold and white, and, for irony, the Ooni of Ife, described it as a “red-letter day.”

We also saw a syncretic integrity of Christian and traditional rites, the Olu bursting into melodies of faith. With the Laz Ekwueme Orchestra and Warri Royal choir, and his speech, it was part church, part the past, in which spirit he lifted an age-old curse on the land.

With a Yoruba mother, and a Bini wife, he encases the Itsekiri paragon with its binary roots: its culture from Bini past, language from Yoruba, while in temperament, a delicate balancing of Yoruba diplomacy and the Bini warrior soul.  I could not miss the presence of Deputy Senate President. Ovie Omo-Agege, whose grandmother’s remains lie in the palace earth, was the grandchild of Nana Olomu, the intrepid warrior who fought the British to a standstill, and the only ruler in the age of British resistance who lived to tell the story by returning to the throne. If anyone had a doubt as to where Omo-Agege’s fighting gears emanated, they need a seance to his grandmother. Grandmothers are powerful.

A fever has caught the two gladiators of Nigeria, and it is the shiver of hope. They are quaking from pocket violence. What ails the country dwarfs the turmoil within the APC and PDP.

Neither party is able to confront the pains outside. Hunger is shrivelling the people, as the Sultan of Sokoto has noted. Herdsmen follow machete blades instead of brains. Zealots on both sides are expressing their lack of faith in the country. Rapine and murder are making newspaper headlines cloy. We are shedding the blood of war in peacetime, apologies to the scriptures.

In spite of these, the politicians seem to have nowhere to go. APC bigwigs wallow in the illusion of a house of refuge as PDP has emptied some of its titans into the party in power. Exit Ayade and others. Exit faith in PDP.

No one is thinking what some call the third force, because Nigeria’s political elites are entrapped in the binary of an alternative without an option. A forked road, each path smelling of the same gunpowder.

Read Also: Conduct national convention, APC Govs tell Buni

APC was once a force that seemed a psychological third force. It was not a third force then, and the political space rippled with many parties, some appealing only to a few states, or a wary demographic or a region, or a tribe. APC was a coalescence of opportunity. It was a mere force that cancelled a third force of the mind. It became a second force, an alternative roaring with strategy. A walk out of the mire, out of the mine. Into more of a destination than a destiny. It echoes Fela’s song, “where we dey go… don’t ask me.” There was a sense that the journey was the fulfilment. It also tapped into the yearning for something else. It was not encased in any language or ideology. To purloin the phrase of writer Gertude Stein, “there was no there there.” But we had to go – there. There we go!

Like the nihilist who was asked what he wanted to replace a structure with once it was pulled down, the APC thought was “let us pull it down first and we shall figure out what to do afterwards.” That was the momentum of the APC, a certain faith and even greed in the future. But now that they have power what are they doing with it?

That is why the APC, a big and mighty party, is living on the swagger of incumbency. It is in a crisis, but it does not know it. It had a national working committee, and it was dissolved with a National Executive committee. Now, it set up a caretaker committee to solve the party woes. They accused Adams Oshiomhole of making himself into a dictator within the party. That is a short hand for not pushing their private interest through.  The CPC wing of the party saw its time had come after the 2019 victory. They no longer needed the irritants of ACN and ANPP and the other little ants in the union. They set up the Mai Mala Buni team. They thought they had gotten rid of an abomination.  But the Supreme Court just hinted that they had replaced an abomination with an abomination.

Rather than gurgle it up and vomit, they kept on swallowing. They went ahead with ward congresses, the genesis of its electoral process. The future is coming, a future of litigations and a supreme court going back to its earlier hint. Aketi escaped, but will Buni? Will APC? The law to every clear-eyed lawyer is irrevocable. To the attorney-general and a few leeches on the party boon, the APC and its caretaker committee are within their rights. The humpty-dumpty fall is ahead. We can see the cracks in its limbs and ribs. When it eventually crashes, it might be the greatest fall in Nigeria’s political history.

The party is even trapped? It cannot even dissolve the caretaker committee within the law because the NEC has been dissolved, and an air cannot slap a tree. Nothing cannot make something out of itself because it has no self. The APC is technically a body without a head, flailing with a cocky air into a waiting ditch. In a sense, it is a party without a soul, a parody of a disembodied entity. No there there.

The PDP almost followed the same path. The governors under Governor Aminu Tambuwal of Sokoto State saved it from a quagmire. Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike wanted Secondus to go. He was in the same ship with perennial presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar. The calculation was self-serving. If Wike wanted to be vice president, the party chairman Secondus could not be party chairman in the same party because they belong to the same region. It has little to do with whether the PDP was failing as an opposition party. The polls will determine that. As things stand, the future battle, just like Jonathan’s, is the ruling party against the ruling party. The opposition can just stand aside and reap if it does not commit an unforced error.

A caretaker committee would have put the PDP in the same stormy water that APC is slushing in without knowing it.

But with Tambuwal making shuttles across the country and communing with his colleagues and members of the NWC, the Wike pouting came to an end, if temporarily. He has now decided to fight another day. A caretaker committee could have been a first stage of an implosion. A cool head, from Tambuwal, has kept the storm at bay. Tomorrow is another date, that October when it will hold its convention and election.

Secondus as a party leader has an opportunity to fight again. But unlike the APC, the PDP has no legal albatross. It needs to conduct an election. APC needs to conduct itself, its character. The APC with its apparatchiks like Buni and attorney general should remember what Ahab told a bullying King  Ben-hadad, “the one who puts on the armour should not boast like the one who takes it off.”

What is going on in the parties is not democracy but the pangs of strongmen. Wike and Atiku in the PDP and the President and his men in the APC. Plato had warned in his Republic that democracies will fall because of democracy. The Greek philosopher preferred philosopher-king, and suspected equality. We are seeing that in the United States, Turkey, Russia, Philippines, et al. Ancient Greek parliament voted out democracy. The strong men that resulted led the empire to war and ruin. Statesmen like Pericles could not save them forever.

There is nothing impregnable in a democracy, it still takes men of wise counsel to save it. Systems are subject to men, and not the other way. Just as Tambuwal intervened for PDP, the APC heads into a void if it maintains it hubris.

No sanctuary

Greek historian Tacitus once asserted that the body and mind of a people are the priorities of governance. But the body reflects the mind. As Covid-19 re-enacts itself in a third wave, a certain professor fell in the southwest. He caught the virus in one of his evangelical missions, it was assumed by his folks. He could have been saved, according to the story, but his state, Oyo, had no respirators for their own good. He suffocated. Part of the problem was the doctors’ strike.

This week a Government College Ughelli classmate will be laid to earth. We had an online evening of tributes to our miler Valentine Ofuokwu and one of the revelations from his sister was that they waited in vain for an ambulance to take him from his home in Asaba to Benin. Fellow classmates had rallied to save one of us, but the system failed him as one of us, Victor Agbro, put it.

Yet while the people struggle to pick life out of a deathly healthcare system, the big man flies out for check-up at everyone’s expense. The sick cannot reach sanctuary, so all that is left is an obituary.

Ofuokwo was a great sportsman at GCU, a great miler who overtook all of us in the 5-mile race. He earned a grade one at WAEC and became a brilliant lawyer. Adieu Valentine. If man and country cannot provide sanctuary, the almighty will – for you.