By Sam Omatseye

As an undergraduate, I attended a symposium at the great Oduduwa Hall at the then University of Ife, and Wole Soyinka, not yet a Nobel laureate, spoke like a past master. Spry and combatant, he lamented how brick and mortar was becoming lord and master over trees and verdure. The lush green lure of lawns on Africa’s most beautiful campus crawled under concrete jungles.

Trees make groves sacred for human dwellings. We strut like nature’s tenants. The deities view our harmonies with envy. The Oduduwa event happened in the early 1980’s before the global rave over the environment and the ozone layer’s fall from grace. Soyinka waxed lyrical over what he saw as the descent of the “university idea.”

He noted that “in these days when some accuse me of obscurities and impenetrable densities,” his position on nature was clear. Decades later, if universities have learnt little about nature, they still need tutoring on nurture.

One area where the university idea appears stunted is the search for a vice chancellor. The battle for VC is always like a night cloud of lightning and thunder. Many years ago when the position was open at Ife, the story had it of a professor and contender who deposited ebo – pot of fetish for sacrifice or atonement – on a major intersection on Ife campus. It often is no different from the fight for governor or senator in the outer world. The campus mirrors the society it mocks. Teacher becomes tyro. The refuge absorbs refuse from the larger society. Town stains gown. A priest dramatises iniquity.

Everything we hate about our politics bares its ugly face. Due process upturned, voter’s lists disputed, candidates disqualified to pave way for men of favour, money upends merit, accusations of rigging overshadow outcomes, ideas fall to sentiment, tribesmen coalesce, bigots assemble, ideologies occluded, ideas cave in to violence, protests erupt on campus not over social injustice in the society, newspapers flare with querulous advertorials, a play of giants. Everyone finds it difficult to escape the epidemic, like the Eugene Ionesco play of the absurd, Rhinoceros, where nearly all in town end up being a rhino. In the end, Soyinka’s university idea falls again like humpty dumpty.

We saw this a few months ago at Unilag. A chill now descends on professors and workers in what we call Nigeria’s premier university, The University of Ibadan, where these bad qualities are on display. They have made headlines not about cure for Covid-19, or contests about the best vaccines, but about infighting. But the worst of it is that it is not the university’s fight alone. It is also the contest of interlopers, both official and non-official. Just as non-state actors are trying to rejig the country, from Igboho to Kanu, the VC battle to the death involves designs from a force as “neutral” as the minister of education, the man with a double name.

Adamu Adamu is being accused of damning the process and imposing his own. According to reports, he is defiling arithmetic, and so he is dissolving the process. Twice he has stopped the process because the voter’s list will not give outsiders power over insiders. The outsiders are those who want to get the number of collaborators within the council to vote for their favorite son. It is just like party politics. The party leader will monitor the voters’ list to doctor it. When he gets the number he wants, it becomes official and legal. Like the US cliffhanger Senate, he is allegedly waiting for a Kamala Harris clincher.

They are also accusing a former health minister who is working with another Osun son-of-the-soil in Oyo State to ensure that the candidate they want emerges. The stumbling block seems the present governing council whose tenure ends on May 9. The idea is, according to the accusation, for the positions of two men of council to be filled for the minister and his people to secure supporters within the body of professors and administrators. The arithmetic as of today does not favour the minister, according to sources.

He is waiting to get the men or women to tilt it. One of them represents the university community and the other represents the office of the VC. They need to be filled before the next vote.

It is also alleged that there is Muslim agenda to foist a Muslim as the favoured candiate. When did the university become this base? What is the difference is the man wears a crucifix or looks at the crescent in the sky? I recall commenting on the process to get the VC at Uniben and how Governor Obaseki muscled his influence for a candidate who did not hail from Edo State to fail. He wanted his son of the soil in a federal university.  I understand that members of the Central Council of Ibadan Indigenes are also at war with the minister for trying to foreclose the chances of their son. That they are from Ibadan should not foreclose their chance at VC, but it does not entitle them. Unlike the Uniben case, they deserve fairness.

On the UI affair, the federal house is in disarray. Five of the council members are from the ministry and they want due process. They want a council with counsel. The minister wants a council that counts for him. The minister is locking horns with his ministry. Minister Adamu is also in conflict with the pro chancellor and chairman of council, Joshua Waklek. Once he leaves his post in May, it may be open sesame for the minister.

All we want at UI is sanity in the selection process. Many do not understand why so many professors want to be VC and die doing it. I recall a friend saying the other day what a certain VC told him when he landed his job as VC. He said, for the first time in his life, he did not have money problems. So, the fight is not about how to propagate Soyinka’s university idea, which is about creating a shelter of excellence for thought and a laboratory of intellects for the larger society.

The professors are not examples for their students. “Jack was sent to school  to learn to be a fool,” goes the saying. “You can polish a stone as much as you want, but it cannot become cheese,” to paraphrase another.

During the French revolution, Robespierre’s men thought Christianity had failed. They replaced its symbols with what they called, “Temples of Reason.” Their Cult of Reason yielded deaths, destruction, anarchy and Edmund Burke’s prediction of the rise of a dictator like Napoleon.

Is the university idea facing the guillotine?

The minister should preside over due process, and let the right person win.

 

 

Not his autumn

 

In temperate climates, autumns are when flowers fade and trees become bald. Governor Ortom is not like the weather that sounds like him. A few days ago, bandits attacked him and he survived, thanks to his security aides. It was a sad day for Nigeria that a sitting governor might have had his heart in his mouth because of some renegades. A report said he ran for about a mile. Our country is in great peril. We do not have answer while criminals are asking all the questions. He said MACBAN held a meeting a few days earlier on him. His chief press secretary, Terver Akase, echoed the account that Governor Ortom was a major topic of their discussion. So what has the DSS done to level with the facts in this matter? If the unexpected happened to Ortom, what will we be saying today. This is not the first encounter of a governor with bandits. Ondo State Governor had one last year. There is a clear breakdown. Let us hope, we don’t go down. The fall downhill stares us in the face and it frightens us.

By Sam Omatseye

Lies are so powerful that they can upend justice, especially in a country like ours. So, the Ibori loot, as it is often described, looks like a story that will not end. For the same case, he fled the country. A former governor conquered the headlines. UK handcuffed him while their media huffed. His mug shot a public spectacle. His love story titillated bedside revelries. We were introduced to his girlfriend and relatives and his errors as a London youth. He was docked because he could not dock. The UK court proved he purloined his state’s money, and locked him for years behind vertical bars.

The story seemed to disappear. Many at home applauded and even gloated at his guilty verdict. The justice that eluded him at home haunted him like an African witch across the pond. He returned into silence after a flourish of a hero’s welcome at his Oghara home.

The man returned to his familiar role as the quiet beaver of Delta politics. He has shied from headlines, interviews or the glamour toast.

Even recently, he probably would not want the Ibori revival in our national drama. After the humiliation, verdict and time in jail, a lie has refused to die. Those in the Delta State government said the billions of Naira for which he went to jail is not missing. They would wish they did not lie. They thought it would change the narrative, and turn guilt into liberty for the Ogidigboigbo. They could have followed the words of German novelist and essayist Thomas Mann: “A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.”

It might have hurt then to say it was Delta money. That would have given them a moral high ground today. But this essayist wonders if it would have made a difference for the Attorney-general and his men in Buhari’s government in deciding what to do with the money. The decision to make it federal money on the basis that the Delta State government said it was not missing is one of the most irresponsible acts of financial impunity in our history.

Ibori went to jail. That means he stole the money. The UK court said he did and that accounted for his incarceration. Those who applauded and celebrated Ibori’s time in jail are now not ready to admit that the money belongs to Delta State. Some SANs logged onto the specious logic that the UK government took the money as its own, and it is only giving it back to us as an act of benevolence. Some SANs need education on justice and the dignity of the black man.

If a Briton stole British government money and brought it here for safe keeping, and he was sentenced here to jail, shall we say it is our money? I think this is colonial mentality. It is a drawback from the slave trade era. The British think what is theirs is theirs, and what is ours is theirs. Lawyers should understand that the law is made for justice. It is the same way the British took our people as chattel, guzzled our oil, our palm oil and robbed us of our rubber, cocoa, and ivory. They still display today, with proprietary arrogance, our Ife and Benin artworks of genius in their museums. “The law never made anyone a whit more just,” noted American essayist Henry David Thoreau.

If, as I have stated before, Ibori went to jail, it was because of the money in question. He was governor of Delta State. It was money allocated to Delta State. It was money meant to do roads, build houses, educate and elevate the lives of Delta State citizens. Anyone who denies this is the bigger liar. No one ought to defend those who said it was not Delta money. It was and is. The accounts paper trail followed the money to Ibori and to Delta. Now that it has returned it should follow the same path to those who own it. It is simple. Give Deltans their money. If the government lied, should the average citizen suffer bad roads or bad schools because of that? The average citizen had no access to the account. If the UK investigators did what even the local courts in their moral perfidy could not, why make the ordinary man on the streets of Ughelli or Agbor moan?

To say it is not Delta money is to say because I swallowed a frog and denied it, it means I didn’t swallow it. It is corporeal self-deception. Shakespeare said, man to thyself be true. I say to the Federal government: To Nigeria be true, to Delta be true.

By diverting Delta money to the centre, we are witnessing grand theft with a receipt. It is licensed larceny. It is broad day-light looting of loot. It is federal fraud without shame. It is like a crazy hen eating up its day-old chic.

We are seeing in clear repose the subversion of the concept of federalism. We have always espoused fiscal fairness. We already have a centre with a big and greedy appetite supported by a rogue constitution. At least, it pursues its routine roguery with honour by giving the states the pittances the law allows. But to take that pittance back, as it is doing with Delta money, on the excuse of an agreement with a neo-colonial master, is in bad taste. It is legalised looting.

The argument has been made that the money should not go to Delta State government because they stole it and denied it. That is not a legal argument. When it came to technical argument, they point to fine points of law. They say the British government gave it to Nigerian government. But when it comes to returning the money, they say it should not go to the government. It is imbecile reasoning. But I am ready to concede that the money should not go to the state government. It can be used to develop the state.

So many are poor, so many roads undone, so many schools need fixing, so many are sick without help. The money can do that without the state government’s finger on it. We cannot punish the people because of their government.

After all, we claim to practise a democracy. It is the people first, not government. Governments are caretakers. Caretakers, like the real ones, can defraud the landlords, the people. Speaking about landlords, who says the money is safer in the hands of the federal government? Is it not the same government that cannot account for hundreds of billions of Naira spent on security? The National Security adviser says the money is missing. If we, as Nigeria on the whole, are concerned about missing money, let us focus more on that. It is because of that many people are running from farms and villages. It is the reason people are slaughtered daily, wives and nubile girls raped, boys take everlasting treks in the wilderness, girls dragooned on trucks and bicycles overnight. No one travels in peace. We cannot abide by Soyinka’s poesy, “You must set forth at dawn/ I wish you marvel of the holy hour.” No holy hour on Nigerian road. It is chockfull of shocks, of madmen and specialists of horror. It is road rage, Nigeria special. I just saw the video of the goons pointing guns at the petrified girls kidnapped in the bushes. NSA Monguno cannot go to his Borno village even with military escort. Even though Monguno denied the claim somewhat, we know he spoke the truth. He did not speak it because he wanted to but because it was his own revenge on the service chiefs who undermined him. We know he is saying the truth because the soldiers say they don’t have weapons to fight the enemies. Again, why should service chiefs be in charge of military contracts? It is only in Nigeria that such a thing happens. It is the service chiefs brief to demand, but the ministry to order and supply. When does a medical doctor now become a contractor of medical equipment? The same government rewarded the service chiefs as ambassadors. The former army chief was never openly investigated over allegations of fraud? To paraphrase Shakespeare, if correction lies in the hands that committed wrong, to whom shall we complain?

How can the money be safer in the hands of a government that distributed billions of Naira in supplies to non-existent students on holiday during a pandemic? Even today, we still don’t have accountability. So, let us devise a panel acceptable to the people of Delta State for development work. Every kobo should be spent transparently.  When Dariye erred, the money went to Plateau State. After Alam’s alarm, Bayelsa State received its loot back in joy. Why not Delta?

If it is no longer Ibori’s money, it is Delta’s, and the people should benefit. It is the meaning of what French philosopher Rousseau called the general will.

By Sam Omatseye

The herdsman is a centenarian. He has ploughed lands flat and steep, from farm to farm, crossed rivers small and large, lapped up running water, and clamped the earth dry and moist. His  cattle with unfeigned fortitude have conquered terrain after terrain like T.S. Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi. The cows have munched husks and crunched grass. They have survived the fury of whips and ferocities of weathers. They have exercised what John Pepper Clark in his poem described as their “courage so mute and fierce and wan.”

The centenarian wants another century. In fact, they have been more than centenarians. They want eternity. They don’t want to abandon tradition because the past is comfort. So, when many say we should stop herdsmen, it is not ever going to be an easy fight. The strongholds of the radical Miyetti Allah and their cohorts will pit battle against the modern ones. The past will yield to the future. But the forces of the future must wage the battle. They must fight the good fight of faith and seize the eternity of change from the dead-enders who are in the forests and exercising the orgies of rape, kidnapping and killings. We have to abide by the credo of Rousseau, who admonished the French society to “force them to be free.”

Coercion comes in two ways, violence and systemic change. When the president urged his men to kill anyone with AK-47, it was no strategy. It was bluster. Hence hours later, bandits stormed Kaduna airport community and barreled away with innocents. Humans are still bounty. The military fails when it lacks knowledge. Like ours. We need to develop a strategy, not rage. Or rage powered with strategy. In our forests of a thousand demons, we need brains to defeat the brawns of wild men thrashing about with antediluvian appetites and promising anarchy.

While we are at that, we need to make the herdsman obsolete. Ganduje made a point in public about the need to stop open grazing. But Sokoto has put that in motion quietly for years on the watch of Governor Aminu Tambuwal. The idea began with his predecessor, but it was abandoned when they sought cattle from Argentina and they could not adapt them to our climate and circumstances.

Governor Tambuwal sought South African breeds of the Jersey, Red Swiss, white Holstein, and created clusters or experimental ranches across eight local governments of the state. He started with nine animals, reported Dr. Adamu Abdullahi Abdukadir, director of veterinary services, Sokoto State. Pointing to the bulky beings, he said “That is American jersey.” A few minutes later, he announced the Holstein and the Swiss red.” The calves were grazing about. Their parents were mouth deep in wheat and corn offal. He reminded me not all of the animals were from outside.

“We have indigenous cattle here. We call them Gudali. When you cross them with the foreign species, we get what you see here.” It is a tour of pointing fingers. Each of the clusters across the eight local government areas received nine foreign ones. At the time this writer visited, there were about 300. Some of them have been sold. The government is preparing a 5k hectares for a more elaborate project in Rabah Local Government Area.

The process is hard slog. It is not a cluster for meat alone. Some of the animals are good only for milk and others for meat. It is biological division of labour. They have milk sheds, with milk tanks, milking machines. They also have feeding troughs and water troughs. I was fascinated with what Dr. Abdulkadir called Early Control, which a section that traps the animals between metal bars and poles.

“When you want insemination and embryo transfer, you restrain them,” he said. The result is that they become hybrids. He took me through the process of semen analysis and implanting the seeds in the uterus, but before that the female ones must be fertility ready. They will become ready to mate and follow the males. This process takes at least 10 months before the calves scream out of their mother’s wombs.

He also took me through the process of milking and how to turn this biological reality into a commercial fact. That is the quiet war against the herdsman crisis of the day.

I observed the cows, plump, ruddy, rested and weighty with meat and milk. These were like the animals I saw in my American sojourn. These animals will not travel from border to border, confront the snarl of beasts or the snake’s forked tongue, or collide with the innocent farmer on the outskirts of Aba or the omen of an Amotekun uniform. So, they will be lush with nutrients for the Nigerian buyer, rather than the lean, weary, whipped wraiths that excite the owambe parties.

As Gov. Tambuwal said, the clusters are a part of an overhaul of the Sokoto young for the future. By implication, it is the right pivot for northern education. We have not heard of a bandit foray into a school in the state. But with Zamfara flailing on his border, he first amalgamated boarding schools, especially those verging on the borders of Kebbi and Zamfara states as well as the Niger border. Now, he has disbanded boarding schools, and allowed the students to attend day schools close to their residences. Gov Tambuwal said, on my television show, The Platform, the idea is not to fulfill the Boko Haram vision of abolishing education. The children have to go to school, he noted.

So, that is the journey to the future, and if there should be emergency in dealing with herdsmen situation, such projects as in Sokoto should take accelerated momentum. Tambuwal said he has also visited Indonesia for the same purpose.

Yet, ranching will not stop  bandits overnight. Some of the criminals don’t even have cattle anymore. Hence we have to prioritise security, and mobilise the intelligence agency against them. It is not about weapons, it is a war of knowledge. The greatest victories in history were won less by superior weaponry than superior intelligence. Goliath had more brawn than David. America lost to puny Vietnam for lack of knowledge. It defeated ISIL through intelligence first. Tambuwal signed a Hisbah law, not to pursue Sharia principles, but to gather intelligence. He said “the forests are vast but humans are limited.” So we need men to alert the security forces.

Gov Tambuwal also emphaised that we have to re-examine our ECOWAS protocol and change it to suit our security need. The marauders are taking advantage of the law for rapine and slaughter in our country. It is a very important issue that President Buhari has to take up. We cannot open our borders to crooks.

The centenarian herdsman is no easy hurdle. Removing him is a battle against tradition, and an effete one at that. Traditions have expiry dates, so do herdsmen.  We have to use force and system to fulfill it.

Just a thought

In an interview with Governor Rotimi Akeredolu, SAN, the Ondo State helmsman made a comment that intrigued me. He said when the Amotekun arrests erring cows in the state, the herdsmen has to beg to retrieve the cattle. He implied the cows would not follow their masters until the Amotekun gave the animals the permission to go. It is a story not arms, I suppose, but of charms. But the governor did not want to go into details. Maybe the Amotekun folks should let us know how they have humbled the herdsmen without guns or bullets. We would do with more battles without arms.

Was it the same situation when we saw last year of lightning striking cows down on mountains? Just a thought.

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By Sam Omatseye

 

His head swathed in hoary beard, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi might be ensconced today as a recluse, the holy man in his mosque in Kaduna, projecting a less dramatic persona than his father. His voice might have emitted lower decibels in the country if bandits did not go into and come out of the forest. If they did not ransack our bushes and made them home. Suddenly he became a prophet as a sort of rock star, his hood, beard and demeanour making him sometimes cooler than Davido!

If he had patience with his life in uniform, we might know him today as a general, a retired soldier with exploits we shall never know. And he seemed he made his path for moments like this. Especially when he volunteered to walk into the bush. The bandits are sick people in the flesh. As a doctor, he can conjure his scalpels and tablets and heal them. The bandits are sick in spirit. As a sheikh, he can redeem them. He has no reason to fear their hoods and guns and bravado. He left the army a captain. He knows how to make a gunner gone.  A healer. A fighter. A Preacher.

He was trained a medic but he picked a cleric’s life over a clinic. Hence he is a shepherd over souls. That’s all he ever wanted to be. He could preside in a consulting room, a scalpel replacing his sideburns. But his eyes beam in between ruddy and sometimes scraggy white beard. To be sure, he is sheikh rather than chic.

He seemed to be the deliverer just over a week ago when Lai Mohammed enunciated the federal government’s official surrender. The information minister said his government had no influence with the brutes. Only a non-state actor like Gumi could meet them and mitigate the turmoil in the land. Gumi also seemed to forget his ascetic aspect and swiveled into the grandiose role of a rock star peacemaker. It was the vanity of the priest, but some had hope. The bandits did not see him as a traitor. They did not fulminate at his shadow. They did not rustle in the woods, growl or shoot him, or even threaten. They welcomed him as a father of sorts, as a man they could engage.

He did not alight from the forest as a man of light. He came out as an advocate for sinners. He said the bloodthirsty youths needed to be listened to. A professor of bones and blood, Yusuf Usman, who reportedly accompanied him, said on Arise News that the boys were between 13 and 17 years of age. The sheikh and professor say the bandits have grievances. They have legitimate points. We should not sit in our moral high horses in Lagos and Abuja and condemn those who have made the bush their habitation and our homes, schools and roads their hangman’s noose.

They changed the narrative before our eyes. The boys are arboreal heroes, new-minted revolutionaries in the woods. They deserve the pardon we gave the Niger Delta militants. The priest made a sacerdotal heresy. He was asking the sinner to forgive the sinned against. We who are afraid should now show faith. They who made us fear are on God’s side. Who are the sinners now? Those now in trauma that they abducted and released? Mothers who died, fathers who bled to silence in front of children? Mothers looking in impotent horror as goons raped their daughters? Schools vandalised, those whose bank accounts now atrophied of millions? We should pardon them for stealing, killing, raping and stirring anarchy? Whose justice will it be? Is that the Sheikh’s own definition of good and bad? In fact, it means we should be begging them for pardon so they do not barrel into our lives again.

First, we have what is called false equivalences. Savage as they were, the Niger Delta militants did not abduct students, or crash into homes. They did not stop vehicles for kidnap of whole families. They blasted the jugular of our oil wealth: the pipelines. They targeted the governments, and enriched themselves with illegal bunkering. They were daredevils and lawless. But the communities even shielded them because they sometimes played robinhood, stealing from the state and plying them with some of their resources. They had a cause, if they did not fight the good fight. With such comparison, Gumi is making the Niger Delta militants glorious though they were not.

But Sheikh Gumi says the boys have a cause. They hate being ostracised. They hate being left jobless because of their rustled cows. They want free access to the farms of others, to trample and graze with impunity.

He seemed to have scored when some of the bandits dropped their weapons. But we had not heaved a sigh when, Gbam!, over three hundred girls were whisked into the lorries and driven into the shadows of Nigerian forests. When asked what happened, he said the bandits under question were not the ones he met. Chibok, Leah, and the long trek of boys from Buhari’s backyard, the slaughter of innocents, the dread of parents, the closure of schools, all took new dimension with the 317 students snatched among the gold mines of Zamfara.

But Gumi’s narrative had hit a snag. He was not a Nigerian negotiator. He was not making peace for all, but for a section. He distinguished the Christian and Muslim soldier. According to a now viral speech to the gangs, Gumi said only Christian soldiers were after them. “What I want you people to understand is, soldiers that are involved in most of the criminality are not Muslims. You know, soldiers have Muslims and non-Muslims. The non-Muslims are the ones causing confusion just to ignite crisis.” What a peacemaker! This is the peace of the bandits, not peace for Nigeria. He wants them to become converts to the priesthood of division, of a bigoted clergy. Gumi has not walked back that tirade.

This episode only recalls his father’s Islamic orthodoxy, an oedipal legacy. His father did not hide his contempt for Christianity. He was a cleric of division. He espoused the purity of faith, the firestorm of bigotry. He took on the Sufi, who saw Islam as dynamic. His father Abubakar saw it as dynamite. He was a slash-and-burn puritan who set the stage for religious hate in the country. He did not believe Christians should lead, only Muslims. His son only followed his father’s path in spite of the cosmetics of education as doctor. His father once made headlines when he said, “Christianity is nothing.” As editor of The Guardian Express, Nduka Irabor called him “fire mouth.” He was a Grand Qadi, the last to hold that title. That was before Boko haram.

His son is aping the father. As he walked into the forests, he saw himself as alternate government. Not only that, he took on the toga of religious alternative to secular government, a theocratic presence. This is what happens when a government has no strategy, when the police scratch for solutions, the air force lumbers in the clouds, when the army thrashes about in the bushes, when intelligence has given up the ghost, when the centre cannot hold, when a sizeable population believes the president is enabling the bandits with his silence, and when the president would not break that silence with a reassuring speech in which we can measure his voice, facial expression and then say, yes the man means it.

As this essayist has noted, the bandits are not invisible. They are juveniles with hot blood and death in their cargoes. If we cannot strafe them, and dissolve them, we stand the present danger of being eliminated as a nation. It is not civil war I fear. I dread anarchy, the mere anarchy that the Poet Coleridge moaned about, the sort we saw in Rwanda not so long ago.

 

 

By Sam Omatseye

I remember the great Aminu Kano and I look at Muhammadu Buhari, and I say, let us not forget the talakawa. They are the northern jewel, but they are more like gold dust in the mud. Their shine will never match their value because, somehow, no one allows them to be.

Today, the growl of the bandit is the voice of the talakawa, a distorted echo of their elegancies. It is more their frustration, its loss of leverage, its fall out of grace. Most of them are helpless while a few among them are wrecking the house.

The poor in the north has never purred with joy. Each time salvation peers, it veers into trouble. Whether in the mining storms of Zamfara, in Kaduna where home is no longer refuge as they become refugees, the anarchy in Niger, ghost farms in Sokoto, or the villages on their knees in Borno, the talakawa are a people adrift for a long time. What we are seeing today is a culmination of failure, not of the poor man but of the northern elite, especially that segment that has always seen them as at once battle axe and breastplate.

The past half century has been the story of two men the talakawa gave a worshipful bow. They were their fount and redemption. With the duo, they peered at a promised land but their feet ran cold. When Aminu Kano rose, he came with faith and butter. He was a great Islamic icon as well as Marx’s marksman. His vision was an alchemy of  God and the world, materialism with mysticism.

He was conscious of the north as feudal forte. He wanted to free the poor. He formed the Northern Elements Progressive Union (NEPU). The choice of the word ‘elements’ has often fascinated me. He craved to conjure Marx out of the people: their skill, their sense of justice, their rage, and above all, a quest for equality. He wanted to overthrow the feudal system. He was a sort of Abdel Nasser of Egypt, who sought to dismantle feudalism. But Kano opted for suasion over revolution, or the ballot over blood, a revolution of the willing and not Nasser’s staccato of gunfire. He was Nasser’s dove.

Gradually, the poor knew Kano, and followed him. He became, next to Awo, the most genuine political leader of his generation. But more than Awo, he was the great mobiliser. He fought against an ideological mountain. He was a loner for equality. He exposed elite hypocrisy while praying at the same altar. He enshrined a war against privilege and entitlement, against the confidences of class divide sanctioned by faith. He asked his people to see the Quran and also inhale the disruptive scents of Das Kapita, and make wedlock of butter and the book. He was squaring up to over a century of sanctimonious contempt.

They loved him enough to give him a berth in the Second Republic. The two big prizes of the North, Kano and Kaduna States, bowed to the noble impulses of new party, The People’s Redemption Party. He had Governors Abubakar Rimi and Balarabe Musa. It turned out that the two stewards of his vision, Rimi and Balarabe, fell short and cut him short. Rimi embraced ideological flamboyance. Musa lacked tact. Both of them lost their way with their leader. Kano’s vision was lost to the bargain, and the man who had fired a great crowd and brought men like Soyinka, Bala Usman and Achebe to the fold was left a spectator of his own impotence.

That was the first big disillusion of the masses. They looked for another, and had to wait for one tall, gangling man of reticent ways and winsome face. He first materialised with a beret in his first misadventure, which included a coup that ended Kano’s life adventure. And because of that misadventure, he nurtured the talakawa. If Kano captured the talakawa with ideas and charisma, Buhari did with soul, a mystical air and spartan exterior. He was the messiah they were waiting for. They were with him always, in temptation and narrow triumphs. They were with him until, after four tries, he won the crown.

Before him they had been astray. Now they wanted to climb out of poverty. They wanted what Aminu Kano promised. They wanted to have good education, good jobs, good homes. They wanted an end to the al majiri system. They wanted the girl child out of the persecutions of genital tyranny and husband’s patriarchal furies. They wanted to traipse into the bright light of the classrooms. Kano was a short, sprightly fellow. His (Buhari’s) head sometimes dodges a lintel. He was Kano’s reincarnate.

Rather, in his backyard, students are carried away in long treks, their villages come down in ruins from gunfire and machetes. The poor are getting poorer and the rich are purring. No safety at home. No school to nurture the mind. because the bandit has spoken. They are still betting on a suspect future while the rich are belching from pots above their waists. His north is the prostrate part of the country, where the talakawa lives but mostly looks to God and not to the man they saw as messiah.

The people always stray when they don’t find their leaders. But once they see a person who flatters their secret hopes, they exalt and follow. When Moses left to the mountain, the Israelites strayed to other gods. They crave what Weber called the charismatic fellow. If anyone dresses up in that toga, they make him an altar, whether he is genuine or not. Napoleon emerged on the ruins of French rabble. Moses stuttered his away to his people’s redemption. They are either good or bad. Hence Brecht was wary of heroes. “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero,” he wrote. He knew heroes often are made of clay feet. “No man’s virtue is complete, the great Galileo loved to eat.” Even in the southwest, Igboho is whipping up nativist ire and reifying himself as the new Yoruba leader. He does not know that a blast can wipe everyone. His Yoruba kin are all over the country. As my father Moses once said, don’t throw a stone in the market because you cannot guarantee the safety of your mother.

The streets and villages are alive with death and dying. The talakawa is broken and today is not the day if they are looking for that man who can flatter them into salvation. What we should fear is not the civil war that Abdulsalami Abubakar invoked, but anarchy. Anarchy is worse than civil war. It foments many centres and trajectories of trouble. The centre cannot hold. We are seeing a void when we need the president’s voice.

The rise of violence from the herdsmen is a consequence of a void. The excuse that the marauders came from outside the country does not explain why they can still thrive within the Fulani in the country and blend. If there is no weakness within, the outsider has no entryway. As French philosopher Montesquieu said, a republic cannot be broken from outside. The infiltration of  infection is here. Before he took his bow, President Washington warned that American democracy would only fail if the system developed its own internal fault lines.

The talakawa are now left to their own devices. That is what we are seeing all over the place. How can we stop a killer who makes a big ransom of millions of Naira in a day’s work when as almajairi he will not make same in a lifetime. When the government relies on a religious minister rather than its own minister to make peace with bandits, it means it has lost the argument. They say we should forgive the bandit who killed and raped but leave the crayfish thief in Kirikiri. It means we have it all upside down. It is the same lack of care that produced the bandit that is forcing us to broker peace on its own term. The innocent are brought to the justice of the murderer.

It is a failure of political stewardship. The talakawa had two heroes. They both failed them. Having no God and no man to follow, they are shooting their way to their own promised land.

 

By Sam Omatseye

The story is told of an act of benevolence that went awry. It was Lateef Jakande’s example of looking a gift horse in the mouth. He was no longer governor, and somebody thought the man, with his mammoth legacy, ought not to ride in a crawling contraption.

The man sent him the choicest of cars: a Mercedes. But the former governor was not impressed with the German invention. He did not want to appear ungrateful, and so he called his benefactor to say thank you. As an aside, he enquired in what dealership the car lay quiet before money sent it out to his home. He just wanted to know.

The unsuspecting benefactor told him the truth. Jakande quickly returned the car to the shop and asked for the refund. The dealership obliged. After all, it was Jakande, and he probably bargained a profit for the sellers.

That was Lateef Jakande, known as LKJ, the first civilian governor of Lagos State. That anecdote was an emblem of the austere politician. But it showed that he was simple but cunning. Yet he would rather be cunning than showy or false.

The man had always been an enigma for me. Anytime I saw him in public I tried to unmask the sage, to rip open his soul. He was now hoary. Age had subdued his flesh. He walked into a venue without fanfare and often outlasted the event with wordless presence. He looked slow but not geriatric.

I always wondered why he did not remain at home. But he insisted on being around, often he arrived early. You thought a certain brio bubbled inside, his ears alert, his eyes without a glitter of surprise, curiosity or even joy. His pose, with a little stoop, gave him an unflappable appearance of unbroken age. A fighter against time, a warrior in silence, his soul a battlefield. He engaged without oratory. Often, the only reference to him was an emcee’s acknowledgement. Even then, he did not seem to crave it or even want it. He sat still. But everyone knew this was the man of Lagos, the man who was the first to inspire the word “action” as a prefix to governor.

In spite of all I saw of the man in public places, I always wondered why I thought that the man finished his life story many decades ago, when he completed his tenure as the chief helmsman of Lagos. His song grew dark after that. He seemed to have spent the rest of his life trying to recreate that grandeur, that moment in the people’s graces when some called him Baba kekere, when he became a synonym for political stewardship, when many saw him as heir to the greatest Nigerian ever, Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

So, I thought LKJ did not die a few days ago. I thought the man had gone decades ago, and that was his days as ripe apple. The days of his visionary audacity, when he challenged governance and proved at once to be the litmus test and success, to be the visionary and implementer, the talker and doer. He embodied the dream fulfillment. It was the time when he collapsed day and morning schools, when he turned his mockers into a hallelujah chorus. When they said he built poultry sheds as schools and the same products are more brilliant than their children.

When the people choked under landlords or under the sun, he built them sprawling shelter. When they thirsted for knowledge, he gave schools. For more knowledge, he erected a university. He opened roads and sub-divisions. He started the inlets into what is Lekki today. He saw tomorrow but he wanted to be there. Not like the children of Israel who did not see the Promised Land. Or like Martin Luther King, who knew he would not get there with his fellow blacks. Or the dream prose of Obama’s memoirs called The Promised Land, but it must have, at times, tortured him to write it. Jakande planted and reaped.

He was called Baba kekere because, somehow he wanted to be Baba. Buhari and his military men saw to it that he didn’t become baba. His Metroline project has become a metaphor of his abbreviated dream. Just as Buhari stopped the train, he ensured Jakande’s personal train could not puff ahead. Jakande never stepped up, again. He wanted to be baba when he ran for president. But even his party and kinsmen could not mobilise for his local triumph. He could work for Lagos, but he could not craft a successful political platform in Lagos. When his group settled for a compromise, they gave us a governor, the late Otedola, who was an antithesis of Jakande. Yar’adua became a grand puppet master of southwest politics, especially Lagos, with his formidable party. His acolytes like Dapo Sarunmi, Yomi Edu, et al, made mincemeat of the great LKJ.

If he rose to be Lagos governor on  Awo’s back, he could not be baba after baba soared into the sunset. So, 1983, when the coup swept him out of office, was the beginning of the offence against him, and his work horse of a life.

But what aches this essayist was an episode in the aftermath of LKJ’s turn as minister under the Abacha junta. It was an Afenifere event, and the door was locked against him. He, the man who was the governor of his generation, and arguably one of the best ever to bear that title in the country. He, who made the sick well and blind see. He who was an ambassador for the race. He the model in integrity, a contempt for extravagance. He who did not steal. He was let out of the inner sanctum. He was not welcome in a meeting of his own folks.

It was because he did not leave the junta when everyone said he should. The story had it that he had warned Abiola and the June 12 caucus that no one should trust the soldiers when Abacha teased them with offices and promised to leave the office in six months. Jakande joined as works minister. He worked well, but his performance did not invest him with the spectral dignity of his time as governor. But that was beside the point. When the time came, he remained with the junta when the rest of his homeland burned with rage against the goggled brute. Others in the cocoon that Yorubas labeled as traitors were Ebenezer Babatope and Olu Onagoruwa. The late Chief Gani Fawehinmi rang loud his objection to his bosom friend Onagoruwa’s cohabitation with the despot.

That chapter casts a shadow on our Jakande, and history will have to script whether all he did in material terms could overshadow his act of looking the other way when his people groaned under oppression. They would ask why he did not become Moses and leave the palace when his people’s back bent under the tyrant’s whip.

Hence I said, our Jakande died long ago. The person I saw in events was probably the Jakande, the disembodied hero trying to resurrect that old fire, that man of action we loved and applauded. But time and flesh have overtaken him.

Gbaja’s poser

Recently when Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila addressed the media after a session with the president, he made it clear that the nation was in a security crisis, and we all should work together as a people to solve it. At another time, he noted that the Nigerian leadership had failed in that area. That was a moment in elite humility. He did not utter his words in syrupy lines.

He belongs to the legislature. He has cried as well as his House colleagues over the herder problem. Such an act of eating the humble pie should send a lesson to the president. It is the president who should have said what the speaker said. After that, he would act. The house does not have guns, cannot command the army or order the police, or even appoint them. It is the executive’s assignment.

The point is, we have not seen even that level of contrition up there in the presidency. As Wordsworth said: “Wisdom is oftentimes nearer when we stoop  than when we soar.”  Shasha Market in Ibadan is the latest of such a breakdown of law and order.

But we are not even seeing any hint of humility upstairs. When a man cannot unite his family, or even his party, how can he unite our country?

By Sam Omatseye

 

 

My  late history professor makes this essayist think of what he might think of insecurity today.

He always walked in crisp and dapper in his French suits. Professor Tunji Oloruntimehin filled his classroom with his deep bass. His grave face belied the wry thunder that parted his lips. He did not seem to orate, but when he was done, it was as though he had perorated.

His words were few because they lit the tinder of unrest in the mind.

In one of those sessions, we were discussing colonialism in West Africa, and somebody referred to what many historians taught us from secondary school as “indirect rule.”

I never heard him laugh, but his shadow of smile was like a cacophony.

“What’s indirect rule?” he churned. “I know that is what they have taught you.” Some of us, like Osagiator Ojo and Austin Odion, named him Segu Tukolor Empire, the title of his book on colonialism in French West Africa.

The term was one of the neocolonial vestiges. The British enacted a phrase to expiate their tyranny, and our historians did not question it. We parroted their sins. They called it indirect rule even though they made the law, they forced our chiefs and intermediaries to execute them, and they benefited by exploiting our resources and making England a coquette of plenty. If we thought the system was bad, then our people shared the blame. That way, England was no more sinning than the locals. It is the Prospero-Caliban dynamic in Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest. The oppressed fawn over the oppressor. They still teach that today in the pockets of places where history is taught. It took me years to know that England deployed the same subterfuge to rule over the medieval Irish under King James, the lecher who empaneled the translation of the Holy Bible. The prof killed the term, the class embalmed it.

It was the same Oloruntimehin, who opened our eyes to the cunning and wily depravity of slave abolition with the following sentence: “The abolition of slave trade was an act of enlightened self-interest by the Europeans to give the Africans a new role in the international economic system.” Men like Oloruntimehin decolonised our past with his historiography of fortitude.

It is because of Oloruntimehin, who passed on recently at 81, that we must regret our tepid study of history today. It is because we do not have the Oloruntimehins as guiding lights that we do not understand that, perhaps, Nigeria is closer to a civil war today than any time since this country turned from a powder cake to rubbles of flesh and blood in the 1960’s.

History has taught us that when hostilities begin, no one believes it. We overestimate the dove in human nature. The Yoruba wars began over a fight over pepper. That food nutrient was to fodder hate for decades in Yorubaland. The first World War broke after the murder of an archduke who no one knew until grenades met grenades across the world. No one thought the First World War would happen because, more than any time in history, the world had interconnected. The tensions blew over one odd moment. But the beast reigned over peace. It was the divorce that erupted over the taste of egusi soup or the snore at 2 am.

Hence we must beware of the warlords. The president ought to address the slide into a de facto hate state. We are gradually descending into a normalisation of inter-ethnic hate.  A man rose from the southwest. No man knew him except as a routine hireling of politicians. His tribesmen are victims of another tribesman. No one cautions the rampage of rape in the farms, abduction of his people and the amassing of fortunes of the enemy at the local’s expense. He roars with their collective pain. They hear him. They follow him. He returns hate for hate. Anger sheds blood and houses burn. Love fails.

We are supposed to have a federal government. But no one is able to chasten Igboho, not only in Ibadan and all of the southwest. The Igboho phenom develops hooves and horns like the character in Rushdie’s Satanic Verses.  He is beginning like a little lizard in the sewer. He takes nourishment and grows bigger by the day. Everyone who feels like him feeds his expanding appetite, and do not know or care if this little master metastasizes into a monster. They are donating money, filling his purse. They are enriching his armoury.

His growing fame emboldens him. He has become an evangelist of hate, trying to work up ethnic miracles from state to state for all who gripe or pine. It is not as if he did not see a need, or that he is not filling a need. It is because the centre is not holding.

The main failure is not arms from government. We often think the bigger the troops, the heftier the stockpile, the better the security. Knowledge is stronger than arms. David was puny before Goliath. In the two world wars, Germany began with best army. But  we have no knowledge to fight. We are being destroyed for lack of knowledge. Or a resistance to knowledge. Do we not have secret service? Where are they? Did they not know of the Seriki Fulani of Igangan and his atrocities? If they knew, why did they do nothing? It is because they did nothing that they fold their arms as Igboho preens and struts. But Igboho has become an untouchable. His is a flame of fire now. To put it out is like the guards who wanted to quench the fires of the three biblical Jews. They made the fire, but who would put it out?

The same thing is happening across the country. Lai Mohammed said the bandits hear Sheikh Gumi more than the government. That is a tragedy. The falcon cannot hear the falconer. It is because the security failed that they are looking for extra-government help. Does it not show military impotence? If the Sheikh knows them, it means they are not spirits. So why can’t we root them out?

Security is about local knowledge. No one can say, in the intelligence forces, that we don’t know who the hoodlums are and where to flush them out? In each forest, there are demons. In each forest, Nigerians farm and hunt. Why is it impossible to trace them? The best technology in the world for this is the drone. It is cheap and works.

It is not enough for the army to publish pictures of airstrikes and torched hideouts of Boko Haram. We are never asked to corroborate them, or even to assess their impact on strategy and the prognosis of the war on terror. Our military is like the cat prowling and growling about in the savanna.

We cannot make peace by changing service chiefs but by a strategy and map for victory. It is not generals who win war, but strategies. Hence during the American civil war, Abraham Lincoln hinged his endgame, among others, on horses. He told his army chief about getting horses and when he was told that it would cost him his generals, he said, he could make new generals but he could hardly make new horses.

We need a word from Aso Rock. We need the president to address the country. Not the sugarcoated flatteries of spokesmen. The president achieved an extraordinary milestone by linking the Apapa seaport to the Lagos-Abeokuta-Ibadan rail. The east should be waiting with fanfare over the Second Niger Bridge. Ordinarily, it should vibrate over the waves. But what damsel wants a mansion when the houseboy is a rapist.

We need to tamp down the tensions. As I noted last week, we cannot be a nation when citizens are less at home when at home. Let’s save the powder cake and make a sweet one for everyone. Professor Oloruntimehin must be purring same from his grave.

By Sam Omatseye

I came upon a video clip where a certain televangelist Sid Roth, a blond, bald and combative septuagenarian, announced that Trump was going to win because he heard it from the lips of tested prophets around the world. The clip featured some of them who uttered, with supernatural pomposity, that the spirit of God had anointed a second term for the petulant American.

It was a moment in ecclesiastical folly. A well-known Nigerian evangelical made the honored list. He preened in his suit as he dispensed his lie. All the prophets, with Biden now with the crown, must be retooling their ear of prophecy.  They had turned the word of God of no effect. They privileged their imagination over the word of prophecy. Jeremiah said: “They are prophets of the deceits of their own hearts…he that hath my word let him speak it faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat?” One of the prophets in America exploded into a burst of cackles when Biden’s victory hit the waves. His church followers chorused his raucous uproar like hens invaded by hyenas. Kenneth Copeland apologised afterwards. But his fervour for Trump was not lost in that feverish hour.

Some have said that Trump was a good man, who just had a bad tongue and an impish attitude. Other than that, he was a child of God. Just as they used the Bible to prop slavery, they excavated passages in the Bible to enthrone the bigot as a messiah. After all, he gave the Christians what they wanted. He hissed at gays and abortionists, and he kissed the prophets and judges. He teargased Black Lives Matter irritants so he could twirl the Bible, if upside down, in front  of a church. It did not matter the man did not know 2nd Corinthians, played golf when others prayed in church and spat out expletives like shithole to address a certain people God had created.

Few understand that the American evangelicals do not prophesy Christ for all but Christ for whites. If you are black or brown, and profess Christ, you are somehow not an authentic soul. You do not belong to the chosen race. You are beneath the priesthood because you are in the hood. To get this we have to go to history, and how they turned Christianity as a tool to justify the black man as chattels in the slave era.

When slave trade began, especially in the heydays of sugar plantations in Brazil and Caribbean, the white workers were too fragile. So they craved black biceps. It was cheap. All they needed was invade West Africa. Some white consciences did not support, but profit trumped prophets. They then enlisted the church. They said they wanted to refine us out of our savages. Slavery was a boon. The blacks gave them prosperity. They made wealth, especially for England and Scotland. Others in Europe, like the French and Spanish, also wanted to ladle out of the plate.

Slave traders became the Bill Gates of that era – rich, puffy, snoring in luxury, erecting palaces. They enacted new lifestyles of taste and opulence, the sort that sociologist Thorstein Veblen would later call “conspicuous consumption.” The African sweat inaugurated and justified capitalism. The church bloomed beside them. No one listened to discordant voices. Slave trade made the world of the west and the west made the black man make them. Hence the novelist Daniel Defoe wrote, “No African slave, no negroes; No negroes, no sugar; No sugar, no islands; No islands, no American continents; no American continents, no trade.”

They converted Africans, but what the whites saw in the message of heaven was, to them, a return home to Africa, to the liberty of their village hearths. Their churches were not for blacks. They brooked black churches but when the revolts disrupted plantations they regretted sometimes that they had evangelised in vain. The whites wanted mammon, but the blacks invoked their God to trash plantation mammon. Yet, some, like Wilberforce, saw the genuine pivot to Christ to free the slaves. When the U.S. was born, it was born for whites. When Jefferson said all men were created equal, he meant not just white man, but rich, propertied cockerels like him. Hence he spoke equality but ravished female slaves he would not marry.

Today the most segregated hour is Sunday morning. Whites and blacks worship apart. So, when the evangelicals supported Trump, they had no blacks in their imagination. Christianity is less a religion than culture in their eyes. They see God in the white man, and the white man in God. God anointed their race, so others are lesser souls in God’s eyes. When they say Trump is a child of God, they mean he is the point man of the race. They confirm how Wole Soyinka defined religion in his novel, The Interpreters, as “the justification of existence.”

The quest for democracy and the vote was resisted, even though the black man earned the franchise after the civil war. The KKK fought them back out of suffrage in the 1880’s. They had to wait till the civil rights era of the 1960’s to get the vote. President Lyndon Johnson, who made this happen ended the Democratic Party’s power over the white vote. Since 1964, they have not won the president with the white vote. This was because of what is called “the southern strategy” introduced by President Richard Nixon. The three words were God, Guns and Gays. These three words were code for white interest. The ideas sacralised the race.

With increasing immigration and spread of so-called coloured folks, the electoral maps will enlist states like Texas and Florida for democratic majority for another generation. That can change America. It will make the southern strategy obsolete and reset the ideological battles, so it will not be a battle about gays and abortionists but for honesty and progress. The white evangelicals will fall out of favour and clock out of history. Bernie Sanders has a strategy to deploy the democratic majority in Congress to entrench progressive ideas for a generation. If Democrats work the electorate to generate a momentum for good ideas, the Republican Party will have to rejig again, like we saw in the times of Nixon and Reagan. It is a consequential moment for America and the world. Will Biden bite?

The evangelicals claim to love God, but back a loveless villain. It is so because, in their sub-conscious, blacks or browns are not human enough. So, how can their votes count? If a black man is a fraction of the white man, how can we say their votes are equal? In their souls, the black man is still disenfranchised. Hence they say that Trump won and invaded the Capitol. Their math is racist and their prophets calculated it in the spirit. They won the white vote, so Trump was cheated.

The same evangelicals who cry against abortion back a president who abandoned babies at the borders. They love the unborn but abandon them after they cry out of the mother’s womb. They do charity for poor folks in Asia but vote for poor colored people to suffer. They hold vigils for a racist president but travel here to Africa to preach love and take prophet’s offering back to enrich their lifestyles. It is evangelical contempt.

The Biden victory can start a new clock to wake Christians to the true value of love, not racism. As one of them, Saint Augustine wrote, “That a beginning be made, God created man.”

By Sam Omatseye

 

Our federal state is undergoing a stress test. A priest asserts the truth and a Muslim group breaks the law and issues an eviction notice. The presidency only launches a tepid rebuke. A governor says herders should register in the forest, the same presidency says he is wrong. Then in Oyo State, a fellow orders quit notice and actually sends northerners out of Ibarapa and we see how one wrong can cascade into a virtual anarchy. Bishop Kukah said the truth and he did not break any law. Ondo State Governor wanted the rule of law. If the Miyeti Allah wanted law, they would ask their fellows to register if they have nothing to hide. While Rev Kukah and Governor Akeredolu only acted according to law, a certain fellow Sunday Igboho stepped into impunity and sent people out, and the IGP orders his arrest.

Why did he not arrest Kukah’s foes and encourage forest herders to follow the law? It took Igboho, who was wrong and foolish, to wrong the IGP to expose the top cop’s bigotry. Igboho reflected a deeper underbelly: the failure of intelligence and impotence of governance. Gov. Makinde cannot now shout. Where was he when the forest crooks raped and killed citizens on his watch? He should have learned from his Benue counterpart. The IGP tolerated Rev Kukah’s detractors and ignored Gov. Akeredolu’s prescience until Igboho did wrong. It is hypocritical justice.