Sam Omatseye

 

HE was just 25 but an icon in a protest of global proportions in the early 1960s. It was not in Nigeria but in faraway Athens, known glibly as the birthplace of western civilisation. That was not the beginning of being first in his life.

That age marked the rage of the young. They fulminated against injustice. The thirst of democracy, or at least cooperative government, was hitting its stride. Paris stunned the haughty Charles De Gaulle and echoed the French Revolution, if not as savage. They didn’t need an English Poet like William Wordsworth to praise the protests as he did the event in 1789: “Bliss it was that dawn to be alive.”

London bowed to the unruly youngsters. New York boiled. The students of the world chose Greece that day, and a Nigerian, Julius Adelusi-Adeluyi, painted the front row African. The media, in their racist impulse, wondered who the hell was that black man to teach them about democracy. Adelusi-Adeluyi had to polish his Greece to understand the impudence.

He became the secretary general of the worldwide students body, and he hopped on the plane every week, building coalitions, learning about the world, breathing in different climates, absorbing cultures, hearing accents, confronting habits, teaching the world about him and his race. He logged over 100 countries from Asia to Europe to the Americas. On the eve of one of such trips, he just finished his exam at Ife. He was full of the sap of his years. And as he turns 80 in a few days, he acknowledges it was a time for ferment. As Plato wrote, “Youth is the time for any extraordinary toil.”

But even today, he is not the dynamo at 25, but he will not yield to the Chinese proverb that says, “When I was young I did not have the wisdom; when I was old I did not have the strength.” He set forth at dawn, apologies to Wole Soyinka. In his interview with me on TVC, he attributes it, the way all the modest do, to the grace of God. But it was that and more.

Adelusi-Adeluyi is known as the owner of Juli Pharmacy. It oversimplifies him. The Ekiti prince’s biography is packed like his compound name. Few who saw him at 25 probably thought he was a student of history, or philosophy or literature. But he chose pharmacy as a course of study, just as he had chosen language studies before he was 17 and was not admitted at Ibadan because he was too young. Before he became a pioneer student at Ife – now Obafemi Awolowo University –  he was a broadcaster with the first broadcasting firm in Africa – WNBS-WNTV.

Throughout his life, he has been what commentators call a renaissance man. He is good at many things. He can do everything, an amoebic talent. The term originates from the time after the Middle Ages in Europe when the world hatched itself out of the chokehold of the Holy Roman Empire. The man of that age was Leonardo Dan Vinci. At Ife, my teacher, Professor Femi Omosini, described him as “the universal man of the Renaissance, a veritable jack of all trades and master of many.” He was everywhere: painting, philosophy, engineering, biology, physics, etc. We remember him mostly for his painting, especially Mona Lisa’s smile. That is the way with renaissance men in history like Michelangelo, Cicero, Benjamin Franklin, Galileo, Thomas Jefferson.

Adelusi-Adeluyi belongs to the Nigerian offering of the renaissance man. He is a writer, a humanist, an administrator, an entrepreneur, a teacher, a lawyer, journalist, philanthropist, democrat, student activist.  He was a singer at church and teacher of the gospel, and was called oga dancer for his dancing prowess. But like all renaissance men and women, Adelusi-Adeluyi compressed his doings into one ensign: pharmacy. Just as Leonardo did his for painting. In his biography of Leonardo, former Time Managing Editor Walter Isaacson says such persons “marry observation and imagination.” So he brought all his talents in engineering, philosophy and biology into that enigma of the Mona Lisa smile, and other paintings like Jesus.

We have had quite a few of such men from Adelusi-Adeluyi’s generation. Soyinka – writer, activist, actor, democrat. Rasheed Gbadamosi – entrepreneur, activist, playwright, philanthropist. Beko Ransome-Kuti – medic, philanthropist, activist. Mamman Vatsa – soldier, poet, statesman.

Few know – or remember – that Adelusi-Adeluyi made headlines as the first pharmacist to clock the first position in law school final exam. Or that he was the first Nigerian to own a company listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange. Or that he was the first governor of Rotary Club all over Nigeria and much of West Africa. First, he was in the position of secretay general of the International Students Conference in the Hague.

He was in sense a political economist, earning the position once as chairman of Oodua Investments. He was also the first president of the West African Pharmacy Federation. He was the first pharmacist to be made minister of Health. He laments that he has not had company, since no pharmacist has risen to such a posh state since he ascended it. He also launched forays into international commerce; hence he became the national president of the Nigerian American Chamber of Commerce.

When Nigeria became independent, he was a boy. Sixty years after, he witnessed Nigeria in its ante-bellum maelstrom and become a maestro like quite a few. But he is evidence of some of the few fine men who did their bit. But his bit, like Soyinka, Achebe, J. P. Clark, Awolowo, Sam Amuka, Peter Enahoro and Anthony Enahoro, was big. The individual is important, but the nation still is a rot, because you have to harness the talent.

Philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his famous essay, Civilisation, noted that “Each nation grows after its own genius.” He said “there is properly no history but the biographies of great men.” That is the opposite of Tolstoy’s collective view of the past. The nation has geniuses as individuals but not as a soul. Here the individual genius has been alienated from the nation’s soul. Adelusi-Adeluyi, in the words of Emerson again, “hitched his wagon to a star.” He waxed into a star. Not his country. So while Soyinka calls that era “a wasted generation,” he can pick quite a few Adelusi-Adeluyis who hitched their wagons to a star. They did well for themselves, but the society has not done well for us through them.

 

 

Funtua: the glorious contradiction

 

HE drove himself on his fatal hour. His chest was choking him, and he called his doctor. His heart condition did not deter him from sitting behind the wheels as was his wont. His driver was beside him. That hour emblematised the man, Ismaila Isa Funtua, who passed on in the hospital. He took his last breath after his last drive. He was tall, looked ascetic and spoke as from a throne. But he allowed himself to drive and, at prayer, he invited the big and small. He had the airs of Kaduna Mafia or what some now call The Cabal. He also craved the common touch. He had money and was willing to share.

Each time we spoke on phone, he would say, “Eko nko o.” ( How is Lagos?). He had strong views but he was ready for intellectual battle, as in the case of my argument with him over Sowore. I didn’t agree with him but later I was pleased that his position softened. He mocked the idea of being called “a cabal.” Never to deny anything, he discussed it with me, and he told me about his apprenticeship into that vortex of power. He spoke about how he was the scribe. They held meetings in secret, he said. He was like a little boy in the group of the shadowy men of power in the North in those days. They went alone, not even the drivers were permitted to accompany them to the place. They ate together and played games like Ludo together and held meetings late into the night and even into the mornings. It was my longest conversation with him over the phone.

He spoke with the same gusto about his fight for June 12, and how he dared Abacha and the northern power bloc that resisted Abiola’s mandate. His was Abiola’s deputy as chairman of Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria. He was a contradiction as a patrician who fought for the commoner, a prince and a pauper. He was free with other ethnic groups. He told me Sam Amuka was his best friend and called him my brother from another mother. Amuka, tongue in cheek, retorted by asking whether I knew of an Itsekiri man who bore Funta’s name. It is often a potent statement to see him walk beside Amuka, his head in the sky, Amuka not far beneath his shoulder. I saw him smile in a phone dialogue with Amuka and looked like a little boy. He was a good prince, sometimes misunderstood, but his heart was in the right place. He is a perfect example of the patrician who embraced the commoner.

 

By Sam Omatseye

I remember when the Naira was born. It hatched out of the British Pound, and we celebrated it as though the birth of a new era. Baba Sala, the great minstrel, welcomed it with comedy. He wafted the air waves with a soulful serenade. The authorities told us it meant happy selling and happy buying. It coincided with the joy clap of oil and what many saw as the oil boom.

Don’t feel sorry for the Naira. It is also sorry for us. Since it was born in the early 1970’s, it has not known peace. It is one constant in the Nigerian story. It does not die, but it has caused many a death. It has been celebrated and damned. It has seen presidents come and go.

In its name, hefty men have fallen, coups staged, prosperities sizzled, scandals festered, holy men disfrocked, prizes won, contracts signed and death warrants executed. It is at once the standard of value and the standard of values, the latter defacing the former. It is the root of all evil and evil of all roots. By it, classes are made in society, Lazaruses become rich men and rich men become patrons.

Few then expected that the Naira would see what we are witnessing in the country today. A body called the EFCC was born as the mai guard. Laws signed as the gate. The estate was the presidency. The National Assembly pitched in as the security firm. Yet, somehow, men after men appointed as the top dogs at the gate failed.

They barked and growled to bite quite a few men. Eventually dog after dog faltered and whined out of its portal. It did not matter whether the dog was a roaring male, or a yelping female. Their tails could not hold the wind, so they hid between their legs. Magu is the latest Alsatian in a low moan out of the sentry door. The canary, the media, croons from a nearby tree.

Now Magu has sent many behind bars over the same currency. For the same reason, he is said to be in trouble. Preserving the Naira’s innocence was his job. Now they are telling us, he is not innocent. The washer man has stained the wedding gown. But when we distinguish the Magu boys and the other power bloc of the DSS and the minister of justice’s circle, it is a fight between loyalties.

It is not about the public trust, but the private trusts. Each cabal is a private trust. The Naira is the public trust. But the two private trusts masquerade as the public trust, all in the name of the Naira. One private trust has won and kicked the other out of office in the name of public trust. They have cast out the devil in Naira’s name. It is the superman who wins over the sentry.

What has happened in the past few weeks are nothing new to the currency. It is the currency of current affairs. See what is going on at The Niger Delta Development Commission. A former managing director and a minister are wrestling in the public square over Naira. The woman came, saw but could not conquer the place, because of Naira. She believes the Minister of Niger Delta Godswill Akpabio is conquering, and he has come to saw the naira in pieces. In the story is not only the sleaze of a slap, but also of blood oath.

We have seen billions mentioned like the name of a familiar harlot. It is like tortoise in every tale. It is the narrative of palliative that amounts to fairy tale millions a month for members of the management. It is in the billions of contract spent without allocation. It is in the warning of a pen. A pen that signs in a job will be the pen that will end the job, according to the allegation. But it is all about the Naira. The agency blooms while the fisherman, the hunter, farmer, school boy in the region still cannot breathe or eat in a polluted environ of air and water.

It is the Naira that is at play at the House of Representatives when the acting MD says he would not sit to hear allegations about his stewardship. The former MD Joi Nunieh weaves a tale of two rescues. First, she plays the role of an action heroine, taking on the kingpin of a minister. She would not swear a blood oath, would not go to bed, would not sign a contract, would not fire a northerner, would not spend money without allocation. She is the “thou shall Not” in the Old Testament. Philosophers like Nietzsche, John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte would not like Nunieh’s allegations.

These thinkers believed that Judeo-Christian injunctions tell us what we should not do instead of what we should do. So, they think Christianity is servile and based on fear. Hence Nietzsche, in   his books Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil, proclaimed the death of God and supremacy of the superman, who has freed himself from the paralysis of faith.

But Nunieh, if we believe her, is actually an action woman because she has done nothing, the insolence of impotence. She is probably following Prophet Isaiah who says, touch not the unclean thing. Or Paul who says, come out from among them and be ye separate. This is negative praxis, but not doing something is actually doing the right thing, according to her. Maybe that is why she thinks those who do things are not holy.

The other rescue tale came from Governor Nyesom Wike, who turned the drama of a police siege into a heroic opportunity. He arrived there in the genre of a western movie, where the hero on horseback arrives with hooves raking up a dust cloud to save the weak. This time he came with a caravan, he in a BMW. He is not just a hero of a citizen, but a man of chivalry, saving a wench from the trench of men.

Akpabio says all that is a lie. Nunieh is in her world of fantasy, weaving a randy minister for a handy slap, a hectoring bully where he was lawful. But in all these Minister Akpabio would be at home and Nunieh an unknown Port Harcourt girl if the Naira was not in the story. It is because of crude oil. It has made the agency awash with Naira. Crude oil has made crude drama for the Naira.

Can the Naira also not weep over its abuse by other currencies just as when a certain gentleman was such a jolly good fellow that Nigerians, friends and associates, have converted into good Samaritans. Then they converted the Naira into dollars and gave $9.8 million to the former managing director, Andrew Yakubu, of the NNPC.

They did not want him to go through the hassle of keeping huge sums at home in a depreciated local currency. Stashing that sum in naira would require him to tell his friends to build a mansion just to store the Naira equivalent that would run in the billions. Why not just make them handy in dollars so he can slap them into a pocket and walk around light.

It did not begin today. At the end of the Jonathan era, many fellows according to legends built houses like private banks just to store their dollar loots. So, even now, the game continues. The Naira must be unhappy with itself. In those early days, the Naira was strong, and if you had such a large sum of money, you had to turn the pounds or dollars into our local currency. Just as the Bible says, money has failed in Nigeria.

Against the backdrop of Magu, Nunieh, Akpabio and Yakubu theatres is a pestilence called Covid-19. While we moan the disease for lapping up lives, a bigger one is eating up our Naira, and it is not going away soon. It is called corruption, and it is a virus of power and influence. Against it, we have not even begun to develop a vaccine.

Sam Omatseye

 

 

LAGOS may be the vertebral bone of the Nigerian economy. But, like a bone gone awry during a meal, it can get stuck in the throat. The question of how to make Lagos right for everyone was the subject of a webinar recently organised by the United States embassy.

The topic of discussion was transportation. Lagos is nothing if not its mobility. For all its residents, the story every morning is not whether to move, but how to move, who to move, who should move, who to move to, where to move, what to move, when to move. Sometimes the Lagosian would have to understand each of these options as an epicenter of all the other options.

It is weird jigsaw puzzle where if and how and when and who are equally and simultaneously important. So the resident would have little time thinking or else, the only thing that would move is a mind that is tossing around possibilities. The result is a whirligig of inaction. Much thinking, like studying, is the weariness of the flesh, apologies to Solomon. So, the Lagosian has to wake up and go.

The question is, when he goes, he stays. Sometimes in a rut. That is what we all call go-slow, a snail in perennial motion. The US picked an expert, Robin Hutcheson, to give the main talk, and Nigerians also were selected to talk, and they included a representative of the Lagos State Commissioner for transportation, Engineer Toriola, a traffic  specialist Tola Odeyemi and Prof Innocent Ogwude, a former vice chancellor and also an expert.

What struck me was that the issue of transportation in Lagos was mostly addressed as transportation. But I could not but be impressed by the way each discussant displayed understanding of the technicalities of transportation. The number of cars, the inadequacy of roads, space management, budgetary bugbears, easing nodal knots, pot holes, et al. Hutcheson showed great knowledge of what we need for every city and they also apply to Lagos. Her focus on space management was on the money, except that all who move around for money think little about some of the fine points, like focusing on the bus as the target of mass transit. Other issues include sidewalks, bike lanes, trains, metro, bus, light rail, train and additional creative points to foster connectivity between buildings and facilities.

She made the great point that to move is to seek freedom for happiness, not just freedom to get around, but freedom from disruptions, from harm, freedom to connect and from exclusion. Odeyemi noted that Lagos is not like anywhere in the country as regards cars per kilometer, a point that Toriola specifies as 284 vehicles as against the national average of 11 per kilometer. She hinted that in 2017 alone, gridlocks cost the city N42 billion in productivity.  She called for improved regulation in water transportation and staff should share transportation. Covid has taught us all that more people can work at and from home. She made a salient point about budgeting, that the impression is that Lagos has all the money in billions in revenue, but she insisted that even healthcare alone will gulp all its money and not even satisfy all we need in that sector. She also hinted at a behavioral factor, the major reference to culture when she adverted to the rage over right of way, the heavy duty trucks and challenges of roundabouts.

Professor Ogwude said the reason Lagos lost its reign as capital was partly because of the need to ease commuting. He called for smart traffic lights, road pricing to discourage car usage, taxing car parking, introduction of car-pooling, accelerating light rail system and more focus on water transportation, which is only one percent as yet. He added that long travel corridors like Orile to Apapa, and Apapa to Mainland can be circumvented with alternatives in ferry travels. He also observed that the work on Ibom Deep Sea port being pursued by Governor Udom Emmanuel in Akwa Ibom State and the Lekki Deep Sea Ports hold prospects for easing matters. He also called for subsidy.

Speaking for the Lagos State government, Toriola reminded all of the work in progress in major corridors in the state, including Ikorodu to CMS, which has advanced. Work is also on in Oshodi to Abule Egba as well as CMS to Okokomaiko. Referring to calls for water transportation, he documented the work by the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu on jetties around the state. In fact, 14 boats are bobbing on water. The governor is pivoting to collaborate with the private sector. On mass transit, he spoke about procuring quality buses not only for first mile but also for last mile purposes. He spoke of shift from car to bus or mass transport as an urgent matter of policy of the government. The roundabouts are yielding to four-way stops like the case in Ikeja.

Toriola reminded all that Lagos was about the smallest state but with great population density. In spite of this, the state has been broken into zones to allow for ease of movement and control. He noted that the state was introducing technology to enforce traffic control and regulation.

The publisher of Business Day, Frank Aigbogun, set the stage for discussion because, as the organisers noted, his paper has been very fervent about transportation in the city. He told a story of a tragic incident that resulted from transportation snafu.

Clearly, Hutcheson may not have understood the geopolitics of Lagos or Nigeria. The other speakers were also speaking on the interstices of roads and the headwinds of traffic. But Lagos as a city of cities. The point could have been made that Lagos is a rescue centre, a city of refuge not only for the runaways from inefficiencies in other parts of the country but also a last mile for internal migrants. Thousands come to Lagos daily never to return. They multiply the number of those who move and the vehicles to move them. This problematizes road maintenance and space. Ultimately, it challenges budgeting. Odeyemi’s reference to inadequate money to do what is necessary hints at the development issue of the city.  It is pressure on housing, on jobs, on crime control, on medical care. So the problem of transportation is a problem of development. While it is technical, it cannot be handled alone.

I would have wanted more dissection of budget and its niceties, and all the other issues gaping for funds like education and health care.

Toriola referred to the issue of attitude, and that is the cultural aspect that was not really explored. Why uproar will dog some of the suggestions, like taxation, road pricing. A cultural point is drainage tight-ends from dirty habits of the city dwellers who discard waste at will and cause floods.

And that calls for the political, and the need to reignite the call for special funding and status for Lagos. It is where the federal government ought to be grateful that Lagos has helped to keep the country from the turbulence of outrage over state failure. Just as in traffic, everyone’s car should be the other’s keeper, so it should be for a federal state. The burden should not suffocate one. To kill the one, may kill the rest. Jeremy Bentham, who led the utilitarian movement, had the right words: “Everyone counts for one; nobody for more than one.” As it is for the commuter, so it is for the federating units.

It is not an issue that should be taken slightly. The population grows daily, the pressure too. This may create a discontent that may not be Lagos’ alone to bear but the centre. If the centre cracks, the whole nation tumbles. This is hoping that the centre does not wait until it can no longer hold.

 

PEACE AS WAR

 

IN his novel, War in a Time of Cholera, Garcia Marquez understood that without human love, all other things collapse. No matter how light-hearted the Nobel Prize-winning author wanted his novel to read, it ended sadly because the couple in the story had romance without peace.

So peace is so important that it vanquishes even the challenge of a disease. That is perhaps the birthday gift Akwa Ibom State Governor gave at the weekend. He is harvesting peace but also mobilising it to the battlefield: against a pandemic. After inheriting a state that reeled in blood and fights, the state is at one against a common enemy.

He has been able to do that by being the front-liner in his state in fighting Covid-19. He holds nightly meetings to cap his work having constructed a 300-bed isolation centre with a three-tier PCR laboratory, staked as the only one of its type and standard fully owned by any state government. This has earned him applause from the DG of the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC). Witnesses say the isolation centre at the Ibom Specialist Hospital has a five-star ambience and facilities.

On birthdays, we celebrate life. What a better way to do it than by working to keep death at bay in his state in a time of pandemic.

 

 

By Sam Omatseye

It is Ramon Abbas he bears. Even that name puzzles. Some reports anglicise his first name as Raymond. But it is Hushpuppi we know, poetic, lyrical and even symbolic. Hush implies silent, furtive, conspiratorial, shadowy. Puppy, in this regard, means playful like a week-old dog. That makes him a sly dog.

But then it has other origin stories. Some others date it back to the founding of New Orleans that gives the world Mahdi Gras, an unhinged carnival for pilgrims of pleasure. An immigrant woman invented a snack of a ball out of cornmeal and the city called it hushpuppy. Their own incarnation of akara. Even then, Abbas’ nickname is spelt ending with an i instead of a y.

The one picture that has trended of late features him in a shirt sporting a familiar brand Fendi. But another brand had been stalking him like a forest cat, slinking, longsuffering and calculating. It was a brand as counterforce: FBI. Nabbed in Dubai but caught in the United States, the sojourn of a colorful conman comes to an end. Behind bars, he will wear neither Gucci nor LV, but an orange top that will, at best, say INMATE.

Now he is no more Hushpuppi. He is now Abbas. He buried his real name in a casket of lies and deceit. He was reborn a glamour icon, one-named, abandoned home, and became a global Smart Alec. He was a man of means with no means of livelihood. He conquered cyberspace, dispossessed the gullible, stashed his global bank account, strutted the world, amassed dream cars, snored in palaces, dressed like a fop, preened like a peacock, seduced the young and befuddled the old.

He became a role model to a lazy generation that lapped luxury without labour. When he was caught, the FBI buried Hushpuppi and rebirthed Abbas. But where is the real Abbas though? Can he recognise Ramon again? He cannot. Like Sophocles’ Antigone, he “neither dwells among men nor ghosts.” He is in a dazed world, a wraith. He died twice; he is born again a jailbird, his third life. He was reckless. Now he is a wreck.

But Abbas is a tale for the moment, if in reverse. He was caught trying to denude a group of people in millions of dollars in palliatives in a time of pandemic. Abbas is a picture of avarice at a time of sacrifice. He was flaunting his shoes, cars, mansion, parties at a time when many hid behind homes, suffered in hospitals, coughed in misery, mourned or were mourned. He represented a heartless species when we were supposed to be our neighbours’ keepers, when many were suddenly whisked out of work.

Read Also: How we nailed Hushpuppi, accomplices, by FBI agent

When his fellow country folks lost their jobs, and men of means contributed their millions and billions to the poor, Abbas was a show-off. The thing with Abbas was no lockdown could stop his party. His extravagance was online. The world was his audience. He flourished and frolicked in real time and space, but his fans joined him virtually. His was a voyeur’s paradise. The young gawped and gawked, followed him, and commented. When they cursed, they did it out of smouldering admiration. He had come to represent a generation of Nigerians who did not trust their parents or their bosses or their leaders. They followed their greed. They followed Hushpuppi. He was a priest of a new goddess: money.

Abbas for them was a sort of escape. He had become the man who gamed the system and scored. All the stadia in the world applauded. They are like the character of the English novel Billy  Liar, a young man who lived in his imagination where he had attained power, wealth and glory, although he had nothing other than living from paycheck to paycheck. Abbas embodied that escape for them. They lived in Hushpuppi. They wore his Fendi, lived in his palace, flew in his jet, caroused his women, or were his women, they sat in the driver’s seat of his Ferrari and Lamborghini and Rolls-Royce.

Here fellow Nigerians had no chance to host Owambes. Weddings and birthdays and funerals have been pruned to parlors and backyards. It is a time for humility, and it was only proper that the man who countered it be caught and put away.

These days no one has anywhere to go with Gucci shoes. No first class tickets to buy to London and take pictures for online vanity. No one has a chance to pile pockets with dollars and pounds to spray a celebrant. Those with big cars cannot drive them to anywhere for displays. No extravagances for the Mephistophelean or the harmless show man. The worst we can do is dress up at home, and flaunt it to our child or wife or husband, like Miss Havisham in Dickens’ Great Expectation who dressed every day for years in her wedding clothes and died in it without leaving her home.

Those with special cars only warm their engines and drive around the neighbourhood. These times are revealing our material constipation. Abbas, the man of constipation, has now left the building, his bowels rumbling with faecal waste.

Things are upside down. Those who see churches and mosques as avenues for amassing wealth are crowing that they want people together but they are tempting the Lord. It is possible that Abbas had some of these men of God praying for him, and he may be taking from this stolen money to feather the house of God. It is an irony we have people like this thriving when we hear men of God preaching. The point though is that this is an age where the Word of the Lord is trading places with the wealth of the Word. Quite a few churches give precedence to material splendor. It is a different kind of hypocrisy from a war-time play Mother Courage where Brecht says, “Whenever there’s a load of special virtues around, it means something stinks.”

Abbas epitomises the Yahoo Boys, and his fall is their fall. It is a comeuppance for a tribe of desperadoes who have demonised technological genius. The new frontier of progress is also their front for fraud.

It is not for nothing that he has been associated with some of our big-name politicians, even if they had nothing in common. He has had photo-ops with a few of them. If he were not Hushpuppi but merely Ramon Abbas, we might not have seen such pictures.

But our politicians have one quality in common with him: impunity. Where leaders promise and turn back on their word, it is as bad a lie as a Hushpuppi popping up on a person’s email and asking for one piece of information and turning the email into an opportunity to stalk and destroy. They are the monitoring spirits of the internet. They get the person’s account and they empty it.

We also see our politicians take away our money when others have nothing. Fraud is now familiar terrain of politicians. To be a politician is to seek avenue for self-service, not service to all. But the arrest of Abbas is hope, but not enough. It shows even the new frontier can be stalked and the crime encircled and ended. Our people are not doing well enough to catch those who are well-off by wrong means. A few have been caught. We want more.

Abbas is caught today, and no one is hailing him. His audience is now jeering. He is like Jay Gatsby in Scot Fitzgerald’s novel. He acquires his fable of wealth to get back a woman, and buys a big mansion just like Hushpuppi. Every neighbour comes to his frequent parties but not the woman he craves. He eventually dies alone and poor. Everybody comes to his parties but no one goes to his funeral.  Abbas is alone now. So is Hushpuppi. Abbas looks on as no one comes to Hushpuppi’s funeral. Hushpuppi’s frozen eyes look without seeing as Abbas goes behind bars.

By Sam Omatseye

“Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince/ And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” – Shakespeare

After I researched and wrote his biography, anytime I saw Abiola Ajimobi it was not the politician, or governor or senator that leapt into my eye. It was the altar boy, crisp, smart, the sparkle of childhood. In his primary school, he was selected to that status, though a Muslim, by the school because he was spick and span. Face upended faith.

He was always the model student in hygiene and fashion. His shirts, his trousers, his shoes, body cream, haircut were examples for others. His daughter Abisola told me how he paid attention to his appearance. From his skin, his bath to his clothes for the day. He would spread a variety of apparels on the bed and meticulously make a judgment, sometimes consulting wife or any member of his family, on what to wear.

Even his colleagues at National Oil and Later Conoil described him as “dapper,” reminding one of the politician in Achebe’s A Man of the People who was described as “the best dressed gentleman.” In his corporate life, his suits blazed in cuts and colours. Even his wife Florence testified to her surprise about how he, as a politician, swiveled into the traditional Yoruba wear of agbada and sokoto with a tailor’s ease

If what the experts say is correct that we should follow the laws of hygiene in this era of COVID-19, the last person I expected to fall victim is Ajimobi. Yet, that virus that respects neither class nor faith nor courage struck, and fatally. In his play, Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s Sir Toby noted, “Care is an enemy to life.” Care did not save one of the most careful men on earth. It is a nightmare of a paradox, a dark foreboding for all alive.

It is a lesson in human impotence. It is not a time to say with the superstitious folks that he died because he wished to say his farewell at 70. Now many will say his 70th birthday was his big, final valediction to the world. It was a fanfare of a party, the big and mighty in the nation came, so did the small in Ibadan. He, too, was in an ebullient spirit. He had a good dance with his wife, and spoke with great hope and rapture about his age and aging, and even his virility, when he quipped that the Ooni of Ife had  assured him, kabiyesi so pe ara mi maa ma le. “His majesty said my body will be virile.”

And he was. He was agile, full of the gift of life and possibilities, and he earned his place again atop the political world. He died as acting chairman of his party. He had told me in his last days as governor that he was contemplating going back to school. During the lockdown before the flu struck, returned my phone call and assured me he would keep in touch over his new post as deputy chairman. But as Joseph Conrad says in his Heart of Darkness, life is as “inscrutable as destiny.”

In that destiny was a managing director of the top oil marketing firm in the sub-continent, senator, governor, party leader, and statesman. When he was a child, according to the story, he visited the Governor’s House in Ibadan with his father who was also a prominent politician. When he sat leisurely, his father told Abiola to sit properly. “Sit like a governor,” he instructed. “One day, you too will become a governor.”

He never forgot that moment in prophetic attitude. But he did not seem the man for politics when he travelled to the United States, excelled in his studies and even worked menial jobs including in a mortuary. He combined studies with work and joys of America, even dating a Miss Buffalo as part of his thrills of youth.

He did not return with any connections or plum jobs waiting in Nigeria. He got his jobs and worked his way up the ladder. As a corporate man, he looked at politics from the distance. He wanted to reach the acme of career before he ventured into the vocations of father and uncle. He stunned his wife when he eventually did. She did not envisage an Abiola, who could sit with artisans, workers and the lower rung of the society. He had been prim at the top for so long. They met at Marina in Lagos when she first shunned him and a proud Ajimobi waited in ambush. So, an Ajimobi, who chummed with market men and women, mechanics, road transport workers, etc, was new to him. “It’s in my blood,” he assured her. He became senator, and after a battle he became a governor, not once, but a jinx breaker by taking it twice.

He understood himself, and applied his energies and vision as governor in Oyo State. He is the most consequential figure in modern Oyo State. He was focused, if sometimes too blunt for his people. But he was authentic and refreshed with his candour. He did not play double standards or suffer fools gladly. He had a portrait of a lion in his sitting room in which the lion says he will not eat grass no matter how hungry he is, not because of pride, but that is who he is. Hence an Ajimobi would berate some errant students who would not listen to a governor. He asked them to obey constituted authority because that was how he was raised, not as a generation of petulant boys who look their elders in the eye with impunity. Or in the Obaship struggle in which he confided to me that the people agreed to his reforms in private only to turncoat in public.  He did not chafe under pressure but insisted on the point he had made. That is the measure of courage in leadership.

He had his flaws. But he was more tender than many knew. A childhood friend of his in the United States was walking through Marina with his wife and stopped at National Oil, and said he knew the boss of that company and walked in. He was allowed up to its top floor. The secretary would not let him see the boss. He was impatient and left with a note. Once Ajimobi learned of it, he shut down every door or lift until they found the fellow who had almost left the building. He spent that night in Ajimobi’s home after asking his wife to prepare a meal for an august visitor.

When he was a teen, he accompanied his mother to a village in the southwest where she sold gold. They had an accident in which the vehicle somersaulted. He survived with his mother. But a certain fellow who was walking by, looked at the lad, still bleeding from a wound that become a lifelong scar. “Take care of that boy,” he charged his mother, “he will become somebody big in this land.”

Whatever the status of the man, whether prophet, or whether human or spirit, no one could discount that his tongue lit with fire. The boy, who fell into a ditch in an accident and bore a scar on his head and escaped death with his mother beside him in a rustic retreat in Yoruba land, grew over the years to travel all over the world, to school in some of the world’s tony universities, to grow in fame and fortune, to become a headline grabber in the nation’s television, newspapers and magazines, became a mobiliser of men and resources, became a helmsman in corporate Nigeria, soared to victory as a man of power, held positions of envy as he leapt from rung to rung, was sworn in as a senator of Oyo State and the Federal Republic of Nigeria and, after a grueling epic of a fight both in the courts and on the ballot box, distinguished himself not only as a governor but has set a record as the first personage to mount the seat as governor twice in a historic state of kings and kin, of quicksand loyalties and royalties in the capital, Ibadan, signposted as one of Africa’s largest cities. He bowed out as governor with the garland and sobriquet: Ko sele ri – It has never happened before.