Sam Omatseye

 

SOMETIMES leaders become nothing like you expect them to be. We are seeing this in this country as Covid-19 flares like a noxious meteor in the night. We saw the centre pussyfoot while Lagos pushed. We saw a governor with an imperial impulse. He proclaimed his immunity to a crowd, rallying the disease to a political cause against the foe.

The Oyo State Governor Makinde forgot this was not his predecessor or the local government chairmen. The pandemic caught him in a cough. The peacock no longer struts. Not to laugh at him, but to caution him on the limits of a throne. So, to lead is not to bear a title or tattle but be humble.

It is not about your bulk or the flattery washing up on your face. Some leaders show their mettle when a crisis erupts. That is what we are seeing in the work of the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, in the past few months even before the virus slithered into town.

We have seen leaders over the ages demonstrate leadership in times of crisis. Churchill led with rhetoric and boyish bravura. Awo soared as an ascetic and seer. Charles de Gaulle made a virtue of nationalist defiance. Franklyn Roosevelt governed from his wheelchair. Mahatma Gandhi inspired with his frock. Lincoln impressed with compassion and cunning. Mandela tapped a people’s pride. Martin Luther turned faith into rebellion. Martin Luther King Jr. turned rebellion into a faith. Mother Theresa made a rebellion out of love. Alexander made a myth of youth. Washington conquered his age with charisma. Bismarck unfolded a brawn… the list goes on.

Leadership comes in guises and beauties. But every leader patents their signature. In times of crisis, whether war, diseases or hunger, they must come up with their visceral powers. They include vision, anticipation, passion, imagination, action, example, empathy, communication, rhetoric, command of human and other resources, and gallantry. If a mystic like Gandhi or a soldier like Alexander or a freedom fighter like Dore Numa, a leader must have a reflex of these qualities.

And in the handling of this crisis, we have seen leaders fail and others rise. Lagos has so far risen on the back of its governor. It is the nucleus of the disease but it is showing the greatest sense of readiness. Governor Sanwo-Olu demonstrated anticipation. He communicated and made a little playful drama of showing how we should wash our hands and shake legs rather than hands. We saw he had deployed his team, with the commissioner for health leading the medical team. We saw the beds in place.

When the first story hit with the Italian, we were not in a panic. He led the centre that was still not sure whether to shut down the borders when more and more cases were flying in from London, the United States and Asia. It was a case shown by Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike, who said he had no control of the airport but anyone who flew in would not be allowed to move in a shutdown.

But a shutdown was not in place in Lagos then; a dynamic of response ensured that the sick were quarantined and contacts traced. The citizens often are happy when they know the leader is on top of the problem even when it is not yet solved. He also at times became the chief communicator, updating us on the happenings per day. He was showing example by being at ground zero always, going about town assuring Lagosians ……… That was also empathy, and we saw that with the donations of food. Some have said it was not enough, but it is the beginning. But he has also been firm in his shutdown order.

While empathy works, it becomes benign without a firm hand. Some citizens have not been happy with the shutdown, because of the hunger that looms in their households. It is a delicate matter. Those who live on daily wages may abide by the words of the character in Shakespeare play Coriolanus: “We would rather die than famish.” But all will die if the disease is not checked. We have to look out for the greatest good for greatest number of people, as utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham puts it. So, the federal government has therefore decided to step in with palliatives, if nothing near the level of the United States and Britain.

Governor Sanwo-Olu is playing that balancing act. We cannot forget that some lazy drones take advantage of this season to seek help as well. We have also seen imagination with the transformation of Onikan Stadium into a Covid-19 spot, in case it escalates. “Imagination,” as Einstein noted, “is more important than knowledge.” Thankfully Lagos has been able to garner resources to help in this matter. This is also expecting that whoever is disbursing the billions of Naira already gathered from the private sector and wealthy citizens will give Lagos State a good chunk as the epicenter to help its handling of the situation. With the shutdown of the city, its economy is going to suffer.

We can see his passion. During the Second World War, Churchill often appeared in the ruins of London with his victory sign to besieged Londoners after the German bombardments. The passion was often seen as a risk for the first minister. But that was not just passion. It was also gallantry.

Communicating also means galvanising your words. Gandhi communicated by fasting when crisis erupted. FDR admonished his people that the only thing to fear was fear itself. Churchill was praised for mobilizing the English language to battle. Sanwo-Olu has become a familiar speech maker, often speaking off the cuff.

Awo’s great gift was not just to organize but as a seer. It is called mystically “the vision thing.” His greatest gift was courage. The centre has followed the lead of Lagos, and after shillyshallying, the federal government has risen to the game. We might not have this level of contagion if the airports were shut down after the Italian incident. Perhaps to rise in Osun State cases also followed border laxity over returnees from Ivory Coast.

Of all the qualities, we can applaud courage, the prince of all qualities, which also fires vision. We need not only the audacity of action, but first the boldness of the mind, the thinking mind. As a man thinketh, says Solomon, so he is. If you do not think, you cannot act. The strategist is so because the mind is bold enough to think, and think audaciously. A callow mind is meaningless with a doughty heart. Sanwo-Olu was bold to take the lead.

Hence in all of the Covid-19 response from Lagos, it is gallantry that has given birth to the other virtues. Hence Awo said, “it is not life that matters but the courage you bring into it.” Earl Nightingale says “everything begins with an idea.”

But if it is a great one, a valiant heart has fertilised it.

Sam Omatseye

 

IT is about coronavirus but first about Soba town. But most importantly, about a people without a heart. That is, us.

When Soba fell, a part of us as a nation went down with it. But only briefly. It seems it was a mere black Sunday that passed. A thunderstorm roared and eased into the distance, out of our ears. The blight was out of sight. So, we returned to the routine glories of our lives.

Even the social media, with all its hoopla and trivial obsessions, saw and looked away. Houses bowed. Schools crouched. Businesses banished. Above all, lives evaporated. At least, 20 persons who saw Sunday will never see the sun again.

Pictures depicted that part of Lagos as a sort of Aleppo in Syria, the debris of a war zone, where monster jets seized the sky and strafed the living. Today, Aleppo is on its knees as Soba is. Soba was a place of zest and magnificence to those who live there. Businesses flourished and a famous school reared the young. Shakespeare wrote about Aleppo as a place of big activity in his days. So was Soba.

But what we saw that Sunday dawn abolished many hopes. But the hope that affects this essayist is the hope of charity. It seems we have no sense of charity as a people.  The BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, set the tone, and it seems to have ended there. He launched a N2 billion fund and placed a huge seed from the state’s coffers. He mobilised the zeal of workers from the state’s emergency agency LASEMA. NEMA also put in its effort. Fire fighters dueled the elemental rage to its quiet. The commissioner for special duties and LASEMA’s head spent whole days there. The Governor visited before jetting to Buhari and unveiled pictures that could pluck out an eye, to stress the urgency. Deputy governor Obafemi Hamzat visited and has been put in charge of reviving the place.

It seems it is just the state government and Soba. The governors forum came by and donated N200 million, a good sum, but how far will it go? Governments can do something, but the place of charity in matters like this belongs to the civil society, to neighbours and to you and me.

Where are the money men around us to donate money? Where are the rich men to give shelter, to donate food, and clothing, and to give succor to the wounded? We do not have to be rich, though, to give. We just have to feel. In an age of impunity, we are more absorbed in our creature comforts and private dreams than the pain and sufferings of others. IPOB ethnicised it but has it mobilised help for the deprived and dispossessed? The churches and mosques have shown little skin in this matter, but would hurriedly ask their followers to attend churches so tithes and offerings will not dry in the offertory boxes. We come from a communalistic root but the community is leaving us. We saw a few acts like the Reverend sister who died a selfless death.

We are seeing ourselves as receptacles of good things, not donors of goodwill. It is a test case for coronavirus, if it grips us the way it has left superpowers panting. It is the boa constrictor of the age. But we see stories of charity all over the United States and Europe. Companies are giving way their resources to help the vulnerable. A politician gave a million dollars a few days ago in the U.S. Basketball stars are paying salaries of workers who will become jobless because of the shutdown of the season. CEOs are donating huge sums. A company in the US decided to turn its alcohol work into making sanitisers. A woman donated free bottles. Football clubs are giving huge sums for food.

This is not a season of the sort of heroism in Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus where a citizen says, “we rather die than famish.” That was a revolutionary ire. Here we would that nobody dies of famine. There are many in Soba town who have nowhere to go. Those who have cars cannot even become cab drivers. Even landlords have become tenants. I read of a person who owned three houses in the inferno.

Oil was the source of this disaster. Many residents believe it was the story of a truck packed on a pipeline. One person’s folly has made us sorry. Apostle prayed that God should “deliver us from unreasonable and wicked men.” One person’s search for livelihood has cost us many lives. It has also cost us livelihoods.

The oil that fathers our livelihoods, and gives us our lifestyles and decadence, has also given us disaster. Oil has done us evil aplenty before. We cannot forget Jesse in Delta where a whole settlement was wiped out. Nor all the other episodes where pipelines have become harbingers of disasters. There is often the turf war between state governments and the federal government over land control. This is politics. But when the fire rages, it recognises no authority but its own. We have enjoyed it but it takes advantage when it wills and can. “That which nourishes me, destroys me,” said Christopher Malowe, the English playwright. It’s oil’s pound o eping in, and we should not wait till it Italianises Nigeria. Lagos is rising up to the task, but the federal government dilly-dallied as if we are not in a globalis ed world. We need a republic of charity in place, so we don’t leave the issue to the government alone. Emergency responses are led by governments but most of the work comes from you and me.

It is not helped when governors close down schools and places of worship are left out. Mosques and churches should not wait for governments to call for them to shut down before taking the initiatives. The Pope was not asked to shut down. He heard the hum of a pestilence. Our people are still tempting God. Even Jesus Christ saw the devil coming and responded by saying, “the prince of the world cometh. What has he with me… arise let us go.” The same scriptures urge that “discretion shall preserve thee…”

We did not see Soba coming in the way we are seeing Covid-19 fatal signals. We can start putting resources aside. Trump was warned. He sidestepped it in his pesky way. Again to the scriptures and my late father’s – Moses – frequent reference to his children, “if thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself. But if thou snornest, thou alone shalt bear it.”

We did not do it for Soba, although we still can. But we should be ready for Covid-19, the pestilence that has been compared to the devastation of the Second World War. It’s time to be Soba.

 

 

Poetry as sacred trust

 

ODIA Ofeimun often reminds me of a Sandinista elder known as Ernesto Cardenal. He was a priest, poet, politician, and a soldier with no uniforms. He became a Nicaraguan culture minister under President Daniel Ortega. As a priest, he was a cardinal thorn inside the Pope’s robe as a liberation theologist. As a politician, he ran afoul of his appointee who he accused of running a thieving dynasty. As a soldier, he acted like American slave revolutionary John Brown, who raided Harper’s Ferry. The Somoza regime’s revenge was irreversible: it wiped out his commune. He had formed a commune of poetry for fishermen and farmers to read subversive poetry and perform other works of art. He invoked the kingdom of heaven on earth.

He did not share all these with Ofeimun, except one. He saw poetry as a sacred trust. Ofeimun is Nigeria’s best practitioner of poetry ever. Since he was discovered by Soyinka, he has proselitised poetry like a faith. Although his poems are not easy like Cardenal’s, he has helped popularise it more than anyone in the country. For poetry, he took a vow of what many see as poverty.

In his tribute, my former teacher and literary critic, Professor Biodun Jeyifo, eulogised or even romanticised his life of poverty. But during the event, I had recalled in my head the words of Henry James in his novel The Portrait of a Lady, in his definition of wealth: “I call people rich when they are able to gratify their imagination.” No one would deny Ofeimun his wealth. He once used the expression “when I had no money…” and BJ quipped, “but you still have no money.” I recall Ofeimun’s story of his opportunity to be Otunba Subomi Balogun’s  chief of staff when he wanted to start FCMB. He had been assigned to recommend a person. He had suggested several people the banker spurned. “Then he called me back as I was walking out,” Ofeimun recalled. The chief offered him the job. Ofeimun said no. He had something more important he wanted out of life. What was it? To put together his work of poetry, and he achieved that a few years back, he said.

Ofeimun has his wealth. It may scare others, but it is sacred to him. It is called poetry, if others cannot see it. Cardenal died at 95, so the Iruepken native still has many sacred years to match the irreverent priest. For that I say, happy 70th birthday.

Sam Omatseye

 

IT all seemed surreal. We had just come from a drama of the courts. Now, we were back there. Something startled where we thought we were safest. We were trying to murder the court. We were trying to turn it to a toy, a diabolical trump card of our body politic.

Enter Imo. Enter Bayelsa. Enter the courts. Exit the people. Is it the new way out of logjams now? If Imo and Bayelsa states fell because the courts say so, are we now a conclave of technicalities? The APC is trying to show us a new tapestry of justice. We saw that last week in a tussle to oust its warrior chairman, Adams Oshiomhole.

For less than 24 hours, a coup boiled over. An Abuja court gave its order, its national secretariat yielded to a military-era barricade, and Adams’ foes could not rein in their ecstasy of celebration.

They want Adams’ apple. Like Tantalus in the Greek myth, the fruit has eluded the groping hands. It has been a game of tease.

Adams responded like a lone and martial fashionista with grenades hanging like beads all over his body, a sort of political Schwarzenegger with a flaw. His roar was at once beaten and defiant.

Meanwhile, many wondered why Ekiti State Governor, Kayode Fayemi, promptly had the president’s audience. To make it a fait accompli or to plead the president should stay out of the fray?

Then came a counter-punch. Outside Abuja, the court noted that the Fayemi crowd, clever as they thought, did not have lawyers who thought deeply enough about a basic Nigerian law.

Abuja court did not have federal powers. So, the Kano court struck for Adams, and we returned to the status quo ante, as lawyers say glibly.

It was Adams’ turn to meet with the president. In a self-deprecatory moment, Adams quipped at reporters, asking them if they felt sorry for him.

The two faces that have shown prominence in this drive to oust Adams are Adams and Governor Fayemi. This essayist had reported earlier of those who had hands in this plot to unseat Adams, and a prominent name was Governor Fayemi.

The other coupists included the Abacha sympathiser and money man, Governor Bagudu of Kebbi State, who never stays at home to govern but he is like the pathetic and peripatetic Mai Sunsaye of Cyprian Ekwensi’s Burning Grass.

The other is the fellow from Jigawa State, who many say does not know how to say thank you to a party that has done so much for him. All he thinks is to subvert its leadership.

Strangely, the squat fellow from Kaduna who just turned 60 has been uncharacteristically quiet. Does it indicate a turn towards remorse, or an unobtrusive recalibrating of his position?

As for Fayemi, he has not blushed about his fear and loathing of Adams.  During former Oyo State Governor Abiola Ajimobi’s 70th birthday in Ibadan, I was just ruminating over a text message he had sent me objecting to my column reporting his dig at Adams.

He saw me at Ajimobi’s party and waved me over, and I sat beside him for a moment. Other governors were at the table, including the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, Ondo State Governor Rotimi Akeredolu and Dapo Abiodun of Ogun State.

Fayemi pointed out that in my earlier piece, I had rightly indicated that he was with Adams in a meeting to reconcile him (Adams) with his successor Godwin Obaseki, who remains a gubernatorial drag and nettle on this democracy. Then he referred to my piece about his (Fayemi) plot to dethrone Adams.

He raised his voice and said, “Adams does not have the temperament to run a party.” I poked back, “Is this not about a 2023 ambition?” He denied it was about 2023, adding that he knew that was what some people are insinuating.

I wanted to roll out what Adams had done for his party and wondered why anyone wanted him removed. But the chairman of the Nigerian Governors Forum was getting a little agitated, and I told him I had to leave, because we were in a party mood, so it was not a forum for polemical exchanges.

I suspected the other governors were paying attention to our conversation. I shook hands with Sanwo-Olu and Abiodun and had a no-contact fist-pump with Aketi(Akeredolu) because his seat was far away, and left.

In a meeting held over a year ago for Southwest party mavens, Fayemi had openly opposed the characterisation of him as a budding Akintola of this era.

He must be conscious of that image, and that mystifies me why he still decides to hold positions that portray him as a politician who loves power play for personal aggrandisement.

Especially the view that he wants to be president or vice president, and that he is ready to play Judas to his fellow Southwest politicians in order to swaddle a second-tier place for a northern politician.

It is the buzz out there, and it is in his interest to tackle this viewpoint that is gaining increasing traction, especially now that he has railed against the choice of his former governor colleague Ajimobi for the deputy chairman of the APC.

Right now, nothing seems clear about the future of the party because of what started as an effort by the upstart Obaseki to turn his new-found privilege into a tapestry of betrayal against his anointer, Adams.

This is the man who took over a party under the inept Oyegun, worked it to win the presidency in a fraught election, won more governors than the opposition, secured the legislative chambers, including the positions of Senate president, speaker and deputy senate president.

Did he make mistakes? Of course, we cannot forget Zamfara State, Bayelsa State and the juvenile rumbles in Rivers State.

They say he governs without recourse to governors. There is no evidence that Fayemi and Obaseki have most governors beside them. The APC, including the President, must be wary of the party crumbling under the aggressive hubris of a few.

Not when Obaseki has turned himself into an emperor with contempt for the constitution, banning rallies and meetings, growling and perspiring over an Adams, who routinely ignores him. He even hounded a fellow who wrote an article for a newspaper against his infantilism in office. A tear for Godwin!!

The president should watch out or else the party will crumble in his hands. His opponent, the PDP, are only gloating in silence. For an APC fall means a PDP takes advantage.

Or maybe, a new party is in the offing, and we don’t know it? Already, even within his cabinet there are charges of fifth columnists, some of them taking cases in disguises to court to challenge the government actions of Muhammadu Buhari.

From the start, the party has been a hodgepodge of interests and egos. It takes a perceptive leader to harness them.  It worked twice in 2015 and 2019. The question is, how long will it last?

By Sam Omatseye

It is no longer time for humour in Nigeria. Gone is that hour when a blogger turns Coronavirus into a visual laugh. Not like the fellow who placed the word virus beside the car named Corona. What a blighted journey ahead.

It is also no day to inflate the black pride or continental hubris by dismissing it as a white man’s disease. A Nigerian footballer in Italy deflated that swagger.

Even the irony of an Italian patient in Nigeria and a Nigerian patient in Italy cannot satisfy the humorist. Once, comedian Trevor Noah bolstered his home continent in his laugh lines when Africa was the only place wi thout COVID 19. He said if it came here, Ebola’s welcome party would suffocate it with a handshake at the border. Not anymore.

Not now that no Nigerian wants a face mask or sanitizer out of their side. Those who believe in the end times can see it in a disease that confounds the best of scientists. Nations with nuclear arsenals bow to this army of germs. China started it and, with all its power surge of an economy, it has to pray to survive its battalions of infections with their body bags. The United States cannot show power over China here as even Donald Trump stumbles in his speeches about what to do and what might happen. Country after country is aghast, and we can recall Christ’s warning of “distress of nations and perplexity.”

There is also human perplexity. Your hand should avoid your mouth. Remember the Yoruba song that mocks the juju man? “Babalawo mo wa bebe/ oni ma ma t’owo b’enu…” “Juju man, I am here to beg/ He says I should not place my hands in my mouth…”

Some pastors are wincing for fear of being exposed as failed miracle workers. A certain pastor went viral for boasting to take the miracle to the Chinese lair. But that was before the rude Italian, and an outcry upbraided him to begin charity at home. Beijing will log in too much time and space.

Some still manage some revanchist joke. A fellow told me if it were possible, let us package the virus into bombs and lob them at Sambisa and the forests of the thousand herdsmen in the country.

Nor is it now humour among some Arabs who no longer shake hands but legs as greetings. A video now goes viral as the friends greet with both hands in their pockets, while their feet, ensconced in shoes, tap each other. They toss their legs in the air for goodbye, as though about to kick a ball. Remember the popular song, Gbe body e? it means “lift your body.” So Arabs are also adding a new refrain: Gbe ese e! It means, raise your legs.

But first we must admit that the federal authorities failed us by allowing the infected Italian into the country without being detected at the Nigerian gate. Senator Borrofice lamented the lack of mandatory checks at the port of entry. It is a case in which act one portends a tragedy. The senator told me the South African medical corps quarantined him among others who wanted to board a flight back to Nigeria, and tested all of them before allowing them out of their country. But on reaching here, there was no screening. They merely filled forms. Somebody reported forgetting to turn in their form. In this matter, our federal government is many steps behind the world. We need to wake up.

Just as in the case of Ebola a few years back under Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, Lagos is taking charge again under the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu. The Italian was promptly quarantined, and we are assured that bed spaces are already secured for any outbreak. We don’t have an outbreak yet, neither do we want it. But we have to be prepared. Everyone in appropriate position has spoken with authority in Lagos. Apart from the Governor, the deputy governor, Obafemi Hamzat, also articulated the state’s preparedness. So has the health commissioner, Prof. Akin Abayomi and  information commissioner Gbenga Omotoso.

If the Federal Ministry of Health cannot show the urgency it requires, Lagos State Government has rallied for Lagosians. Lagos is Nigeria’s main gate, especially for airways and water access. The land border will remain closed, so the debate as to whether we should open the borders will be cradled in ice for now.

This is one of the few areas where a crisis does not inspire geographic or religious loyalty. No one is asking where it came from, or whether it can speak the same language as those in power or not. Of course, no one wants it in their church or mosque. I hope it does not veer there.

Just as in the case of Ebola a few years back under Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, Lagos is taking charge again under the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu

God forbid that it gets to a point where we have to appoint persons to superintend it and we bicker over whether he or she should be a Muslim or Christian, or an Amadioha or Sango faithful. Or the PDP will say the APC is incompetent, which ironically is what we see at the airport with no screening. The virus is its own tribe and discriminates against others except when it devours.

It makes no sense that the federal government will impose its incompetence on the states, especially Lagos. The state will now scramble to respond. What this calls for is a partner, not pariah. During the Lassa days, the Federal Ministry of Health worked with Lagos, although the main engine room was Lagos.

The most potent power of a pandemic like this is not the disease itself but the fear. It is like the fear of war or invasion. The country already is crippled before it is crippled. It places itself on voluntary lockdown. It’s like Christ’s prophecy about “men’s heart failing them for fear…of those things which are coming on the earth.” Just like U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt, who said during the Great Depression, the only thing the people should fear is fear itself.

This is where leadership counts. There are a variety of theories about what caused the disease. Some say it is from rats, others say it is from snakes. Some have conspiracy theories that it came from the West in a bid to choke China’s rise as a superpower, what some historians have called the Thucydides’ trap. Historian Thucydides wrote  about Greek anxiety’s over the rise of Rome, which boiled over in the Macedonian Wars.

Others said it was a chemical weapon gone awry. The Chinese, according to the theory, engineered the virus as a weapon but it got into the wrong hands. Senator Borrofice, a geneticist, believes the theory.

Whatever the case, what is important is not to panic, but to keep a country of hygiene. Many of us see hygiene as an abstract, a speculative injunction to keep everyone from random harm. No to coronavirus. Everyone knows any error might be fatal.

This is no sexual stigma like HIV, nor heredity like diabetes. This is more lethal, although we are told that two of every hundred patients die, which means it is not necessarily a death sentence to contract it. We don’t want the sort of experience as delineated in La Peste, or The Plague, the novel by absurdist novelist and Nobel Laureate Albert Camus in which no one in the epidemic-ravaged town knows the cause of the disaease or the cure, but everyone awaits its demise. The good news is that all plagues in history have come to an end, and humans survive, like in Camus’ The Plague. The wait and morgue’s rising population are a torture. But the end, when will it come? That is the question.