The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Waiting to fly

    Waiting to fly

    Sam Omatseye

     

    THIS is not a time to soar. But then it is. That is what everyone thinks these days. I remember the song of childhood about flight. “If I had a wing like a dove/ I would fly, fly away, fly away /and be at rest…” We are airborne in our spirit but grounded in reality.

    At the moment, we all seem to be at rest, from work, from play, sometimes from the law, from bear hugs and public excitations, from travel, from faith, from fiestas. But everyone wants out of the egg, to break out like the baby dove or squab, flutter the wings and zip into the air. Something happened that seemed to have caught our fancy recently. It was not the arrival of an aircraft from outside the country that was arrested and impounded. That was against the law of travel. It was a British airliner. It dropped on our land like fly on a plate of egusi soup. It might have been a bad flea for the feast, except that no feast flares these days.

    Not the other incident in Port Harcourt with Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike and Caverton Helicopter. The first was a case of violation of airspace and territorial rights. The second was an issue of federalism, and the rage of a state governor against a perceived central bully.

    But one happened without controversy, and it was the sort of flight we seek these days without hope until the flight of Covid-19 takes a rest or flies away forever. It happened with the landing of a local aircraft from the Akwa Ibom State, by aircraft years a relatively new affair. When I saw the picture, with the state Governor Udom Emmanuel on the stairwell, and the plane sitting in its tantalising majesty in the airport, it put the whole Covid-19 burden in perspective. Udom and a pilot were not flying. The machine had no ambition but rest.

    We are all here, like the plane on earth. We want to move, but we are a mobile race. The reason we made machines is to move, to get from one place to another. It is what we dreamed from beginning. Gods were in the skies before we got there. It was before the Greeks came up with Icarus, who crashed and Daedalus, who restrained him, and when the Wright brothers defied earth and tested gravity. Before the machines, the Tower of Babel also tumbled. In her novel titled: Flights, the Nobel Prize Novelist Olga Tokarczuk writes, “Barbarians don’t travel.” We are back, at least temporarily, to the age of caverns.

    Even in the law, we have grappled with flying. As this essayist argued in a recent piece, the exigency of safety over all else in our federal state has harked us back to the state of nature. We had to suspend everything that appealed to the niceties of law because to be safe was the first condition of citizenship. Even Amotekun, for all its ethnic comforts to regions, took a back seat though it was the only topic boiling in the new year.

    Talk about social distance, but not before socializing. What more way to explain a lack of flight than that we cannot have the owambes. How many chickens, goats, cows, ducks have ducked because no parties. Goodbye to big society birthdays, weddings, funerals that might have feasted on animal cruelty. No appetites, no plates clanking, no dances or money sprays, no inebriated chatter. Interior Minister Rauf Aregbesola turned 63 in virtual silence. Dele Momodu exploded online on his 60th, but the fellow did not have the opportunity in public to devour his delicacies, like the ones we had together in Ibadan and other places in the Southwest in our reporting days. The mama puts and their intoxicating varieties.

    But what of those who cannot work? Talents at rest. The engineer, the artist, the salesman, the pilot, the contractor. Rather than work, they remain at home, brooding what might be done. They want to fly with their creative juices. But they are, in the words of the American writer, the rabbit is at rest. But it is no time to rest. It is the noon of the bees, the time to break the egg and break out, in “one equal temper of heroic hearts,” in the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson.

    Yet as we say, the roads are not happy. Soyinka always sees the road in his plays as the theatre of human action, whether in the play of that name, or the Jero plays, or Mad Men and Specialists. Because of Covid-19 fears, contractors are not able to take advantage of silence to do road work as they might. Road work may lead to blood work, and positive tests.

    Cars are coy. The big and flashy SUV, the bold, brash tyres roll only in the neighborhood. The engines roar in the yard to keep alive. Few people in the buses. Social distancing tame the bonhomie of intracity mobility, the jokes, the fights, feisty repartee, the quotidian theatrics of commuting are gone.

    Even the sick are afraid to be sick, not of coronavirus, but of common fever. They don’t want to visit the hospitals because you might contract the dreaded disease. Small ailment may be an entrapment. It is still so because we don’t have records of how many people die of malaria or diarrhea because they don’t want to die of Covid-19. They die because they do not want to die. “Something startles where I thought I was safest,” noted the playwright Walt Whitman.

    We noted that it is not a time for the rich to fly to safety, that is, to choice hospitals abroad. They cannot take shelter. A few big names have died of Covid-19, and they will not be flown in from London or Germany. A boon to local medicine. We cannot fly out of ourselves. Whether we are good or bad, great physicians or poor ones, we are stuck with our own competences.

    We cannot believe the way we used to. We cannot huddle in the church. Even to sing, and dance, cannot be the same. To sing in a choir is to tempt the Covid-19 beast. Spittle from different lips is airborne together, and faithful folks may form a fellowship of infection. Those who have private jets and want to evangelise will have to do it the humble way: online. Now, Skype, Zoom, Facebook, Instagram, et al, have overtaken the tactile power of worship. Daniel had said in the Bible that he read but could not understand, but the Spirit told him, “Go thy way Daniel, many shall be purified and made white, and tried…people shall go to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.” To Christians, today the prophecy is in full bloom.

    Those who travel, and do businesses across the world, continent after continent, this is a humbling time. Never since the time of colonial expansion into Africa, when the imperialist merchant Cecil Rhodes made virtue of conquests and profit, especially in Southern Africa, has commerce cowered. If Rhodes were alive today he would not pronounce his famous quotes, “I would annex the planets if I could.” The irony though is that within the era of Covid-19 American astronauts shot into space in its first commercial launch. Just like birds or astronauts, commerce worldwide is taking a beating. Money is going away like the Bible line: money mounts wings and flies away.

    So, what Akwa Ibom State did was to tease the future with its Bombadier CRJ 900 aircraft, which for effect claims to filter dust as well as “microscopic particles such as bacteria and viruses… removing contaminants and greatly enhancing the quality of air in the cabin.”

    As the plane is still on earth, so are all of us, hungry to fly.

     

     

  • Three sovereigns

    Three sovereigns

    Sam Omatseye

    Our constitution is a scaffold that wrestles with itself. Since 1999 when it came into being, it has been searching for itself. An odyssey without self-discovery. It is alive with the bones and biceps of a sumo wrestler. It is strong but not healthy. An elephant that is not agile. It roars without a message. Rosy and robust, it is a carrier of diseases. It careers on without a compass. It is a beast, a beauty but also a burden. It is ultimately a priest with dubious sacraments. Justice may be blind, but this is not a maiden with a fold over its eyes. It peers at justice but it tears at it.

    We saw this last week when Covid-19 pitted three forces against themselves over the Friday prayers ahead of Sallah. The Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Saad Abubakar III, warned against any massing of the faithful on prayer grounds because of the dangers of spreading the ailment. Some governors across the north countered that their prayer grounds were holy and wholly for Allah. They ignored the leader of the faith, the ear and eye of the Almighty and oracle of the mystics. The states included Kano, Bauchi, Yobe, Jigawa, Gombe, Borno and Zamfara. From the presidency came the word that everyone should mutter their supplications in the solitude of their closets.

    Suddenly the constitution became a shadow presence in this wrestling match. We are supposed to have a federal constitution. That leaves the decision in the purview of state executives. But the president has powers in a federal constitution to subvert the cocky brow of any state executive. We saw that in the language of the inspector general of Police who warned against any prayer activity, whether Christian or Muslim or even traditional, that contravened the federal position. We often turn the word federal to mean central, which is exactly a travesty.

    As the state-versus-centre conflict unfolds, how is the power of faith? Constitutionally, faith leaders should subject themselves to temporal authorities. So, Lords temporal is powerful. In the hearts of the people, the lords temporal are temporary. The lords spiritual are eternal, come from heaven. The lords temporal are bound by the human document that comes and goes. The lords spiritual, in the people’s heart, may be flesh and blood, but their spirits soar above us, like the eagle consorting with angels. The lords spiritual are in the people’s heart, the temporal in their heads. Hearts trump heads.

    After all, who fights for the nations the way armies scrimmage for gods? Is that not why nations at war coin their patriotism with the register of the almighty? When you fight for the country, you are fighting for God. The enemy nation belongs to Beelzebub. Hitler coined Nazism as a battle between Christ and Jews who slaughtered him? George Bush saw Sadaam as fighting against a Christian America. Saladin in the Crusades inspired the faithful who bested the Christian army and seized Jerusalem for Allah. Even wars against those of the same faith see themselves as authentic believers against hypocrites or despoilers of the sanctum.

    But when the sultan said all the states should respect social distancing, it also provided a paradox. The spiritual authority was bowing to science. The temporal authorities were bowing to faith. Faith respected science; the others defied science. Where does the constitution, a secular document, provide an answer? It would have been interesting if such a matter went to court. The faithful, though, does not need a court. God judges in his time. The seculars live on courts. Such a duel would apply a temporal document, the constitution. The faithful believe Koran superior to the constitution. But the governors, all Muslims, would be in a delicate position dueling against their God in a human court.

    Separation of religion and faith is rooted in Islam. In the early years, scholars stayed away from the government. The Christian faith, which always wanted the church as an interloper, borrowed the concept from Islam. The United States Constitution saw to that in the polemical engineering of Jefferson and Madison, and it made its way into the First and Second amendments. Before that, we know of the Holy Roman Empire, which historians described as neither Roman nor Holy. England formed a church in homage to romantic squabbles with Rome. Men like Thomas Cromwell and Henry the Eighth dramatised the era as superbly recorded by historians and recreated in fiction like the Booker Prize-winning novel, Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. The irony though is that the concept of Caliphacy, which in Nigeria dates to the 1804 Uthman Dan Fodio onslaught, has come to cast Islam as prioritising theocracy over what Buhari has called for today: prayers in the closet. ISIL, Boko Haram, Al Qaida, only are extreme manifestations of the perversions over the ages.

    Jesus himself was not a great advocate of open and uproarious prayers or the open banditry of the prophetic word. He said pray in private, God will reward you openly. He also said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” That is the strain that the Sultan reflected for Islam when he urged caution. Those who defied the sultan were also playing politics with the faith. According to Yusuf Alli’s reporting, some of the governors noted that defying colleagues were influenced by local leaders, including Ulamas. It is the politicisation of the mystical.

    But if the constitution is agnostic, what of the centre versus the periphery? The states, as Lawyer of lawyer Wole Olanipekun, noted in an interview on my TVC Show ‘The Platform’, give birth to the centre. The problem is there was never a formal handover ceremony from the parts to make the whole. Impunity is therefore fuelled by lack of memory. Without memory, there is no desire. How do you say you handed over power to me when there was no such event in history? The 13 colonies did so in the United States and deliberated in perhaps the most turbulent fest of ideas in history.

    The 1999 constitution is foisting an unnatural power from the centre, and that is accounting for the fulminating actions of men like Nyesom Wike. Covid-19 is perhaps bringing out the beast in the Nigerian nation.

    Sallah prayers brought out three De facto sovereigns: the governors, the president and the sultan. The matter is settled outside the constitution. So we ask, why do we need the law? It means that when we have good men, the law is superfluous as Apostle Paul asserts. When we contend with bad laws, good lawyers save them. When we have bad laws, good people save us. What do we have today? We have bad laws searching for good men and lawyers.

  • Peter Pan Arises

    Peter Pan Arises

    Sam Omatseye

    In a thriller of an interview that spanned over one and half hours on Arise Television, Reuben Abati and Laila Johnson-Salami took on Peter Pan, one of the best ever to write a column or call himself a journalist on mother earth. At 85, Peter Enahoro, who never had a university degree but graduated from Government College Ughelli, spoke lucidly about the Nigerian press, the Nigerian crisis, restructuring, his family and the sham of a pardon for his elder brother Anthony, also about Obj, Sam Amuka – The Vanguard owner and fellow Ughelli old boy – Chief Segun Osoba who he called young man, and of course the mighty poet J.P. Clark, also Ughelli old boy. Enahoro granted the interview lying on a bed because of injuries from an accident in 1961.

    What struck me was intervention on the 1966 coup, and the note he obtained about Ifeajuna’s impressions of his role. According to Enahoro, Ifeajuna seems to present himself as the leader. Many believe Chukwuma Nzeogwu merits that accolade, if accolade is the word and if the word merit should ever go into that blood-nosed narrative.

    Ifeajuna said he wanted to hand over power to Ironsi, then chief of the army. But Nzeogwu said Awo was their target to take over the mantle. That remains a speculative aspect of our history. In his book, There was A Country, Achebe testifies to Nzeogwu’s indignation at Ifeajuna’s claim. Ifeajuna ran away, tails and all, to Ghana like an athlete in a counterfeit jump. Nzeogwu stayed put. Ifeajuna did not perform his part of the task successfully in Lagos by leaving Ironsi untouched. Ifeajuna’s act complicated the definition of the purpose of the coup as an Igbo affair. Again, Ifeajuna, as Enahoro noted in the interview, did not make the announcement in the morning. When he didn’t Nzeogwu took up the role in the afternoon. Nzeogwu, in my mind, was the leader. If he did not lead going into the coup, he did coming out of it.

  • Red death

    Red death

    Sam Omatseye

     

    TODAY’s pandemic is redefining, if for now, how it is to be rich and poor. To be rich is not to flaunt, but to help. It is to spend all the cost of a business class ticket to buy a meal for over six thousand people. For the first time in history, billionaires clap as one beyond their clans.

    It is also a time to beg with impunity. The poor are bold and don’t bow with their bowls. They jettison a loaf of bread and toss it like an Arsenal player into the air. We also have the episodes of genuine destitution where long lines of the city’s lower class buzz for a bag of rice and garri.

    We are witnessing a moral moment in our country, and it is easy to interrogate the rich as a cynical or afraid, or full of empathy. The rich must be full of introspection today. Why did this sort of good feeling not flow out pre-Covid? Why now?

    If the pandemic were not raging, the planes would be revving above us, their contrails pointing to England or France or the United States. Money burning in those plumes of smoke, dollars, pounds and Euros. They would be travelling for deals, to make more of the millions or billions. When they were not making deals, they hunt for parties, the weddings, the birthdays, or funeral, or a mere flamboyance for a fellow who bought a new mansion, had a new baby or new contract.

    Some of them would take place in a small town in Monaco, or Italy, or Spain, and everyone who wanted to be regarded as somebody would travel first class or business class, and land in the town. The services would take place in a local church that was never half-full for a decade until the Nigerians came. Or a party in which some exotic-looking fashion, gaudy and showy, stuns locals who take pictures, or merely gawp. The head-ties of the women, the men without a tie but shoulders and torsos swathed in colour and fine material. The shoes and scents are local, but above the onlookers leagues from whose factories they are spun.

    The visitors know not the hosts. The hosts know not the visitors. The visitors are vain and happy. The hosts are paid and marvel. Everyone wants to be in the picture, posing with false grandeur. No local reporters or newshounds come or care. The ones that care are not aware or even invited until a few days later. Or in this internet age, a few hours later, or even minutes later. They are here in the society circuit of the newspapers like this one, or television. All the visitors need to do is record the matter for the world to see. We see their façade of wealth and dignity, their smiles of hauteur. They have good camera to take still and moving pictures. They transfer the moments to editors and producers.

    The editors publish. It has cost all of them, probably 50 people, about a million dollars to get that done. It probably would cost a fraction to do the same in Ikoyi. But better to tell the world that my daughter’s wedding reception or my 50th birthday took place in Dubai or south of France, than in miserly place like home.

    Even at that, what of the ones that happen at home?  We have big parties. The invitation cards of a rich man’s party are enough to fund the whole of a carpenter’s son’s graduation party. We have the general invite, and then we have access cards. We have all of these because we have to classify those we love. We love you less so you don’t have access to the holy of holies.

    Some of the money spent is not theirs. Some of them are loans, or money diverted from contracts that they will not perform, but rig so they can get new ones.

    So when they go to the hovel of the poor, and they donate bags of rice, or beans, or dole out N1,000 each to a specified number of people in Tudun Wada or Ajegunle, we wonder whether to say thank you, or to say, well, this is our money that the almighty Covid-19 has stopped you from spending.

    It is also known that the rich is trapped among the poor. They cannot run if they tried. If the poor revolt, the rich cannot jet out to London, nor their children who are around. They cannot do much but to remain here.

    This may be a cynical view. This may be a point of view that demonises the rich. Some of them, after all, worked for their money. It may not be a fair system. As Thomas Hobbes has argued in His Leviathan, we are all born equal into a jungle of power. Don’t begrudge the other’s success because we did not win. Rousseau said “man is born free but everywhere he finds himself in chains.” The poor will argue that the French philosopher was foolish. Is the man born with a million dollars from his father as free as the man born in a ghetto? One is freer than the other. But, says the counter, some ghetto-born have overtaken the rich. It is that Ghetto-born exception that preserves the myth of equality.

    We have always had in capitalist societies of two halves as Plato noted in his The Republic. One for the rich and other one for the poor. The poor will always be with us. But it is the duty of the society to remember that the poor make the rich. But the rich maim them in the process.

    What we are probably seeing is that the Pandemic has brought out the angels in the rich. Plagues are often more ruthless than wars. They recognize neither class. They ravage without discrimination. They are the best humblers. They level the revelers and haves,  and hack down the other half, the have-nots. Government sometimes helps to preserve the poor with their programmes. For instance, the almajiri schools. This essayist had some flak from readers over my jibe at those schools. They praise President Goodluck Jonathan for building such schools. I described them, as I have done in the past, as tokenist. It preserves their status rather than eliminate it. But if you integrate them into public schools, it forces you to improve the schools, and an almajiri graduate does not become a stigma. He is as qualified as any other.

    The issue of alienation is at the core of this season of donations. We hope that it is a show of empathy, not of cynical dismissal. It is not a show of pity, or fear, but of love. Aristotle has shown that human drama is about pity and fear. In this case, the rich show pity because they fear backlash. We hope it is not the contempt of the Lazarus of crumbs and the rich man of lavish luxury. Paul said he knows how to abound and abase.” Jesus said if you do good to the poor, you do it to Him.

    Our rich are however more clever than the prince Prospero of Adgar Allan Poe’s story, The Masque of the Red Death. The prince moves his friends and family away from town to a “safe sanctuary of leisure” while the plague decimates the people. He does not escape when the red death comes.

     

     

     

     

  • Citizen Udom

    Citizen Udom

    Sam Omatseye

    Covid-19 will not cease to unfold in irony in Nigeria. We saw one recently in Akwa Ibom. A certain George Udom, not the governor, had thrown up a wild and insidious allegation that the state cabinet was corona-infested. He even charged that a good number of persons in the executive council were in the grip of the global pandemic. People should stay out of the government, “hide and run,” he warned. It was, by implication of his charge, in a tizzy of coughing, sneezing and fever, throats emitting phlegm and chests snarling.

    Akwa Ibom is afire with social media activities, perhaps more than any state in the country in this obsession with political warfare.

    Governor Udom Emmanuel, in a moment of transparency, paraded members of the cabinet to the media and told them, like Samuel in the Bible, this is who we are. No one was down with Covid-19 in the cabinet. Citizen George Udom was then charged to court for peddling those malicious information. When he appeared in court, he began to show that he was not well.

    The judge observed he was showing possible symptoms of Covid-19. The magistrate ordered him to be quarantined for 14 days. The accuser is now the accused, reminds one of Governor Makinde.

    It seems 2023 politics is taking too long for the mischief maker. The flavour is getting very tangy and angry, and some are already running before the whistle blast. Even at that, we should make everything quiet. There will be enough time to throw brickbats.

    The violence in the past was not just viral but virulent in the state, and in harvests of human bodies. Governor Emmanuel has cooled the state temper. Doves of peace resumed to flap their wings but some people in the opposition are not happy.

    It is time for vigilance.

     

  • Almajirai in paradise

    Almajirai in paradise

    Sam Omatseye

    He has been a person without a place. As a boy, he knows no father, no mother, no home. He is a canonised wanderer, anointed to beg, to scavenge. He has grown to have no state, no boundaries. He is weaned to be a student. He ends up a stooge.

    Bowl in hand, mastery in the chants of the supplicant, his face an eternal suppliant. His feet, shoeless, have logged in miles. He is a holy boy this morning, a soldier tonight. He inspires pity from one, instills fear in another. He is nurtured into a belief but this faith tortures with the weapons of blood and death.

    He is the almajiri, the boy who was once a saint. Now he is a worry. He is not a worry because we pity him. It is because we fear him. Before, the almajiri was left to his own devices. We condemned his fate with the rhetoric of sympathy. We did not want him to suffer. We wanted to give him schools. What school? Just tokens here and there. It turns out that we are hypocrites. We love to be seen or heard to love the boy child. Such hypocrisy is self-exculpatory. It makes us free from guilt. The French writer puts it succinctly. The writer and essayist, Francis Duc La Rochefoucauld said, “hypocrisy is the compliment that vice pays to virtue.” We hide our evil because we want to be like the good.

    They were born a flood. They were not just a throng of beggars. They were an electoral machine. Videos show them as multitudes of voters, enhancing the fraud of a candidate they neither know nor love. When it is convenient we make the almajiri the masses. He becomes an elector, a model citizen, constitutionally backed. At other times we make him a scoundrel, an avenger on the street. Today he is the people, tomorrow he is the mob. We fail to conflate them, but we preserve the illusion.

    So, when they were carted about from state to state in the north in their truckloads, they became a scandal. Governors in the north started to act as “statists.” My almajiri is better than yours. To your tents, all almajirai.

    Suddenly, we pretend we love the almajiri by saying they should go to their very homes. We now know that family trumps the evangelical. He now has a father and a mother. He has become not a specimen of human beggary, but a human with the full complement of ambition. Government has not worked so that he can benefit from the dividends of democracy.

    But all those who peddle ethnic lopsidedness in appointments in this country should ask the poor. The almajiri in the north who does not benefit from what we have seen as appointment favoritism.

    We had this anxiety in the Jonathan era. The Otuoke man had come with an image that he was very close to the Igbo. He recalled that his middle name was Azikiwe. He did well to appoint many Igbo into sensitive positions. He made one the virtual prime minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. He also elevated an Igbo man the chief of army staff, the first since the end of the civil war.

    He did the same thing with some folks in the Niger Delta. He was a warrior for the minorities. He never looked up, though, to see the suffering minorities up north.

    But after his tenure, the rich were happy. But what of the poor in those communities? Any progress on the roads, the farms, the gullies, projects of empowerment, schools? The kidnapper and militant had to take advantage of class divisions to launch terror on fellow citizens.

    Yet in the Jonathan era, the streets of London knew no rest. The buying cards slid into machines for purchases that ran into fortunes. London media noticed and serenaded Nigerians with peculiar hats and generous pockets buying up vanities from the luxury shops.

    Yet Ogoni remained Ogoni. The creeks were poor, the schools in bad shape when they were not washed into the sea or oil-clogged rivers.

    Yet, they snagged Louis Vuitton in London while the man and woman in the creek had no shoes.

    Today, the same way the almajiri up north does not understand it when a Kano or Zamfara man clutches a hot ministerial portfolio or agency directorship. The almajiri does not fly with them. He is not in the airport except to beg. Or if older, he serves as assistant to convey bags.

    What follows is herd mentality. The leaders invoke the masses to fight for ethnic solidarity. When it’s time to reap, the poor are absent at the table. Philosophers and political scientists have identified two major ideologies that have remained resilient over time. They are those based on economic inequalities and the others on race or, in our case, ethnic thinking.

    Inequality was the basis of Karl Marx’s ideas. But when Europe erupted with anti-semitic rage, especially in France with the famous Dreyfus trial, Marx as a Jew himself was accused of ignoring his own race. Race thinking is innocent until it becomes racism. Ditto ethnic thinking. Rene Descartes had said “I think, therefore I am.” In these parts, it will be, “I think, therefore I am Afemai, or Yoruba or Ijaw, etc.” But it is the economic warriors who deploy such ethnic shibboleths to stir up division and entrench themselves. This is the cynicism of the ages.

    So, the almajiri is not the problem but those who made them, the feudal elite of the north. The former Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi, in spite of his personal contradiction, could not survive putting it to the test of its own morality. It is the same hypocrisy elsewhere in the country.

    The crime though is that the political class is not worried about the hypocrisy.  The same almajiri become Boko haram, riot in elections, commit pogroms, slaughter political enemies. They are sent by masters hiding in cosy ramparts. The big men are not arrested or even accused, but the almajirai are locked up. Some of them die. It is two moralities. Just as 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli noted, “What is crime among the multitudes is only a vice among the few.”

    Meanwhile, the almajiri’s case will continue to haunt the whole country, especially the north, because any almajiri who bears a bowl and chants in the rhythm of hunger, is like the scarlet letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel of that name.

  • Age of Innocence

    Age of Innocence

    Sam Omatseye

     

    MAYBE the word is not lockdown but knockdown. Nigerians are bracing for a showdown with COVID-19, and we want to see after a few weeks on the ring, who will go down, the pandemic or denial?

    The statistics bear out the denial. Look elsewhere, and you will say, yes, Nigeria is not doing poorly, we have a few thousand cases where the big nations have many thousand dead. They can afford to pay their citizens to stay home. We are giving pittance in the name of palliatives. Charity here, donors there, but the large majority will go hungry, eventually. Did the character not say in Shakespeare’s play Corolianus, Better to die than famish,?

    Why not ease the lockdown, and let the streets flow with the rush and tumble of humans, the factory buzz with hands touching hands, the offices with work spaces where they sneeze and cough and a little fever here and there can spice up life a little.

    More of that than a Covid-19 that kills just a few  people, while we hundreds of millions as people can conjure a better life, feed and be happy. After all, we have seen many a tragedy before and since. Boko Haram is taking its toll, kidnappers and herdsmen are slurping lives. So, why not, and what else have we got to lose?

    In Yoruba is a swansong, “Won fi ku sere,” they are playing with death. Maybe that is what Nigerians need, to have the lockdown undone, and let everyone take advantage of a berth of freedom. We can call it, the freedom to be sick, or even to die, a new chapter in the charter of freedom in the world. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once noted that freedom is not necessarily about what we see as the higher virtues like love, life and joy, but also freedom to be evil. For instance, Boko Haram militants want to be free to kill and coerce. We may not like those freedoms, but those who seek them have sublimated them.

    So, as persons go about, they have to contend with the fact that Nigerians have not yet imbibed the discipline of social distancing, or the hygiene of the west. We are a slovenly lot, and careless with the basics of human hygiene. Yet we are going to war with an invicible enemy, whose main salvo is slime. It fights without gunshots or tanks rumbling, but a marksman of cold accuracy and clinical finishes that defy clinics.

    Maybe this is what those in high offices are thinking. If they say they want easing, we shall give them, and if the community infections go up a notch or two or many, it may be scary. Many, many Nigerians start not only getting infected but start falling like flies on the streets. Hospital overload, no doctors or nurses, or drugs. Mortuaries shut, backyards not permitted by landlords. Homeless die on the streets. Stench and corpses make both the nostrils and eyes compete.

    What will happen in such an apocalyptic scenario? We may see people on their own deciding whether to die or famish, whether to work or stay home, whether to risk or live? We may go into what some philosophers as well as economists call the chaos theory.

    We shall see that the lockdown guidelines may not be necessary, and people would retreat home without the help of government orders. We saw this in the turmoil of June 12 when the fear of death and bloodshed sent people into the safety of their homes. In a chaos theory of this sort, people would just decide to find a comfort zone in their home.

    What that comfort zone will be, we can never know for now. Will we have most people staying home to starve, or will they obey the jettisoned lockdown guidelines on their own?

    By the time this is done, how many would have died, or would have been endangered? How much damage would we have suffered in the economy? We may recall the story of the Egyptian plagues. Only the Jews were told to stay home. But when the plague came, everyone who was caught outside and could make it ran home, even without safety guarantee.

    We can look back in history to Colorado where I lived for about a decade. During the Spanish Influenza that scooped up millions of lives in circa 1918, the mayor was pressured by the business elite to reopen. He did. More people died after the lockdown than before the reopening.

    So, I pray that we do not go through a horrendous turn. We are a huddled nation, Mushin, Kano, Ajegunle, Nnewi, Onitsha, et al, are full of people who cannot do without touching. It is a touch-and-go pandemic, and pandemics are deadlier than wars.

    Nothing seems to shake Nigerians. Not the news of the death of the President’s treasured aide, an infected billionaire’s son , a lawmaker’s goodbye, three emirs six feet gone, eight of a high-profile family in its throes, the infection of three governors. Hardihood like Okonkwo’s flirting with tragedy, or what the literary critic Killam called insistent fatality. The Nigeria Doctors Guild has warned against it. But many Nigerians would never get it until, it seems, they get it. In her novel Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton unveils how a man escapes a fatal turn because he is saved from himself. We need that. After all, Jean Jacque Rousseau said of the French people, “Force them to be free.” It is a hard sell in a democracy, though.

    Trump, Fox News and other conservative media denied it in January. America has now had more deaths than the jungle barbarities of the Vietnam War. May that not be our fate!

    The consequences of Malam Abba

    WE cannot underestimate how we affect even ourselves when we wield power.  During the stewardship of the late Chief of Staff, Malam Abba Kyari, a whole ministry was mortgaged to another. The Ministry of Health with its over N10 billion budget was asked to take permission from the Ministry of Agriculture to spend any Naira and kobo. What it meant was that the minister had to report to a fellow minister. That was the way Kyari wanted to humiliate Professor Isaac Adewole, former health minister because of his principled stand on a corruption scandal regarding pensions fund. The late Kyari upturned order on his order. Translation: he exercised power on behalf of his principal, and fulminating commentaries and editorials did nothing to chafe him. A minister begs another minister for money, a cabinet level slavery.

    Fast forward to 2020 and Covid-19, and the country needed the most important ministry to have money to work with. The ministry did not have resources. Before he tested positive, he was approached to reverse it, and he would not. We don’t know how much damage his decision has caused the nation, in deaths, in illnesses, in money as well. Now, sources say the decision has been reversed by the president, although the director general of Bureau of Public Enterprises has yet to transmit the letter to restore the old and normal order. Power may be transient, but not its consequences.

    Leaks and state worship

    A LOT has been made of the leak of the presidential speech, and somehow the media has been blamed for it. Femi Adesina, president’s spokesman and former editor in chief fumed over it. I think this is unnecessary. When there is a leak, it is not the media’s business how it got out. It is the president’s team who should worry. I spoke on this on Jones Usen’s show on Kiss FM and I likened the situation to that of a lion, lioness and their cub on one side and a hyena on the other. The hyena wants the cub. If it succeeds, the lioness has itself to blame for allowing its baby in the hyena’s jaw. The leak material came half-way, before the final copy. Nothing wrong with that. It was a scoop. The only snag was that those who published did not examine it for grammar and consistency. If they did, they might have asked for update. There was nothing special about the speech anyway. In fact, we learn that the speech was done

    Femi Adesina

    without the president’s input until late. I thought they should have debriefed him first, but it’s their structure. No security threat. So, what was the hoopla about?

    Adesina exaggerated by calling them enemies of the state. The media is not supposed to be a friend but a reporter. No one has a monopoly of what is good for the country. As John Locke said, the state is in trust for the people in a social contract. We are not running what the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Von Misses calls the omnipotent state. Or what Gramsci and others have designated state worship or statolatry. In his play, the Public enemy, Ibsen shows how a man who is reviled by the state saves the people. Leaks are a staple of good journalism. It happens everywhere the media holds power to account.

    So, when leaks happen, it is the media doing its job, the leaked team not doing theirs.

  • Funtua and chief of staff

    Funtua and chief of staff

    Sam Omatseye

    Since President Buhari’s chief of staff Abba Kyari passed, newspapers have been frothing with speculations of his successor. One name that came out like an irritation was that of former minister, publisher and what some call the cabal. He is Ismaila Isa Funtua. He came out to dissociate himself from it. He is 78, and happy with what he is doing. He does not belong to the self-indulgent class of senior citizens who would die in office. He would be none of it. Funtua was a benefactor of Kyari, and even was instrumental to making him editor in his heydays.

    The media could have called him, a former president of the Newspaper Association of Nigeria and one of the mainstays of International Press Institute, and asked him if he was interested. He wasn’t. Other names came up including former Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima, a senator who would not submit his mandate.

    Eyes should point to a man like Ahmed Rufai Abubakar, the director-general of the National Intelligence Agency, an ambassador of vast experience, a close associate of the president, and Mamman Daura. Abubakar would play well into that crowd. He is young and energetic and with the right instinct for the role.

    Many have written tributes to Kyari, and it seems our people don’t understand that when a big man dies, our jobs are not to praise or vilify, but to look clinically at legacy. Many fail to mention Kyari’s irony as a man who saw the world, and learned everywhere, but was instrumental to the lopsided image of the administration, cosmopolitan in outlook but insular in execution. What was the chief of staff doing in Germany to cut power deals and where was the power minister? Or why did he flay lawmakers for not isolating themselves when he did not do same? Why a member of NNPC board? Or why did he want to preside over security meetings when the  National security adviser was not handicapped? While praising his virtues as lawyer, administrator, banker, et al, we should remember that he did not do any of that as a public servant. What concerned us and posterity was chief of staff.

  • Malice as virtue

    Malice as virtue

    Sam Omatseye

    We don’t make politicians like Richard Akinjide anymore. Or even lawyers. He was a man who understood malice and turned it not only into a virtue but also into a sort of glamour. But first, he made a good career of it.

    I could not but ruminate on this idiosyncrasy of this man when he died last week.  He belonged to that class of statesmen who did not believe in joining the other group. He did not love the quality of compromise. He shone in his own ideological skin. He did not envy the “wicked.” He did not aspire to the pollution of the age.

    He was Akinjide, conservative, virulent, brilliant and successful. Yet many would deny him the tag of statesman because he was thought an ideological retrogressive. This writer thinks so, but I do say so with a sort of envy. He did not belong to the mainstream of his tribe. But he was a toothache that gave worry to the whole jaw. An Ibadan man whose group found a way to lose virtually every poll since the 1950’s, Akinjide still stuck to his position to his dying day. He was a loser as glamour.

    He was successful as some people might say. He was a federal minister. He was attorney-general of the federation. He was a lawyer and made senior Advocate the same day with his great foe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo. He did that in spite of the cauldron of disaffection from his own people. He ran his race, and he cut the tape, in spite of his Yoruba race.

    When he became a SAN, he might have embraced Awo. But what history recalls was not their joint celebration but celebration as grudge match. In the same hotel in Victoria Island, they clinked glasses in different rooms. Awo thought Akinjide a political wayfarer of bad warfare who turned the law to the service of servile causes for profit. Akinjide thought Awo was a naïve lawyer who he defeated all the time and was not a SAN worthy of his – Akinjide’s – luminous robe.

    Akinjide did not need anyone’s praise. He did not need anyone’s money. He did not need anyone’s epaulette. He was a proud and contented hater. He had peace just to see his enemies squirm because of him. And they did squirm.

    Even when you defeated him, you knew he was down but not out. So you did not beat him. Your victory was Pyrrhic. When Bola Ige of the acerbic tongue flunked him out of the debate floor over whether his family bred thugs from Awo’s free education, he suspected Akinjide would come back. He returned in the camouflage of the garrulous Oluloyo to flush Ige out of Molete as governor of Oyo State. Till his dying day, Ige ached at the mention of Akinjide’s name.

    As for Awo, he must have thought of Akinjide like Jefferson and Adams thought of each other in their dying moments. John Adams and Jefferson were foes to the death. And when Adams lay dying, his last words were, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” Jefferson had died five minutes earlier wondering the same thing of Adams.

    The point though was that Akinjide conceded Awo’s superiority in political organization. But that was obvious. He said Awo was an inferior lawyer. He also thought Awo was no better in wisdom. In stature though, Akinjide is a puny figure to the Ikenne titan. He did not admit it, and the Awoists are not happy that he still arrogated to himself a position of grandeur that belonged elsewhere.

    This peacock element of Akinjide made him a source of admiration to his friends and foes. Where he thought he did the most harm was on the legal pulpit of what is called twelve two third. Many see it as a legal battle, but it was both legal and political, and he won. Awo and Awoists will go to their graves grieving, but that is the singular battle ground that the Ibadan warrior exacted his pound of flesh – raw, bleeding and juicy. They never got it back.

    If Akinjide turned to the other side, his prestige and myth might have diluted. He didn’t. He remained the ideological foe. The man who looked the other side. The man who scorned when he smiled, the peacock who strutted and preened.

    We don’t have them today. He remained the metaphor of the politician without compromise. He was with the NPC with his Akintola crowd of NNDP. He was with NPN. He was with NRC. He was with PDP. He was, in the words of Henry Thoreau, not a joiner who are like pigs who come together in a sty to feel warm. The only time he had common cause with Awo and the progressives was in the early days of the Ibadan People’s Party when his coalition saved the west from Zik’s onslaught into Yorubaland. After that, he was done. Like Lot’s wife, he never looked back. The Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler wrote that “it is easier to fight for one’s principle than to live up to them.” Akinjide was one rare personage who lived up to his. We cannot say so of the politics of today.

    Many we see in PDP today were in APC. Many in APC were in PDP. This is an age of the harlot, of convenience. You may call him a quisling to his race, a lawyer as carpet bagger, a serial dissenter. But he was Akinjide. His apology was to none.

    I had a short shave with him shortly after I started this column. He called this essayist. I was in the car and I picked up the phone. “My name is Richard Akinjide,” he announced. I recognised the voice, but I still ventured mischief. “Is this the Richard Akinjide sir.” He said yes. He was impressed with my writing and he would want to meet with me. I eventually saw him at his office in Lagos.

    It was quite a good conversation marked by bonhomie of ideas and he introduced me to his daughter and future minister Jumoke, who was then beneath the public radar. We discussed many contemporary issues and he was such a mind. As he accompanied me out of his office, I saw a cartoon applauding his Twelve Two-third cause celebre. I said, “I like every other thing on the wall except that.” That was the last moment of our friendship. He would not speak with me after that.

    His enemies wished they are like him in an age of harlotry. He was what the writer said, “My enemy is gone. A soul divine like myself is dead.” His malice paid off.

  • The 5k Naira Republic

    The 5k Naira Republic

    Sam Omatseye

     

    I PITY the almighty naira. This is not what it is supposed to be. It has seen its plum days. It did not only rule; it reigned. It did not strut like the dollar or the pound when I was a child, but its notes rustled with promise. The naira huffed and puffed. It was worth its weight in gold.

    When we transitioned from the pound to the naira, we chanted and hoped. In memorable notes, Baba Sala gave us minstrelsy performances in jingles and dance, celebrating and delineating the various naira notes.

    One Naira was a lot to hold. A thousand naira was a salary of big men. Company managers in the 1970’s earned gloriously who took home three hundred naira a month. Car loans of three thousand naira gave you a good car. You rented a great flat in choice areas of town with N40 a month. Even up to the 1980’s, N5000 gave you a car, a new one.

    Now we are demonizing people with N5000. In this COVID-19 era, anyone who has a bank account of N5000 or more is regarded as happy enough not to qualify for federal government cash transfer, although the COVID-19 palliatives differ from the conditional cash transfer. For the poor, the distinction is not necessary. They will accept anything to tide over this turbulence.

    Suddenly we are giving value to the Naira where it does not deserve. The world ridicules us that Nigerians live on less than two dollars a day, and that amounts to about N8,000. That sum, by world standard, is awful. But we are making those who earn even less than one dollar a day look like princes.

    Five thousand naira could buy a car in the blossomy days of the naira. What can it do today? It is like a former millionaire who lost the luxury years of posh cars and decadent parties to the locust of bad times. He now waits at bus stops to commute.

    Five thousand naira cannot feed a family for a week, no matter the frugal genius. We should not make it look like those who earn 10,000 or 20,000 earn anything in this cash transfer. They will accept it. But it does not save them.

    Another condition for cash transfer is that it should focus on the urban poor. That’ s a good idea. The urban poor, the sufferers of capitalism, are worse off than the rural poor. In rural Nigeria, they feed on what they plant and pick and kill. They retain the hunter-gatherer instinct. They thrive on what they get. The urban poor live on what they are given, and they don’t get anything near what the world calls a living wage. They are like the characters captured in Festus Iyayi’s novel, Violence.

    The naira has failed, but it has not fallen. The Bible times bewailed the poor fate that befell money, and it wrote, “money failed in the land of Egypt…” The apocalypse can fall on a currency as we have seen in some countries like Argentina, Ghana and Zimbabwe. Money became a burden more than an enabler. As Isaiah noted, “the land is utterly wasted” and explained earlier that “as with the people, so with the priest, as with the servant, so with the master…as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower…”

    Money value falls gradually all over the world. In his classic, The Return of the native, Thomas hardy writes of a man who in the 19th century came into money and how much was it? Eleven thousand pounds. He was a wealthy man. Not in today’s England.

    So, we should be mindful of those we think can flourish, so we know who to nourish. Anybody earning N5,000 is like a destitute in today’s Nigeria. By taking it for granted that the money should go to people with bank account, we take it for granted that the very poor can be reached in the banks. Many of them have no bank accounts. It is a failure of imagination to think that bank accounts will do. They should follow the Lagos model of employing political mobilization tools to reach the destitute among us.

    The system also assumes that those who top their phones with less than 100 Naira are a tool to reach the needy. That might be true. There are many, though, who cannot afford a phone, and they borrow to make calls. There are too many things that are luxury to many people in this society. Just as one generation’s rich is another’s poor, a pauper in a rich man’s imagination is actually a comfortable man. Our comforts make us into snobs but make the poor sob. George Bush Sr. fell into a storm when he walked into the supermarket and did not know of the new sales machines. Marie Antoinette made her husband Louis 16th the last monarch in French history when she asked protesters to eat cake if they could not afford bread. It is the same acceptance of low standards that made graduates hot cake first and wastrels of the economy now. We have disenfranchised some citizens with our opulent imagination. By making the poor look rich, we have made the destitute a non-citizen, like Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man.

    We are now a 5000 Naira republic by that policy. The notion may be noble, but not wise.

     

    A tale of two bags

     

    ORDINARILY, her name does not ring a bell. And even as politics goes, she is not even a belle. But she is trying to bell a bad cat. An APC cat.

    The task is to divert the attention of  Akwa Ibom State from high and sublime issues of development. Blessing Osom Edet is going junk and prurient. If she is a party face, she is also the APC façade. She wanted to represent the people under the APC in the state house of assembly, and the people spurned her. And now, her idle mind is accusing the government of parsimony. What does that mean? That Governor Udom Emmanuel’s government is not opening the state coffers for lazy drones. She wants a rebirth of stomach infrastructure, Akwa Ibom style. It has spun attention and a flurry of backlash on the social media. She is invoking corruption as an instrument of governance.

    Because of that alleged stinginess, the allegation says women are now bidding farewell to their marital vows to bow to men of means in the PDP with their husbands’ tacit consent. She is, in essence, demonising a whole generation of Akwa Ibom women as citizens of what novelist Henry James calls “the big, bright Babylon.” They have abandoned God and their faith for filthy lucre. Evidence? She has none. What a self-indictment! But many are saying her cry is not about money, or faithless wives, or conniving husbands, but about 2023.

    Haba! If they want to focus on a battle for the next set of electoral champions, do they have to invent ghost stories? Why not focus on the issues, and not tissues of lies. Why make a bedlam out of marital beds, or lies about who lies with whom?

    Issues abound to tackle rather than who sleeps with whom? First, why is there a bout of tranquility in a state in which blood and death was routine. A man of peace put an end to an era of human waste. Rather they are romanticising the pre-Emmanuel era of Ghana-must-go bags. They want it back. Well, if we recall, it was an era of two bags: moneybags beside body bags; deaths and dollars. But Governor Udom Emmanuel said he has come so his people may have life and have it more abundantly. They should take him to task on that. No news of shootings at churches, or at homes or rallies. Is that not true?

    He is staking claims at making an industrial hub of his state, from coconut refineries, to syringe factories and metre hub, etc. With Ibom Air, he has lined the Nigerian sky with its top-of-the-line aircraft. Any counterpoint? We should focus on facts, not phantasmal delirium that fuels tabloids and the nadir regions of the internet.