Sam Omatseye

Sometimes when a news story erupts, this essayist denies it and calls it a rumour. It is my own attitude to the im    probable. Until, of course, I accept that it is no lie. I approached the news of the so-called EndSars# bank accounts and the CBN in that fashion. But as Shakespeare said: “Against my soul’s pure truth why labour you.”

So, why would the CBN become an interlocutor of subversion? The top bank froze the accounts of 19 persons and a firm. They froze first and obtained permission later from the court. They deployed what lawyers call ex parte, which is a carte blanche to hold the accounts of the citizens for six months. Normally it is two weeks. They say it is so because the youths supped with the devil.

They imply what lawyers call a prima facie case for terrorism charge against the fellows. This is no small matter. A charge of terror against youth cannot be a flaky affair. If it is true, it abolishes their future. They cannot have a career, a public life, a professional assiduity, or family tranquility. They cannot see the world and the world cannot see them except as pariah. The worst of all, they will spend the sap of their lives in jail.

That is why what the CBN has done must attract everyone’s attention. It is not just about the EndSars fellows. It burrows the root of the concept of democracy and free speech. Banks often freeze accounts if they suspect an underhand breach. But this case is different. When such things happen, they resolve them in short order. They don’t often take six months. If it is a case of terror, then it is extraordinary and the CBN has a right to flag the accounts.

But they have no right to put the cart before the horse. They should not freeze for six months and ask the court for leave afterward. It is disobedience before obedience. That flouts the concept of the rule of law.

Two, if the CBN is sure of its case, we have the right to know what they know. To freeze accounts in that manner and keep silent runs counter to the democratic norm. We want to know who funneled money into what accounts, when did they funnel it? What the money was spent on? We want to know the biographies of the benefactors or donors, and show that they paid the cash to perpetrate terror.

In a military dictatorship, such things happen without explanation. But in this case, we must hold the nation’s top bank to account in a democracy. Information is the lifeblood of a democracy. It oxygenates its dynamics. It is a republic of facts, not fiction. When facts fade, the state fills in its chronicles. It decides what is and what is not. It can suffocate dissent, and inflate error. That is why some philosophers have opined that without information, we lose the system to an Orwellian coven. With knowledge vacuum, tyrants control space and time. Sentiments rise, cults fester, the innocent end up in cells and a cabal prospers. Like in Soyinka’s play, madmen become specialists and specialists become madmen.

The CBN again is supposed to be an independent unit, why is the CBN doing the job of the DSS by going to court? I suppose that if the CBN sees a terror leak, it freezes the account and notifies the federal government. When did the top bank become a sleuth, while the DSS, the statutory sleuth, snoozes on? Is the CBN working on behalf of the DSS? The DSS has said nothing at the time of writing. Reports say CBN acted on DSS orders. So, where is the independence of the CBN? Lai Mohammed has kept mum. Emefiele is the fall guy.

The other point is the allegation of revenge. The widespread suspicion is that the government is after the promoters of the recent protests because they embarrassed the state. If that is not the case, they owe us an explanation to delineate the truth in public. We don’t have to wait for the courts to know these facts. We know the rigmarole of the judges, and this matter can outlast even the Buhari administration. In the meantime, stains on the names of the accused may have turned from innocuous ink into Kandahar. The persons may have to spend the rest of their lives explaining their innocence.

Again, this essayist hopes they are not conflating donations for the peaceful protests to the vandalism and self-serving anarchism that hijacked the protests. They will have to prove that the donations are not for peaceful protests but to subvert the state. Facts, only facts, to parody Charles Dickens’s opening lines in his novel Hard Times. If the money they are flagging were donations for peaceful protests, it implies that the CBN is subverting democracy. It is within any citizen’s rights to collect money to pursue democratic rights. Just as everyone in government today lifted Ghana Must Go bags for elections, so too the civil society can fund its affairs.

The peaceful protests openly called for donations, and we are all aware of them. Did they cross the line? They drew up their demands and the President appended them.  We now know them as “five for five” when the presidency acceded. If they collected money for their activity, freezing the accounts would be an extraordinary act of democratic self-immolation, of the leaders of a democracy undermining democratic norms. That is the closest to a self-coup. That is why we want to know the real truth.

The fellows have also gone to court to challenge the freezing. That is not enough. We want the accused to also tell us who donated the money, how much, and why. Their accounts are now like a fish bowl. They, like the CBN, have the public ear to answer to. We want the equilibrium of public hearing in the civil tribunal or what Jefferson called the “tribunal of the world,” a balancing of facts, a reckoning of conscience. All sides work their angles for the public good. I suspect they will have to do so when the courts wheel into an eternity of procrastination. Patience will give way to confessions.

I am still wondering why the names of the accused only come from one part of the country, whereas vandals went to work around the country, including in Kaduna, Abuja, Kano, Adamawa, Jos, Taraba, etc. Is theirs a geography of guilt? Did the 20 sponsor the vandals around the country?

When vandals took over the protests, the Endsars# fellows lost their battle, if not the war. Their inability to coalesce into a concrete body with leaders was their undoing. They fell on their own swords. It is a generational statement of failure, if for the moment. This column warned them of the trap fall of idealism. Their icons retreated. They could not lead. They were decapitated without a head. They were in the skies for too long. Like the Greek myth of Icarus, they flew high only to crash at the sun of reality. Because of their naivety, they might have frozen street protests for a long time as a legitimate platform of dissent. But they can innovate and rejuvenate. It is a challenge to their imagination. In his great novel Father Goriot, the French novelist Balzac noted that a city goes through three phases: obedience, struggle and revolt. The youths jolted our cities out of its obedience. After all the ruin and clamour, we are where we were. Hence conservatives like Edmund Burke railed against the French Revolution, and many say reforms refine societies rather than the upheavals of change. That view is not nuanced.

The CBN action is a challenge from a failed generation to a flailing generation. How the youths handle it will show how wise and prepared they are for the next era.

Sam Omatseye

It was a rollercoaster without a timeline. Ups and downs, hope and despair, high pulse and pause. It thrilled minute after minute, but it gave no joy. When will it end? Today? Next hour? Or tomorrow? Toilet breaks. Meals were part of the menu. Seat on edge. Heartbeats. Bleary eyes. Deferred appointments. Stolen family hours. No second chance for bed time. Insomnia.

At long last, the elephant staggered and fell. Trump, the Don, came down with a thud. He had finally worn clay feet. What is intriguing is not that he was defeated. The man still has the great following that brought him to power four years ago. It tells us that democracy is not a guarantee in this age or any. We have to fight to keep a freedom.  The only people who deserve freedom must fight for it every day, wrote German writer Heinrich Heine.

It was an election  as democratic correction. The people voted against indecency. They chose truth over lies, range over rage, solidarity over solitude, propriety over profanity. They pushed against a President that hailed white supremacists, that called a set of humans Shithole, that classified some nationals as rapists. The people rejected Christian hypocrites and a God its prophets had overthrown on issues of abortion, race, gays, et al. It was a victory over vitriol.

Joe Biden’s victory is a statement for commonwealth, for a new attempt at humanity, at a handshake. A time to rescue the climate, to re-energise a world of siblings, to nip bluster, to hit the pause button on the hawks, to remember that we, as a race, gave history the holocaust, carted humans as chattels across oceans, that we groan under income inequality.

The paradox is that some people want him today. They love the demagogue, the temper of hate and division. They love the ‘us versus them’ rhetoric. It shows that democracy is a big tent, and can absorb the bad, and the bad can loom so large that it takes over. Awo fought to save the AG’s big tent from the forces of the right. What Trump did recalls what Winston Churchill said of democracy: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect but all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” It shows democracy is a dilemma for civilization. Ancient Greece abandoned it for tyranny. Germany, Spain, Italy were democracies before they embraced despots in the 20th century. Today, Putin cons his people to make himself a de facto monarch. In the Philippines,  Turkey, Poland, we see the rebirth of the strongman after the vote.

Trump worked his crowd into a populist frenzy. He stoked hate. He spoke bile. He cursed. He gloated over losers. He demonised others, tossed about the rule of law, pockmarked institutions; put a soiled finger on sanctuaries of state. No one heard him laugh. His scowls seduced his adherents. His smiles were folksy to his followers. He was a pig grunting triumphantly in a sty. Yet, he was legitimate. He was going to win a re-election if not for the fervour and vigilance of the other side, of the decent quarter on the democratic block.

We must not forget the big chunk of his followers: the evangelicals. But they are the great hypocritical followers. Without them, Trump is no president. These are people who pledge loyalty to the Bible. They say Jesus is love. They say peace is better than war. But they supported a man who abandoned about 500 children on the Mexican border without their parents. They support children unborn but give sacraments to the born ones to hunger and die. They watch blacks suffer and look the other way.

What concerns me more is that they support a bigot like Trump at home and come over to Africa to preach the love of Christ. They are hypocrites of the first order. They are not the prophets of God. They are the pharisaic bunch. They are turning their tradition into tenets of faith. They are appropriating the Holy Spirit. They were not always appendages of the Republican Party, but it started when a few evangelicals launched the Moral Majority, and this was exploited by men like President Nixon, who developed what became known as the “southern strategy.” They summed up the idea in three words: God, Guns and Gays. They knew they would blend the faith and culture of southern whites. They fought over school prayers, abortion, and gays. Rather than work to make conditions to prevent abortion or preach to gays, they build the Trumpian wall. This negates the words of Christ that says, “I come not for the righteous but for sinners to repentance.”

Hence Jesus came a humble God. He did not look down on the poor. Unlike John the Baptist, he embraced grace. While the former was always fasting in an ascetic remove, Jesus was often dining with sinners. The US evangelicals are a shrinking race. They are alienating others. Their lights are not shining. Hence they are no longer appendages to the Party but part of the mainstay. Christian values are not upstream in their agenda. They are now clutching at straws to justify a man who lies, who cloaks murders under the law, glorifies race haters, etc. Trump’s religious adviser Paula White invoked angels in Africa to fight for Trump. Some have wondered where she found the concept of angels from continents. Nowhere in the Bible are angels assigned to countries or continent. Each year the evangelicals come here and are given pride of place by our pastors. But do they ask them why they stand against abortion and not for the love of the living who are not white in their homeland?

They would want to justify their argument that Trump is modern-day Jehu in the Old testament who ousted Jezebel, who they likened inelegantly to Hilary Clinton the feminist. Now that Trump is defeated, I want to know how they could stretch that comparison. Did Jezebel come back as Kamala Harris under the shadow of Biden. What evil man will they compare Biden with. When Obama won, they said he was the anti-Christ. The Bible did not say the anti-Christ would follow redemptive liar like Trump. They are using the word of God with craftiness, privileging culture over scriptures. That is the nature of false prophets. They have negated what French philosopher Blaise Pascal warned against in religion: “There are two equally dangerous extremes: to shut reason out, and to let nothing else in.”

Trump wanted to be king. Americans just reminded him they don’t want monarchs in a democracy. Their first president George Washington warned against such temptations over 200 years ago. Last week, the American people echoed their first leader.

By Sam Omatseye

While we awaited the president to speak, I conjured the image of the last Romanov Czar before the monarchy fell to the Bolsheviks in the first quarter of the 20th century. Nicholas II was asked to speak to the crowd. They panted and surged and held their breaths. All they wanted was to hear his voice and a lyric of empathy.  The man was to choose between addressing his people and attending a party. An automatic decision became a Hobson’s choice. He chose vanity instead of emergency, the flattery of advisers over counsel, perdition over prosperity. His fall reminds one of the words of French philosopher Saint-Juste: “Monarchy is not a king. It is crime.”

I was relieved when President Muhammadu Buhari materialized on television and gave a broadcast. At least, he did not act like the Romanov. He heard the cry and heeded. Yet, it was a speech less than a speech. It was long on symbolism, short on content. Some may say it was also long on contempt. He did well to say work was on to revise salaries of policemen, that he heard the wailings over SARS savagery, the list of policy initiatives, the desire for youth enfranchisement.

The writer of the speech embarrassed speech writing in a time of crisis. Speeches of that sort are rallying cries, not policy papers. Policies should come across like candy to a child, in terms of endearment, not as seminar points; as persuasion, not justification. In spite of that, we hear them and even accept them. But we did not hear the president’s heartbeat, or imagine a tear drop, or the shadow of a hug in the about ten-minute delivery. It was presidential tedium couched in generalities and aloofness.

The president may feel what we feel, but we need to know it. He may say the right things in private, we can’t hear them. He may have empathy for the people, but we can’t feel it. He has some good policies, but what of the optics?

So, why is it that he gave a speech and left out the big tragedy? Why did he not visit even a victim, or show he plans to? Why has he not done that in Abuja or come over to Lagos, the epicenter of the boil? When will he come? Time ticks.

The speech was expected on the coattails of the Lekki episode. Who were the miscreants in uniform who opened fire on the innocent? The impulse at the beginning was to push the onus on Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu. But within 24 hours, the yarn changed. He gave his own perspective. He did not invite the soldiers. As Professor Wole Soyinka noted, soldiers don’t come in a federal arrangement unless the governor invites. The Nobel Laureate confirmed he did not invite them. What happened, the governor said in an Arise in interview, will be unveiled in an inquiry afoot. He imposed a curfew, but did not call in the soldiers. Who was the barbarian soldier who thought harmless youth should suffer and die when the ragtag boys of Boko Haram made mincemeat of them?

Allegations filled the social media? Some newspapers ran away with unsubstantiated body count. Some in their tens. Some alleged eyewitness accounts said it was over ten, some others said twenty. The Governor went from hospital to hospital, and the inventory eventually confirmed a couple at the time of writing. Some said they saw the CCTV camera being removed? He said it was a camera belonging to the Lekki Concession Company and it was to monitor vehicular tags. The CCTV is intact and it will aid investigation, he said. He also added in the interview that he would ensure it is not tampered with. The panel should illuminate finally why the lights were turned off.

Some have said the soldiers evacuated the dead. That will be really sad. But the camera will have to expose that, too.  The governor said he confirmed an injured person who eventually gave up, and another body with gunshot wound that they wanted to trace where he died. “One death is a tragedy,” noted Stalin. “One million deaths are a statistic.” Every single soul matters. There have been names and bodies bandied in the social media. A few have come up to deny that they died. I think the families of those who have lost their youth should show up. That is one way we can have closure on this matter. Many were injured. Not acceptable. Lekki was made to look like the land of Lecqui, the flint-hearted slave owner after whom the place was named. We need inventory of the night. We need to know who passed. We cannot speculate people into the grave. We cannot morph whims into corpses. We cannot mourn phantoms. We cannot know the truth unless the process is open, accountable and transparent.

Again, why did the president not return the governor’s calls, and promptly? How can such a sad episode occur and he is not in dialogue with the state’s chief security officer? It is still difficult to understand.

What also came out of the governor’s interview is the countervailing narrative of the army. Why would the army deny it? Who were the soldiers? The governor said plans were for police to be there about 10 pm. The incident happened hours before then. Curfew was not called to carve coffins.

There is also the narrative of the youth. Last week this essayist warned over a wasted opportunity. The raft should not capsize in the storm. The peaceful protests, in their grand gaiety, fell into the hands of goons. It was like the gecko that comes before the snake. When the snake of hoodlums came in, the #EndSARS euphoria came to an end.

They burned and looted. Even political gangsters and opportunists turned arsonists, stoked fire, took revenge, and exercised envy. For the masses, looting became a metaphor of hidden rage, a gap between predator and victim. The predator was now on the other foot. The masses stole as revenge. They burned as anger and with anger. They stole the way the political elite stole from them, without shame and with impunity. They stole as celebration of excess. It was a bazaar, if a magnificence of savagery. Hard work has rewarded indolence. But the palliative warehouses became emblems of the people taking back their own.

They also became arsonists of self-waste. Why burn the buses that you need? The rich don’t need the buses. They have their cars. Even their cars you burned they will replace. Why burn to make the army of the jobless swell?

We saw also the north-south divide? North says it wants SARS, the south says no. Both have failed to listen to each other. It calls for dialogue, not mutual condemnation. More of us in the south suffer from it than up north. In the peaceful days, while the south youth protested against SARS, the north railed at bandits and kidnappers. About two years ago, four SARS men, gun in hand, entered my car uninvited and bullied me. But the north has fewer roadblocks than Lagos-Benin expressways. It brings up the north-south debate over state police. The state of police will make us rethink this matter. If police were a state matter, each state will decide whether or not and how they want it.

We shall still have to combat robbers, kidnappers, herdsmen, etc. The regular police cannot do it. That is why the youth protest must reinvent itself. It cannot go into silence. But they must now understand how naïve they were to not have leaders. Some posed as leaders in the comfort of their twitter and instagram pages while others sweated on the streets. Even Lagos has a panel and asked them to bring a rep, they said they wanted two. There is no revolution without its elite. The Governor consented. No one name has come up at the time of writing.

When J.P. Clark’ play, The Raft, drew some flak, Femi Osofisan recalibrated it with his play, Another raft. The youth needs a new raft, with ballast and captains against the storm ahead. And we wait. We hope, unlike a certain speech, they will rise to the occasion. We hope it will end like the words of Gbede in Osofisan’s Another Raft, “My duty is ended, which is to lead you through the hidden channel in the wave of history to the turning edge of knowledge.”

Sam Omatseye

It is a story of stories, a raft of anecdotes. It is the small stories that rise, wave after wave, volume after volume, before we see the flood, the crowd as they surge. But this is a crowd like nothing we have seen before. Not during the June 12 imbroglio, or even the famous Ali mungo. Those crowds had a menace of the exterior. They pre-announced their purpose as warriors of conscience, a sort of judgmental ferocity about them. The authorities felt a sense of righteous revenge to deploy soldiers, to distort and minimise their moral authority, to condemn them and quell their onslaught.

This time they disarm with the small stories. The fellow who was frog-marched to death by crackpots called cops, the virgin who was cracked and popped in a hotel, the mother who saw her son die, the father who was asked to pay to see his son in a parade of corpses, the laptop seized, the ATM heist, a certain officer Nwafor who was impatient to play god, money and victims parted ways, families parted ways between life and death. The bullets unleashed, the insolence of bravado, the finger trembling on a trigger. The settings, like the acts, were arbitrary: in the car, in the home, at hotels, before your family, at the barracks, mosque, church, at the beach. SARS was like the air: ubiquitous. It became, like the air, a presumptuous necessity. The authorities said it was our oxygen for safety. But the air was poisoned. And many people, like the Chenobyl disaster in Russia decades ago, inhaled and died. SARS started as adhoc but morphed into a pseudo-institution.

The internet sprung up with a vengeance, like we saw with the Arab Spring, the French Yellow Vests, in Lebanon, in Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand, et al. The young came forth. They started as though a soap bubble. But the lather outlasts anyone’s thought. Were they not the type the President derided as lazy, the bunch that did no good. They were defiant, able-bodied, insistent. They said they wanted one thing: they wanted SARS to go. Once this essayist witnessed the crowd, and even watched them close, I knew this was a different kettle of fish. These people were not Ali Mungo, or June 12. They were young men and women who had been bearing their anguish for a long a time. They were the young who wanted to eat, but begged although they could work. They applied for jobs but the jobs went to their age mates who were children of the well-feathered class. They had their degrees in UK and landed a job in Shell or became SA to a minister without experience. They were the whiz kid with brilliant ideas who watched their mother die because they could not afford a surgery. The boy who saw a girl get a job because he was not a girl. Or a girl of virtue who did not get a job because some starry-eyed fellow wanted to make a virtue out of her.

It is the class divide. The young man who is the victim of SARS is not likely to be the son of a senator or governor or minister or commissioner or permanent secretary or a CEO, because he will be in the UK or the USA, or some posh environment immune to the impunity of the SARS men. #ENDSARS is their demand, but it is not their goal. Sorosoke that means speak up, does not mean the young have small ears. They are saying “address the injustice in the land.” Police are often the face of injustice among the people. When the police misbehave, they see the larger bastardry of the elite.

So, it is about #EndSARS but it is about unemployement. Obasanjo warned not long ago that the army of the jobless could foment a revolution. Are we there? Those who say we should reopen the universities as distractions are mistaken. Schools are more potent engines of revolt. They have organised themselves in a way many have not. Ali Mungo had leaders. June 12 had rallying points. This is an amorphous, amoebic rage on  the streets. Replacing SARS with SWAT was like swatting a housefly. It was called a naming ceremony, and a miserable one without food or drinks or a newborn. The boys who were eating and drinking on the streets, dancing and swinging were not part of the sacrament. They were having fun at the government’s expense.  They loved to party. “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive,” crooned Poet William Wordsworth on the French Revolution. “To be young was very heaven.” They loved to protest, and who is going to stop them without consequences?

Many of them come from seedy homes like the one painted in Festus Iyayi’s Violence, or the home drawn of a lodging home in Balzac’s Old Goriot about condition during the French Revolution. Some struggle for food, or board. Others are what Balzac described as “joyous youth condemned to drudgery.” Some had parents and elders that the French writer saw as “old age lying down to die.” Such persons will be happy to remain there day after day. It is an alternative party, the sort Odia Ofeimun invited the masses to in one of his poems.

But in spite of the ideal of this movement, some have called for the protest to stop, for the youth to pick a committee, and sit at table for a talk on their demands. They have said they do not trust the government. They have seen governments come and go, and promises come and go, and they are not ready for popcorns too pretty to be sweet. They have seen promises in the recent past. They were promised the NDDC scandal would be resolved, but it is going into silence. Recently, billions of Naira for school feeding was found in private pockets. No dice after promise. They have reasons to doubt.

The youth don’t want assurances. They want example. They are at a crossroads, though. They are at their ideal stage. They have to bring everything to reality. That is the critical point. Movements and revolutions are beautiful until they create what political philosophers call the revolutionary elite. We saw that with Robespierre, Danton, Abbe Sieyes and how the joy turned into turbulence. The English conservative Edmund Burke predicted that it was going to end in the hand of a strong man. He was right, and Napoleon arose to emblematise what Sieyes called for: “Power from above: confidence from below.” We saw that, too, in the Arab Spring. Egypt now crawls under a tyrant. Revolutions often die in the hands of its leaders.

But it is not enough for the government to say they have met their demands. We need the president to address them. The BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, ever a quintessential leader, played shuttle messenger from youth to president. He became a charioteer of the people’s dream. Others followed. Wike prosecuted an about-face, and joined. Taraba, Osun. Makinde did a false equivalence giving a million to victims’ families and N100 million to rebuild a feudal monument.

It is not just for the president to say he has met their demand. He needs to stoop with empathy, and speak with them and not to them, and in their language. He has youths around him. He should couch the tone and diction, and address them and meet with them. That is the call of the moment. It is not about policy. This is the politics of the real polity. It will be nice for the president to visit a victim’s family in the way Governor Sanwo-Olu did.

The youth have energy, but they need the soothing conciliator in the president. It is then he will understand that they don’t want just SARS to go, but inequality, ethnic favours, malignant hypocrisies, electoral lies, jobless hemorrhage. They were already convening the national conference that the old have not been able to hold in their gilded halls in flamboyant brocades with palates sweetened with cakes and tea. Theirs is already advancing without rancour on the streets of Enugu and Lekki.

This moment for the young, as for the nation, resembles J.P. Clark’s brilliant but maligned play, The Raft. Will the young fall over and drown, or will they survive the fog ahead? They have to navigate the crossroads, and my heart is with them.

By Sam Omatseye

Governor Godwin Obaseki’s cheeks should bloom in his election victory. It is his supernova hour. The people illumined it, gave him their word, and beatified it in their vote. No one on earth has a ground to begrudge him. The voice of Edo people is the voice of God. The people lined up, breasted the tape for him, appended their choice, INEC attested, and the tally anointed him the people’s ally.

If even this essayist was not, and is not, his fan, the majesty of democracy must take its course. Some have questioned the turnout. Few people came to the polls. But those who came conquered. It does not matter that one person, or a million, showed up. Democracy or a democratic constitution does not compel choice. If you want to vote, it is your right. You have the right not to use your right. It’s thumbs up for those who thumbed down. Those who did not vote gave power to those who did. Democracy is about numbers. Numbers legitimise a vote, superior numbers. It is not about eligible voters, but men and women who defied rain or sun or wind and spoke with their first fingers.

Democracy is about what is, and not what might be. Some assert that Pastor Osagie Ize Iyamu might have won, if all voted. That is speculative. You don’t count imaginary ballots. This malaise has afflicted democracy for decades. Trump won because blacks who gave Obama the edge shrank into their homes on polling day.

It has led many to question democracy as a form of government. No one has come with a better idea since Greece. It is still the best form of popular persuasion. Democracy is about rights, not who is right. The majority may be foolish, as philosopher John Stuart Mill has asserted in his On Liberty, but they are entitled to their foolishness. After all, since the Greek century, democrats have voted out democracy in exchange for tyranny. We saw it in Spain and Italy and Germany in 20th century. Even in the guise of democracy, we still vote in tyrants, like Trump, Duterte and Erdogan. Democracy thrives more on culture than reason. Just as in Edo, we cannot rule out sentiment over enlightenment in the popular will. French philosopher Rousseau enshrined the concept of popular will. Tyrants like Robespierre, Danton during the French Revolution and later Napoleon exploited it in the name of the people.

So, in Edo the people won. But this is a time to rejoice but not to gloat. Governance is no party but work. Rather than radiate the humility of victory, Obaseki still reflected the bitterness of a fight. As Winston Churchill noted, “In war, resolution; in victory, magnanimity; in defeat, defiance.” Rather than open a tent, he was looking askew at his opponents. He saw triumph not as grace, but as triumphalism. He started jabbing at what he called godfathers and how their positions are not tenable in the constitution.

It was a moment in hypocrisy. He did not rile at godfathers when Adams lofted his arm four years earlier and pivoted Edo voters to make him governor. He snuggled under Adams’ shadows like a new baby. Now that Adams turned against him, godfathers are sinners overnight. When he came with his fellow governors like a thief in the night to seek Asiwaju Tinubu’s support for the APC ticket, he did not know it was extra constitutional to be a national leader. Welcome, Mr. Godwin, to knowledge in the 21st century Nigeria.

If anyone should condemn godfathers, it is not Governor Obaseki. Has he not been playing godfather in his state? When he started strong-arming local government chairmen, did he not act outside the constitution. Was he not wielding the autocratic powers that all governors bask in? Did he not reject the Edo nominee to NDDC? Our governors have almost monarchic muscle over their state? Was it in the constitution to ask Adams to seek permission from him to enter or leave Edo State?

A democrat does not foreclose about two-third of lawmakers voted in by the people for years from exercising their rights. Strongmen bend the law to suit their democracy, and not the other way.

If we all should squelch godfathers, we should not cherry pick the autocrats we like or hate. It is not in the interest of democracy. Yet, we lie if we deny that some individuals of certain skills and influences can ennoble democracies. Obama’s candidacy drew momentum when men like Ted Kennedy endorsed him. Charles De Gaulle amassed his personal charisma to rally his people against the Nazis and French democratic leaders.  After all, democracy is made for us, and not us for democracy. Strongmen can sour it, too. In her opus, the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wondered how democracies in Europe gave birth to colonialism and Jewish autodafe, and how power elites bond with the mob. Democracies can be dangerous. It calls for vigilance. Hence the Russian writer Maxim Gorky wrote that the only people who deserve liberty must be ready to fight for it every day. When it fails, democracies yield tyrants and yield to them.

Even the APC was not vigilant within. It went into battle a divided house, a prefigure of its 2023 fortunes. Sokoto State Governor Aminu Tambuwal had hinted that the Edo fortunes would declare the state of the APC. He was probably right. If elections were held today, PDP might win. They are a better coalescence than the APC house of cards. The next year will give us hint whether the party will become like a broken car where PDP will fish for spare parts. The party has to look in and re-tie its knots. President Buhari  has the time to repair.

Even in Edo State, I foresee those who defected to APC may start moving back ‘home.’ In our politics of mobile whores, everyone is looking for a room with a view.

In the final analysis, Governor Obaseki is now alone with Obaseki. He has no Adams or Ize-Iyamu or Tinubu to bark at. No #EdonobeLagos bogeyman. Edo State is now his responsibility for the next four years. He was not voted in because he performed so well as chief helmsman. He will not have Wike from Rivers or the APC wheel horses who backed him on the sly. They will not provide security or jobs for his people. Columnist Azubiuke Ishiekwene praised him for improvement in WAEC. But education reforms don’t bear fruits in WAEC until years after. If anyone should take credit, it is Adams. After all, Obaseki, who stumbled at the debate, did not really do much of education reforms.

Edo State is in a bad state. The education, economy and infrastructure need him. When Lincoln won election to the presidency, he told reporters, “Boys, your troubles are over. Mine have just begun.” Obaseki’s  began four years again.

He had a great career in the private sector. We need that expertise in government. He vilified the Lagos where he made his mark and earned his daily bread. It is the lot of Lagos that hides the failures of this federation with its success. Yet those who fatten on Lagos come back to bite it. Obaseki has to unite his state. It is still divided in spite of his solid vote. He won not because voters love Ize Iyamu less, but because they love Edo more. He must turn Edo love into progress.

As a former investment broker, he should follow St. Paul’s words, “as poor, making many rich.”

By Sam Omatseye

In spite of the flurry of violence in the north and even its neighbour, Benue, the Plateau has been relatively quiescent. In the past few weeks, though, we have seen a few spasms of bloodshed. The security forces responded, but damages had been done. Lives were lost, and a sense of unease arose enough for Governor Simon Lalong of Plateau State to invoke security forces and community leaders to wake up from their slumbers. This is a call to pact. The community leaders across the state, including ethnic avatars and religious icons, all signed an agreement to keep the peace. This has accounted for the joy of silence the state has had under Lalong’s watch. But we still see foul rhythms of violence. Hence those who signed must ensure the state does not retreat to the pre-Lalong years. The state still longs for those days when Peter Igho filmed Cockcrow at Dawn on its scenic farms. The pact is a pact for the return of that halcyon time when cock crows at dawn.