The first abused glamour. The second abused money. The third abused power. They became a triune of impunity, but they thrived in the tribunal of a vain and idolatrous generation.

The stories of Hushpuppi, Obi Cubana and Abba Kyari only show how they make a mockery of money and hard work in this country. They were the odds and ends of the Nigerian contemporary culture, the alliance of decay. Ironically, they are not on the fringe of society. The likes of them have become the mainstream. Those who pissed on the river’s edge have polluted the whole body of water. The fishes now bob as lifeless creatures on the ebullient streams.

When they began, they etched their tales as epic. They now ebb as anti-climax. They were models of class. Now they seem like yokels. Instagram sizzled with their faces and poses and quotes. Now they are footnotes and distorted memories. Everyone wanted them who robed them as winners. Now some worshippers are wincing in existential doubt. They were online idols. A million eyes bowed, clicks were rites, shares evangelised, likes were the amens and envy were the iniquities.

The first was Hushpuppi. His narrative for this essayist was his subversion of the work ethic. Ramon Abbas emerged from the dark but all over him was a cloud of confetti. They called him Gucci Master, a toast of the internet. The young followed him, cursed and envied him. Few asked how he became so rich that he draped himself in the high-octane waves of brands: Gucci, Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Jimmy Choo, et al.

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This is the sort of brand most people save for years to purchase. Even at that, they get one item and savour it, be it a bag, a pair of shoes or even a shirt. I recall in Paris years ago, I saw a Chinese lady who planted herself outside the window of a Louis Vuitton store long after it had closed for the day. She was ogling an item. The lust flamed through her soul. She was like an engrossed somebody spying her beloved. Obviously, she could not afford it at that time. She was probably saving, and hoped she would be ready in time before the item evaporated from the rack. Our man Ramon hauls them home like a trawler of fish.

But the paradox is that Hushpuppi thought he was working hard. Indeed he was. A Bloomberg report showed the mockery of industry that attends his work. It was often a triumph of intelligence monitoring, internet acumen, psychological scheming, data processing, mastery of timing, a finger on the pulse of the market. It is a genius at work. He understands the geography of money movement in the work, the policies of banks, the politics of each country, the soft underbelly of the financial world. He knows when to pause, when to parry, when to decoy, when to strike. Like a marksman, he marshals all these into a flawless shot at a deal. When he sunbaths beside his pool, he is celebrating his diligence. It is the sincerity of a conman.

That is why people like him have distorted the work ethic. He was a conman who was different from the pen thief in the ministries. Those only need to sign and doctor figures. For Ramon Abbas, it took racking of the brain.

So, they see themselves as the real thing. But they are parodies of work. It is wealth without industry, profit from the devil’s plate. It is like George Orwell’s short story titled A Hanging, in which all the executioners employ the normal language of a workaday labourer, like a farmer or fisherman, when they execute a fellow man. Men like Hushpuppi would quote Christ when he said “a labourer is worthy of his hire.” But even in that Bible passage, he warned against greed, and forbade his disciples to go from house to house. Hushpuppi travelled from brand to brand, from Gucci house to Chanel shine. He lived not for the brand but for his brand. He conjured Hushpuppi and its glam for instagram. Instagram was his arena, his stage. How many times did he wear them? Where did he go? He had no mainstream skill. No one invited him to a conference, or to give a speech, to a black-tie event. His office was languor, not glamour; in the bedroom where he could hide only in underwear and mint millions of dollars.

For Obi Cubana, this essayist is not interested in how he made his money, but how he spent it. Especially when his mother passed, in a town known as Oba, which in some places means king. He played obscene royal for his mother. The comedian Elder GCFR warned all those females trooping to the Oba of Benin’s palace to not confuse the Oba of Obi Cubana with the grand abode of their monarch. The laugh merchant was referring to females at the party, where money was turned into a gutter. Those who make money through sweat, who belabour bone and blood, should think twice about the display of squander. Those who have many times more money are not seen in other climes to descend to such vanities. It was in a village, I learned, where many would want to send their kids to good schools, where many may not have the square meals they desire, where schools and hospitals could have been memorialised in his mother’s name. Now the memory for the poor woman is money baked in dust and slime, much of it unspendable. No legal tender for mama. Rather than being a burial of remembrance, it was a memorial of superfluity.

Wealth comes with responsibility. No one makes money out of a vacuum. The society demands, at least, a dignity of success. What happened at Oba was a subversion of merit. In Warri, in my young days, we called it money miss road. His is the sort of reckless splurging that Scott F. Fitzgerald documented in Jay Gatsby, the main character of his novel The Great Gatsby, who threw parties of extravagance and everyone, most of whom he did not know, attended. He never connected with his guests. The person across the street he wanted to connect with and impress never came to the party. It is the futility of such self-indulgence, making money the be-all and end-all of society, just like the old Dickensian woman in the novel, The Bleak House, who thought whenever a person mentioned a figure it must refer to money.

Abba Kyari was the supercop who has been associated with both men. A supercop who gyrated at parties, who glorified stunts, who witnessed Obi Cubana’s vanities even as he broke the law by “spraying” money, and did nothing. It is he who now has to explain why he had a team that emboldened a crime with a crime. Now the fault lines of his character are in the open. In the FBI report, Hushpuppi expresses himself in a righteous tone, and the supercop obliged.

The story of the three is the story of how tribe matters little when money is involved. No one thinks Yoruba, Igbo or Fulani in the three. Money has no tribal fealty. It does not speak a language in the market. The story also tells Nigeria’s materialistic turn. Hushpuppi represents making money no matter how. Obi Cubana wasted it no matter how much. And Abba Kyari endorsed them from the high quarters of the law for whatever they were worth.

By Sam Omatseye

The two men do not belong in the same sentence. One a sheikh, the other a pastor. In spite of their antipodal rostrums, they have passed the same sentence on Muhammadu Buhari. They say he has failed, and he has no legitimacy again as the leader. They are not saying he has no legal legitimacy. They are saying he has lost his moral mooring.

The northern streets may hail him as the sai baba, but it is coming not out of facts but delusion.

We have two priests who were once allies of Buhari, but they are allies against him. Not allies in the same sojourn, but they are together from the distance. They hug without touching. The one’s heaven is the other’s hell.  The one’s torch makes the other touchy. They serve two gods, who authored contradictory books, designed different worship centres, chant opposing rhymes, craft different histories and have shed blood to consecrate their martyrs, and whet appetites in the name of conflicting paradises.

But on Buhari, they have found common cause. It may be fleeting, a soap bubble, but it engrafts a feature in Buhari’s biography. He is a man who does not keep friends. Especially men who have worked for him, and made him shine. It is what psychologists call the fear of gratitude. Hence the Roma historian Tacitus noted that “Men are more ready to repay an injury than a benefit.”

It means he is comfortable in a narrow vortex of flattery and reinforcing praise singers. I first observed this in former petroleum minister Tam David West who had great faith in him. When Buhari won the polls in 2015, the then weak man with high vitality could not conceal his gung-ho spirit. “It will work,” was his refrain. The pundit went to the grave a disillusioned soul.

The two clerics are Pastor Tunde Bakare and Sheikh Ahmad Gumi. They don’t feel Buhari’s body heat anymore. Not a menage a trois. Unlike Cameroonian playwright Oyono-Mbia’s Three Suitors, One Husband, their romance with Buhari has expired.

On his pulpit, Bakare was in his combative tempo. Announcing a movement that he calls Nigeria for Nigerians, he indicated that Buhari wants to come after him. He says he is ready for the ramrod president. He said he loved him, served him and respected him. The most emphatic verb in the past tense was respect. It means he has no place for Buhari in his holy of holies. He declaims in the name of his God that he is above Buhari’s hurt. He might have in his mind the passage that says, “Touch not my anointed and do my prophet no harm.” The lean, fiery cleric is daring the president. He did not mention Buhari by name, but it made his reference to him even more potent.

It is also clear that Bakare is haunted by his endorsement of the Katsina titan for whom he served as vice presidential candidate. He asserted that holding the sword for him in the past and anointing him as a candidate did not in any way crucify him as a sinner. He referred to Prophet Samuel who anointed Saul. That did not hang the prophet because Saul became a scoundrel. This essayist agrees with him. If we blame all who endorse Buhari and have now felt disappointed should also blame God for Adam’s lips on the forbidden fruit. We should blame Jesus for orchestrating his own betrayal by picking Judas. In the Old Testament, God gave Solomon brains. But the wisest man on earth died a fool and God bequeathed his ten northern tribes to Jeroboam and two southern ones to Rehoboam, the only son we know of his happy doings with a thousand women. Both men were failures. Do we blame God for that? God did not blame Himself. Neither did Jesus for Judas. It is the nature of democracies to take risks, and hence it does not bestow offices for life. The people have bouts of remorse and can make a change. Renewals are the hallmarks of the republican spirit.

The paradox of democracy is that the masses vote but the responsibility is personal. Just like Apostle noted, he should work out his own salvation. As the proverb says, you can get a job for a person, but you can’t do the tasks for them.

Ahmad Gumi said Buhari should resign. His is even more curious.  Not long ago, he seemed to be the pious shadow of Aso Rock. Now, he has abandoned the villa to the pharaonic fate. He was the bandit’s uncle, the one who called for amnesty in a false equivalence with the Niger Delta militants. It is not clear, in spite of his moral assertions, why he turned his back on Buhari. Could it be that he had a bad experience with Buhari’s security men? Is he going to make a pirouette again? It is interesting that he said he had to pay Buhari in Jonathan’s coins. He called for Jonathan’s resignation for failing to secure the nation. His conscience emboldens him to do same to the Katsina politician.

If two priests have turned their backs on Buhari, it makes him a pariah in the temple. Yet to some, he is a secular saint, especially to those who swear by him up north and who bowed on the streets and drank grubby water from the soil when he returned from illness.

Could it also be a case of Bakare and Gumi failing as priests over an adherent? Some adherents are just too resistant to the holy of holies. This secular saint is one of them. We may not say it is a case of madmen and specialists as in Soyinka’s play where it becomes difficult to distinguish who is mad and who is a specialist.  We have similar motif in Scott F. Fitzgerald’s novel Tender is the Night where the line is hazy between psychiatrist and patient. Some have regarded Buhari as a religious zealot, so where do we put Gumi in this narrative?

The point is that Buhari sees himself as a great follower of his faith and tribe and he can do anything he wants in their names. He does not care to please anyone but himself. He can invoke antiquated grazing maps and declare a lopsided appointment profile a meritocracy. He enjoys his voice and if others call it vice, he is content to call it melody. Hence he does not set much store by his own personal loyalty to people. He has always been like that. It was so when as GOC who challenged his chief of army staff Garba Wushishi and unilaterally engaged his army in a duel, and also asked Nigerians to start reading the constitution. This is the same man whose government is not reading the constitution enough. He became with Idiagbon a lone wolf as head of state in the military cabinet. It was the same Buhari who was a titan of the ANPP and became a fringe player before he formed the CPC. It is the same man his wife cried that her husband did not stand by those who fought for him. He is, in a diluted sense, like the essayist William Hazlitt who wrote, “I am never less alone than when alone.”

He may see it as principle.  But others, like this essayist, call it betrayal. He may see himself as saint. That must be a satisfying illusion.

Go home, Buni

Much has been said and written about the verdict on the APC caretaker committee and its chair, the thin, absentee governor of Yobe State, Mala Buni. One thing is clear, all seven judges agree that the governor has no business being the chairman of that party contraption that has no place in law but in the devious imagination of the party chieftains. If the party constitution echoes the 1999 law, why is there any controversy? Maybe the party is waiting to muscle the wise men of the highest court to save it. That is to be seen, whether the men will turn timid when the case comes before them in future. Some are already saying it based on the illiterate statement of the attorney general who needs to attend government 101 on the meaning of executive. Maybe he sees it as non-executive because he is one of those making Buni into a marionette who obeys every of his instruction like a stooge. He makes a mistake equating governor’s executive function with a club like the governor’s forum, etc. The party is looking like a self-destruct horse heading down an incline.

But it is clear that Buni is a lawless executive in the party. He lives in Abuja whereas he was voted to sit in the Yobe executive suite. The man has abandoned his mandate by hibernating in the nation’s capital. It is time to go back and listen to his people. Yobe is in a bad state.

The ghost of Adams Oshiomhole is haunting the party. Buhari knew the legal implication of his ouster hence he asked for him not to go to court. Now, he can’t stop it as complaints will turn molten hot for the courts in the land. APC may be a larger version of Zamfara and Rivers, and that will be a humpty-dumpty fall and a gift prize to a quiet PDP.

By Sam Omatseye

It may not surprise historians that when the story of Sunday Igboho is told it may not be about humans. Not about a rustic upstart rewriting his hubris to muster a tribal pride. Not about herdsmen as barbarians, or the torching of palaces, or the slaughter of red-blooded hunters and the defiling of nubiles.

It may be a legacy of a cat. Hence, I wonder when the case of Igboho against the federal government in the international court kicks into earnest, will the cat be summoned in evidence? Many things have been said about the night cat, but nothing about its identity. Was it a fat cat, nourished in the rats and droppings of the home? Was it a lean cat straying into a human staccato of action just as a cartoon now trending has suggested? Was it a bold male, a sly kitten? Was it on the run, in a half-daze? Did it meow or growl, or squint? Was it a black cat, now invisible in the night, now visible, its eyes bright and defiant, stabbing the night? We are left to fill in the void, a vast tapestry of colours and sounds in that night of augury and blood.

The men and women of the DSS and the Nigerian army who rallied into the compound without warrants, may have shot few persons dead, slurped away Igboho’s wife and the guards and others in a triumph of a cat fighting a rat, but it was the cat that won the night. The fuzzy creature became in their eyes not an animal but a transformation act.

It became an escape artist, like the goat Djali who helped the stunning damsel Esmerelda outwit her foes in Victor Hugo’s classic, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. So, they thought Igboho was the cat, and what did they think they could do to it or him? Could they force it to rehumanise? To turn into human again? Could they have handled it or would they have fled, gun and all, in a commotion of cowardice? The little creature transformed from a low, small fur into the mammalian hulk, eye turning human, fore legs turning to hands, hind legs elongating into a full stretch of a homo sapien, feet unfurling and his voice shouting in strange bass, “Yoruba nation.”

Even as they surveyed the cat, did they tremble? Did it occur to them at that moment that the very spectacle of the cat exposed the hollowness of the whole project that night? That it was all fiction? That they were looking for a man who was not there, and they were fighting a cause that was not there? That the man had riled up a crowd did not mean he rallied a nation? It meant the state had lost its onions. It was pursuing a fiction just as it was pursuing the chimera of Twitter. Twitter that should bring job to us, excite a community, leverage a cause, to help fight the ignorance. They were now fighting in the vanguard of ignorance.

The cat in question has no name, it may have been a neighbourhood cat, a hungry cat, straying with the same impunity with the soldiers. Cat without warrant. Soldiers without warrant. We might say it had the guarantee of a cultural warrant. Soldiers had no legal warrant. The cat, however, came like a thief in the night, an intruder’s humility. The soldiers came like the beast in the night, barrelling in with a rat-tat-tat of gunfire. The real beast, paradoxically, was innocent. It wanted food. They wanted humans as fodder, a cannibal feast. The humans were beasts. Did I hear Fela croon, “beast of no nation…” Some said the cat was Ighoho’s pet, that helped to rid the home of rats. Reminds me of my maternal grandfather in the village of Orogun. Once in a while he would ask us to open the doors and let the cats in. The gleeful predators padded stealthily into the rooms and a few minutes later, they were growling out with mouthfuls.

In the west, if a raid of this nature happened, the police would look for a treat for the cat. They would even play with the creature.

That our soldiers decided to arrest the cat reflects how as a culture we have made ourselves lower than the animals. The cat cowed them, it probably meowed them into fear. They stooped. The cat conquered.  In metaphor, they were like playwright Tennessee Williams’ cat on a hot tin roof. They were intimidated by the animal because the whole incursion into Igboho’s compound was lower than humans. It was a bestial act. Rather than coddle the cat, they saw themselves as lower than it. God made us a little lower than angels. The army acted a little lower than a cat. They did not think it harmful in physical terms but spiritual. They had guns. They had bombs. But they had fear. That is the power of superstition. Rather than shoot, they shrank.

It is the same superstition that is at work with fighting Igboho that is at work with what we now know as the fear over a free press and free expression in a democracy that led to a nationwide first-page advert in the newspapers. It is the same suppression of dissent that we are seeing with Twitter, that we have seen with NBC.

It is not today that tales of animal superstition have pervaded military escapades and campaigns in Nigeria. I recall a visit to Black Scorpion, Brigadier Adekunle as a reporter in the late 1980’s. The small man, then old but the sparkle of his martial past undimmed, spoke without glee about the war. I asked him about stories of his disappearing acts. He laughed it off. He said there was no truth to it. The man was hardly in the battle front. But some myths said he turned to animals and disappeared. That soldiers in battle believe this only tells us how idle some of the minds of our soldiers are.

We need not only liberation from ourselves. We need it from animals. When President Clinton was in the White House, I was one of a few guest journalists who paid a visit to the man. He was in Colorado for the G-8 then, but we saw his cat, a buxom affair named Socks. The caretaker asked us to touch the hairy creature, and I did with delight. It was the first time I had touched a cat. I would in the course of my American journey not only play with them, but feed them. I helped a colleague whose cat died perform a burial ceremony over her beloved cat, with a swoop of Shakespearean oratory while she shed tears. It was a black cat. When I was in the newsroom a month later in Denver, reporters made me feel like a superstar because I touched the nation’s first critter.

If we remember the feline story, we can say they feared the Igboho cat the way the Europeans slaughtered medieval cats instead of rats as culprits for the plague that overwhelmed the continent, a scenario painted in Albert Camus’ novel The Plague.

The raid at Igboho’s and the cat episode was a moment in Bubonic plague in Nigeria and the state, a plague of fear, a fear of free expression, a fear of democracy.

It’s in the Southeast

Two weeks ago, this essayist noted that the Jonathan administration rose on the enthusiastic wave of Southeast joy, but the Otuoke man did little other than pad the elite. I noted that Buhari, for all his sectional zest, has done more for the region than anyone for the region since Gowon. A trove of protests online could have shocked me if I had not prophesied that even if Fashola paved the roads with gold some would not see it. Prejudice makes a good thing seem bad. Just as I wrote this the FEC approved MTN to assist in the Enugu-Onitsha Expressway that is a great work in progress. Or shall I say also of the Owerri-Enugu road? The Second Niger Bridge was Jonathan’s rhetorical feast without a feat on the ground or water. Even the blind will rejoice at the vista of what is going on there. When Jonathan left office, he had infrastructure vote of N18 billion. With Fashola on the seat, the budget is over N260 billion. By any fraction, this government is spending more for the southeast than Jonathan budgeted for the whole nation when the dollar was over 100 dollars per barrel. Babatunde Fashola, trojan of works, is leaving much for history to chew.

But Buhari is his worst enemy with Igbos. He has hurt them too much to please them. But the work is on in the region. They only have to look. For instance, three out of the six-lane driveway of Onitsha-Umunya-Awkuzu-Abba/Ukpo-Amawbia-Awka section of the Onitsha-Enugu Expressway has now reduced drive-time from 1:15 to 25 minutes. So, there!

By Sam Omatseye

Language can be tricky, and it is more so when it challenges a person, a people, or a nation. We saw that when President Muhammadu Buhari called one of us a dot in the circle. When this essayist suggested last week that it was all about IPOB, many Igbo argued that I dipped my foot in the whirlpool.

Whether to mock himself or impugn the president, even incite ethnic umbrage, Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe made himself a dot. Writ large on his T-shirt, the senator seems to have crystalised the definition in the Igbo – and even – national sub-conscious.  Abaribe’s profile as a dot is personal like the character in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, Scarlet letter, who was forced to wear a letter on her chest to accuse a society of hypocrisy. Igbo is now scarlet, a red alert to his people and the nation. Buhari is coming after them, to wipe them out. Buhari was not referring to the Igbo secessionists. He was referring to the whole Igbo as a race. He was deracinating a whole people. For him and people like him, the Igbo as dot has become a sort of discomfort as fact. The dot has come to go.

Neither Garba Shehu nor Femi Adesina, nor even the prattling tongue of Lai Mohammed has waded successfully into the slough for clarification. This evokes a spectre worse than the pogrom. No prime minister or premier inaugurated the Igbo hate and bonfire in official terms in the First Republic. It just happened. A spontaneous spark mushroomed into ethnic conflagration.

If the president was believed to have communicated in the Arise interview, this is a fog he must clear. But even if he does, will it not worsen the horizon, and reinforce the distance between meaning and intention? Will it force Abaribe to wear another T-shirt bearing an even scarier scarlet letter?

Language has never been easy in politics, especially when it carries cultural reverberations. Some have said Buhari made the point about dot in the context of Igbo who have businesses across the country, whether in the north, east or west. He was therefore not referring to the ethnic entrepreneur but the Igbo as an entity.

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When matters like this arise, we understand why it is important to communicate. We also realise how hard it is, even in plain words. When sentiments flare, “is and was” can mean war. We lose the syntax, we lose the sense. We appropriate meanings. What is right depends not on what you say or hear or what is written, it is how you interpret it. Whoever is the beast depends on who is installing the mark. In the tale by the Nobel Prize novelist, Rudyard Kipling, titled, The Mark of the Beast, it is not clear who is the beast and who bears the mark, and who is the victim.

Last week, this essayist suggested that even the Igbo can appropriate the dot as superior to the circle. After all, the dot makes the circle. It can be a David and Goliath duel. Was that part of Abaribe’s point? Even Abaribe’s symbolism opens itself up for multiple translations. So, why not Buhari’s?

If any other leader said those words, they may not engender much furore. But when the man has a trail of rhetoric and actions perceived as diminishing the race, his words will not go unpunished. Only recently, a decision to map out a security initiative for the region was announced and hardly a single member of the race was part of the deliberation. They have had series of slaughters, and have been lying on the slaughter slabs of herdsmen. The president made a series of visits recently, not even Owerri heard a whistle stop.

When such things happen, when you say “I love igbo,’ they will say “ah, this man is mocking us.” That is the power of rhetoric. When he made the “dot in a circle” comment, he was not seen as innocent.

We are not seeing this today for the first time. When Awolowo declared that the Yoruba would pitch their tent with the Igbo if they were allowed to leave, and the civil war exploded with Awo as finance minister, the Igbo never forgave him. Even in in his grave, they still scowl at the sage. No amount of explanation has impressed the Igbo. The Yoruba are satisfied with Awo’s clarification. But it is a big wound between the races. In the Second Republic, Awo peered east and campaigned against stock fish. He apparently had the view the fish was a health deficiency. The Igbo read it differently. This same fish sustained millions of them when a heroic Catholic charity, Caritas, shipped them in through perilous nights. The man who shut down Biafran economy had come again for a part two of his onslaught. They booed him first and drowned him in a landslide of the eastern vote. The sage’s legacy in the east will take ages to redeem, if ever.

Intentions are not enough. Language makes the difference. We saw the same in the United States. When the United States stated that “all men are created equal,” it first meant all propertied white men, before it opened into all white men. It later encompassed white women. About two centuries after, it opened to all humans. Words mean nothing, so long as humans are mean. We traffic them. We weaponise them. Ronald Reagan, revered by many Americans as a great president, perpetuated the racist motif. When he made a campaign stop in Mississippi in the 1980’s, he proclaimed, “I believe in state’s rights.” Ordinarily, it was innocuous. But it had a racist undertone. The south fought under the toga of state’s rights during the American civil war, but it connoted the right to own slaves.

Even the book of books, the Holy Bible, has been used to oppress over the ages. In its name, some owned slaves, justified empire, shed blood. While whites deployed it to make human chattel, blacks drew from it a freedom charter. The 21st century capital religious movement was the liberation Theology. While some see Jesus as a conservative, other say he can pull down a rotten behemoth. Martin Luther and the Catholic conservatives read the same Bible. So, there.

The poet Robert Browning is believed to have made the following assertion, “when I was writing, only God and I understood. When I finished writing, only God understood.” It is easier to say a thing, but we cannot determine who will gain from it.

By using the dot metaphor, he has ventured into what in literature is called, synecdoche, which means a part represents the whole, or vice versa. This is more specific than metonymy.

Does anyone believe that Buhari can order the army to wipe out the Igbo? Was that what he meant? It may be a comfort to those who believe that in order to demonise the president. But that is why the president should see it as a marker of how he has alienated himself from the southeast. He offended first with words, when he spoke about percentages who voted for him in 2015. He has gone downhill since. Maybe the way back up their hearts is to rejig his rhetoric.

Kudos to BOS

We remember Chioma Ajunwa over two decades ago as the Nigerian golden girl of the Olympics.  Her heroics might have faded away until the BOS of Lagos on the eve of his 56th birthday dusted up the gold medal with a new honour. He was given a three bedroom flat at the Babatunde Raji Fashola Housing Estate. By the way, Fashola turns 58 today – Happy birthday!

The point is that Governor Babajide Sanwo-olu has turned his birthday period to honour another. That is selfless birthday. Making one’s honour an opportunity to honour another, especially one who has been forgotten. It is also a testament to an inclusive Lagos. It is an honour that Chioma’s state did not accord her. Kudos to the BOS.

By Sam Omatseye

Some Nigerians are not happy today because Buhari took away their status as a god of creation. But they were first a god of death, an Egyptian Anubis. In one face time, they lost their dual divinity. The one they killed puffed back to life. The one they made melted into a smoke of oblivion.

Goodnight Jibrin. Daylight to PMB.

The man even gave them a quote with both mathematical and literary evocations: a dot in a circle. He smiled, defied, sometimes defiled logic. He was also sometimes stoic, avuncular and paternal, if paternalistic. However, he was mostly unfazed by the impudence of camera.

The Arise team led by Prince Nduka Obaigbena – the duke – wanted to poke and caress, to make him uneasy and set him at ease simultaneously. In a delicate balance, they tested while knowing the man could be testy. He was eyeing 80 with the instinct and breeding of a soldier. He was a toddler at democracy. They were not supposed to spend more than 30 minutes, according to the arrangement. But the quarry did not mind. He was battle-ready. But Femi Adesina was ill at ease. He wanted PMB under his shadows. He did not want them to ruffle his principal.

But the defiant one was the duke himself, ignoring Adesina as he and his folks kept teleguiding their barbs. Then Adesina turned it into a roforofo moment. He planted himself in front of the camera. The war was over. Arise gulped down 42 minutes.

I wonder how much more the president could have said that he had not said, and those who questioned the professionals should tell me what else they wanted to hear other than the airing of his positions on herdsmen, merit, violence and order, on federalism, on his cousins on the other side of Lake Chad, on his ultimate ambition to mull among his mooing mammals.

We were stunned not a few times, even when we knew it. As poet Samuel Coleridge noted, “anticipation is more potent than surprise.” Especially when he expressed his romance with ancient documents. That makes him our first true historian as president. Now that we have abolished history from schools, we have a president with attachment to preternatural details. He mines the memory of man-mammal embraces. He wants to scoop documents about routes, men with sticks and beasts coursing through 19th century byways of trees and shrubs. He is also a historian of the law, except that he seeks the memorials of laws and forgets the new ones. Not for him the Land Use Act. Facts are sacred, especially artefacts.

But more telling is that a day after the interview he vaulted into the 21st century. He launched a modern landmark, a railway line that moves a million times faster than the herder even when herder and cow are on steroids. The Lagos-Abeokuta-Ibadan rail line contradicts an ancient gazette. Amaechi’s trains blaze forward; gazettes gaze backwards. But he abides both. In the words of the American poet, he is at peace with the conflict. Walt Whitman wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Yes, I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.”

He is a man of two routes, the one with animals cantering on. The other on wheels whirring and buzzing into the future. One past, the other fast. The old one a farce of blood and tears. The one is what Walter Raleigh called a “monument to dead ideas,” while the other is monumental. What does he say when a grazing route meets his Second Niger bridge, or rail track or even one those mighty expressways that Babatunde Fashola (SAN) is sweating into being?

Paradoxically, the word popped out of his austere lips. “Do you want me to contradict my attorney-general?” he asks with pithy disdain. Abubakar Malami was swamped by critics when he said southern governors could not implement a ban on open grazing. Some thought the lawyer was on his own tangent? We know better.

We know that when Garba Shehu rattled off a line against Governor Rotimi Akeredolu over an order asking the herders out of the forest reserves, he was not a dog out of the leash. He has been an obedient servant.

On federalism, we saw a conundrum.  He asked Obaigbena to define federalism, and he obliged and adverted to the devolution of powers. Clearly Buhari’s definition of federalism is different from the classic. His men should now pen down his new theory. While we are talking of the centre ceding power to the states and regions, he wants states to shed power to the local government. He is protecting the unwieldy centre, and the interview revealed a man with deep malice against governors. An irony because governors have been bowing to him like a monarch. The first whiff of protest was when the southern governors grunted in Asaba. If he wants the states to go lean, it is because he wants them to lean on the centre, and make a unitary bear of the Nigerian state. If anyone is to defrock itself, it must be the centre first. Give the powers to the states, and the states can now see that not only one part is giving.

We cannot deny an equalisation of rhetoric on the northwest and the southeast, invoking the language of language on the upstarts of both regions. Even by a stretch, some in the southeast  could even say a dot is more important than a circle rather being defensive regarding themselves being tarred as dot. Without a dot, there is actually no circle. At any rate, he was not referring to all Igbo. He was railing at IPOB.

On the army and MDAs, he says appointments were based on merit, and only those who deserve it get it. That is not a federalist spirit. It will mean that only those from a section of the country are blessed with lopsided intelligence and competence. The others trail. Even if that were true, the constitution frowns on it in principle. Hence cabinets are based on balance, or else a man can fill his cabinet from a few states. The cabinet principle of balance is supposed to guide appointments to the parastatals. Same should happen in the military. If the law insists on balance in the cabinet, it is silent on the MDAs because it wants the president to follow its lead.

I wonder who the two governors were who the president berated. In an open democracy, they would speak out and let us into their response to the scolding. The president is not the boss of any governor. He is a first among equals. That is why we say the president has to beg governors over land, because the states own their lands. So, when a president says the governors should keep peace in their domains, he was speaking on the area the law gives him powers. He passed the buck to the governors, although he controls the police, military, including the DSS. What he should hold he let slip. What he should let go, he grabs.

On the northeast, I am one of the few who have no objection to rail lines so long as they end on our borders. But rather than expatiate on the need to revive the commercial beehive of old on the Lake Chad region, he went maudlin about cousins. When Winston Churchill was trying to lure Americans into the Second World War, he invoked his American mother. “I have a latch key into the American heart,” he crooned. Buhari’s case is different.

It is clear that the interview revealed the president as the man in charge. Many say his men were forcing their views on him. We know that there might be a chicken cabinet, but the chef is Muhammadu Buhari. He dictates the ingredients. They may make it spicier, or overfill the plate of rice. But the menu is basically the appetite of the chef in chief. Any principle they espouse in public only parrots their principal.

The president is out of the cocoon, but his aides have always been inside.

By Sam Omatseye

My first meeting with M.K.O. Abiola came early in my career as a reporter with the Newswatch magazine. I had come early to the office, and assistant editor Dare Babarinsa asked me to accompany him to the chief’s house for an interview. I was a society reporter covering the popular celebrity column Newsliners, and my social diary had no urgency. I was free to be hunted.

I jumped into Dare’s eternal beetle. Excitement ran in my blood like a swallow cruising under an eave, though I suppressed it beside Dare. I had not seen MKO up close. The last time he was within my ken was at Ife when red-blooded radicals booed him out of the majestic Oduduwa Hall. He was regarded as the icon of parasitic capitalism, a robust bug of rapine and glamour.

We did not have to wait long at his reception, but not before I had a sense of the man’s aura among the fair sex when a vainglorious young lady’s lips unfurled fantasies about her intimacy with the great man. She probably thought she alone knew she was spinning fables. She conned herself in bliss.

Moments later, Dare and I were in his presence. He looked larger than life, bold eyes, bonhomie, playful chatter, all belying the grit of the entrepreneur and the man of controversy and politics. He spoke about everything, tribe, politics, unity. But the interview was not the day star. It was the sudden eruption of a figure, the woman Simbiat. His first wife materialised just to say hello, but she struck a halo of romance. The interview was only half-way but Abiola rose like a man in love. The tape recorder whirred with its appetite. He, a stammerer, burst into a mellifluous song. His fluency defeated the stutter. I wish I could remember the song. More spectacular, in a repressed eroticized manoeuvre, he followed an aghast but smiling Simbi about the sprawling sitting room, focusing his gaze on her munificent backside. His throaty sonority and voice level rose with every step and Simbi’s serpentine adventures of escape among the furniture.

It was about the time that a speculation fueled about his cuckolding a familiar king, and whisking her into motherhood with the authority of his famed libido and impudent pocket, a version of modern-day retelling of Paris and Helen of Troy of the Roman world that Homer poeticised in his epic tale The Iliad about the Trojan War.

I did not see MKO again until I was his employee in the Concord Press. But what struck me was how he ran the Concord newspapers, the diversity, his conscious Nigerianness. At that time, my editor was Lewis Obi, at the African Concord. The top editor was Ben Onyeachonam, and Tom Borha led the editorial board as deputy editor-in-chief under the well-known Dr. Doyin Abiola. The Sunday editor was Sina Adedipe, the only Yoruba among the brass of editors.

When President Buhari, in his Arise interview, was saying that, in the army and the MDAs, only those who earned it got plum jobs, he should have looked back at how MKO interpreted merit. He did not see it in ethnocentric terms, although I remember Okonjo-Iweala belching the same tone under Jonathan about the Igbo. June 12 reminds us of a time and place that merit did not work through obtuse lenses.

When it was time to change guards, MKO retained Obi at the Concord. He replaced Onyeachinam as editor with the mercurial Nsikak Essien, who was Business Concord editor. Nsikak, from Akwa Ibom, became the flagship editor. Abiola’s closest members of staff were on the editorial board, and one of the closest to him was one Chike Akabogu, although Dele Alake, Segun Babatope and Nnamdi Obasi were in his close circle. Tunji Bello was to become a mainstay in that trust as well.

But a drama occurred during the June 12 debacle when he learned that Chike was working for the enemy. Abiola would none of it until he heard the fellow’s treacherous voice on tape. Abiola did not take Chike for an Igbo traitor because he often thought individuals were individuals. He worked with many Igbo, including Ndubuisi Kanu, in the fight for June 12.

He was a man who knew how to put ice in the fire. I recall during the royal intrigue for the Sokoto throne, he told of how he used his wealth to quell a possible inferno in the historic city. I had another interview with him with Bayo Onanuga and Dele Momodu and Femi Ojudu. I don’t recall if it was during that interview, or the one with Dare, that he recalled the role he played till nightfall to engage the stakeholders to sheathe their swords, using his money and verbal suasion. By one man’s action, bloodshed fought shy of Sokoto streets. It was a tale lost to history, since he wanted the names of the tempestuous fellows away from the public eye and ear. That was a leader without excuse, and with solution. By the way, it was during the interview with Bayo and co. that he revealed his mathematical mettle. With a scientist’s pride, he showed us a book of mathematics he read and saw the error in the British professors work, wrote a letter pointing it out and the professor wrote back to acknowledge.

My last encounter with MKO was when I was serving as the managing editor in charge of the Abuja Bureau. I was going to visit a friend at the then Nicon Noga Hilton, now known as the Transcorp Hilton. The lift door parted and, as I attempted to walk in, MKO’s eyes bored into mine. In front of him was a security man unmistakable for his cap that the Yoruba call abeti aja. I stepped back in deference. He roared with his characteristic philter, “Sam, Sam,” and motioned me inside. I followed him for the rest of the evening. In the frantic hour of June 12 and its annulment, he still remembered little details.

“I heard you are now the landlord of Abuja,” he said with a smile. He was referring to my new appointment to run the newspaper’s capital bureau. I followed him to his suite, and it was full of the who’s who in Nigerian politics from north, east and west, including Abubakar Rimi and Professor Wande Abimbola, et al. He introduced me to them all one after the other, and he reiterated his characterization of me as the landlord of Abuja. He also knew I was still looking for accommodation, and he said, “do-o-ont worry, everything will be fine.” I had dinner in the suite while he was in a little meeting. I left while he was in one of those meetings by quietly waving goodbye. I never met MKO again.

This was the man that Nigerians voted for, but a few flinty men of tribe and intrigue wanted something else. They are the progenitors of the politics of hate and schism today. His story should let us understand that when we have an opportunity to bring ourselves together we should not fluff it. It can unwind a generation of narrow-minded apostles who blaze on with the legacy of fear and loathing. Abiola looked forward, embraced the future and could not have served as a president who invokes a Neanderthal document like a grazing routes gazette from the sewer of memory, or espouse cows to replace 21st century highways, whose consequence is unlearned herders transporting themselves with AK47 into highways of lust in rapes and rapines of maidens and mothers.

Abiola called himself a member of the Labour Party in England. I mocked it then before I understood his philosophy as a rich man who wanted to deploy his wealth as a counterforce to the poverty of his childhood. He evolved from an NPN man, to a military apologist to a hero of the people. He personified the apotheosis of a man of moral destiny. A few years before June 12, many Nigerians saw him as the parasite of the people. He died their hero as a traitor to his class. That was the labour of his life.

By Sam Omatseye

Despite the Twitter rupture, Lai Mohammed is lucky it is not Instagram. Even his grandchildren would be erupting now in their homestead against their paterfamilias. Instagram ban would enlist even those who cannot spell Lai to burst open the quiet streets, protest with breast and bra, and express their first face of political rebellion. They will abandon photo-ops and twerking and swear in an accidental homage to liberty. Or those who only can identify Arsenal or Chelsea in a picture but can fan their embers as football fans into the political arena.

I don’t know much of Attorney General Abubakar Malami’s family in the technology world, except that he likes to join his children in holy matrimony amidst quaffing, guffaws and grandiloquent dances on social media.

But he should be ready for a million hostages if he is serious about arresting and prosecuting the hundreds of thousands who, at the time of writing on Sunday evening, have already outwitted tweets with tweeps. They have manoeuvred the ban and banded in the underground. Shall we call it the rebirth of NADECO route, except that it is even more ominous than in the days of IBB and Abacha, over whose tyrannies Buhari started his first sojourn into the brave new world called democracy?

If he started Decree 4, when he howled that “The press? I will tamper with that,” today, he does not even need a decree to throttle Twitter. He just needs men like Lai, Abubakar and others around him who never wore a uniform. His jackboot fell on the Guardian and transmitted a climate of trembling to the whole media as we knew it.

Today, the media is big, sprawling and amorphous. It has no head or tail, and it cannot be arrested. It is an eel, bold and sly, defiant and coy. Banning Twitter stops nothing. Rather, it is another chapter in infamy. Whoever thought it or suggested it knows nothing of the modern world, and belongs to the antediluvian frenzy of Rome under Nero. It is an assault on the human voice. No one, in democracies or tyrannies, has ever squashed the human voice, from the Medes and Persians to Hitler to Bokassa, or even Decree Four.

History tells us this all the time, and we keep repeating our follies as humans. Hitler seduced the West with a speech saying tyranny never changed the world. It did not stop him from plunging the world and from perishing in it. The intriguing thing is that whenever, or if ever, this government unbans Twitter, no one will say thank you. There are too many arteries for voices, and many of them they have no power to stop.

If the military could not stop Tell or Tempo magazines, and never had an answer to NADECO route in the brick-and-mortar days, how can they fight in a non-tactile world of the social media? Now you see me, now you don’t. Even experts are saying that the next world war may take place in cyberspace, and all the guns and tanks and fighter jets can be immobilised by an algorithm from an arthritic finger or in a cellar by a pot-bellied couch potato facing a laptop beside a bottle of beer.

Yet all this hoopla started over a comment about a tactile movement that they cannot touch. IPOB is not a spirit. If ethnic entrepreneur Nnamdi Kanu has eluded them, it is not Twitter’s fault. With all our army and police, IPOB told Igbo to stay at home, and no soldier or police officer could guarantee their safety if they defied.

Some have wondered whether the call for secession is real, or whether it is a symptom. We should not kid ourselves, it is real. It may not be realistic. In the east, the IPOB has become strangely more legitimate than the government of the day. Just as we say of federal impotence in handling restructuring, non-state actors are taking over. Just last week, Tompolo held the south-south hostage when he threatened to shut down the region if Buhari does not reconstitute a board for the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC). He gave an ultimatum. For a test case, the East-West Road paralysed. Quickly, they brokered agreement with him and Akpabio said they will oblige by the end of the month.

This is a dangerous trend. If non-state actors get more leverage than constituted authority, the people may now start hurtling towards an alternative society. The twitter bypass is an example. Tompolo is another. Igboho may start his own uproar in the Southwest. We should not forget that Boko Haram started when Yusuf created an alternative society for them.

It is a breakdown of law. Kanu has been adept at this and turned Ohaneze Ndigbo into a dog rattling in the cage. The Southeast question has now overtaken the national imagination. The ESN has become the de facto force in the region, and the feeling is being generated that the nation is sitting beside a ticking bomb, and again we are on the verge of a civil war.

It may not be that simple. Wars don’t just happen. But they also happen when we don’t expect. Many underestimated Hitler even after the Second World War was declared, and historians recall a phase they call the “phony war,” when soldiers sat idle and drowsy on the German border, their tanks asleep and nozzles quiet. Before the Nigerian Civil War, Gowon declared police action on the east. Many thought Biafra was a hoax.

The conventional wisdom is that the Igbo do not want to go. Some think a referendum will put paid to the matter. How naïve. Who will conduct it, who will count the votes? In a nation where rigging is mantra, IPOB will take charge of the narrative. If secession wins, IPOB will ramp up its engine of legitimacy and Nigeria will be a lost cause. In the tradition of the lost cause, IPOB has nudged up Biafra as one. But if the votes do not favour Biafra, IPOB will say it was rigged. And the howling will inject the ethnic entrepreneur with more vigour. It is a catch 22 situation.

The same will happen if it were ever to happen in the Southwest. That explains why the onus is in the centre to tread carefully, and shun rhetoric that will divide us. It shows that the Biafran state of mind is neither here nor outside Igboland, and it can only be resolved by making them happy to be here. I have often told Igbo I know that even if Biafra is granted today, the next day the Nigerian embassy will run out of facilities to engage Biafrans scrambling to return to Nigeria. That is why I characterised Ojukwu as Omo Eko, who killed Biafra by trying to take Lagos instead of stay and protect the east. He was too much of a Lagos boy to coil up in an Enugu bunker. So, the Biafran state of mind is like that of its eponymous ancestor. It is schizophrenic.

The tweet was in Buhari’s name. Unlike Trump, Buhari did not tweet it. Somebody who wanted the president to look savvy brought all this to the old man. Now, he has to own it, and handling it has been shoddy. Some have accused Twitter of double standards, including the two-faced statement from NPAN and the tepid one from the Guild of Editors. We cannot compare a Tweet from a president with those of an upstart like Kanu. The president controls enormous formal power. Trump has tweeted many things and they have been pulled down and flagged. They have had it with him and pulled down his account. Again, Twitter has descended on Kanu more than the president.

The outrage was that the president did not show such outrage at the killings of people in Katsina, Zamfara, Niger, Kaduna as he expressed against the east. Yet it is within the nation’s power to stop the killings. It is like the story of Czech writer Franz Kafka in which a father with a big knife cannot cut a big loaf of bread at breakfast table while the children watch. Our weapons and army are now big for nothing.

That is the message of the hour. Just as the bandits are eluding our military, the social media also is too big for any government to cow. It is a double takiti, which in Yoruba means to stumble. Cicero’s words: “to stumble twice over a stone is a proverbial disgrace.” My hope is that, as a people, we do not become stubble in the process.

Kumuyi at 80

I remember as young man, I encountered the sober cleric at his church office after a service for an interview. I was a reporter and writing a story on the rise of new-age pastors that Quality Magazine called Funky Preachers. It turned out more than an interview but an inquiry, or a mild debate over scriptures. I did not share, at that time, some of his views, and I expressed them. I made him open his Bible to confirm some of my references.

I was impressed by his unflappable decorum, his solemn avuncular dignity and lack of offence that a young man in his late 20’s could challenge a man who was already an ecclesiastical authority. Even though I am not his church member and do not still share some of his ideas, I consider him a holy man, a restrained man who has guarded  his national intervention with poise and heavenly flavour. Happy birthday sir at 80.