By Sam Omatseye

The Edo poll is igniting again why this essayist has never failed to campaign for the study of history. A pivotal year, or morning, in Benin history has snapped our attention like the crack of palm kernel in a homestead fire.

History is haunting the vote in Edo. The 1897 barbarism of the Englishman has come back in 2020. It was the Englishman who razed the palace, stole its precious art, and uprooted its sovereign to Calabar. It took the recent peace meeting of its debonair king, Oba Ewuare II, for the old wound to emit a septic stench.

But it is not 1897 alone that is walking the night like a ghost in Benin. It is also the 13th century, or as recently as 2016. So, two epochs of royal peacocks conjoin to rake up a republican rage. In 1897 was the raid on Benin, when a certain Captain James Phillips wanted the Oba of Benin Ovonramwen to yield the royal pride. He would not. A certain Agho Obaseki, who was supposed to be a loyal, betrayed his king and gave him away to the British, who chained him and took him away as exile. Obaseki, who already had wedded the deposed king’s daughter, wanted to be king. It took the civic uproar of the Bini people to thwart the coup of a man who was already made Iyase of Benin, an influential position. But Obaseki was like what the Igbos knew as warrant chiefs, except that in Igboland there were no kings. For close to two decades he ruled without reigning because he had sold his soul to the white colonialists.

In the end, he lost out and Eweka became king. But that has not stopped the animosity between the descendants of Agho Obaseki and the royal family. Godwin Obaseki, the present governor is the grandson of the subversive in-law of Ovonramwen.

The other story belongs to another prominent family in Bini known as the Ogiamien. They had in 2016 mounted a rebellion against the throne before the present Oba prevailed and became king. This is traced to a treaty signed with the forbears of the present king in a battle royale involving the humiliation of the Ogiemien. The ogiemien family, or some of them, feel a romantic longing for their past glory, and wanted to paint the lineage of the present king as tainted by the Oranmiyan blood.

The Ogiemein family recently endorsed Governor Obaseki, and this is seen in the palace as a defiance of the throne. More potently, it shows that Obaseki is finding common cause with the opponents of the Benin monarch.

In the past week, a certain article went viral attacking Oba Ewuare II for coming down on Philip Shuaibu over the deputy governor’s celebration of violence ahead of the polls. The article written in a pseudonym, Osaro Omoruyi, a generic Edo name, undermined the king and insinuated that the Governor had the power under the constitution to overthrow the oba and replace him. The writer invoked the recent fall of the emir of Kano and how the governor could not stop the tragedy. It was a royal threat and some Binis see it as impunity against the man on the throne.

This led to many in Edo State to ask who wrote the article. Since the piece shed its sympathy for the Edo State Governor, the APC campaign has charged the governor and his men as having masterminded the subversive and incendiary piece. The writer, conveniently writing from Canada, has not popped up with a face at the time of writing. He was a writer on the side of the governor without the courage to own up to his work. The Edo Governor’s men have said they have nothing to do with that poisonous pen. But it is now difficult for Governor Obaseki to dissociate himself from the piece, or even the sentiment expressed in it because of his association with another key enemy of the throne, the Ogiemien family, who have shown an open distaste for the present king.

Such an alliance of history betokens a sense of revenge. That is the fear of some watchers of the election trend. The speculation is that if Governor Obaseki wins on Sept 19, he will go into alliance with the Ogiemein and bring maelstrom to the Edo throne. The reference to his grandfather in the public discourse has unsettled Governor Obaseki. His grandfather is called “the traitor” by Benin historians.  The Omoruyi glamorises him as a patriot. Agho Obaseki was also brushed as a quisling by playwrights and other chroniclers of the period. They are tying that trait to the Obaseki clan, including one of his uncles who reportedly undermined the stool. What Agho did to the throne, Godwin Obaseki is now doing to the governor’s seat. His opponents are echoing the Biblical refrain that providence is visiting the iniquity of the father upon the children. In this case, they say the malediction did not wait for the third and fourth generations. Whether republican or monarchical, they see the Obaseki soul as a Judas.

He became governor and has looked the other way from the man who helped him get there. That is the psychology portrait of the man and his grandfather, according to chroniclers of the Edo narrative. What he is doing to democracy, the story goes, Obaseki’s grandfather had done to monarchy.

How this will play in the election is not exactly clear. But many factors play into an election, and they mix. Political theorists have identified the three C’s of election: Candidate, culture and condition. Culture is at play here. At what percentage? But it shows how history can blindside an era. When the British invaded over a century ago, they made away with thousands of the people’s treasures now blooming in Museums in Britain, Germany, France and the United States. They stole them. There are campaigns to repatriate them. In Oxford University it generated a crisis. Some British citizens say they should loan them to Edo. What insult? You want to lend what you stole? And Governor Obaseki is quoted as working with them on that. He even accepts the idea of not returning them, asserting that they are ambassadors. It is what I call cultural surrender and neo-colonial servitude.

The issue of the Benin bronze and the play of atavistic malice recalls Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return, that the past will always come back.

In his treatise on politics, French philosopher Montesquieu noted the qualities associated with monarchy and republic. He said the main driver of the monarchy is honour. For the republic, it is virtue. But in a society like Edo where monarchy and republic cohabit, the republican should act with virtue to the monarch in order to earn honour. That is the burden on Governor Obaseki as he faces Edo people on Saturday.

By Sam Omatseye

He speaks for the country, and he spoke peace. In between Ghana and Nigeria, neighbours who duel and dwell together, war is never an option. Alienation will bear no fruit. So when both countries were at each other’s rhetorical throats, it seemed we were in an impasse. Foreign ministry jibed at foreign ministry. Spokesman threw barbs at spokesman. Both executives spat anger. The Ghanaian trader wanted peace to trade. The Nigerian merchant wanted a way to profit. Where was the way out?

Enter the Nigerian Speaker, Hon Femi Gbajabiamilla. He became not lawmaker, but peacemaker. He became ambassador, spokesman, negotiator, mollifier, shuttle diplomat, statesman, bridge maker. He became what prophet Isaiah called “the restorer of the breach.” He echoed Jesus Christ, who said “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God.”

He has leveraged what he did recently by pulling the speakers of parliament across the continent as a platform to resolve conflicts and promote progress. He has certainly done well so far. He belongs to the legislative branch. The real work still belongs to the executive. Speaker Gbajabiamilla had President Buhari’s nod to pursue the peace.

He has started well but the foreign ministry and others in government will have to work with the speaker who has broken the ice for peace.

By Sam Omatseye

The objection to the CAMA law has not come from the traditional churches. The Pentecostals are kicking, and I still cannot understand it. The law does not say it will take over the spiritual part. It targets integrity and frown only when it violates accounting principles and commits fraud. And contrary to popular misconception, it is not the staff of Corporate Affairs that will take it over. It is on the court of the court. It should not surpass one year. If you run your account well, what is the fear? After all, the scripture frowns against fraud. The money comes from citizens, and what’s wrong to give account to them? When Prophet Samuel was retiring, he said: “Here I am: witness against me before the Lord, and before his anointed: whose ox have I taken? Or whose ass have I taken? Or whom have a defrauded? Whom have I oppressed? Or whose hand have I received any bribe to blind my eyes therewith? And I will restore.”

In the New Testament, Paul said, “I have not coveted anyone’s silver or gold or clothing. You yourselves know that these hands have supplied my own needs and the needs of my companions.” Rather all the church leaders when they bow out, should have the sort of record of Demetrius as Apostle John recorded, “Demetrius had good report of all men, and of the truth itself; Yea, and we also bear record; and ye know that our record is true.”

I am a Pentecostal but I sometime wonder why they want to be independent of such commonplace law as CAMA. They keep calling for sovereignty of the church in a secular state when the Muslims in power are pushing their positions. We cannot make it a Christian state or Muslim State, all must follow the law. Jesus said the wheat and tares must live together. As Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has noted, if they object they should follow the law to change it. After all, quite a few of such churches have had to bow to the law elsewhere, especially in the U.K. is it about CAMA or fear of Karma?

By Sam Omatseye

The problem with the hoopla over the Chinese loans is that lawyers think it is about law. But as they are thinking it is about law, it becomes about sovereignty. While mulling it as sovereignty, they mistake it as law again when it has swiveled into national pride. But it is about pride because it is about law. You cannot lose your pride if the law does not crumble. But they still see it as about law. While the lawyers muse, the Chinese are making the chain-links for the Nigerian chattels.

Lawyers have looked at international law. They have looked at the question of sovereignty as well as immunity. They say it is okay to take the Chinese loans because, according to international law, you cannot take over a country. Banish the thought of an Aso Rock overthrow. Banish the thought of knocking off Lawal as senate president or appointing a Chief justice in Mandarin. We still own all that. Our nation is intact. Our nation, our destiny. Open the tap, please. The Chinese can roll in the billions in loans.

But then they concede. They have a right to take over our assets. Take, for instance, the rail line from Lagos to Abuja. If we default they could take it over. Same the rail line from Lagos to Calabar, or from Lagos to Kano. Take again, for instance, a huge loan on Mambilla Plateau, the picturesque highland that will light up millions of citizens and hold the economy in thrall. Then the Chinese fund it, and then we default. They take it over, and decide to switch off the light for months or whatever duration and for whatever reason.

We can boast that we have sovereignty. But we can move at their mercy only, or power our businesses and see our spouses across the dinner table at the happy flick of their switches. Where is the law that prescribes freedom of movement? Or the law, even biological law, that assures freedom of sight?

They explain why the Chinese do not speak. They act. In his book, On China, former United States secretary of state Henry Kissinger, saw the Chinese strategy historically as the will to encircle others. They watch you with the malice a boa constrictor until they have encircled and the story is over.

The argument about sovereignty is often traced to the Westphalia treaty of 1648, after the Thirty years war in Europe that slaughtered millions, a war that pitted France against the Hapsburgs and later became a bottomless, borderless conflagration and carnage. Also called the Westphalian sovereignty, it is believed as the first time nations agreed to respect borders. That is one of the great hypocrisies of history. Did the agreement not exist when they conquered our kingdoms in Africa, and took away slaves? Did it not exist before the age of imperialism, and the imposition of colonial rule on us? Did it not exist before the Berlin conference when they decided, without our input, to allot territories and sovereignties to European powers? Kissinger, in his latest book of that title, saw it as the beginning of what is called world order. World order is never sacrosanct. It has grown into a Hobbesian or Machiavellian term. The question has always been: whose world order? Or who orders it?

It was because it was meaningless that nations in the west went into alliances, like the Triple Entente versus the Triple Alliance before the First World War. Hitler destroyed Europe from contempt for any Westphalian sanctity. Even after the Second World War, when Roosevelt asked Churchill to cede colonial governments under international trusteeship, the so-called Lion roared, “Never. Never. Never. I did not become the queen’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.” Napoleon ran rampant. Bismarck overran France.

The concept of empire is alive and well today. In spite of Kissinger’s claims, he backed Nixon’s replacement of the Chile’s leader. He said the U.S. would not sit back and watch a “country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its citizens.” During the Second World War, De Gaulle carried, in Churchill’s words, the French pride in his soul when England flew him out of Paris after Hitler’s blitzkrieg rumbled into the pretty city. The same de Gaulle formed the Free French and conscripted Africans to fight for French freedom while they were French slaves. A slave fighting to free his slaver. De Gaulle was not their hero, but the blacks were happy to slave away. Where was Westphalia? Some have even argued that the world wars had nothing to do with us. It was a European grudge match elaborated into a global maelstrom.

So we should not forget that the clause about not affecting our military assets means nothing. If they take over our major railways, of what use is the army? The internet was born when the United States saw that only the railway network connected the military from one part of the country to the other. In case of a military attack, the army would be cut off from itself. Hence it developed what it then called The Net. It was the necessity of security. So, if trains are cut off, of what use will our military be to take care of an interconnected nation.

What is clear is that national pride came before sovereignty. What is a nation without its pride? If the law allows you to take over major assets, it is awry. So, you can begin as a staff of the Nigerian railway, and later, the Chinese own it, pay your salaries, decided when to promote or fire you, decide when to replace a wheel and where to buy it. From staff to chaff. As Olisa Agbakoba says in my TVC show, a man who owns a car is removed from the car with his family, and goes away with the car. You are still a man but what sort of man, with your pride crushed in presence of your family?

The Chinese have taken over Zambian assets and whole downtowns in an Asian country. The west gives loans and looks for ways to rearrange the loans. But the Chinese want their pound of flesh. And like Shylock, they don’t care if you bleed, especially if your pride bleeds. The new CAMA law exempts Chinese firms from registering while Nigerian firms must. Are they encircling us as Kissinger characterised them? In considering the matter, let us not forget what Saint Augustine quipped, “In the absence of justice, what is sovereignty but organized robbery?” Sovereignty is the peoplecin whom the law consist.

Sam Omatseye

This is not the time to hold grudges against Malam Nasir El-Rufai. It is not the time to say he, like Napoleon, suffers a small man’s syndrome, or that he pulled down the homes of rivals. It is not the time to say his mind has not grown above his height, and that he does not deserve to speak about who is a Nigerian.

So, some avatars of liberty will say the Nigerian Bar Association railed against the three Johns of thinkers: Locke, Mill, Rousseau. They invited him to their conference only to disinvite him. The man salivated over an empty table. They probably did that because the man has a sour tongue, a fratricidal impulse, pitches tribe against tribe and, in the vexed issue of southern Kaduna, El-Rufai has taken sides, and has anointed violence against peace.

If anything, the man on the democratic throne in Kaduna is a Nigerian. He is Nigerian enough to confess that he is Fulani, and he is honest enough to say that he wants to go after the Christian leaders in southern Kaduna who have lashed him over his sectarian furies.

We can also forgive him for poor memory. Maybe he forgot that when the region raged a few years ago, he confessed he paid Fulani hordes to silence them. He paid with the nation’s taxpayer’s money. He confessed they were the goons of evil, the machete-happy brutes whose eyes blared with human blood. Like harmattan fires, they brushed through the homesteads and farms of their quarries. They barbequed fathers, roasted mothers, turned farms into a dark, frescoed mural of bonfires. They haunted huts, glamorised houses in smoulders, prostrated schools, littered a litany of streets with disembodied limbs. In echoes of the 1960’s pogrom, they grinned so others may scream; maniacal glee over gleams of blood.

The governor has many matters on his mind, so he could not remember. Hence he says he will unveil the leaders who begged to swap gift for peace in southern Kaduna. His morality may not be balanced because his power of revenge dwarfs his power of recall. He read law, and maybe his history is famished. Something foul happened to his mnemonic faculty. When he was minister, he said he knew the marauders. Now, he says he is gathering material on rampaging Christians. How time flies from memory. He has lost the power of the past. He is obliterating his own past. Maybe he did not want to forget. Fate tampered with his cerebellum.

If the Christian leaders want money, does that cancel the carnage going on? Is he not saying Christian leaders set their own people on fire? He has no evidence. He said it for the headline. He craves public spotlight. Hence he is bitter that the NBA disinvited him. No need to fume with the man. El-Rufai is at war with El-Rufai.

He loves attention, and does he not deserve it? Nothing wrong with vanity. After all, one of the world’s great actors, Al Pacino, says, “vanity is my favorite sin.” Except that El-Rufai can never admit it is a sin.

He won governorship election twice. The people must love him. He is so democratic that he loves one set of people against another. One plus one equals one, apology to Dostoyevsky’s novel of ideas, Man from the Underground. For him, it means Fulani plus Fulani equals Kaduna S  tate. Or Fulani plus Muslim equals Kaduna State. So, for him, Kaduna is one, and it is Fulani. One is majority. Of what use are the over 30 nationalities in southern Kaduna? They may be many but less than one and Kaduna is just one. Maybe 30 are like the Biblical tower of babel, and his tribe bestows peace to his ears than the cacophony of variety.

Recently he said the presidency should go south. He who damned the south of Kaduna and dispensed with the Christians for reelection? He said he wanted a Muslim/Fulani as deputy and implied the Christians could go to hell. The fires of hell are alive in southern Kaduna.

His ticket went to heaven and won. So the same man wants presidency to go south, and anyone is taking him seriously? He is a closet comedian. If he cannot accept Non-Fulani on his ticket at home, why would he want it in Nigeria? So, when the NBA says they don’t want him to define who a Nigerian is, we deprived him a good platform to amuse us.

Theorists of liberty often clash with the concept of decency. It’s like Paul’s assertion, “Shall we continue in sin so that grace may bound?” Shall we allow El-Rufai to defile decency, so free speech may abound? The NBA says, Nigeria forbid. The thing is, he is immune to Lai Mohammed’s hate speech law.

But El-Rufai wanted NBA as a way to push for balance, to confess Nigeria, but act Fulani. The classic hypocrite. The hegemonist as inclusionist. The people of southern Kaduna want to be at peace. They may not always be innocent when the settlers lay claim to their own soils. But they should not be displaced because a governor separates memory from peace. He should not be a rabble-rouser as leader when the rabble has lost its temper. Men like him give peaceful Fulani-Muslims a bad name.

El-Rufai backs a southern president in order to be vice president. If the ticket wins, he may not wait three months to toss hot coal under the president’s seat and whip up headlines.

His concept of society is caste. He does not want equality. He touts it until he flouts it. He wanted a Christian beside him in the first term and Muslim afterwards. He remembered he gave money to appease the plunderers before he forgot.

He is like what Historian Isabel Wilkerson is saying in her new book, Caste: the origins of our discontent. It looks at how racism in America is like a caste system. That is how El-Rufai is looking at the folks in southern Kaduna. He is saying to the over 30 tribes to “keep to your caste,” in the words of Emile Bronte in Jane Eyre. That is his concept of who is a Nigerian.

He should know we run a republican constitution, and he may sit on the governor’s throne today. But as Victor Hugo quips in his novel, Les Miserables, “A chair is not a caste.”

Gbaja stakes out for Africa

IT is an act of courage. House Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila has thrown a gauntlet to the continent. He says enough of the debts of the continent, and he has rallied his counterparts on the continent. They met virtually last week, and they have agreed to tackle the vermin of loans.

He was motivated by the piling debt profile, the need for the executive to give account of their spending, and the ravages that Covid-19 has inflicted on the continent. Hear him: “We all agree that Africa’s debt burden has become an existential threat to our societies, our economies, and the future; we leave to posterity, and we need to do something about this and treat it as a continent-wide priority. It is safe to say that the burden of debt servicing, vis-à-vis spending on education and health care, for example, is a threat to our continent’s stability and development, especially in the era of Covid-19.” Wise words.

His counterparts enthused to the idea. I say kudos to the Nigerian speaker for his initiative. Covid-19 calls for the idea of debt to be revisited. The globe reels from the pandemic and no economy more so than the African where deficit is a dark mantra. No less in these days of Chinese loan strangulation that threatens to swamp us first with money and later servitude. Few understand the implication as yet. Hon. Gbajabiamila is also saying it is good to borrow but, to be forgiven, we must show fruits of repentance. That means not blowing away the largesse in corrupt profligacy as in the past.

It’s an act of diplomatic leadership by the Nigerian speaker, and it will set in motion other initiatives as the speakers will work together on a platform called Pan African Speakers Conference or CoSAP.

By Sam Omatseye

Many would have preferred her on the hush.

But this mummy is too feisty to keep mum.

On social media, was it on twitter, Facebook, Instagram, she regained her buzz!

She was not oil minister here, or a commissioner that fled to the Caribbean. She opted to play moral teacher, a sort of secular priest preaching to the young. She wanted them not to err, not to be corrupt, to focus on the heroic and virtuous life. She did not want them to ape the ways of the yahoo boys. It was cheery not just to see the beauty back to her elegant ways, but alive and well. In her low-cut and with lucid words out of her piquant tongue, we felt assured cancer was behind her. No more the shaved head and lean face. Some of her puff of spirit and frutescent cheeks were back. She may have lost her meridian glow, but her charms retain much of her lustre.

Even for those who saw the cancer tale as a sort of Canterbury tale, no one should begrudge her right to health and cure.

But who would not want to hear from Diezani Alison-Madueke, a former oil minister who turned into something bigger, or shall we say scarier, than oil. The one who did not bore us when she was minister. Her first act was tears. On Ore road, as works minister, she was like one of us, weeping in public over the crater-infested highway. We did not expect her to translate tears into cheers for fixing the road. We just saw her as a naïve former oil staff too pampered to know the task ahead of her.

What many did not understand was how those who invited her thought she was the right person to play nun only a few years after she was spun out of office.

She was, in a sense, canonising her time in office. She was anointing her generation. She was making herself a heroine of governance. Some, especially in the social media, thought her tongue was unfair to its host. She was unfair to her host, a group of Ijaw youths. She just came off an administration inundated with corruption charges. She, too, has a case to answer amounting to billions of dollars. Once Buhari accompanied some former governors to the US under Obama, her name was associated with billions of opaque transfers. We know of the other stories, like the upstarts of ONSA. Some of the persons in the regime have been in and out of detention, and investigations are afire.

She is not here to answer. She is preaching. That is why her reference to yahoo boys seemed out of place.  Hence, someone called her Hushmummy. It was a parody of a fellow from another generation, Hushpuppi, now wallowing in an American cell.

Both Diezani and Hushpuppi dramatise two generations. Hushpuppi’s is showy, Diezani’s cocky. But both are not ashamed to advertise themselves. They periscope two failed generations, coming after that of Soyinka’s wasted generation.

They tell the tales of three generations that have found warmth in the sty. Her generation, which is also mine, started with a lot of zest. We began in the student union days. I recall when we made bonfire on the streets, broke down the Bastille of false democrats, eyeballed the army into fear and trembling, digested revolutionary literature, slurped Marx, recited Engel, quoted Castro.

At Ife, we could not wait to save the nation, to salvage progress from the plunder in progress. I saw the generation, mine, born in the 1960’s, who had the last set of good education, descend into the corruption of their fathers. Whether as fathers and mothers, they gave the wrong lessons. They encourage their children to either leave the country with stolen funds to attend schools. They bring them back to cradle positions over their Nigerian mates who schooled here. Or when they could not afford them to go abroad, they presided over miracle centres. As CEOs, they ran big firms into the sewer. As bureaucrats, they perpetuated bastions of corruption and kafka’s slog. They have built few landmarks and tarnished many.

So, the children saw their parents lie, steal and plunder. They defy the rule of law, jail the innocent, kill the just, torpedo the federalist ethos, become ethnic titans, and enshrine the ethic of an oligarchy.  The generation also gave us militancy and justified it. They created the environment to hate the other, as we have seen in the flourishing of herdsmen. Of course, Boko Haram.

It is the same generation that is giving us the topsy-turvy of the NDDC, where billions of our money is flowing into private pockets though  clinics are absent and fishes die in rivers. The result: the yahoo boys. I thought of the Nobel Prize-winning novel, Lord of the Flies by William Golding. I saw it as a Nigerian story where a group of young people deserted on an island become cheats, turncoats, intriguers and murderers. A lush environment becomes an elaborate jungle of barbarism. We ruined a boon given us on a platter.

I blend the generation of those born in the 1960s with those in the 1950’s. If Soyinka’s generation gave us a war. The following generation denied us democracy. The Yahoo boys’ generation cemented a graveyard of bad values. Soyinka’s generation stole 10 percent of contracts, and Nzeogwu was outraged to foment a coup. Today, the contracts, just like EFCC testifies and NDDC, too, are not even done. Then they ask for variation and start over again and again.

That is why we have moved from a nation where the Naira was shoulder-to-shoulder with the British Pound to over 500. This is the sort of nation Soyinka predicted in his best play, A Dance of the Forest.

Maybe the generation of the Ikorodu Bois will yet save this nation. We are seeing that the offspring of the yahoo boys may be rejecting their parents’ values. A parricide of values, an Oedipal rescue. They seem to follow a radical pattern of salvation through industry and creative experimentation.

We have seen quite a few in that generation. We have two of them, Anthony Madu and Olamide Olawale in an unusual field of ballet, who were mocked by their friends but have worn international recognition. They belong to a low-budget school owned by Daniel Ajala. The joy leaps without standard  arena captured millions across the world. One Emmanuela Mayaki is teaching afterschool coding in the UK. More of such stories are emerging.

Maybe rather than the dystopic nightmare of Golding’s Lord of the Flies that fictionalised the world of Hitler, Musolini and the despair that followed, maybe we should follow a true story captured by Rutger Bregman about a crop of young people in 1960’s lost in an island near Tonga with a pledge never to hurt each other. They did over a year until help came. Maybe they will save  a nation adrift.

By Sam Omatseye

Serenity came by way of a governor’s voice.

The plea leapt out first from a child in anguish.

Governor and boy enriched a vocabulary for peace.

“Mummy, calm down,” the boy petitioned, his face flushed with pain, in his florid tee-shirt and whitish short.

It was an act of beggary audacity, the boy demonstrating with both hands how mama should calm down as though waving down a car on top speed. He also sat on a chair in repose as example for her, a gesture that provoked her even more.

Mama’s tone bore the augury of a whiplash. Boy knew mother’s wasp and whip, her executioner’s routine, when she was angry. He apparently was witness and victim, and would not go through that Golgotha again, not in the season of Sallah, a time of sacrifice and atonement.

“Calm down” is the homily of the hour. Boy popped it. Governor popularised it. Language telegraphed a message between generations, one of the Governor of Lagos, and the other of the boy. The BOS of Lagos connected. He took the phrase all the way from a little room to the platform of a national chant.

It is not only the power of words, but also the ardor of technology. A domestic incident transformed into a sort of cause celebre, thanks to social media. The Orwellian big brother will not always chide us. Here he ennobles us, brings empathy from a closet to a teary-eyed public square and gubernatorial rhetoric.

And entertainment, too. We all, at once, laugh and gripe in a moment of pain for a small boy. We were deprived an ending. Did the mother whip? Did the boy weep at last? Or did she give? Only then can we forgive.  But mother says it was no abuse but a snapshot of the boy’s intelligent strategy to wade out of the cane when punishment looms.

Again, it is a moment of humility for Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who picked up the phrase “CALM DOWN” from a little boy, Oreoluwa Lawal-Babalola. “Out of the mouth of babes and suckling, God has ordained strength,” said the Psalmist in scriptures.

When Governor Sanwo-Olu asked all to calm down, one cannot but go back to the emblematic hour that gave birth to the season, the story of Ibrahim and Ishaaq, or as Judeo-Christians say, Abraham and Isaac. It was what the Almighty says to father when he takes son to slaughter slab. He stops the human sacrifice, and gives him a ram instead. He asks father to calm down. He has seen his faith.

It shows God loathes humans as sacrifice. The irony though is that here in Nigeria, we have been sacrificing ourselves. We have abandoned love and kindness to butchery of our kind. That explains why as a country, we are not doing well, apology to Mr. Macaroni, a skits comedian and another word enricher.

We did not do well when we met at the battlefield for 30 months in the Civil war. We did not do well in the Cement Armada, a corruption scandal that rocked the ports in the Gowon era. Or the splurging of our oil reserves. Not in the Shagari era when we slurped our country’s wealth like drunkards.

Not with the military interventions that gave us tyranny instead of redemption. Nor with the agbada men who subverted the vision of a young nation.

Today it is worse; we are not showing that we understand the importance of sacrifice. Those in office offend us rather than fix things. In his Sallah interview, President Muhammadu Buhari noted that those who were entrusted in office in the NDDC have fallen short. With huge sums carted away, they have exploited our sacred trust.

Where was the sense of sacrifice when they ogled our billions of dollars without an eye of innocence? The Minister of Niger Delta, Godswill Akpabio, unveiled names of persons in the National Assembly that he claimed had signed multiple contracts. They were mainly in the Senate. He said it was 60 percent of the contracts. It turned out even in his testimony he may have perjured since the contracts were far less than that percentage. Yet, he made grave allegations against some persons who are lashing back.

The former Akwa Ibom governor has pushed the ball to the legislative court, but the nation is aware that NDDC’s former managing director Joi Nunieh has exposed a dirty pond. Akpabio’s face and acting MD Pondei’s fainting fits are in its reflected pool. Billions of Naira has been allegedly diverted, and the Senate says there are more. That, perhaps, is why House Speaker Gbajabiamila, always calm, has a reason to question the minister to vouchsafe his charges to facts. In the House, no such records of individual contract as yet. Only one constituency project.

We wait for the president who promises to get to the bottom of the matter. And we await it with baited breath, while wondering while the Bernard Okumagba-led management his government nominated still remains in abeyance.

The EFCC is not a good story either. How is it that both prosecutor and prosecuted are tainted? As I have often quoted on this page, if correction lies in the hand that committed wrong, to whom shall we complain? Hence, the president’s promise bears weight, and it should not end in anticlimax.

Corruption is costing us human sacrifices. Many die from poverty, ignorance and disease in the Niger Delta when the money could provide schools, clinics and job opportunities for all. It is the humans that die. That is not what God intended.

We saw another instance in Borno State recently with the ambush of Governor Babagana Zulum. He says it was the Nigerian army that sabotaged. He has been throwing barbs at them for months for failing the people. Even the Shehu of Borno lamented that his people are not safe. In spite of the money sacrificed for security, it is humans that are dying. In Southern Kaduna, Governor El Rufai is under fire because the people are under fire and rolling in blood for his negligence.

The sacrifice we need is not even animals. Many who eat rams still kill, still lie, still steal. It is not the sacrifice, it is the obedience. “Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as obeying the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams.” The Isaacs or Ishaaqs are going to the slaughter while the rams run into the bush.

The spirit of the sacrifice is more important than the sacrifice. The ram we can eat, but we just stuff ourselves and are merry, if the next day we lie. The animal is not guilty, just as the goat Djali in Victor Hugo’s classic novel, The Hunch man of Notre Dame. Djali means “free.” In Soyinka’s Death and King’s Horseman, human life prevails over sacrifice.

In the United States, presidents follow a ritual of forgiving a turkey on Thanksgiving Day. In every faith are rituals but they are not to be taken in isolation. They show who we are. If we sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake, we pretend to fulfill what we are asked to do, which is the law and institutions. But we don’t love it, which is what is called “rational choice.” Laws are meaningless unless fulfilled. That is where rational choice confirms institutionalism.

In Nigeria, we love to pretend to love traditions and not authenticity. Ritual has become an end in itself. Which is the fear of such sociologists like Emile Durkheim in his idea of “collective consciousness.” We hail the rule of law, but we mock it in deed. Jesus said we have “out of our traditions made the word of God of no effect.”

Jesus died so men should not die. The ram was given for the same reason. But it is not about the blood Jesus shed, or the ram Ibrahim slaughtered, it is about our nobility. If we continue to plunder and destroy our nation’s resources and our people suffer and die, we mock God and we enact a nation of hypocrites.

As St. Paul noted, even though the Jews were asked to circumcise, it is of no effect if they do not remove the “foreskins of their hearts.” Back to Governor Sanwo-Olu and the little boy, we ought to calm down and do the right thing.