By Sam Omatseye

 

This essayist often has to hark back to past melodies on this page, and I do that today. It is because, sometimes, one man’s symphony is another man’s dirge. While I noted last week that state governors have the power to put paid to the controversy over restructuring, some thought it a fanciful idea, and that In Touch is suffering from the armchair languor of a columnist’s idealism.

Such a position arises out of a lack of near-sighted vision. If they looked well around them, they might know that the work has already begun. If they looked at the state of states in this federation, that is Lagos State, they might have urged other states to hop on the train.

They might have known that no less a visionary and fighting liberal of the law than Asiwaju Bola Tinubu has been daring the federal bear since 1999, and his successors, especially Babatunde Fashola, SAN wore the amotekun uniform to chip away at the power of the centre. Tinubu was an auditor who brought a numerate eye into legal literacy. Fashola, a lawyer and SAN, followed suit suing with a suite of cases. Only recently, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, the BOS of Lagos, threw his hat in the ring by setting up an anti-corruption agency to democratise and federalise the fight on corruption.

The concept is, if the centre rusts, what will the parts do? In other words, why should the parts wait or watch while the centre rusts, if it can maintain the health of its metallic state. If David can shoot down Goliath, why wait to unleash the shot?

Today, Lagos is enjoying the plenty of revenue not by accident? It came with diligence and probing the frontiers of financial imagination. Tinubu and his successors in Lagos adhered to Jesus when he told his disciples who cast their nest away from the wrong side of the river when they could only look close by at the other side of the boat. The net was heavy with precious haul of fish. So, when Tinubu became governor of Lagos, it had a revenue of N600 million a month. When he left, Lagos was hauling close to N10 billion. The revenue has been doubled by his predecessors, and the beat goes on under the BOS of Lagos.

What Has Lagos done? Barrister Femi Falana (SAN) has explained this in 2019 in a lengthy piece published in African News Digest titled: The Legal Battle for Restructuring. Falana noted, “Although the federal government has failed to stop the restoration of limited federalism through litigation only the Lagos State government has consistently mounted political pressures to ensure power devolution. Thus, apart from litigation, the Lagos State government has dared the federal government by enacting laws in areas not covered by the exclusive and concurrent legislative lists in the Constitution. As a result of the successes recorded in the law courts, the internally generated revenue of every state government has increased rather phenomenally.”

Some of the areas Lagos has stared down the centre include Local government, town planning, land tax and the certificate of occupancy, tourism and hotels, lottery, etc. Some other matters are still in court.

It is the courage of Lagos at work. It is the fortitude of democracy. It is also the facility of the constitution, maligned at will, that is alive and well. If Lagos State can do it and raise its revenue, why can the whole 36 states not do it? Why can’t they raise enough numbers to do it as a cooperative bullwark.

Lagos did this without the bulldozer of the state houses of assembly or mobilising men and women in the National Assembly. In spite of the shadow of corruption over our courts, it is judges that swayed matters for states. This started under the Owu chief’s muscular reign. No one was more gung-ho about the power of the centre than Obasanjo, and Tinubu stared him down, and the court ordered him to release local government funds to Lagos State.

So, when the coalition of southern governors was crying for restructuring, it was like a buxom cat crying for his mother to help in felling a mouse. The power is in you. Use it. That is the plea.

The Buhari administration has said over and again that the federation is in good shape, and it is not in any hurry to even tweak. Power is not served a la carte. No one in history ever gives up power. Not even in the home. It is negotiated, coaxed or coerced. During the Yalta Conference of 1945, Winston Churchill would not give up the colonies even after Roosevelt asked that they should go into international trusteeship. “Never. Never. Never,” roared the English lion. “I did not become the Queen’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.” He was kicked out of Downing Street. Eastern Europe fell in spite of the Soviets. The Nigerian centre will not give in.  Even if any of the southern governors went to the centre, they would start fighting instinctively for the status quo. Even when all forces work to the contrary, the one who holds the power will still not relent. Gorbachev thought he was rebuilding the soviet empire when he was dismantling it. So was the last Czar, Nicholas II, whose obstinacy led to the wiping out of the clan.

If the governors do not do it, no one will. Nigeria will be our babel of federal ululations without a prospect of change, an eternal cackle of complaint. No one will do it. The centre will not hold, but it will hold out any agitation. It will be a rickety molue that will not stop or keel over. Or the Sisyphusean rock that keeps falling back down.

Those who say we should dust up the files of other committee reports or conferences know that will not work. We shall start a debate within a debate. What papers shall we adopt? Who will adopt it? Some will say let us set up another committee to determine whether they are still relevant. We will reenact Ola Rotimi’s play, Holding Talks, where jaw-jaw is a sort of war-war. Or Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. We shall be looking for a conference to end all conferences. Bishop Matthew Kukah once said Nigeria has never resolved any issue ever. This is an example.

Men like the juvenile attorney-general Abubakar Malami will pursue their hidebound visions as he did defending the herders. Or the senate president who said a wise thing in a foolish hour. They will obstruct the wheel.

If the governors cannot come together, take advantage of their Houses of Assembly or their senators and representatives, they will be wasting their powers as monarchs of democracy. Every system, no matter how republican, always stores some despotic powers either in a body, like the Roman senate, or  in a man like the US president until they abuse it, like Caesar did in Rome, or Emperor Commodus, son of Mark Aurelius. They will need governors, and manage baby-minded governors like El-Rufai, who does not know when to rein in his youth.

Governors don’t have to do a big law at once. They can chip away, one legislation at a time, one court case at a time, while lunging at a fraught constitution. The federal bear will be a spectator at its own death, the clock ticking way. Lying prostrate, the bear is clothed by a swarm of ants, killing bite by bite while the federal monster watches its decaying hulk of a body until its eyes say good night.

By Sam Omatseye

They came with the air of heirs to a new realm. They were revolutionaries. They were rescuers in a time of peril. They had great ideas. In Asaba, they all arrived, one after the other. In sartorial facades, they highlighted the cultural cornucopia of the south. The caps, tunics, beads, neckwear, footwear, et al. The time was near. Indeed, the time had come for the big jump over the chasm to save the heirloom for the realm.

But it was like a small sigh from a giant’s chest. This was an anti-climax. The governors from the south did not see it that way. They had had a great meeting, and they unveiled a great resolution.  Some call it anti-climax. Others say it was heroic.

They called for restructuring, but it was nothing new. They asked the president to address the nation. Nothing special about that. The man had been quiet on that front from the neck up for too long. They shut their borders to open grazing. Even the north has said that much. So, why all the hullaballoo, the private jets, the attires, the royal ambience, the caravans, the air of majesty of the southern governors as they strode into Asaba?

The host, Governor Ifeanyi Okowa of Delta State, hailed his colleagues. The senate president thought otherwise, couching his onslaught in logic as inelegant as its language.

They did not do anything bad. They just pointed the finger to the centre instead of at themselves. By their resolutions, they admitted that the centre could not hold. To avert anarchy, rather than release a charter of action, they uttered a cry of surrender.

Did they expect anything from their resolution from a centre that has not been able to comb the bandits from the bush, save nubile girl in college, or the old man in a village hut during night raid? What they did was a grandiloquent ritual, a good photo op, a good headline, and absolutely nothing.

It might have been better if they went to Mr. President, and told him that. Even if the man did nothing, it would have made a greater gesture, perhaps a prelude to action. Even at that, it begs the question.

The governors forget that even if the centre cannot hold, they can tie the country together. They need to heal themselves of what the Hungarian novelist of ideas, Milan Kundera, calls the unbearable lightness of being. They feel light whereas they are freighted with great power by our constitution. It is the great virtue of the federalist system that if the centre fails, the parts can save the union. This is the power they have failed to realise.

One of the great opportunities from security is the security council that men like Femi Falana (SAN) have been harping on for some time. It is a council that has not been holding. The president and governors are supposed to meet on security. That body has remained inert. The governors have the power to invoke the law and compel even the president to convene it regularly. In that meeting they can take far-reaching decisions that will even make the present security architecture superfluous if it does not obey that council. It is a body with constitutional heft. So why are the governors crying about their impotence when the power to attack the goons in our midst is within them? Are they afraid to call on the president to convene it? They have the right to browbeat him to do it within the ambit of the law.

Again, the issue of restructuring has rankled us. The argument that we have all matters resolved in the archives has droned for so long that Nigeria will need another conference to decide what document will work. It will be the rigmarole, a coming and going that goes on forever.

The southern governors can go into action and restructure the country without a conference. We know that we need two-thirds of the state houses of assembly to append signature for a matter to be passed into law. If these southern governors are ready, they can start right now. The state houses of assembly are virtually rubberstamp, and the governors preside even in this democracy with the paraphernalia of a monarch. They can bring their monarchical resources to the benefit of democracy. Soldiers have given us democracy, like the charisma of George Washington. So, why not elected governors? After all, the governors also decide who will be a member of the House of Representatives and the Senate. They control who makes law at home and centre. All they need do is come together as governor and decide to whittle the centre one law at a time, and within one year they can restructure the country, without a conference, without a billion naira jamboree and without a jot of blood. It will be a game of numbers. That is where the task calls for statesmanship and perseverance. It will be interesting to see if the president can turn down the law at his desk.

If the southern governors are serious, they can start shopping for support among their colleagues up north. It will be a grind of give-and-take. They don’t have to win them all. They just have to win enough. They can start with revenue. All states know they lack for money and that is why they go to the centre as beggars. Why can’t they take the financial wind out of the centre and legislate for fiscal federalism? This is what political scientists call cooperative federalism. Eventually, it should redound to what is called dual federalism where all powers belong to the states except foreign affairs and defence.

If the governors start this, it will give the nation its great ferment in politicking since 1960. There will be back-channel deals, threats and carrots, but the excitement of give and take will trump any subversive forces. It will be the big Nigerian dialogue. It will be the move to save the country. There will be wolves and there will be lambs. The idea is to change the wolf to lamb, or what Shakespeare calls “ravening-wolvish lamb” who might yield to their gentler natures. Governors have done such feats in the past as in the introduction of the doctrine of necessary during YarAdua’s time.

Theory will yield to practice, just as it happened when the Americans had to translate their Federalist Papers into a country. It is still work in progress even though Hamilton and Jefferson belonged to opposite ends of the pole.

It is a way to make democracy save federalism, and vice versa in the midst of the present rumbles in Nigeria.

 

Fiction in Akwa Ibom

Those who follow Akwa Ibom politics will not appreciate it until they go online, and it is a pot-pouri of opinionated folks often masquerading as great journalists. It is also the stronghold of the opposition who must tear down whatever the government is doing. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish opposition pamphleteering and honest rage. For instance, I read a piece that was saying that the government has done little on unemployment, and I wonder if the writer saw the syringe factory, the best in the subcontinent, or the coconut refinery under works, or the meter factory, among others. Or even Ibom Air, with the best planes today, and surging the Nigeria air every day. That shadowy writer also somehow blames the state government for the unfortunate slaughter of Iniubong Umoren, whereas it is a police matter and it is in the hands of the federal authorities. Beware of what brand of social media you like.

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By Sam Omatseye

We might not admit it in public, our government has reached its wit’s end in contending with both bandits and Boko Haram. This much is known from Mallam El Rufai’s rhetoric on the Forestry students. With his impotence, they were abducted. In his impotence, they stepped into freedom.

He fantatised a commando-style raid. It did not happen. It could not happen because, unlike us who have babyish intelligence networks, the bandits knew and strode out of sight. The Kaduna State Governor’s fantasy fell flat. Then he had the effrontery to tell us the story as though we should clap and caper over his imaginative failure. Generals don’t applaud strategies. They sip wines over conquests. Strategy ended Hitler’s bodies in ashes. Mussolini, known as the Sawdust Caesar because of his oversized ego, was burned in effigy. Ojukwu fled to Ivory Coast. Gadhafi expired in the hands of street thugs.

In the fever of El Rufai’s imagination, the air force would launch, wipe out the goons, save some of the students, and declare victory. He had wet dreams of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He expected blood trails, corpses of some students with hurrah in the streets. He advertised his mournful fantasy and expected our praise? His dwarfish thinking blinded him to the meaning of victory. Parents would be in sack cloths, tongues limp from wailing, faces in runnels of tears. Even if the goons died, it would be what historians call a pyrrhic victory.

Even if they had a plan, good leaders keep mum. Such revelations don’t see the light until the end of the war, in the height of hostilities. Now, they know what government plans. The strategic cat is out of the bag. It shows he lacks as a leader the mental acuity for a people in crisis. El Rufai is too glib to lead.

We also saw that in negotiating the Faka students’ release, the family of the bandits were involved. One of them whose name is coincidentally Buhari was also coincidentally Known as General. His father had a role in the bargains. The story shows, one, that it is not just foreigners who torment us. They are part of us. As French philosopher Montesquieu noted, societies don’t fall from outside forces until forces within have already fallen. Bandits cannot abide in our forests with such prosperity and defiance without roots here. Two, if they have roots here, why are we finding it difficult to root them out and rout them? It shows we are not serious about peace in the land. It is, as it were, in the family. It is like we love our family too much to rebuke the bad boys. So the ferment of evil eats us alive while we look.

Three, it shows that we cannot fight the war on bandits with our army, intelligence networks, or air force. We might buy the best weapons, but we shall fail. Superior arms have never guaranteed victory anywhere in history. It only complements other factors, including intelligence and motivation. These two factors are lacking and they cripple any fire power. We are fighting bandits without bandwidths. Our telecom forces are not catching their phone calls or not understanding them.

Hence, we must go beyond our armed forces. The appeal to American forces will not do it either. When Americans fought ISIL in the Middle East, they employed what they call in their fancy and euphemistic language, “Private Military contractors.” The world calls them mercenaries. No one deploys that language because they have been declared illegal by the United Nations since 1989. So if the problem is that they are called mercenaries, countries like the United States who are signatories, decided to conjure a different language. All over the world, they come in handy. They are deploying the Illegal for the service of peace. Some of the best fighters as mercenaries are American veterans, including the dreaded Navy Seals, who still want to fight out of boredom and more pay. Two of the major such mercenary groups are the Wagner Group and Blackwater.

We cannot pretend we don’t know these fighters. There is nowhere in the world where there are conflicts, especially high intensity ones, where mercenaries are not at work. They are crack squads, if some of their personnel are crackpots.  The Jonathan administration hired them against Boko Haram, and according to documented reports, they achieved in a few weeks, what the Nigerian army could not in six years. That fruit was exploited by the Lai Mohammed in the early days of Buhari’s administration when he boasted that Boko Haram’s end was in the horizon. Jonathan built, Buhari inherited. But he could not maintain the house. They did not pay the mercenaries to continue. They packed their loads, including their Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships, and left. Their exit was a shot in the arm for Boko haram, hence their current swagger.

The reason is the hubris of our army and government. We cannot hope on an army that has failed his people. The Americans, with the best the world has ever known, uses them. Irbil, the capital of Kurdistan, is the chief marketplace of mercenaries today. Veterans of drug wars in Chile, Panama, Colombia, El Salvador, have been enlisted in their fiery market. In Africa, Sudan, Chad and Eritrea have harvested them for conflicts around the world. Even Ukraine and Russia, who are staring each other down like two cocks, have them in their armoury.

It is because the Nigerian army has failed that it cannot give up. That is the tragic irony. But we cannot stop these goons in the bushes until we get the mercenaries. They know no fear. They want to be paid. They care not for the herdsman or the gang of kidnappers. They will go from forest to forest like bush fire, and raze the bandits to ashes. They will save us time and money. New reports show we have spent N10 trillion in six years on security, and we are here walking our streets with our hearts pounding like a goat’s in a lion’s grip.

Reports say we have spent too much money and some in the political and military top brass want it so because security is profitable. It means the death of our fellow citizens is profitable. Lack of development is profitable. National fear and trembling is profitable.

Standing armies are not always the cure for fear. From the ancient times, mercenaries have been a forte of fights. In the Bible days, they were handy. Pompey and Caesar used them. Xenophon employed Greek mercenaries. Carthage deployed them for the Punic Wars. Hannibal’s army was typical as they mounted elephants. Alexander the Great could not write his exploits without them. Popes used and applauded them during the Crusades. Author Thomas More hired them to protect his Utopian state in his satire, Utopia. Colonial armies used them to take our people as slaves and conquer us into colonies. They also formed the West African Frontier Force in British West Africa and Senegalese Sharp Shooters for the French.

It is not a moral army. They have no ideologies or faith. In fact, Machiavelli described them in The Prince, as “gallant among friends, vile among enemies, no fear of God, no faith with men.” Frederick Forsyth wrote that Adekunle recruited some never-do-wells, including prison inmates, to form the Third Marine Commando, the fiercest force in the Civil War, where Alabi Isama was chief of staff. Their only loyalty is to get the job done. In my television show on TVC, Alabi Isama said, soldiers are not asked to do their best but to get the job done.

Our task is to flush out the felons. Let us get those who can do it for us. To hire the mercenaries is the beginning of wisdom, the urgency of freedom.

By Sam Omatseye

When the Owu chief foisted the EFCC on the nation, many hailed him as a moral arbiter, a secular priest with the anointing oil to wither the itchy finger of the mighty.

The pious hailed, and they could find a place in scripture to buoy him. After all, in the Old Testament, the prophet Zechariah invoked Jehovah’s curse on the house of the thief.

Someone asked us for restraint. He is dead now, but he must squirm in triumph in the grave. Rotimi Williams had challenged it in court and noted that we cannot fight corruption as revenge. And, in any case, where was its place in the constitution?

We have seen the fight on corruption become an onslaught either for one man, against one man, against a political party, a sword of menace, a populist piece of meat in the tiger’s cage. It has often turned into an intrigue in Abuja, whether it was to browbeat a fellow party chieftain or to make a Magu turn from a slobbering flatterer with an idolater’s badge of the president to a wimp besieged.

Professor Itse Sagay (SAN) warned not long ago that the attorney general is trying to upend the war on corruption into his personal moral fiefdom.

So, there. We have had a few scapegoats. A governor here, an IG there, a few business perverts.  But for most part, the war on corruption is like a farce mocking corruption on an elaborate stage. It claims victories that we cannot even call pyrrhic, since there are not real victories but mockeries of the overcomer. Just like the Roman leader Caligula, who wanted to distract his people and get home approval in his reign of profligacy and sexual orgies. He decided to invade Britain as a prize since even the great Augustus could not. On the verge of battle, he retreated and conned his people by marching into Rome with his own soldiers decked as prisoners of war and his people hailed him as a war hero.

The EFCC made the Nigerian thief into the Igbo proverb popularised in Achebe’s Things fall Apart. They learn to fly with our money without perching. The EFCC keeps shooting and missing. The war has even morphed into a game of an unspoken alloy and ally between the judiciary and the federal government, so a case can become an eternal song like the case that never ends from generation to generation in Charles Dickens’ novel, The Bleak House.

What is wrong? We have tried to make the fight of corruption into a sort of martial presence. It is an overhang from the military era. For the most part, it runs against the gain of a federal constitution. Hence this essayist supports the step by the man who bears the payload of Lagos in his small frame, The BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu for setting up an anti-corruption agency backed by law.

“We believe that this law will not only ensure accountability of public funds, responsibility of public office but also promote dialogue among public officers to keep the trust of the people…” noted Gov. Sanwo-Olu.

Some have railed at the law as a dig on Abuja and a shield of Lagos bigwigs. If we must run a federal system, let us do it. Corruption fight is not oil, and it does not belong on the exclusive list. Why should the centre think it has moral authority over the states? What makes them holier? After all, we have seen in the intrigues and infighting over the EFCC that the hands of the priest are not better than the hypocritical character Teribogo in Soyinka’s new novel, Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth. Or Brother Jero. They lay claim to equity, but where are their clean hands?

The fight on corruption was taken as harmless at first, but gradually, like the Rhinoceros in Eugene Ionesco’s play, everyone becomes a rhino and loses their own personality.

We need to hark back to Rotimi’s William’s wisdom when he first challenged it. Some who say it is primed to save a man only look at the moment. Democracy is not a system for a day, it is for centuries, a system of laws and not of men. To federalise the fight is to give it back to the people.

The fight against corruption is also part of the larger current of a populist trend today. In the legislative sphere, the lawmakers are angling for not only freedom to make laws but also money to be free. In a democracy, your major source of strength is your finance base. If we want to federalise anti-corruption war, we should also support free legislatures, so the executives do not hold their purse strings.

The judicial arm also deserves same, and the JUSUN strike hits at the heart of this. When a court does not need a chief executive and the assembly can account for its own money, nobody has a power to steal with impunity.

But when we subject the war to the peccadillos of one man in the centre or an agency, we don’t have anti-corruption. We have dictatorship. We are not running a totalitarian state. We are running a republic.

The Owu chief was very clever when he started it. He looked for a big fish, and it had to be a police chief. He appointed a junior police officer to squelch his former oga. It was a dramatic episode in Nigerian history. It had the ingredients of great theatre: suspense, overthrow of mores, surprise of outcome.

It is an irony that the police have been used to prosecute the war. The same police have become the punching bag of federalist fighters today. The same police are on the exclusive list. A clamour for state police has drowned the land. In this day of the breakdown of law and order, we are saying that we need each state to own their security. It was resisted for a long time. We are growing close to a national consensus on state police now.

The same should apply to the anti-corruption war. We build an institution to save a system, not to coddle a few. Even if they save a few for the present, we cannot elevate one person’s hatred for a generation’s loss. The white made a few laws to protect the white man and white woman from the black man. One of them is the divorce law. It is the whites who benefit from them more today. Once a law is just, it will save the people. When the US said all men were created equal, they meant white men. Today, George Floyd’s family appropriated that declaration for all humans.

Lagos has always been the lab rat of Nigeria’s democracy, just like New York and California in the United States. The revenue system, the local government order, the search to make electric power broken into parts, etc, all began here in Lagos. Lagos is putting its fingers in the fire again, and this time to burnish our moral fibre.

If the problem with Nigeria is about leadership, as Achebe noted, it is about leadership of values. We cannot do that when we enthrone values with Czars instead of democrats.

 

Helen Prest’s other beauty

Many remember her as beauty, one of Nigeria’s belles who took home the prized trophy of Miss Nigeria. She became a wife and mother and moved out of the spotlight. It seems she does not want to be the lady who is known as the pretty face or the curves of seduction for memory. Or what some with mischief might call femme fatale. She challenged herself and has written a book, not about fashion or how to make your skin glow for your man. It is a book ambitiously titled, A Complete English Grammar Guide. Helen Prest Ajayi pays attention to some of the nuances of grammar as she explains the basic errors of tenses and how to make them right.

This book is her other beauty.

By Sam Omatseye

The tragedy is not just that Isa Pantami did it. It is that he will get away with it, and with Buhari at the helm. It is not that he will get away with it. He has already. The bigot with fantasies of blood and death is our minister. Live with it.

He decides the lives of good Muslims and Christians as a steward of the constitution. Whereas the good Muslims and Christians don’t regard him as belonging to civilization, he will stand atop the dais and point the way.

Surely, rather than bring a coalition of both faiths against the man, even this matter is separating Muslims and Christians. It is bifurcating faith and tribe. The Muslims (even in the south) are, at their best, mute. The ones in the north, at their worst, are repackaging him. Even as we caught Pantami with his pants down, we are covering him from the eyes of shame.

Here facts do not matter. It does not matter that he wants unbelievers dead and gloats over it. It does not matter that he lionises Osama Bin Laden as a superior Muslim over him. Osama is the radical of his dreams. That means he might have wanted to stage a feast of human blood, a feat of pious massacre, to stand as vanguard with Ak47 and his troops behind, ramming triumphant into Christian and other non-Muslim yards and taking persons down, slaughter after slaughter. That makes the Sunday Achi incident a puny experiment.

That is why we say he is a sympathiser? But he is not a sympathiser. How can we call him a sympathiser when he hates to be a bystander? He was an imam when he and his mosque issued a Fatwa on Sunday Achi at the Tafawa Balewa University in Bauchi. To issue a fatwa is not an act of impulse, but calculation. Like that on writer Salman Rushdie. Between the fatwa and the execution takes, at least, hours. So he violated our law as a co-existent nation, capsized the constitution and ordered a lynch mob on a fellow citizen. Was he not grinning for fulfilling his vision of a sanitized theocracy? In any society, Isa Pantami would not be attending a meeting of the Federal Executive Council but languish in the court answering to charges of murder in the first and second degrees. Achi’s ghost, like Shakespeare’s Banquo’s, woke up a few weeks ago. It will walk the night and day beside Pantami whispering in his ears. But he thinks he is immune.

Read Also: Pantami: Senate must be more careful in future, says Dogara

He is not only in the scented tyranny of an exalted office, he is part of the governing elite. He is sitting under the aegis of the presidency in the federal executive council whose minutes are anointed by the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He will take a seat among administrators and politicians, when he should keep company with Bin Laden’s dregs. He will wear babaringa or western suits, when he should don the tunics of apocalyptic daydreamers. He is invoking language registers like development and unity in a lie since his comfort zone consists of words like “kill” and “eliminate” and “burn”.

For those who say he has repented, let them look for someone lame to convince. He first denied and attacked a newspaper. A man of repentance would show remorse, not aggression. He should show proof and not take us for fools. He seemed to recant in his statement, but he did not seem to have regretted it. He did not condemn what he said. He merely excused them, even justified them. The statement was written with the cunning of zealot and the artifice of a Pharisee.  He was caught, and said he was too young. Too young when he was past voting age? Young when he was old enough to be a senator or minister or CEO of a company? He was not 18. He was in his 30’s, older than when Gowon became head of state.

It was even alleged that he beamed a programme of his ministry on a dedicated Islamic channel. Is that true? It is like Osinbajo beaming the Anchor Borrowers programme on Dove TV.

Between when he grinned over a lynch mob and roared his will to attack Shendam, and now, what has he done to show a change of heart? No evidence. We cannot trust leadership on speculation. But facts have meant nothing in this matter.

It has meant nothing to the presidency, hence Garba Shehu’s glib remarks. He wrote to praise him, not to upbraid him. He wrote to accuse critics, rather than face the facts. He wrote to defend a bigot, not calm a bewildered nation. He wrote to tell Nigerians to go to hell.

Some have said the security agents knew about the facts but shielded him. The senate, at the time of writing, has not said it had any facts. That is why we must worry. The senators are paid to research, and dig. The security agents are paid to do same, and the man fell through the cracks? Some said he did not. Garba Shehu did not address this. But as for the secret service, they have failed too many times to track bandits and militants, and allowed them to roam the country with their human loot without information. So, there is no incompetence they cannot exhibit.

Persons like Pantami will continue to erupt and defy, and get away with murder. Men like Pantami are the most dangerous bigots. They go to school, speak like the highbrow, learn a lot of western theories about liberalism, put on a veneer of urbane society. They embrace the ideas of democrats like Locke and Rousseau and parrot the grand theories of civilization. But their acts mock their learning. Some of the great theories of racism came from men who learned and traveled. Trump has a master’s degree. Such men read to reinforce their prejudices.

Pantami has been to the UK, and has lived and enjoyed the trappings of western civilization. He might even enjoyed their movies. But these beauties are the seed bed of his hate. He loathes himself for loving them. After all, he has a PHD, and he learned a technology steeped in western inventiveness. Like in Romeo and Juliet, he says in his heart, “my only love sprung from my only hate.”

Pantami is afraid of modernity, a zealot with fear in his eyes. Hence he loves Bin Laden. But he is the hypocrite. He feeds on modernity so he could suffocate it. Sane societies heal themselves by providing a reckoning for them with public disgrace. They resign, or are fired. They slouch out of sight, end up in jail or out of the limelight. Younger ones imbibe from the public ignominy the lesson that actions have consequences. But with Pantami off the hook, his legacy is clear: Inspire hate, grin over a lynch mob and you can become a minister of Nigeria.

From being a model zealot, this administration is making him into a role model for future leaders.

 

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Keeping schools safe

The kidnap tales from Kaduna schools show that the state is showing naivety in the face of danger. Why are schools still left open for the marauders? Is it not time to change the model of security? When the matter was hitting its fatal stride, Sokoto State Governor Aminu Tambuwal developed a strategy. For public schools he first merged them, so the ones close to borders were properly monitored and guarded. Then he decided later that boarding was out of sync with reality. Now they have day schools, redesigned to make students attend schools close to their homes. It is better to be safe than sorry. Any school that is vulnerable should not be open.

This is no time for risk taking. Lives are more important than policy.

By Sam Omatseye

We did not see moments of national empathy for President Muhammadu Buhari when he fled Nigeria for his routine medical checkup. After all, it was not like in 2016 when the morbid hour threatened, or Yar’Adua 2.0. Nothing startled in our presidential comfort zone.

The thing was the president was well. But what of the country? The president has a jet to fly out, but what of its citizens? The president has a doctor, but what of Nigerian doctors? The president’s doctor was not on strike, but wore his frock and wielded his scalpel. At that time, the Nigerian doctor was striking a match of protest so he can wear a frock and wield a scalpel. London was cold, our president was warm, but Nigeria was boiling hot.

Garba Shehu, ever making a wrong leap, said the president had a physician in the United Kingdom, long before he became president. He demystified his principal’s image of the common touch. The talakawa captain ate with the poor but healed with the rich. When they chanted sai baba, they returned to their huts when hurt. He hurtled to the Queen’s bosom.

We have no record how many Nigerians slumped and expired here while his doctors doted over him. How many kidney’s failed, hearts arrested, wounds bled without stop, tumours that halted humours at home. Or how many died from malaria or routine birth pangs.

Yet, we cannot say the president does not deserve the best medical care. He is the leader of the country. He should be in the best health to decide on education, the infrastructure deficit, the herdsmen forays and the thieves on official prowl.

He had the benefit in 2016. He was a baby president, apologies to Ayo Fayose. He still needed to put things in place for medical care. He had to thresh the floor for policy, to turn Nigerian hospitals from mere consulting clinics to full-fledged clinics and hospitals, to reengineer personnel recruitment and training to make our hospital on the march to the 21st century. We have not seen this, and when he decided in the sixth year of his stewardship to travel for mere checkup, we can understand why many Nigerians are not asking whether our president is doing well. He did not speak to Nigerians but he made himself an epistolary poet, a man of letters. He wrote a letter to another leader about his welfare. Not to us who pay the bills, but to some fellow elite enjoying the same perquisite.

There are some members of the elite who feel Buhari’s pain. They can afford the thousands of pounds it must cost for a day at the hospital. They spend it without apology. They can afford it, and why not. They don’t run our healthcare system. They have no say. They just consume. And if they must consume, why should they wait and die in consulting clinics. They put their dollars where their health is.

But that elite self-justification has been purloined by their political elite. They set up a few clinics with a few drugs, and hail themselves as the John The Baptist of good governance. Years after year, our health indices fall. OBJ’s centres of excellence became excellence in cretinism.

Six years after he was sworn in, Buhari has no reason to seek empathy. He did not need to have brought us to healing pond or Pool of Siloam. But we should see it in the works. No one forced him to proclaim that no public servant should seek medical attention abroad. He is seeking it. That does not make him a hero. It does not make him Sai Baba but “Baba say”. Many say baba does not say anything these days.

In 2016, many thought he would go. His great foes were his associates. Some of them were in the frenzy of permutations.  Who would replace him? Underhand plots unearthed and cracked like pots of clay. Colleagues jousted in furtive places. Meetings and counter-meetings. On the streets, some prayed in the spirit. Some prayed against his spirit. Churches and mosques were vessels of heavenly invocations. Prophets mumbled his apocalypse. Imams saw the new successors. Newspaper editors were imagining headlines. Talakawa beggars triumphed who raised their hands in divine pleas.

When he erupted through the Abuja skies, we saw bedlam on the streets. I wonder what is going on in the minds of those Nigerians who fell in a trance for him in 2016. In their delirium of joy, they carped and howled as he returned after the medical suspense. A certain joy-clad fellow poured water on the ground and drank. That person may have headed to the hospital afterwards. Dances. Claps. Songs. Sai baba. That was then. He was draped in messianic robe. This time, no éclat, no claps. We can say also, there was no stake. His health was in no danger. That exactly is the point. Since he was in no danger, he did not need to go, not when medical care was in turmoil at home.

Not long ago, I learned of a Nigerian who lives in the United States who had a pacemaker for his heart. Former Vice President Mike Pence had a similar procedure last week. The Nigerian would love to retire home, but he said he could not. “We don’t even have the drugs I need here in this country,” he explained. “When I had the surgery, there were six doctors who spent hours in the operation. I can’t count the nurses and support staff. When they were done, the doctors said I would be up and running in six weeks. The way I was feeling, I did not believe them. But they were right. If I was living in Nigeria, I would have been history. They said they gave me presidential-style treatment.” He is a regular US citizen.

This is why many go abroad. This is why the president did. He has the power to set such infrastructure up. That is why many are not happy, and would not as much as say, hope all is well, our dear president. The average Nigerian is like the blind Bartimaeus in the Bible crying for miracle as Jesus walked by. Many of them are not as lucky. They don’t get their miracles.

I wonder if the president grieves over the graying of his myth, that his faithful now choke on his mantra, that baba and sai no longer occur in the same breath. I would want to enter his stream of consciousness, to know whether, like Lord Jim in Joseph Conrad’s novel, he suffers delusions about himself, or remorse. Not whether he failed his people, but whether he failed himself. That is what this essayist likes to know.

 

Fear, glory and Ebube Agu

Last week, this essayist set some English language and semiotics pundits on fire over how to define an icon, or how iconography works. I had a friendly joust with Transportation Minister Rotimi Amaechi over whether we could as yet call the railways headquarters an icon. While that debate raged in and outside this column, I saw that a poor definition was afoot. It was in the southeast when the governors launched Ebube Agu, the region’s answer to the Southwest’s Amotekun. I joked that Amotekun, a big cat in its own right, was as a baby jaw compared to the famed king of the jungle, the lion. The leopard will wince when it hears the territorial roar of the big cat. It will know no peace but retreat even when it sniffs its territorial piss. No matter. But when Ebube Agu was translated for the public, some called it the fear of the lion or the glory of the lion. They mean well. I don’t speak Igbo, but it shows how translation alone cannot be left in the hands of the owners of the language. They can destroy it. Remember Nkpoko Igbo, the popular TV series of yore. Fear here makes the lion strong without authority. Glory hints at accomplishment or celebration. The translator must look for a word that matches the context. In this case, it is security. Here, I suggest AWE. It encompasses both fear and glory, and lends respectability. You don’t only fear the best armies, you respect them. How about that, my Igbo friends.

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By Sam Omatseye

Sometimes a column such as In Touch takes a time off for self-reckoning. It is doing so today with permitted indulgence, or I daresay not permissive indulgence. One of its followers, a man not known to many, passed on. His name was Joseph Lucky Agbro.

He was until last week a fellow traveller with In Touch for about a decade. He was not just a reader. He kept date with me very Monday morning wherever I was. In London, In New York, In Denver, Paris, Abuja, Sokoto, Maiduguri, of course Lagos. He called in the morning. The first refrain often was, “I read you this morning.” My reply, “Thank you sir.”

He passed on at 75 precipitously. He was old, but not tottering. His voice, a slow, methodical poise, did not reflect a man grasping for ideas or elocution. His going was a blind side. He did not belong to my ideological jacket. He grew up what many would call a conservative. He was a player in the old National Party of Nigeria. If he was in the wily water of the Umaru Dikkos of that era, he might have earned himself a ministerial slot, in that twisted portfolio of prepositional ministers of Shagari. Minister of and minister for.

His contrarian worldview played a role in shaping my argument and poesy. I had to watch out for that polemical fine point, that phrase, that allusion. When he disagreed deeply, we could be on the phone for up to an hour, especially if it was the prickly issue of taking on Jonathan, or pushing an idea he thought was a bit radical.

When he agreed, his favorite phrase was “Sam, there is nothing to take away, You said it all.” Sometimes he accused me of bamboozling the readers with my fancy phrases and lofty allusions. Sometimes he took exception to my use of allusions, to references to histories, myths, literary texts, philosophers, et al. Sometimes he would say he loved them so much he had to do some research like a student. Since he started to call about a decade ago, he never missed a Monday. When he travelled or had an early morning appointment, he alerted me and called later. Uncle Joe, as I called him, had become part of my early Monday ritual.

As I mourn Uncle Joe, I also look back at some old men who were part of this column until death did them part. One of them was Chief Hope Harriman. A roly-poly of a man, bustling with humour and a great raconteur, I first met him in Denver during my American sojourn. He was attending the Itsekiri Convention, and he walked up to me and introduced himself. I had heard of him. He kept calling wherever he was. I was then writing a column for the Sun Newspaper, and he commented liberally on his thoughts.

When I returned home to start In Touch, so impressed was he that he invited me with his wife Roli to a party in Ghana. He was the father of the day at my 50th birthday. He was used to calling from around the world, whether from his Florida home, during a business trip to India, or Port Harcourt function. Few anticipated his end. He looked eternal in his bonhomie. His daughter Temi told me they were preparing his 80th birthday bash when his earthly story ended.

Tam David West, former oil minister and something of a cause celebre in this country, was another frequent caller. His voice declined over the years, from an argumentative brio to a wobbly blur. His first call came about 2007 when he expressed ecstasy over how I interpreted German philosopher Nietzsche’s phrase, “God is dead,” and he called often to assent, assert and encourage me. We met only once in Abuja at the Hilton. Towards the end of his life, I hardly heard what he said, except something that sounded like “fantastic.”

Another familiar oldie was Chief J.O.S. Ayomike. He was a man of great vitality, who called to spar. I never met him, but he was not only a repository of ideas but also of history. Anytime he called, I had to abandon whatever I was doing to pay my respect. At one time, so enamoured was he of In Touch that he mailed books from his precious library to me in Lagos. It was one of the treasures I feared when some hoodlums came to burn The Nation premises. Thank God they were intact. I was trying to surprise him with a visit when I was billed to deliver a keynote address to Government College Ughelli Old Boys, Warri Branch. But he had gone. I was in Benin a few months earlier, I might have peeped in. The other visitor outstepped me.

Pa Mosanya, a light-skinned man with a debonair air, who loved to quote the classics and was steeped in western region politics and history, walked into my office one afternoon. He was already in his 80’s. He had memories of some of my columns I could not readily recall, and he became a sort of father figure to me. When he called, he spoke like a lawyer, “Me Lord.” Once he brought copies of my old writings. When he visited, I did nothing else and he would spend hours dissecting the problems of the world.

I was amazed at his capacity to retain long poems in his head and he reeled them out with gusto and arresting flow, from Oliver Goldsmith to William Blake. The great thing about him was his sense of contentment. The last time I saw him he said he had outlived his father. He was about 87 years old.

When he passed on, like the others, it was hard to take. Columns are a lonely affair without treasured communities, especially of the old. I still have quite a few of them but will not mention them. I want them around. They abound across the country. Not only the old, but quite of few young who have adopted me as mentor, a role that I confess I have not played well. Too many things on the plate. There is a fellow, who like Uncle Joe, has sent me a text every Monday for more than 10 years. I will not say his name. Or the fellow, a prominent Nigerian I would also not name, who called me and sent me a big wallet to buy “more books.” The money could build a library.  He wanted me to continue with my turns of phrases. Many more of such stories for another day.

But I mourn Uncle Joe, and I know there will be no phone call from him this Monday or ever again. May his soul rest in peace.

Is it an Icon?

It was not only an inspection. It was a moment in cultural dialectics. Full of energy, Transportation Minister Rotimi Amaechi showed me the façade of the new railway headquarters in Lagos and remarked, “Is there any place as iconic?” A boyish glee was suppressed in his voice. I looked at the impressive façade, and I said, “Iconic?” I said when I hear the word, I think of National Theatre, not the railway headquarters. He was driving and swerved into the large sprawling compound, and we undertook a tour. It is an impressive spectacle, and I said it drew my mind to my visit to New York’s Grand Central Station, and of course the Hauptbahnhof in Berlin. The place is complete with waiting area that can sit at least 2000 persons, and transport a million passengers a month, more than all of our airports in one year. It has a mall, a suite of offices, state-of-the-art electronic boards, steps and escalators.

It is such a cheer to see such an edifice in Nigeria in spite of the killings and fear in the land. When we were done, the minister returned to the word. I said it was not an icon. It had not even been launched. He asked me to look up the word in the dictionary, and searched Google, and it read, “An image, emblem, idol, or hero.” He insisted he was right, along with the Nigerian Railway Corporation’s managing director and few of his team. A building, no matter how impressive, did not make an icon, until human beings turn it into a cultural experience. Humans make icons, things don’t. But I understand where Amaechi was coming from. He was eager to institutionalize the edifice. Time will shape things. I conceded though, that it is potentially iconic.

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By Sam Omatseye

 

He moved in the night as the news dawned. The BOS of Lagos wanted facts, not in the mockery of Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times. He wanted to be sure he did not mix the dead among the living or the living among the dead.

This is in respect of the Lekki incident that some social commentators or media outlets sensationally called massacre in a macabre abuse of the word “massacre.”

The matter rose from its smouldering stove last week when the United States expressed ambiguity over the story that many people died. The report expressed the position of the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, that noted that two lives were confirmed dead. Even at that the connection of one of the dead to the scene was tenuous. The US report noted that the army was there as an ignoble presence. The governor as much as acknowledged that at the point of the controversy.

What strikes this writer is the contrast between the report of the US government and the CNN, the country’s most vocal outlet in the world. The CNN reported killings. It verified none. The human rights body, Human Rights International, said 10 people died. It did not prove their names.

Since the infamous night, we have seen claims, encountered ghosts, a certain D.J. Switch with apparitions of the dead on social media, mothers have materialised with the rage of a puffadder only to ebb out like puffs of smoke.

Other than the two mentioned, we are yet to ascertain if there are any more dead. Even one death is a tragedy. No life is worth the insanity of an army.

Amnesty International with their Nigerian researchers jumped into conclusion. Its hubris will not let it flag to facts. Rather it challenged the US report without facts.

The US, just like the Lagos governor,  say they are open to facts. If there are more dead, let us see them. That is the reason he set up a panel that includes the EndSars representatives. So far, we have seen no hard evidence. Somehow Amnesty wants us to believe 10 died at least.

If the Nigerian staff of the august body wants to justify their pay, they are welcome to it. But they should not sacrifice the facts. As this writer has noted in the past, corpses are no ghosts. If they are dead, they  should have found brothers; if not brothers, sisters. If not siblings, parents. If not parents, co-workers. If not that, they should have neighbours. Amnesty International cannot say that because there were shootings, it must result in massacres.

To be clear, the army acted like a leopard in ambush. It had no right to fire bullets. Its acts had no place in a democracy or in civilised place. It was barbarism even if it shot the bullets in the air. The army brass contradicted itself first by denying it was there and later confirming its presence with defiance. Up till today, no one has been queried for that night.

CNN has, for its storied record, goofed. It will be interesting to see the executives of the network go back to the story in humility. It is not reporting to turn social media mirage into facts, to elevate a fleeing DJ Switch into a heroine, and make professional cockiness into a virtue.

The US position was a responsible one. It wanted to speak with evidence, not sentiment. CNN wanted sensation as driver for revelation. Because they saw rage on Facebook and Instagram, some media leaders and so-called influencers marshalled facts to match the fire of the hour. It was a leap of Imagination, fantasy over facts.

Media gets away with a lot, especially when it does not face scrutiny. But when it comes to body count, it has often been a guess game. Media leaders must learn to be sure of their facts when disasters strike.

Headlines about incidents often differ. Reporters ought to leave matters not provable on the level of speculation. They tend to get away with it. Now, they have to collide with the truth. The main point here is that facts are sacred, as they teach all historians and journalists. But opinions are free.

The advent of social media has complicated the business of facts and the power of truth.

Ambiguity is a better virtue than leap to facts. Facts are a sober business. Biases can colour what we seem to see into what we deceive ourselves to have seen. Hence reporters delve into several checks before delivery as consumables. Once the words are in the public space, they contaminate the society.

The business of reporting is not a flawless enterprise. But its integrity lies in the humility of admitting errors when they occur. It is because of professional hubris that some people like Donald Trump have lashed on to the fake news mantra. News gathering is a human effort. It has done a great job for civilisation but that is why it must be humble.

For all the lack of grace of the former US president, he forced the media to look inwards and recast its certainties. It is an irony that the US reporting on the Lekki Shooting played down CNN and that should tell them that it is better to err on the side of caution than jump headlong into falsehoods.

It is interesting that those who call it a massacre have not eaten the humble pie of apology. It is because even in the news business, we exercise the same impunity that we accuse the army of performing. Bad news can be as harmful as stray bullets. Wars have erupted because of it. The media helped George W. Bush plunge the world into over a decade of turmoil in the Middle East. It was based on false claims over weapons of mass destruction. When I taught media in the US,  I kept urging my students to address the facts. I said no media house had proved it. A year later a student accosted me on  the hallway to apologise to me. He said he thought I was anti-American. He had learned a great lessons in news sobriety. The media also inflamed passion that lit the tinder of pogrom that imploded Nigeria in the 1960′. Words are more dangerous than guns. Words made firefights. Wars cannot happen without words. In the beginning was the word. Too many lives end because a bad word started it. Napoleon boasted that pens were not mightier than the sword. It was words, the reporting of his magisterial fireworks that brought him down at Waterloo.

When we hear facts, let us be sober before we soar into anger. It is an irony, that the first words on body counts  came from Governor Sanwo-Olu and, up till now, even the US government cannot controvert him.

 

Soludo’s escape

 

The attempt on former CBN chief’s life is a sad chapter on Anambra State politics and political ambition in Nigeria. We cannot say it was not bloody. It was choreographed to threaten Chukwuma Soludo. Maybe they didn’t want to kill but to shake him up. The facts remain blur. They killed the guards and wounded others. They probably want him to quit the race. So they sacrificed his security for that? Such murderous cynics.

It’s up to Soludo, a distinguished Nigerian and by any means a worthy man to be governor, to decide if he will faze or face his detractors. If we cry over the herdsman’ butchery, let us not forget the dark heart of the desperate politician. They are no better. They are the ones we trust to stop the herdsmen, whereas they are cousins in carnage.

 

By Sam Omatseye

He could not wait. Ibrahim Shamaki’s heart failed him. The government failed him. Time had also failed him. He probably felt he had failed his daughter caught on video under the monstrous, gun-wielding goons who took away 38 other Kaduna students. So, he succumbed.

The clock ticks like a heart but it has no heart. Shamaki imagined his daughter under the spell of bandits. He probably saw the video many times or only once. Was the girl, viral online and wrapped in silky blue hijab, her face in palpable fear, still alive? No voice contact on phone, no emails or text messages. Was her beauty defiled by the jungle men? Beaten? Raped? Tortured?

He probably had the answers, or some of it, and he could not live on as witness to the despoliation of his flesh and blood, and offspring he brought in innocence to the world. He waited. Patience united him and his daughter. But, unlike the word of Jesus, patience did not possess his soul. Patience failed. Life is about waiting. We wait for what we give timelines. We wait to finish school, to eat, to heal, to get home, to become fathers and mothers. We never wait to die.

Most of our goals we think we have control over because time and chance will answer it. “We never live,” crooned French philosopher Voltaire, “we are always in the anticipation of living.” Shamaki gave up hope of any anticipation. He gave up his own ghost. He clocked out.

Shamaki’s story is Nigeria’s story in the past few years. It is Nigeria’s tragedy, but it is families who mourn. We may pity the families, but real persons like Shamaki shed tears, or die.

The travail of the Shamakis gives us a peep into the bandit’s house of horrors. These men act in bushes, in cells, or groups. They are forest demons. Each group has its leader. The forests are many, especially in the north and middle belt. They have their own modes of operations. They have no other life. They band, they attack, they work their victims as task masters, they ask for ransom. They also kill, maim and rape. They have carved up their own paradise, their alternative society. They play by their own unwritten constitution. They have, as it were, signed an oath to die as bandits of fortune.

It may have started as mere criminal forays, as red-blooded boys seeking a livelihood. But it is not like Boko Haram that morphed out of neglect into faith. Yusuf saw the abandoned boys and adopted them into a ragtag republic under heaven. Today, even with Yusuf gone, his flames and fury ravage the northeast and have given fodder to the routine corruption of a bedraggled army brass. A failed government gave birth to an army of pious renegades. But the nation’s organised army is helpless to fight it. Order at the mercy of chaos.

We may have a bigger monster on our hands than Boko Haram. Sheikh Gumi had described the ongoing banditry as “ethnic.” That is perhaps the first articulation of some form of rhythm among the groups scattered about the country, from north to east, to south-south to southwest.

We have also observed their obsession with schools and students. If it is not a meeting of minds with Boko Haram, it may be a coincidence of vision. But that is dangerous. In my recent TVC interview with Sokoto State Governor Aminu Tambuwal, he warned that we should not close down schools. It may fulfill Boko Haram’s tenet of forbidden education. He converted boarding students to day students, so as not to fall foul of the bush men.

That is what we should watch out for. These men of the forests may be working as separate entities, as bandits of fortune. But with the state weak, they grow strong, and even more daring as savages. If the military brass cannot work together to stem them, the next step may be the rise of a uniting hero. We have to watch out for the rise of another Yusuf. His second coming may bring down the country. This may become the hero in the forests across the country. They could find such a man even fascinating, like a god. All he needs are two qualities. One, he has to exude the charisma of a brute who flatters their secret hopes of dominance. Two, he may synthesise their dreams into an “idea.” The idea might not be religious or ethnic per se. And it could be either. But the idea only needs to intoxicate. So under this charismatic villain, the leader in Niger State may join with the leader in Kaduna, and the ones lurking in Ekiti or the one in Benue, and we could have more than a rebellion in our hands. We shall have commotion. We may call it so, but they might see it as freedom. They could elevate barbarism into a cause. Racism, Nazism, colonialism or other forms of stylised butchery in human history began by sugarcoating prejudice.

As Philosopher Isaiah Berlin has noted, one man’s scoundrel is another man’s freedom fighter. Such a charismatic leader may be in the offing. We may be lucky he is not. When the French Revolution was in its deep flames, Philosopher Edmund Burke warned that the rebels were still in tatters but they could be overtaken by one fiery villain. He was right. Napoleon erupted and changed the history of not only France or Europe, but the course of world events.

This is the time for arms for the army. But, more appropriately, for intelligence. It did not help matters that the National Security Adviser accused the former army chief of missing funds and weapons. The federal government has not explained what happened to the missing funds and whether we have weapons anywhere. A mere presidential denial does not sate the quest for truth.

In such uncertainty, we are witnessing a failure to tackle this febrile hour. If the man of intelligence is out of sync with the man of arms, how do we coordinate against a potent enemy at the door, in the bushes, in schools? When a defence minister says we should defend ourselves and a sitting governor runs for his dear life, we know that the monster is growing in the cellar. If the NSA was at odds with the army chief, is the breakdown of security a result of large egos? Are deaths and blood flowing from the clash of men in the comfort of their offices?

In spite of the change of service chiefs, we have no sense, other than bluster, that the war is heading in the right direction. The rise of a charismatic bandit is the monster next time. If we don’t master the moment, the incredible might become inevitable.

This is hoping that Nigeria does not become like Shamaki the father. May we not collapse when we see the contours of a bush fire.

 

MERCENARIES, PLEASE

We have had some call for the use of mercenaries to stop the riot of banditry and killings. The House of Representatives is the biggest voice to wade into the matter. The matador and Borno State Governor, Prof. Zulum has also advanced the idea.

But the House of Reps under Hon Femi Gbajabiamila has said we should consider it. Maybe the top brass of Nigeria’s military is not at home with the idea. We should think more about what will save us than what will pump our egos.

At the tail end of the Jonathan administration, mercenaries were hired and they accounted for the rollback of the insurgency. In the first year of the Buhari government, Lai Mohammed boasted that they had licked the enemy. But it was not the fruit of our army but Jonathan’s mercenaries. Once the contracts did not continue, the mercenaries left and our army returned us to the cycle of defeats and scandals.

The executive branch should stop this flirtation with ego. We want success, not pride. We want our territories back, not fat cat generals claiming their official territories in their offices.

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