Sam Omatseye

IT is a novel as cornucopia.

For those who have read Professor Wole Soyinka’s new novel, they may not be sure what to call it. That is its enigma. Some may say it is journalism, and for good reason. They meet the benign ghost of the former Oyo State Governor, Abiola Ajimobi. They cannot miss the grinning mien of Rochas Okorocha and his happiness ministry of in-law, siblings and cronies. Also from Kano, Governor Ganduje skewers emirs into sundry emirates.

Of course, we also see Okija, the shrine as cause celebre. The ecclesiastical takes centre court, with a cleric, neither Muslim nor Christian, both though and more ensconced in his charismatic, ecumenical soul of grand deception. He is the sort you saw thumping a fist on teevee, or the imam of reclusive and taciturn awe in the neighbourhood. For good measure, you meet, pop-eyed, the mystic island of Sat Guru Maharaji on the express.

This sort of novel is what French critics call romans a clef, a novel of recognition, a novel with a key. In Primary Colours, novelist Joe Klein tosses President Clinton about.

The novel, Chronicles Of the Happiest People On Earth, Soyinka’s third, is a recycling of the author’s work, parents giving birth  to a child, but the child taking on all their traits while individualising them. The child is theirs, but the child is his own person. It is 506-page tome of a society of oddballs and bloodthirsty villains and abbreviated heroes.

If you want satire, you can keel over your chair. For instance, we see a prayer session when the pastor as patriarch, Pa Davina’s “rising obastacle” around his loins confronts a woman on her knees. She genuflects, face before Terigbogo’s mid-section. Terigbogo in Yoruba means “bow your head for glory.” Pa Davina is also named Terigbogo. Or when a governor arrives for an award with an exaggerated caravan and he flicks out a grateful dagger from layers of babanriga. The host faints and finds himself in Dubai overnight. Or Badetona’s encounter with a lizard that ignites a wife’s fear and sees it as an omen of wizardry. The husband, a skeptic, has to ascend a breathtaking mountain for absolution with, of course, the mystic masseur of the soul, Pa Davina.

The novel takes a swipe at religious hypocrisy and sexual peccadillos of men of power and mystery, oaths upend oaths. We see this in the triumphs of the Jero plays and the Lion and the Jewel.  We also see the exploits of Madmen and Specialists in one of the main characters, Duyole Pitan-Payne, although it is his son who is the maleficent type of Dr. Bero. That also gives a hint of Death and the King’s Horseman in the strain where son charts a different path from father, in an oedipal betrayal.

The novel is about four main persons, friends, ostensibly since they leave school. In his first novel, The Interpreters, we have five graduates confronting a teething nation. Their idealism falters. In this Chronicles, the four are supposed to belong to a Gong of Four, a fraternity of good intention with a dose of the idealistic.  Badetona is a bureaucrat, Pitan-Payne an engineer, Kighare Menka a surgeon, and Farodion. Who is Farodion? He is the mystery man of the tale, a man of many names, many faiths, many countries, many sojourns, a man with a pact with life and death. We do not know him until the story ends, and the sophistication of his treachery enlarges the skewed nature of the happiness project that Nigeria is.

The tragedy re-echoes Soyinka’s lament of a wasted generation, brilliant idealists who make bonfires of a nation’s dream. You cannot also miss the motif of the tyrant in power, the hustlers around him, the vanity of bringing up those who know nothing into reckoning of the wrong kind. Opera Wonyosi is his play of political indulgence, megalomania and glamorous putrescence, where a character says, “he who begs, bags.” A fellow, Ubenzy Oromotayo, is the dispenser of awards that flatter the egos of vain and parasitic elite. Oddballs and lofty maniacs replace the good. A street gang dressed up as models. Opera Wonyosi adapts The Beggar’s Opera, Playwright John Gay’s play that flays the first British Prime Minister Robert Walpole. It also adapts Brecht’s Three Penny opera.

The motif of ritual and body parts undergirds the tale. He calls it the “meat mall.” It weaves the story of kilishi and Boko Haram, and the ritual murder in the south as well as nurses and hospital staff across the country who make a killing out of blood and offal of patients purloined from hospital theatres. The high and mighty use albinos and other human parts for wealth and power. It is all tied together in the Okija tale, where we see him soar into the roman a clef territory again.  The novel tells, with a sardonic eye, the familiar tales of a governor abducted, a toilet farce, a police officer’s list of marque members and a national audience in bewilderment.

The cadaverous mess is the undertow of a society that claps over a crowd of mourners, a carapace above dead men’s bones, where pious ecstasy props the lies of priests and political leaders. It creeps into family. The Pitan-Payne clan is a connected, well-known name. But the fellow is not loved. They crave his wealth. His son colludes with his enemies to destroy him because, somehow, the son envies his father’s prowess.

The novel gets personal with Pitan-Payne in a recast of Femi Johnson, the bosom friend of the bard. In his memoirs, You Must set Forth At Dawn, he recounts his effort to exhume his friend’s remains and rebury him here at home.

In the novel, he makes the yarn a series of genres. A comedy, when the deceased’s sister pours accolades on Austria’s scenic beauty and lashes at Nigeria’s slovenly environment, whereas she fattened on defacing the Marina in Lagos. A thriller in the tale of outsmarting the family obstruction in bringing the body home. A whodunit in the inquiry into the fiction that Menka hid something inside his friend’s body. And, of course, his son’s role in his father’s death. A farce in the dance march to the funeral. He also gives us a slave trade tapestry as Pitan-Payne, who hails from Badagry, a slave port, has to be returned home to reverse the servile relationship with the west in that symbolic act.

In his interview with The News editor Kunle Ajibade, Soyinka says he is wary of claiming to know the life of any person. And this is wise. No one can appropriate anybody’s interiority. French Philosopher Rousseau asserted that autobiographies are inevitably self-serving. We only cut slices and spices of other’s lives. It is a matter of perspective as Pa Davina himself says in the novel on the issue of happiness.

The happiness of Nigerians is the illusion of wellbeing, a people diagrammed to accept anomie as peace, a sense of life as glee. We are like Sisyphus, who takes the rock up the hill on end. Albert Camus says Sisyphus is happy in his book of essays, The Myth of Sisyphus. Nigerians embrace their joy in rigged elections, in fuel prices that rise, in kidnaps and slit throats, in baby factories. It is what Fela calls Suffering and Smiling.

It is an offering that has it all. Sometimes Soyinka writes with the rigour of an essayist. Sometimes we see the stage as the dramatist unfurls his yarn. Or even as a poet and he gets cryptic. Sometimes he flows as master story teller.

The humour lifts the heavy passages at times, like an engine that revs a B-2 bomber to fly light in the sky. The humour sometimes forgives the prose. But it is no easy read like Things fall Apart or Half of a Yellow Sun. It offers pleasure to those ready to plumb its depths.

 

Fifty claps for Kabiyesi

 

HE ascended the throne at 32. Fifty years on, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi III, the Alafin of Oyo, still acquits himself with poise, charisma and a royal presence unsurpassed in the land.

He is the sort of royal who brings compassion and modernity to an institution some have passed off as history. As they say, the king makes the crown.

He has been a crown to the king as well by the majesty of engagement in society these five decades.

He exudes erudition and has positioned himself on the side of the progressive principle of the age.

 

Sam Omatseye

 

A GOOD nanny is a parent’s dream. A good nanny, though, can overthrow the parent. That provides a dilemma for a home. But, more so, in the running of a country.

A government as nanny captures the imagination. When we encounter novels like the Perfect Nanny by a French Moroccan writer Leila Slimani or The Help by Kathryn Stockett, we wonder what a mother-surrogate who thrashes about the cot and kitchen has in common with politics.

The nanny state, first advanced by a lawmaker Lain Macleod in Britain in 1965, is another way of saying we should choose between a state of affection or the one that leaves citizens to their devices. But no state can be free from the nanny’s apron.

The nanny state is a welfare state. It spreads its benevolent bosoms over the suckling citizen. In a country like Nigeria where the needs are many, the state should play nanny. And for good reason. But not an absolute nanny. We expect the nanny in special places. We expect such a nanny to be a good one, or else the nanny will unleash a maleficent soul like in the novel Perfect Nanny about a so-called happy family. Things go awry and the children choke. Murder suffocates affection.

The Buhari administration was born not sure whether it wanted to play the nanny or the aloof parent. It has managed to do both, but unmanaged it. It has left the child at once panting for the nanny and the parent. A Hobson’s choice. A riot of a vision.

In a country, the state provides infrastructure, security and resources. The parent does that, too. But in a nanny home, the parent does not exude empathy and intimacy. They cannot give the routine joy and play for the child. They are aloof, swum away to workplace avarice. The parent cedes their seed to the maid.

It reinvigorates the debate as to how much of government we need in our lives. Abraham Lincoln asserted that governments should do for the people what they cannot do or cannot do so well for themselves. Lee Kuan Yew boasted that if he did not run a nanny state, his country would not have leapt ahead. It draws the charge of a despot. Hence we have a democracy after many years of gun-handed mulls on the throne.

A state plays nanny when it builds roads, bridges, secure army and railways and schools. Dinner table steams with food, the sick get drugs, the jobless work. The nanny state is the capitalist antidote to the smothering blanket of a socialist state. it is a Fabian ideal free of Lenin’s shackles.

Under Buhari, we see two things working quite well. Work is going on for the Second Niger bridge, the Lagos-Ibadan expressway and many restored bridges across the country. We also have witnessed the Lagos-Abeokuta-Ibadan railway project on the verge of formal commissioning. These are the doings of two work horses. One is the Trojan of works, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, and for transportation is Rotimi Amaechi.

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka made a subtle point recently in his commute on the train to Abeokuta. He said he loved the train but he was not ready to speak about Buhari. It looks like a disconnect, but it is not. The bard was like the child who loved the nanny but is alienated from the parent. Of course, Buhari will take the credit for the train, a first and even revolutionary approach to transport on that heady corridor and busiest in the sub-continent.

See the Third Mainland Bridge. But for what Fashola has instituted, that iconic bridge was a prefabricated preface to a major world disaster. Just one rush hour, one crack, then a lagoon roaring with metal frames and blood. Under him, we have the first institutionalised check. It is a story of the nanny checking the cot for fragile hinges. Or else the parent, like in the Perfect Nanny, comes home to a tragedy of broken bones.

Other elements make the home right. For this essay, I would mention security. Even in keeping the home for the nanny, parents must prioritise safety. The nanny will not do well when the doors are open for robbers and kidnappers. That is one cardinal area of worry.

That was Bishop Matthew Kukah’s Xmas homily. When people die and the army frails, the parent fails. With a parent aloof, the child drools in a pool of blood. The administration has appointed the right people for works and transportation. Why has he not done the same for areas that would have helped him succeed? In his security outfits, his picks grovel. The service chiefs are chafing, and defence architecture is aching. They don’t bubble with ideas or action. He won’t fire those who fumble. Buhari is scoring with Fashola and Amaechi because he hired the right nannies.

But the nannies of safety are wrecking the home. Why has he retained them in the kitchen while tuwo burns the palate? The ministers of works and transportation hold his keys to posterity, so why has he not done the same in the areas of welfare, security and finance? He does not need to look at tribe, just the square pegs. If he puts the right people in place, maybe they would have saved his name. But he has stuck to incompetent men. They are his “kinsmen,” not keen men. They have held him in their mesh – as hostage both as a president but also to failure. He should pick those who can make him shine, not those who shine for themselves and at his expense.

If you must be a nepotist or ethnicist, emulate President John F. Kennedy, who picked his brother Robert as attorney general. Not the sort we have today who pines more for power than justice. We cannot run a diverse country for justice when some groups are barred from the temple. There are competent nannies everywhere, north south, east and west.

We cannot sugarcoat a disaster like the Borno slaughters or emirs eliminated, or broken schools or power outages.

In terms of welfare, there were some good ideas. Feeding students across the country has been applauded in this column. But we also saw the scandal that befell it recently when COVID shut down schools. The food was going to ghosts of students. Disembodied hands and mouths shoveling non-existent plates of rice and beans. No student, no food, big budget. The humanitarian lady of the cabinet stuttered afterward to explain why shuttered schools had supplies. After all, we have seen snakes and reptiles digest tens of millions of Naira in the past. The welfare programmes for small-time investors seemed to have a good beginning. But the numbers affected are too small to turn around the poor man’s economy. What happened to its initial momentum?

If daddy and mummy cannot do it, then find a good nanny.

 

 

Tambuwal’s counterforce

 

AS the north cringes under militant hoodlums, the times call for imagination. Sokoto State Governor, Aminu Tambuwal is not waiting for the service chiefs or Buhari’s architecture. He is taking the fate of his citizens in his hands. He has come with the idea of merging schools, especially those in the perilous areas. The affected schools include GSS Kebbe students who will now couple with GSS Sanyinna, Sultan Muhammadu Tambari Illela to GSS Gwaddabawa, and a quite a few more. The state has seen lords of violence send farmers out of their farms, extort taxes, maim and maul, and send some citizens leaping across the border out of the country just to keep safe.

Governor Tambuwal’s step only demonstrates how desperate things have become in the country, especially in the northern part of the country. The school merger goes to the safer areas, especially away from the borders. This makes it easier to police and monitor them and keep students safe. Leaving them in clusters in vast stretches of land problematises the ability to track the militants.

This is a model that other states can follow, especially because the north is a vast geography and moving from one place to another is unwieldy. The felons know that. Governor Tambuwal’s decision is a counterforce of an idea.

 

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Sam Omatseye

AS the year ends, eyes focus on 2021, a year a politician and Buhari insider told me will be “turbulent.” But that dialogue preceded the spark from Bishop Matthew Kukah’s sacred fire. It is none other than the quicksand path to 2023. The dreamers and their footmen are jockeying for the public’s imagination. Never before in this country’s history has an election been sought and the prospects so cloudy. We are bracing for eruptions of surprises, blindside, and even personal misfortunes and losses. Hence even a conservative poet like Samuel Coleridge crooned, “anticipation is more potent than surprise.”

We are now back to the hobgoblin called zoning. Rather than joust over ideas, we are there again at the familiar altar of comfort: the shrine of the tribe. But the lesson from 1999 has told us what lie zoning has been. It has neither benefited the tribe, nor their gods. It has satisfied the priests of sacrifice: the elites. It is just like Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God where the priest diverts the cock meant for the palate of the gods. It ends up on the plate of the home.

We saw that under Obj, the Owu chief. The short realm of Yar’Adua precludes him from judgment. Jonathan had the sin aplenty, and today we are watching the iniquity at play under Buhari. When the republic began, the idea was to expiate the wrongs of June 12, and give it to a Yoruba. The poll was a bow at the shrine also of MKO. To pay with a Yoruba president would exorcise the stammering rage of an Abiola ghost. But when it happened, the Yoruba kinsmen did not like the choice that resulted. OBJ was not Yoruba enough for the race. It was good enough for the other ethnic groups. Obj satisfied a zoning that was not at that time seen as zoning. It was a payback for the northern sneeze at Abiola. The southwest saw it as casting a swine before the Yoruba pearl. OBJ did not romance Abiola in life or death. Like in the civil war, he benefited where he did not toil. MKO built a presidential dream-house, but he inhabited it.

In this narrative, Obj may have become a Yoruba man in Aso Rock, but the southwest spirit was not with him. It was the opposite. The southwest haunted him. If the polls sought to appease the MKO gods, MKO ‘s ghost growled at night over Aso Rock. It was a victory to paper over a crime. Obj read it that way. Even within his ethnic group, Obj played a divide-and-rule hand, and revved a train wreck against its progressive mainstays. This led to rigged elections, and surrogate phonies as governors until a backlash came through the courts. The west had its revenge after presidential zoning failed.

For the people of the southwest, they were invited to dinner. The invite read dinner at 8pm. To the others, it read 6pm. Food had finished before they arrived. They arrived to the crumbs and the dance session.

When Jonathan came, a shoeless era had begun. He was known also as Azikiwe, a name that shushed the Igbo into line. Money was awash. Oil rose to over 110 dollars per barrel, and Jonathan was the wonder boy of indulgences. In Abuja, we saw rows of Niger Delta hats just as a witch saw an apparition of gods at the Witch of Endors’ place. They expected great deeds for his people. So did the Igbo. For sure, we saw the appointments. Many came for his folks. When Anyim was secretary to the federal government, he could not escape the charge that he was partial to his folks. So much was the money, that even on the tony streets of London, shoppers could not escape the hats and the buys, the profligacy of preening elite. Even the minister of minister, Okonjo-Iweala once said Igbo were beating everyone in tests for jobs without showing how candidates were recruited and perimeters for testing.

In all though, Jonathan left office, and what legacy? Of course, the appointments and peacocks with their big troughs of personal cash. But the real people? Not much for the average Ijaw. The Igbo who complained of bad federal roads forever did not even put Jonathan’s feet to the fire. They loved him, and that sentiment enshrined him in their hearts. Now, some people want him back, even when the constitution says that anyone who has finished a term of another person cannot be eligible to contest again. The constitution also says anyone who has been sworn in twice cannot be sworn in a third time. His lovers are so tied to him that they can subvert the evidence before them.

It is an irony that an unlikely person in Buhari, with the force of Babatunde Raji Fashola, his Trojan of works, has done more roads for the east  than any minister in a long time, including the second Niger Bridge that is on course to be a breath-taking achievement.

Bishop Kukah said if any other ethnic leader did what Buhari has done in his nepotism, he would have inspired a coup. He was right. But he forgot that Jonathan committed the same crime, and that is what led to Buhari’s second coming. It was not a coup of the gun, but of the vote. But just like all coups in Nigerian history, they were heralded as messiahs and have disappointed in the end.

Today, the reason that Buhari came was also partly because talakawa rallied behind their hero. They would not do that today. The talakawa vote rid their hero of his mystique. Buhari the aspirant was a soldier who did not bend to folly. He did not accept injustice. He did not work with the filthy or the compromised. He was the myth and legend of the aspiring poor. He was idealized in stratosphere. But Buhari the mythmaker will not pardon the ambitious Buhari for snuffing out the epic tale. Office closed the orifice.

But giving prime jobs to his kinsmen have not stopped the butchery in Borno. It has not stopped the bloody maelstrom in southern Kaduna, the ferreting away of the Boys of Kankara, the blood-spattered highway between Abuja and Kaduna, the tax-collectors who have set Sokoto poor out of their farms and out of their country. His home state emir wondered what sort of a country Nigeria was. The Sultan of Sokoto has lamented the north as the perilous part of Nigeria. The talakawa are poorer today than ever. So, there. The soldier’s gun is dud at his own homestead.

It is the region that Soyinka in his new novel, Chronicles of the Happiest People on Earth, locates part of his morbid tale. In the bard’s Chronicles, the society is like a living mortuary, so we the analysts are “social morticians.”

Why do we think we should vote according to tribe, when tongues still can’t taste the good life?  We should stop thinking ethnic when we vote. Zoning is a ploy, not policy. The issue is, when does the tribal end and the Nigerian begin? It is only when such a leader demonstrates it that the Nigerian can save the tribe, and ultimately save Nigeria.

 

  Isama and Sagay at 80

 

TWO distinguished Nigerians turned 80 this month, and In Touch pays tribute. They are Itse Sagay, man of law. The other is Alabi Isama, a man of war. Both have served this country with their treasures. Sagay, a warrior, has fought battles for democracy and justice on the street and campus as an early day Action Group youth. On campus, he threw salvos at intellectual colonialism. Sagay wanted to be a doctor until, after he left Government College Ughelli, was in Lagos and spent evenings watching parliament with Awo in action. Awo the pundit, researcher, methodical presenter and polemicist took the doctor from Sagay and seduced him with the wig and gown. He decided to be a lawyer. I

in his Ife days, he formed the AG youth wing and has since been in the vanguard for democracy. On campus, he fought a military that dislodged him from his home in Benin, where he set up the law faculty. He won the battle in court with his colleagues like Festus Iyayi. Today, he is still at it, the latest being his joust with the attorney general on war against corruption.

Isama is a veteran of three wars. He fought in the Congo, became chief of staff to Black Scorpion Adekunle during our Civil War, and led the force that ousted the Matatsine revolt.  He fought to save the continent, to unite his country and quell a sectarian impulse. Ensconced in his Ilorin home, Isama should be an invaluable consultant in these heady days. His book, A Tragedy of Victory is perhaps the best book as yet on the civil war, written with great anecdotal support and pictures.

These are the true Nigerians, and I doff my hat to them.

 

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Sam Omatseye

 

FEW can imagine the trauma beneath the façade of the hundreds of Kankara boys as they walked out of bondage last week. We saw the freedom of the body in pictures and video footages, but how much damage is afoot in those souls?

I recall a personal experience over a decade ago in Ibadan at a conference, and how robbers visited us in the hotel at night. I was sharing a suite with Dapo Olorunyomi, then chief of staff at EFCC and now publisher of Premium Times. But many persons inhabited rooms in the large hotel. We had completed the course and had an evening together outside after the heady hours of intellectual exchange.

I was in my room when I heard what was like brawls and capers of the unhinged. I chalked it up to the wall banging and throaty uproars of the drunken, a wild afterglow of what was however a tame evening. It went on for almost an hour before a silence. And someone knocked on my door to ask for my whereabouts, and it was then I learned that robbers had struck. There were no after-parties on the corridors, but armed goons flexing guns and daredevil eyes. I walked out of the room to see the air-conditioners dislodged to the floor. Televison set crested the refrigerator before I went inside. In that position, we had seen African Cup of Nations the previous night. But now both Televison set and refrigerator lay prostrate beside each other.

Where was Dapo? I asked. He had been rushed to the hospital. He returned with neck braces. Former Rivers State commissioner Ibim Semenitari, then a publisher, had cleverly outmanoeuvred them. Most conferees saw the men, trembled and lost valuables. I did not lose a kobo. I wondered why they did not even knock. My door was not locked.

But I did not escape their foray. The sound of hectoring and banging followed me out of Ibadan, and it did for at least a year. I never slept well. Whenever crockery quaked, silverware dropped, a foot fell, an involuntary cough leapt into the air, I started. If at night, I woke up. They did not rob me of Naira or phone or shirt, but they murdered Shakespearean sleep. They banged my soul. I was bruised and bled inside. It was a trauma I thought would flog me forever until I decided to fight it with willpower and prayers. That was for me as an adult.

I recalled my struggles when I saw the boys. They had seen threat, walked miles on barefoot, hectored by what one of them described as “tiny boys with big guns,” survived on grass and leaves of questionable edibility, starved, displaced, tortured, pined for home, despaired of rescue.

We are not sure how they were released. Few believe that they did not get ransom. Negotiations imply concessions. We are not sure what they conceded. But the boys are back. We thank God for their body, but is their soul in hell? Are they battling nightmares? Are they going back to school? Can they ever see school as education rather than a door to danger? Did that weekend just seed a monster or breed a mouse? “The diseases of the mind are more numerous and more dangerous than the diseases of the body,” noted Cicero.

That is why the government’s self-congratulation is premature. Somehow, some are seeing it as a feat of the military triumph, even trying to force us to fantasise about Entebbe Raid. President Muhammadu Buhari called it a military operation. Army spokesman General Enenche said the army had no hand in the release. The word ‘rescue’ exaggerates what happened. Until we know the details we should suspend judgment. Were the boys just too many for them to handle. From reports, the goons did not know what to do with their miracle. They had to make phone calls on what to do, and decided to walk many of them. Unlike the Chibok girls, there were not many trucks to ferry the find. We still need an accounting. How many did they take? How many are left behind? A reckoning in form of a roll call should clarify. Then we have to ask, why did they leave the others if we cannot account for them? Was it a sort of selection, a Spencerian survival of the fittest? I hope they released all. We do not want the repeat of the Dapchi example of Leah Sharibu and a few others held behind?

Maybe we are seeing the boys back because they form a logistical nightmare. It takes too much resource to feed such an army of boys, even if you want to make an army. Again, one of the boys said they asked for the location of the girl schools around. Are we “lucky” because they are boys? Would they return them if they had three hundred girls, innocent, nubile, waking up the primitive impulses of their loins?

One reason we cannot celebrate is that we know it should not have happened. It shows our army, unlike Buhari’s claims are not motivated and ready for the task ahead. We know that even as the boys returned, an emir was laid to rest after a bandit attack, some innocent were killed and ferreted away in Borno, several died in southern Kaduna. Death still skulks the north while Abuja gurgles its Kankara wine.

What we had in Kankara is the story of lost boys. They are lost even though we found them. There are many who are not captured but who are lost because they are thrashing about for hope and meaning for their lives. Yet, it is not about the north alone that we should grieve. We are seeing in the south another incarnation of mass murder, slow, surreptitious, apoplectic, its numbers swelling. They butcher better than surgeons. Or call them surgeons of the gods. In his new novel, Chronicles of the Happiest People On Earth, Wole Soyinka draws parallels between a surgeon treating many butchered after a terror onslaught in Jos, and the ritual murderers down south. Both cut human parts, the southern ritualist being more cold-eyed and clinical. Like in the north, they pick the child, the albino, the big and small man, and the women.

The federal government has decided to subject the boys to medical tests. But it is not just about a test or a psychiatric treatment of a few days. This is a lifetime experience.

The Katsina State where it happened has been in the spotlight for years. Many have drawn the president’s attention to his home state of terror. They did not strike for the boys when Buhari was ensconced in Abuja. They waited moments after he came to town in all his pomp and presidential grandeur in Daura. For emphasis, they farted when the emperor walked in for dinner. If he was absent when the House called him, and the soldiers were a no-show when they arrived in Kankara, why should anyone think we have any answer to the free fall of insecurity? It is a season of absences, both soldiers and president. Were the soldiers there when the bandits made a butchery of slit throats in Zabarmari?

We have all kinds of lost boys today. Not only the herders on the prowl, not only the gold hunter in Zamfara, not only the jobless in the Niger Delta. Nigeria is a lost boy with his father preening about his luxury and great power. Rather than the son, it is the leader who is prodigal.

Nigeria is not the first country to have lost boys trekking for miles. When Southern Sudan fell to slaughter over a decade ago, thousands of boys were displayed and walked for miles in lines, through bushes and plains, and villages, some of them bitten to death by snake, others devoured by lions. They were scattered all over the world, including in the United States and Europe. American novelist Dave Eggers captured it in his novel, What is the What, a thriller that reads like a movie. But it was a real life experience.

But our boys came home. But is the body together with the soul?

 

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Sam Omatseye

 

MAYBE Malami did not see the constitution. Or maybe he did not see House Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila when he visited the President. If he saw, we may pity him if he did not hear the clear timbre of the speaker’s voice when he said it.

If he did not see, and he did not hear, then we may conclude that Abubakar Malami is the first deaf-mute attorney-general and minister of justice in Nigerian history. I don’t want to go that far. The man is a SAN, even if we know that some SANs today are no better than glorified charge and bail lawyers, SANs sans erudition or quality. Some SANs are born great, some achieve greatness and some have it thrust upon them. I often worry about the third and last category.

It all began with the butchery in Borno, when a band of barbarians slit the throats of 43 persons and electrified our hearts with terror. The speaker invited the president to engage the lawmakers. The president assented. He also fixed a date, and that was last week Thursday.

But before Malami were APC governors. Four of them paid a visit to Buhari. They were the gubernatorial emissaries. They didn’t bring light but left with a stroke. They did not want him to show up at the House. It was a booby trap. The president would step height and frame into the parliamentary chambers, and implode. They draped him in their flattery like brocaded court jesters. Their words cut the president to the quick, and his eyes barbed back in reply. He had given his word, and he was in no mood for an about face. The humbled quartet squatted out of sight. Game One: President four, Governors on all fours.

Game Two. A NEC meeting. An ambush. The governors trembled over the prospect of a PDP enemy at the parliamentary door. They contended that the opposition lawmakers awaited the president with hangmen and snipers. To sooth their conscience, the APC governors lamented Borno’s grief, its prostrate and its dead. Pharisaic tears, but no more. Before the president could say a thing, he was procedurally incapacitated. The meeting was over. The resolution was on the record. NEC forbade the president to attend the meeting. The president exited, his voice unheard. The score: Governors 20, President yet to sore.

My reporting found that it was not the president they loved more, but themselves. They feared his appearance would plant a precedent. If the National Assembly can invite a president, then their own houses can enact uproar. That was the private musings among the state chief executives. They were preempting a mutiny at home but castrating it in the centre.

It was then that the question of English literacy ambushed constitutional illiteracy between governors and attorney general.  The speaker invited. He did not summon. It was an engagement, not a confrontation. The speaker visited the president, and the atmosphere of cordiality prevailed. He did not invade the villa. He did not even go to beard the lion in his den of beefy body guards and wily reptiles. He came in peace. So how could he summon the president in that ambience? He even never employed the word ‘summons.’

The speaker did not take on the belligerence of former senate president Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki. He was not in the old tradition of the French Estates General that led to the guillotine, or the war between parliament and Crown where the crafty and decapitating Oliver Cromwell fomented the British Guillotine of King Charles The First.

If Speaker Gbajabiamila was not in a mood for affray, why did Malami bring a register of verbal warfare into the fray by seeing summons in an invite? Was it a case of a bloodthirsty attorney general with a will to war shielding the president? Was he installing a nuclear arsenal in peacetime, like Putin who is so intimidated by his better rival – The United States – that he has to always boast of his military arsenal even if they make him sound like a grandiloquent cymbal? Before the Second World War, historians called a similar episode on the French and Belgian borders “the phony war.”

That is why I wondered if this was not a case of a hallucinating minister. Maybe he is like the blind man in the New Testament miracle who saw “men like trees.” He saw that the speaker said invite, not summon. He invoked belligerency. He heard him say invite. He also has a constitution; at least, he should as SANs do. And the constitution says the house can invite the president.

Maybe his is like the man who once saw and did not see like the folks in the novel Blindness by Jose Saramago. This is the sort of attorney general, quite like a few we have had in this republic, who misguided their leaders. Some have asserted that invitation is a subtle way to summon. But that is when there is a state of confrontation between both houses. And in that instance, both men would not meet in Aso Rock, and smile over a confrontational meeting in the wings. It just does not make constitutional sense to see it as a summons. Summons suggests consequences. No such threat exists.

By not appearing, the president is presumed to have bowed to the governors and his chief law officer, and welshed on his word. This contradicts a president whose main public DNA is integrity. He did not come, and as at press time, he had not told us why. Neither has he canceled.

We hope that Malami is not the force behind this ill-advised move because the minister knows little about public accountability of this sort. It is this kind of decision that made the APC first decide to dissolve the party structure of elected offices in the states and local government. The carapace of caretakers does not cover its illegality. They were not elected caretakers. This is a gangster act in a party that is unraveling like a spool in a pool. That is the first act of the party’s implosion. Until and unless the president addresses this, we shall see humpty dumpty in a great fall.

What we are seeing is pride. The next chapter may be suicide. With the sort of advice from its governors and law officer, a free fall beckons.

 

Sam Nda-Isaiah: Such a long time

 

I HEARD his voice next door. He contended with another voice that would also become familiar. But it took just a few days for us to meet at Awolowo Hall at the University of Ife. When he materialised, I recognised the philter of my neighnour’s voice before the slight stature. His mind was stout, though. Later in life, his body would match his mind. In our first year, we were virtually roommates.

When I first saw Sam Nda-Isaiah, he radiated bonhomie behind the veneer of an aggressor. The other fellow, his sparring partner, was Paul Akinsola, who studied estate management. Nda-Isaiah and Akinsola had a renaissance spirit.

I forget the point of contention when we met, but he wanted to know my course of study. When I said History, he snapped, “You guys in the faculty of arts are autistic.” I did not know the meaning of the word, but I knew he had insulted me. I also concluded with humour that he had lost the argument. We were to meet many times in the course of our Ife sojourn sometimes to spar, but most times to say hello. When I learned he was studying pharmacy, I knew this man was not a scientist by temperament. He was the first to introduce me to the feisty Radio Kaduna political programme, perhaps the best political programme in the country at the time. When I met another roommate from the north central, law student John Kuleve Galu, Radio Kaduna etched itself more on my mind.

When we left Ife, I did not hear from him until he started his life work, The Leadership newspaper. It did not surprise me. He was cut out more for the pharmacopeia of the mind and society than for the laboratory or the flesh and bone. He pored over the chemistry of votes and social dialectics; the laboratory of circumstances more than substances. He ran for president on the APC platform, and I know a few people who thought he was more than little ambitious for himself. But he was not one to be taken for small. I thought he was following his star, and it took him up and up until the icy prosecutor knocked coldly at his door at 58.

The last time I met him was at  a dinner in Lagos a few years ago, and I reminded him that he called me autistic at our first meeting at Awolowo Hall. He didn’t remember. He couldn’t and we laughed it off. He did not say it out of spite, but out of boyish hubris in 1980. He brought a voice to journalism and politics, and we shall always have him on our mind.

 

Sam Omatseye

 

THE most enduring legacy of Diego Amando Maradona for us in Nigeria, may not be on the turf of play. It may be political. Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida was the victim and culprit. He manipulated politics in a way that evoked the magisterial vista of the Argentine maestro.

Both men mastered their turf. One left sweat, tears, cheers and boos. The other deposited blood, fear, tears and cheers. One was a thieving genius, the other a self-proclaimed evil genius.

While the diminutive ball juggler made an obstacle course of defences, IBB slalomed the world of politics. He turned election against politician, politician against soldiers and soldiers against bureaucrats. From the stands, the people cheered and booed, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes together. At times, they were not sure whether to do either, or both. At long last, the sunset came for both men. But for people such as Diego and IBB, they make too much impact, good or bad, for the sunset not to leave a halo.

As Diego passes we know the folk hero as god, a god of soccer in the Argentine shrine. But his worshippers transcend race and borders. Black and white, Asian, European, African and South America, including Brazil where they love to hate him. He started as a rough-hewn area boy, but after riches and fame, he died still a rough-hewn. He enjoyed the fame. But he was not comfortable with celebrity. He loved the wealth, and unfurled it in a lifestyle whose obscenity seemed a revolt against plenty. Drugs, women, Rolex, parties. Many wanted him to be a light. He never saw himself in that light. He probably rebelled against it. He might have loved the contradiction. He a poor man who associated with the people’s politics. He was an anti-elitist elite. A traitor to his class.

The story of his life was told within four minutes in 1986. He scored a goal with a hand. While many were panting over a cheat, he dazzled with honesty. He picked the ball from his own half and undertook a dribble run, beating every player on his way including the goal keeper. He netted perhaps the best individual goal in the history of the game. The British press called him the Argentine thief. He said it was a holy, transcendental moment in soccer. So he said it was the “hand of God.” In the words of Peter Abelard of the age of Transformation, God became man. But his hand was Satan, his feet divine. Rather than punishment, he earned victory. Rather than infamy, he found redemption, a golden boot and a world cup trophy. His aerial larceny became a lance on England’s skin. The thief handed England a humiliation. He became a Barabbas of soccer. He got absolution without confession, or he let out a confession as defiance.

Again, Maradona was a metaphor for crime with a reward. It also was comeuppance for England, a deuce of doom. The South American nation had recently sunk a British warship in a war over the Falklands Island. The World Cup match was not just two nations sweating and trading tackles in a friendly affray to entertain a bored world, it was a grudge from sea storm to turf of play. If all was fair in war, Maradona was not the sort of guy who did not know its significance for a critical world cup match. The British press anticipated revenge. Instead, the former colonial power crumbled. The press expected England to do its duty. The argentine stole it. It was not fair. So, too, was colonialism.

Nigeria did not have a great memory with the bard of soccer moves. They beat us in USA, and when the match ended, he likened the Nigerian defence to Mike Tyson. He was perhaps the most bruised soccer forward in world cup history. Pele is second. If he triumphed against African countries, he did not forget Cameroun till he died. The African nation was led by Roger Milla, 38, who danced to scorn after scoring. I remember that evening at the weekend Concord newsroom. Editor Mike Awoyinfa, with an eye for moments, titled: the story, Maragoner.

The story of the Argentine player is often interlocked with Pele O’Rei. Who is the GOAT, the greatest player of all time? The problem with many assessors of Pele is that they were not in the moment as they were with the Argentine. They watched the clips. They never witnessed the tension, suspense, surprise, the immediacies or value the victory first-hand. They are too close to Diego to be impartial. They tend to give it to Maradona. There are quite a few parameters to use. They include skills, set pieces, goals, great moments, team player and legacy. Some have said the Argentine wins in skills and team player categories because he was an attacking midfielder, who had to sweat through thickets of defence. Pele, on the other hand, played advanced forward, and did not have the fight that Diego had.

They also say Pele savoured a complement of great players like Jairzinho and Alberto.  They may be right, but Pele was a master of ball control around the eighteen yard box. He hardly scored an easy goal. Was it the one in which he, a small man like Diego, lofted high and crowned the effort with a header? He did not use a divine hand. Or the play in which he beat every player in sight on the goal keeper’s box and lifted the ball over a defender’s head? Was it a goal he scored from the centre field? Even if they give it to Maradona, they cannot take away Pele’s number of goals, netting 12 goals and 10 assists in 14 world cup appearances while Maradona had seven goals and 8 assists in 21 appearances. The point that Maradona played for Napoli in Europe and Pele at Santos in Brazil does not diminish the Brazillian club games. Santos was a great club that even won two club world cups. Pele said if Diego scored over 1000 goals as he did in his career, the conversation could begin. Goals make soccer’s fruition, and the master of it is the master.

The stats show Maradona wins the set piece category. For great moments, Pele clutches it. He has three world cup, Maradona has one. If Pele had big players, we cannot punish him for his blessings. Legacy goes to Pele with three world cup wins, and a scandal-free career and life. Diego was a colourful hero, Pele a bland brand. The game is about legends, and Pele tops the Argentine.

Nevertheless, the humanity of Maradona is inescapable. He associated with the Argentine poor, and even spent as though he wanted to be poor for plebian authenticity. He even associated with leftist leaders like Da Silva, Chavez, Castro.

But there is one person he reminds me of: Haruna Ilerika, Nigeria’s best. I have seen players in the country since the 1970’s. No one had the ball control abilities, dribble run, colour and team spirit like him. He played at the wrong time, before global television age and universal scouting. Ilerika would have been in a conversation of the greats today. Unfortunately, we don’t even have the videos of his plays.

Diego’s deity is his feet, even when they are made of clay.

 

In Jos, Barabbas and Jesus

 

TWO things happened recently, all connected with Plateau. One gives you reason to cheer about Nigeria’s moral future. We all saw the theater of looting of palliatives. But about two thousands of them confessed after a sermon by Pastor Ezekiel Dachomo of the Church of Christ in Nations. Of their own freewill, they returned the loot from a penitent heart. They asked for forgiveness. Their souls no longer warehouse guilt but pardon. They are the Barabbas of the Nigerian soul. They stole but had the audacity to confess. Penitence tortures far more than hardihood. It takes a crumbling of the spirit to confess in public to stealing, especially if you did it with a mob and got away with it.

The contrast is that of Yakubu Gowon, former head of state. A British member of parliament said Gowon brought “half of the Central Bank” of Nigeria with him to the UK after he was ousted in Murtala’s coup of 1975. He had no evidence. It adds to the apocryphal tales of the EndSars narratives. No one has ever vouchsafed Gowon to any scandal. When he was a student in the UK, he was even mocked by the British press for lining up, plate in hand, for food in the dining hall. He was a former head of state. They expected him to be dining in a London mansion.

Jos posted two countervailing skeins. A lie about looting, and looters who confessed the truth. It’s like the story of Jesus and Barabbas. Barabbas the thief gets redemption. Gowon, like Jesus, was innocent, but the MP installs a hangman’s noose for him.

 

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