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Category: Sam Omatseye

  • The comfort revolutionary

    Sam Omatseye

    The Sowore saga shows a state in search of a sage. They set up a stage, filled it with a cast so peculiar and they treated us to a theatre of the absurd. It first seemed improbable, then it was a laugh, then a farce and now it is unveiling what seems like the beginnings of a tragedy.

    What were they thinking when they transformed a non-event into a cause celebre? In media philosophy, it is called a pseudo-event. You fake it to make it. The DSS faked a non-protest into a storm.

    How did the Buhari government allow itself to lionise a fellow who cannot even bark like a dog? He whined and the DSS lost its balance, went for a chain and locked up Sowore. Did they find out who this fellow was before their desperate frenzy? Did they know they were operating a democracy? Of course, they have operated from the premise that democracy must bow to the strong-arm view of state security. Dasuki, El Zakzaky and others are examples. Just as the United States democratic Czars did with Guantanamo Bay, they have suspended the law and become the lawgivers.

    The man said he wanted revolution. And he was locked up. Where is the evidence that he belched out more than a vapor of words? Did he amass arms to overthrow a system? Where is the armoury? Were they in some faraway country? If so, what country? If in Nigeria, where? If so, he would not be acting alone? Who financed it? For sure, he is no Karl Marx with resources. Even Marx winced. You must be some sort of billionaire to overthrow a system or enjoy the backings of men of money. In that case, it would not be Sowore alone in the narrative of subversion. The DSS would have to name accomplices, nations, arms dealers, etc.

    But they keep telling us they have facts they would not tell us. It is like a tale of calling a house fly a tsetse fly. The latter sucks blood, the former dumps filth. The vampire insect sets one to sleep or death. You swat the house fly. You do not swat when the tsetse fly buzzes into view. You reach for the insecticide. Sowore is no more than a housefly. But the DSS bombed the air.

    Sowore had just run to be president. He ran a puny contest. He lit no democratic fire. He did not impress with logic, rhetoric or charisma. He was just a publisher who failed to whet a national appetite. Then afterwards, he wanted a last word, an after word. He sought the attention that eluded Sowore the candidate. It is a sort of Pavlovian yearning for fame. The DSS allowed itself to yield to his craving. He is not Lenin, who struggled for bread and butter outside his home country trying to give his country to Karl Marx. He is no Mao, who groveled like John the Baptist on the mountains plotting to wrest his home country from a feudal cenacle. Nor is he Castro in the bushes before the Batista government fell.

    He is a comfort revolutionary. he is not like economist John Galbraith, who urged that we “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Sowore never wanted the classic agony of a revolutionary. He called off his hunger strike when he became hungry. His family is ensconced in what many see as the bourgeois languor of the United States. Not like Mengistu Haile Mariam, who yelled, when he was in his “revolutionary trenches,” that the state could kill his wife and children and even butcher them. Sowore’s is what Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn described as “revolutionary cretinism,” in his novel titled Lenin in Zurich.

    Nor is he a moral light. Did he respond to former Inspector General Mike Okiro’s charge that he jumped bail over raping a girl?

    So, I keep wondering why the Federal Government would do such a grave infamy to itself, and allow a military-style impunity to reign when it has nothing to save and nothing to gain from it. As we speak, the  military keeps working fruitlessly to rein in the Boko Haram goons making themselves landlords in most of Borno State. Even the national security adviser cannot go to his home village, Monguno, without a full detachment of security forces to protect him. Yet the DSS still is playing haughty in the city while those who cannot eat, or farm, or secure shelter have become refugees as a routine in their own country.

    Maybe the Federal Government is trying to save face by the act of the attorney general Abubarkar Malami, who has now called for the files. Is it a transfer from impunity to law? It is evidence that Buhari’s men are still in turf wars because the commander in chief has left too much power in their hands. A hands-off approach will drop the egg. If they are trying to save face, they should do it fast. Keeping Sowore under lock and key would not give them peace. The world will continue to clamour, and the man will continue to grow in grace. They already have made a tyro into a hero. We have to follow the constitution. It is the document that separates us from a tribe of savages.

    Somebody needs to convey to the president that his men are ruining things for him. Democracy does not work this way. The whole world is now going through what political scientist Neil Diamond calls a “democratic recession.” Whether it is the U.S, India, the Philippines, the United Kingdom, Israel or Hungary, the world is getting weary of liberal ideas. Nigeria seems to embrace this and it is a bad omen.

    The editorial that hit the waves saying the newspaper henceforth will call Buhari major General instead of president of a democracy and call his administration a regime was a beautiful piece written with rigour and wit and finesse until it reached its conclusion. It stumbled and undermined the very basis of its logic. You cannot ask for the president to obey the rule of law and the constitution while undercutting the same constitution.

    The Punch editorial, while showing rage for a president adrift, drowned itself. It sought to delegitimise a presidency that is a fruit of the constitution. It sought to delegitimise the constitution by calling it a regime though the constitution says it is a democracy.  A feudalist has the right to hate the king, but not the throne. Democracy, not a newspaper, voted Buhari to office. A newspaper has no vote in an election; it’s the people’s voice. A newspaper, like the presidency, owes its legitimacy to the constitution. A democrat is Machsvilan if he appeals to a dictations cudgel to pursue a democratic end. You cannot torpedo same constitution and serve the higher virtues of a republic. The editorial affirmed a right by expressing its views, but it wanted to deny Buhari his right to run an administration, both guaranteed by the same constitution.

    But all of this would not happen if the DSS does not create a case that turns public sentiment against it. Abraham Lincoln warned that a government’s fortunes lies in how it manages such sentiment. Sowore is the winner at the moment.

     

     

    Gbaja’s sparks of light

     

    THE speaker did something revolutionary for the country in the past week, but the Sowore din drowned it. House Speaker Femi Gbajabiamila sponsored a bill that scaled second reading calling for free education across the country. In an age of illiteracy, Boko Haram, extreme poverty and sectarian implosions, the speaker hit the bull’s eye. It is a panacea for the youths and a pathfinder for the future. For whosoever neglects learning in his youth, wrote playwright Euripides, loses the past and is dead forever. The speaker has, with one shot, exploded a thousand points of light. We know what it did when Awolowo fought generations ago, and the fruits today.

    It is time to make it a Nigerian compulsion. We have to force fathers and mothers who oppose their sons and subdue their daughters that a time of light has come. Education and health, wrote the philosopher, are the two ingredients for a whole human being. Speaker Gbaja has evinced extraordinary strength. He has also shown extraordinary political leadership that the bill did not spark controversy but light. He has mobilised the House.

    I hope when it swivels to the executive floor from the House, no force of regression will obstruct this law of the future. Gbaja has laid the egg; all we want is how this grows into a full fowl. It is a legislation of great transformation if we take it seriously and with democratic urgency.

     

  • The footprints of an Oguta boy

    Text of a book review by The Nation Editorial Board Chairman Sam Omatseye in honour of former Inspector General of Police Sir Mike Okiro.

     

    When we look at celebrities, men and women who have made an epic out of their lives, we see only the glitter. It is like the ephemeral white foam on the brand of coffee sometimes called café latte, its true colour, a deep blackness, smothered in a sort of royal froth.

    We see them on television, speaking with humble hauteur.

    Whether a political hero, an entrepreneurial maven, a soldierly avatar, a cultural pathfinder, a literary torch, an engineering disruptor, a police firebrand, or a social icon, an inventor, an innovator, a revolutionary, or even a martyr, they seem not to be like the rest of us. Somehow, God made them complete, as though they were a masterpiece that the master did not make from pieces.

    On the public square, their swagger is unmistakable, like a glamour lion roaring harmless before our eyes.

    We admire their attires, the babaringas, or Wole Soyinka’s mockery of the opera Wonyosi, the fez and bowler hats, or the suit from Manhattan, the ties knotted with the delicacy of the hands of the Brooks Brothers, the shoes at once pointing up to the heavens and the earth.

    They exoticise the concept of the automobile, their homes playing host to more cars that the car dealership. We see a blend of the lofty and the vain, of God and Mammon, of what that American novelist Scott F. Fitzgerald calls the beautiful and the damned. And some of us want to be beautiful even if it means we should first be damned.

    We weave myths about them because we know little about how they grew. May be their fathers were from Mars, and their mothers were related to the woman who sat beside Jesus and said her two sons, James and John, must sit beside him in the kingdom of heaven.

    If we don’t go that high, we come down and say, well, maybe their mothers were mammy water, and their fathers descended from Sango or Amadioha. That is why when they die, we see them on the moon, or we don’t just build statue in their honour, we honour them like deity.

    That is why biographies and autobiographies are necessary. They justify the humanisation of the hero, they clutch them from the skies, they free them from the fable, and put the epic into a narrative of their toils, grind and sweat; they see the blood, the sweat, the tears, the rise and fall of the human spirit, the dynamo of the march of history. Hence Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that “there is properly no history but the biographies of great men.”

    So, many might have woven a story about the life of Mike Mbama Okiro. Who was this guy who rose to become the commissioner of police in Lagos and Benue States, who earned double promotion to become the deputy inspector general of police, and then became an inspector general of police in a force where that position of DIG was often a death knell of careers? He finished it and became the chairman of the Nigerian Police Commission.

    All of these are in the public space. Yet in spite of his visibility over the past two decades at least in the public eye, the average Nigerian, even those who live in Oguta where he hails, know that an inquiry into Okiro’s life is still like peering into the dark.

    Few know what I know having read the biography ably put together by the writer Dozie Kingsley Bonseh Okebalama.

    His story reads like a novel, a boyhood of truancy and brilliance, of daring and obedience, of naivety and defiance, of a charmed life unknown to the fellow himself.

    How many know for instance, that Okiro is a firstborn but not the firstborn of his father Samuel Okiro and mother Amaruomunma Okiro.

    That they gave birth to thirteen children, and only four survived? And Okiro was by that cruel fate the first one that survived and thrived, opening the way to three others, although in between some of them still passed on.

    Some at birth, others in infancy. These strokes of ill-fortune turned the couple into refugees from infant mortality, moving from place to place, hoping the air and water and ambience and the spirit of a new place would save their children.

    The couple stuck together in spite of entreaties and pressures to break the marriage.

    But Okiro’s story is that of escapes and paradox, ultimately showing triumph of surprising beauty.

    He started, for instance, as a seminarian and that meant he was headed for the priesthood, but later he developed a love of writing and wanted to be a journalist like me, but ended up doing what he himself described as a gamble: he became a police man, to the shock of his father; and, looking back, to his own amazement.

    So, even when he resigned over principle as an officer years into the career, his letter was rejected. So, a man who started by trying to be a servant of God, rejected the pulpit and was unlike Paul who could not resist the heavenly calling.

    He then opted for the pen, but ended up with kondo and gun. He exchanged the frock for the police uniform. He did not want to wrestle with spirit like Jacob but with flesh and blood in the underbelly of society, the criminals who arguably were the devil made flesh.

    The other irony was that as a writer in school, especially as a student at the University of Ibadan, he became a discomfort for the authorities, and a young man who was going to confront students later in life as a police man was earlier in life a scourge of the police as a student, such that when students wanted to stage a protest, one of his bosses called Okiro and described the student protesters as “your people,” and was asked to take charge.

    But as a pupil, he was exemplary, scoring high marks. In fact, how do we explain how a person scores 105 marks over 100? Read the book and find out? Read how a boy who was believed to be too small to attend school wowed teachers by answering questions that pupils could not and earned  double promotion, just as it happened later as a police officer.

    But his gifts are manifold, a great swimmer, a cunning chess player, a drummer of taste, net-maker of intricate fingers, a marksman that prophesied his future not in priesthood but security, et al. But he was awful in the queen of all sports: soccer.

    As a swimmer, he became a local hero when he saved the life of a friend who was drowning. He became a drum major in the civil war. As a chess player, he beat the best in the country and he was going to represent Biafra in Switzerland just before the civil war ended.

    As a young man, his civil war exploits are benumbing. More so because he was not a soldier. At one time he ran home stranded in his village when he went in search of parents who had all fled from an advancing Nigerian army to Owerri.

    His only hope was a man and his son, who would not take him along. If the fellow looked away after his visceral plea, the soldiers might have caught up with him. A few minutes after he joined the ferry, their shouts of oshobe resounded and bullets landed frantically in the water beside them.

    Or shall we recall his conscription by a detachment of the Biafran forces. He was to go on a battle. But before then a certain priest saw him and identified him as a seminarian and he was let go.

    Everybody in that group was wiped out later by a Nigerian force. We cannot forget, of course, his many acts of truancy. One was being caught in a group of hemp-smoking boys, who had special names, but Mike was sober enough to call himself Mike as nickname.

    Or the fellow known as Baba Agba who sent him as a courier of hemp and set him up to buy it while hiding in the bush. A naïve Mike was lucky not to get caught.

    He also showed himself a man of great integrity when in the dormitory, he committed with his peers what was described as cockroaching, that is prowling about at night when all students should be on their beds.

    The school master caught them but Okiro and was to send them out of school. Okiro turned himself in and identified himself as the fellow he could not pick out. Because of him, everybody was freed. He probably learned this from his mother during the civil war.

    A woman had run away and left her huge sum in the boat as everyone scampered to safety. The money was in his mother’s hands for a long time.

    She went to the market to announce for the owner. The woman eventually found Okiro’s mother and his father insisted she counted it to be sure it was all complete.

    One of the great escapes was as an officer when Okiro’s car burned in an accident, and everyone stood watching until a strapping fellow drew him out of the flames.

    His wife was in the car, but saved. She thought she had been widowed. She went to the mortuary to look for him afterward. Okiro recovered through an Indian doctor’s recommendation of a certain variant of salt sold in the market, for him to regain not only consciousness but the use of a tongue that was, to all intents and purposes, dead.

    Ironically, his dear wife was going to lose her life in a freak accident and rather than being widowed, it was Mike that was widowered.

    Paradoxically, he also escaped lynching by students of the University of Nigeria when as an activist he spoke to them about the virtue of resisting the Gowon regime.

    The students were miffed that when they did so in the throes of the Nigerian crisis no other school joined them. So, they saw Okiro as trying to disrupt their academic tranquillity. His uncle bundled him out in a truck of livestock in the wee hours of the next day.

    His escapes were not of his life alone. His academics joined the trail. When he was a student at Ibadan, a certain unnamed female student took fancy to him and followed him around the campus until a friend told him he did not want to graduate because he was too close to a lady who was a professor’s mistress.

    Mike decided to avoid the lady including coming late to class so she could not sit beside him. He was on the cusp of making a second class upper, but the same unnamed professor argued that Mike did not deserve it because he was too busy playing about campus instead of focusing on his studies.

    The man was the dean of the faculty, and if anyone wants to probe a bit later for his identity, the archives are available.

    Because of that same fellow, Mike turned down an offer to work in the university because of the bullying spectre of the love-struck professor or, we may call him the professor of desire, apologies to Philip Roth. Here, Okiro’s escape was with scratches.

    We cannot forget the family saga when his younger brother Tony, whom he fought for when they were much younger, subjected him to a frog-jumping punishment because Tony was a Biafran officer. He bullied his older brother with his assistants in their own home, until their mother came to the rescue.

    The story of Okiro as a police officer was full of escapades and compassion. Was it his role in reducing crime in Lagos from its whirlwind years by over 85 percent, or was it the quelling of the restive days of OPC, or the serenity he evinced when the bombs of the Ikeja Cantonment quaked and lit up the whole city?

    Was it his ability to understand the scent of cohabiting with other ethnic groups? We cannot forget how he made a case for M.D. Abubakar before President Goodluck Jonathan when the latter asked him to recommend an IGP candidate. Jonathan said MD Abubakar was not a graduate.

    Okiro said the fellow may not be a university graduate but if you put 10 IGPs together and gave them an assignment, Abubakar would beat them all. This was loyalty not only to a fellow professional; he did not hear tribe.

    His appointment as IG reads like a piece of stage drama. I spare you the juicy detail but a man who went to congratulate his friend who was announced on NTA as IG ended up being the IG. What an awkward situation, and the man helped the disappointed man afterward to succeed him.

    After all, it fit just as two of them, Okiro and Onovo, wore the same size of shoes, trousers and shirts.

    The book is a work of great detail and research, and the writer took pains to shed lights on unknown reaches of life. Okiro also wrote some of the pages, expressing his skill in clear earnest.

    The prose flows without condescension or flattery. But the story flows for pages on end without quotes, which takes away some of its appeal of verisimilitude.

    But he does well to compensate with a deluge of pictures that tell their own stories. We also do not see Okiro’s thoughts as a young man about the civil war, his thoughts about pacifism or justice. Nor do we get a good read of how the mobile life of a soldier affected his family.

    Yet, it is a work of great episodes and events, of escapes and escapades, of a young man daring to be himself, a novelistic description of scenes, a probe of a life of a man who loved the adventure of life and tried, in the words of Emerson, to “live the life he imagined.”

    While following the words of the Poet Robert Browning that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp but what is heaven for,”Okiro had ambition but not greed; fervour but not fanaticism and energy but not excess, audacity without recklessness and kindness without cynicism.

    He abided by Apostle Paul’s injunction that “let your moderation be known to all men.” If six children died and by being the seventh, he decided to hold on to life, he made a theatre of it and did it at the very top of human striving.

    So, he worked with all the presidents and heads of state of his generation, loved his God and his fellow men, and was not afraid to fail. But he did not fall to death because his God was with him like the famous quote that shows God as saying,

    “The times that you have seen only one set of footprints, Child, is when I carried you.” He is, like the hero of Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim, one of us, but one with a difference.

    So, like the words of President Goodluck Jonathan in the forward to the book, Striking Footprints, I deeply recommend this book.

     

  • Civic peace

    Sam Omatseye

    The story of Anthony Joshua is a metaphor of what can be done if we apply our spirit in this country. When the Nigerian pugilist fell to Andy Ruiz Jr about half year ago, I pitied the fellow. And after I saw footages of that sweaty duel, I almost gave up on Joshua. He didn’t return me the favour. I gave up on him. He gave himself time. He probably pitied Ruiz for the ruin that was to come.

    The American-Mexican boxer’s build was a source of laughter for me, but also of curiosity. He looked more like a wrestler than a boxer. Even for a wrestler, his body looked like a mess of loose flesh. His build seemed to qualify for the street brawler of amateur manoeuvres. At that, he did not look like a man who could survive a featherweight wager.

    Shorter than Joshua, Ruiz rammed into his quarry with raw vitality and pluck. He plucked at Joshua’s every weakness. His weak points were his sweet spot. Joshua was perplexed, out-hit, out-decoyed. The opponent Ruiz seemed a bag of flesh, but actually a sanctuary of muscles. He was a rampart, a fortress of courage, indomitable, roaring with jabs and fury. Joshua collapsed from the charismatic brute to a puny Adonis. Tall but fragile, fine but not fiery, looking more like the party man who missed his way to a ring of professionals. Joshua could not penetrate, or feint punches or rage into a momentum. He fell flat before the champion.

    Fast forward to December 7. Joshua overcame all that and beat his quarry. I had told people I did not expect him to win, but I hoped for him to conquer. His victory was evidence that spirit trumps flesh, confidence overtakes resume. Joshua rewrote the story of his life, and also the story of Nigerian boxing.

    So, we can in this country do better, if we think better. As a man thinks in his heart, so he is, said Solomon in scriptures. It is not by power or might, but by the spirit. Joshua the David beat Ruiz the Goliath. He disappointed my fears but affirmed the hopes of many Nigerians. We do that in sports. We rarely accomplish such feats in governance.

    We have a few such narratives, though. I contemplated it as I put pen to paper and looked at one aspect of our national life that is a model of organisation, dedication and focus. I am referring to the transformation of Lagos from a city of brigands when I returned to Nigeria from the United States  in 2006.

    Lagos was a place of fear and trembling. At this time of year, the banks and tony places became targets of the hoodlums. They stormed a street of banks, and raped it. They would spend hours in a bank. The air quivered with gunshots, the hoodlums not even afraid to be seen. No disguises, no masks. They looked their victims in the eye; they killed when resisted. Sometimes they snuffed out unprovoked the roadside innocent. They often were powered not only by greed but drugs, their breaths were the flames of Indian hemps and cocaine. Their language was the refrain of the beast.

    They were the lords of the city. In traffic, it was common to see everyone abandon their cars and run for their lives, whether on Third Mainland Bridge or Ikorodu Road. Even in tranquil traffic, a hood may materialise beside the car and point out a gun and ask for valuables – handsets, money, jewellery. Other commuters feigned inattention, while at once grateful that they were spared or praying they were not next in line.

    So, last week, when a town hall meeting was convened by the BOS of Lagos over the Lagos State Security Trust Fund, I recalled how I travelled to the Civic Centre venue without routine trepidation I had just 13 years ago.

    The plan hatched during the years of Asiwaju Ahmed Tinubu was etched under the watch of then governor of example, now the Trojan of Works, Babatunde Raji Fashola SAN.

    But how time heals. When members of the Trust Fund went to visit the BOS of Lagos after he became governor, they thought they were going to brief him on the dynamics and origins of the Trust Fund, but the men realised that Governor Babajide Olusola Sanwo-Olu was not only steeped in the activities. He was there on creation day. He dreamed with those who dreamed it, birthed it with those who birthed it. As commissioner for establishment, he was the operations man of the Trust Fund. This is a testament to continuum in government for which Lagos has been thankful and beneficiary.

    Since its inception, the Trust Fund, not without support from the pockets of the state Government, has become the engine room to finance security in the state. It is also a paragon of democracy at work in the saving and securing of life. Citizens and corporate bodies have been contributing. At the event that day alone, individuals and corporate bodies announced donations of over N20 million. The people donate, the government secures. From the big oil firms and banks who give millions to the average citizen who gives N50,000, the state benefits from its own citizens.

    According to Abdulrazaq Balogun, Governor Sanwo-Olu rejuvenated the purse after it dropped under the previous governor into an empty shell.  It earned one billion four hundred and one million, eight hundred and eighty thousand, seven hundred naira in 2019. This contrasts to barely five million Naira in November 2018 and early this year under his predecessor.

    Crimes come in various forms, and the new commissioner of police, Hakeem Odumosu, unveiled crimes and how they have been attacked in the city. I was shocked to learn of a mushrooming of cults in the city. The one that stood out is Awawa that now recruits children in primary schools. Their area of operation is in Surulere and its environs.

    This emphasises what the governor, who has mastered his own cadences when he speaks, said about modernising the architecture of security, to embrace social media strategies, and modern equipment. To secure we have to think. Just as Joshua gave jabs to ruin Ruiz, so Lagos and his governor should showcase one of the few fountains of Nigerian success story.

    It is not that crimes cannot happen; it is that we are on top of it. It is civic coercion for the people’s sake.

  • Adams’ Apple

    Sam Omatseye

    Somehow the impression is given that those who are ganging up against the APC chairman, Adams Oshiomhole are gaining traction.

    True, some governors are plotting, but it is a show of desperation.

    Adams’s foundation still stands sure in spite of the work of his opponents who include governors of Kebbi, Ekiti, Niger, Kaduna and of course the traitor in Benin.

    Some on the fence include the Governors of Gombe, Ondo and Nassarawa, which means they are still contemplating their positions, with Gombe almost going Adams’ path.

    Most of the other states are with the spry chairman. Again, the plotters are finding it difficult to push their case because they need to convince President Buhari, who is well pleased with his party chairman.

    The apple is still in Adams’ throat. The plotters cannot pluck it, and don’t have the numbers.

  • Obaseki’s secrets

    Sam Omatseye

    The fascinating thing about politics is that what we see in public is the charade, the rites of glamour and blood. We see the politicians in their high hours in agbadas and babaringa and bowler hats, their smiles in supernova light. During campaigns and in social arenas, they wave hands like royals connecting with the poor. In sober moments, they talk policy and affect empathy.

    In turbulent times, they retreat from the public. Their supporters, just as we saw recently in Kogi and Bayelsa, are landlords and cavemen, bearing the torch of war, burning buildings, slashing necks, breaking windows, slaying widows, despatching red-blooded youths, telegraphing fear.

    We are not too sure who they are, just like the quiet guard at the door, his bulk and mournful eyes and biceps say nothing until we provoke him. Sometimes, we see them on display when the rumbles in their souls, like a constipated bowel, cannot hide inside anymore.

    Then, as we saw recently in Edo State politics, the private spills onto the public space. The Nobel Prize novelist and author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Garcia Marquez once said that “all human beings have three lives: public, private and secret.”

    Much of what we know of politicians is public. Their private lives they invite the public to see so we can somehow humanise them. We observe their children, their friends, when they sport, dine, dance and pray, when they are sick, or when they lose a mother or father or a child. Or when they do charity, or cry at funerals. The private is sometimes public. In his memoirs, President Richard Nixon documented the crises he endured and how the media exposed much of his life. His wife Pat was scandalised. Nixon replied, “People in political life must live in a fish bowl.”

    What fascinates the public is the unintended detail of their seamy secrets, the ones that they cannot sugar-coat with public relations cunning. They don’t tell anyone but confidants. Yet when we know, they wince. President Lincoln, a politician whose wife’s eccentricities he tried to hide, once said: “It’s not me who can’t keep a secret. It’s the people I tell who can’t.”

    That was what happened when the All Progressives Congress (APC) Chairman Adams Oshiomhole’s residence was attacked by hoodlums loyal to  Governor Godwin Obaseki. The theatre was re-enacted during a university convocation when the deputy governor, playing an Okada rider, stormed Adam’s house with hoodlums to embarrass guests like the CBN Governor and a monarch. The situation was first rigged in news reports as Adams being hostile to the governor before the full story lit the headlines.

    But how did Adams, who became the first apostle of Obaseki’s candidacy turn into the enemy at the gate? Even when he was warned that selling his candidacy was like retailing a dead goat in a muslim society. Now, the APC chairman is often reminded by those who warned him about “Godwin’s style” that the man would look the other way and knife him in the guts. Prophecy has met providence. But all these, I learned, began with the issue of party primaries, and the Governor wanted to shut out all stakeholders, including Adams.

    This led to a series of efforts to reconcile Obaseki and Adams. From all available evidence, Obaseki does not want any form of peace. He rebuffed all the overtures and suggestions from people outside the state and within APC. The first and only meeting had wheel horses of the party as well as a man of means. The politicians were Abubakar Bagudu, Governor of Kebbi State, Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State, Dr. Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State and also head of the Governor’s Forum as well as the man of means. Of course Obaseki and Adams were at the meeting. All efforts to persuade the governor of Edo State to reach an agreement about the primaries and for both men to reconcile did not yield fruits. El Rufai, who knelt to Kogites recently also genuflected to Obaseki, informing the governor that whatever happened at the party at the state level would have to be ratified by the National Working Committee. Obaseki did not budge, and the man of means in their midst was clearly unhappy with the governor’s tempestuous recalcitrance.  The meeting was stalemated. Another meeting was scheduled to hold to include a broader landscape of party stakeholders. Obaseki said he would not come to Adam’s house because his (Adam’s) people did not like the governor. Adams agreed to meet in Obaseki’s house. It did not happen. He asked them to meet at Transcorp. Adam’s agreed and went there in the company of his lawyer friend Nnamonso Ekanem (SAN).

    Obaseki told Adams that both had nothing to discuss because they were heading to mutual self-destruction. Adams reportedly forswore such a fate for both of them. Obaseki had his deputy, a one-time ally turned foe and storm rider, and secretary to government with him in the room.

    This meeting was to prepare for a meeting in Fayemi’s Abuja residence. But Obaseki did not show up for that meeting, and both Fayemi and Bagudu, who had arrived for the meeting had to do something else with their time.

    It was after that the Edo Governor sacked 18 secretaries of the local governments and councillors. He also fired over 200 senior special assistants, all appointed by him. He also reportedly asked Mrs Eghe Ogbedmudia to do a press conference to condemn APC leaders who were not on his side. The woman balked and advised the governor to reconcile all factions. Obaseki announced her suspension afterwards.

    In a recent APC caucus meeting, Katsina State Governor Aminu Bello Masari had to rebuke Obaseki when he turned such a grave matter as reconciliation into a gale of laughter, and he wondered whether the Edo State Governor thought they gathered there for trivialities.

    I have inquired, what did Adams ask from Obaseki that he turned cold to the man who engineered his rise to power from an obscure technocrat, though now an obscurantist power player? Did he ask for appointments? I learned Adams played minimal role in appointments. He only had one commissioner, Mika Amanokhai, whom Obaseki fired along with seven others. In all 33 local government areas Adams only had three. I would like Obaseki to come clean with evidence of Adams’ overbearing presence.

    A source told me that Obaseki once asked Adams if he had any interests, and his predecessor said nothing.  Yet, I wonder why he said once that, “I am not an ungrateful person.  No one made me governor. I became governor by God’s grace, with the support of many other people.”

    Men who brandish God’s grace should remember that God first made Nebuchadnezzar king.

    Lalong vs Ortom

    Irony came last weekend with two appeal court judgments. One, in Benue with the election of Samuel Ortom. In Plateau, it’s the election of Simon Lalong. Both of them ran on antipodal platforms.

    Ortom ran on ‘them versus us,’ and he took advantage of the herders crisis to con himself into the graces of his people. It worked. Lalong ran on unity. He also won.

    Now, in spite of Ortom’s divisive vanity, the herders crisis are not on the front burners. With the mollifying voice of Lalong, Plateau is now cooling towards development rather than the tempest of fear and trembling.

    I would rather follow the path of Lalong as Paul said: “Follow peace with all men…”

  • The Cave man and Kogi Elections

    Sam Omatseye

    Anyone who heard the name Salome Abuh on the national stage until last week paid no heed. No one hears it now without a tear at heart.

    A woman was asleep in her home. A band of hoodlums came there, poured petrol on the house and set it on fire. They hear the woman moan and cry for help. They looked with a devil’s eye and heard with a reptile’s deafness.

    The woman cried until she descended into silence. Her party –PDP- had lost the election. At least, they should have given her a chance to live. The thugs sniffed a suya in a human body, a woman, a wife, a mother, a neighbour, a citizen. Minute by minute, she burned.

    The window’s burglary proof installed to prevent the intruder prevented her escape. The thugs are modern day cave men. They are technicians of human extermination.

    I am not for the death penalty. But in this case, I make an exception.

    The hoodlums have no place in human society. It is how politics and the caveman have defined modern Nigeria.

  • The Road

    Sam Omatseye

    The road has always fascinated our species. It is the outlet out there. Even the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who hated to travel taught our minds to move into the future via his metaphysical highway, so he gave us what we call the Kantian teleology.

    No government, no club, no school, no god operates without the road. It is our ticket out of and into our selves. So, it is little wonder that development is nothing without it. Now that we are in the dry season, the main reason we have wondered why the rains will not go away is no other than we want to leave the house. But when we leave the house, the home follows us to the road – in our imaginations, in our appetites and romances, in our dialogues, in our domestic plans, in our work.

    Even if we know no asphalt can resist a downpour, we still sulk that the roads should be fixed. Is it the failure of human artifice, the shortfall of technology, or the supremacy of the element? Everywhere the weather riles up, it routs our efforts. Hence in temperate climates, no roadwork in winter. Here the road is wounded when the sky tears up.

    So if you want to ruin a town, a party, a project, mess up the way. That can happen even in politics. So, while the Trojan of works, Babatunde Raji Fashola SAN ploughs the Nigerian road, we should not forget when the rain started to beat us under the Buhari regime. The rains did not begin in the clouds. Its first torrents sounded in the red chambers – in the Senate under presidency of Bukola Saraki, aka Eleyinmi.

    When the budget was presented, the chambers balked. They said the money was too much. But later we learned, it was not the billions that was too much but the ambition. He wanted to do more roads with much money. Fashola collided with them on two fronts. One, the senators wanted money in their pockets. Two, Saraki wanted to frustrate the Buhari government since he – Eleyinmi – was then a foe in the APC family and joining forces with the PDP.  They butchered the budget. The legislators wanted him to give them money for constituency projects. They presented road projects on roads that only existed in their imaginations, maps they conjured up. I call that a cartography of fiction. The Trojan of works was not going to be a party to the duels of politics and greed. The senators fought back, and the consequence was for him to have little money to do work in a country of many roads, roads to fit into the descriptions of G.K Chesterton’s poem, The Rolling English Road. He wrote about reeling roads, rolling roads, mazy roads, et al.

    Politics has consequences. So, he worked with what he had. Since his stewardship in the ministry, he has gulped up about 5000 kilometres of roads so far, which is significant. But in a nation of tens of thousands of roads, much is left to be done. The thing with roads is that when you travel, you don’t praise the good part, but we query the bad. The bad part slows journey, tortures the tyre, imperils the engine, slurps more fuel and prepares the body for the panel beater. The Lagos-Ibadan Expressway is going through its most concerted work since the project began, but many complain about the traffic. For all the abundant work done so far, no one will hail the Second Niger Bridge until we see the infrastructure rise out of the river.

    So are many roads now under construction or completed. Here are some of  them- Abuja–Kano; Ilorin–Jebba; Enugu-Port Harcourt; Benin–Sagamu; Arochukwu-Bende; Kano–Maiduguri dualisation; dualisation of Sapele–Ewu road Sections I and II; Apapa–Oworonsoki Road; Apapa-Wharf Road; Ikorodu- Sagamu; Sokoto-Tambuwal-Kontagora–Makera Road; Isoko Ring Road; Abak–Ekwarakwa Road; Obajana–Kabba, dualisation of Bayelsa Palm–Otuoke Road.

    There is no development without roads. The budget this year of N262 billion is little. But the budget excludes the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and the Second Niger Bridge since their funding come from a special infrastructure purse with the presidency.  At least this budget is not going to be slashed and this 9th Senate is not playing monkey games.

    So when Eleyinmi’Senate hurt the budget, they hurt the country. Lawmakers ought to see beyond their hidebound avarice and gamesmanship. If they had allowed abundant funding, more roads would be under construction today and more of the roads would have been completed. They did the same to the Customs boss Hammed Ali because he would not yield honey to the lawmakers’ lolling lips.

    The use of tax credit has drawn some flak, as though it is privilege. How would the Apapa-Wharf project or Obajana get into gear if Dangote and Flour Mills did not take advantage? Or the Sukuk facility? The NLNG is also constructing the Bodo-Bonny road along that principle.

    The complaints about roads show how development must be taken seriously. Especially roads. We are on the road more than we are in the house, either in deed or in thoughts. Sometimes when we are in the house, our homes are on the road. Historically the road is civilisation and history. There we worship, we party, we fight, we play, we plot, we make love, we die. Soyinka’s plays often happen on the road, apart from The Road. Whether it is Lion and the Jewel, The Jero plays, Death and The King’s Horsemen, or Mad men and Specialists, it is the place of his interpreters. Shakespeare and Dickens loved the Road, just as Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and even The Mad Man.

    The story of the Second World War cannot be written without how snow crippled Hitler’s army near Moscow. The Ore battle in the Civil War has gone into lore. Political campaigns are by definition road tours. In legends and history, we love the road. Moremi adventured, Lot’s wife looked back, Jacob wrestled and Paul was converted on the road. Whether it is Fagunwa’s A Forest of A Thousand demons or Homer’s Odyssey, it haunts.

    Any time I recall the great American novel, The Road by Jack Kerouac, I pray for the day when somebody would travel from state to state, his car cruising like sea on a tranquil  sea, without one complaint about a pot hole, a gully, a cater. That is what the Trojan of Works dreams. But money and politics must collaborate.

  • Lyon’s roar, Kogi’s harvest

    IT is not often that a columnist waits for the news on deadline. For the outcomes of the Kogi and Bayelsa  governorship polls, I had to comment on the strength of knowledge. So, my fingers dithered on the keyboard until I knew.

    The polls invoked paradoxes, and nothing excites a writer more than this. And we saw this at the weekend. For instance, everyone expected warfare in both Kogi and Bayelsa, but we expected Kogi’s harvest to be a child’s play compared to Bayelsa’s lords of the flies, apologies to Nobel laureate William Golding. The creeks squeaked compared to the growls and bloodlust of Kogi land grabs.

    Kogi collapsed into fear and trembling. Ballot snatching, voter intimidation, gunshots, et al. It was a Hobbesian terrain. Those with the superior will to power must triumph. He who was bound to violence was bound to win.

    But Bayelsa’s feast of paradoxes roils the mind. First, we heard the state governor’s outburst of outcry. Normally, during elections, governors soar, while the opposition is sore. Optimism and self-pride tranquilise their situation rooms. There is often tension, but it is a tension of hope rather than despair. Their minds are like the words of Poet Samuel Coleridge that “anticipation is more potent than surprise.”

    But when a governor does not only sulk, but makes an open play of his frustration, you know the game is up. When Governor Seriake Dickson started calling for polls cancellations in Southern Ijaw, Nembe and other local governments, it was obvious he knew that his candidate’s face would not break into the smile of yesterday, that yesterday being when he triumphed, if controversially, in his party’s primary. That is a historic irony.

    But it is a paradox because of the story of Oil Minister Timipre Sylva and former President Goodluck Jonathan. Who would have thought that Jonathan’s people and Sylva will be smiling together over an election result in Bayelsa. We know what harm Jonathan did to Sylva, and how the lanky fellow was kangarooed out of power as governor and, as president, he mounted a campaign against him with an EFCC hound. The irony, too, would be a horde of PDP stalwarts grumbling that their former leader has defected at home to sup with the enemy. But that is the drama that Dickson has wrought in his home state. The man Dickson called his elder brother when Sylva was the enemy has now become a sibling disaster.

    The other historic irony is that David Lyon’s victory in Bayelsa signals the first big fall of the PDP stronghold in the Niger Delta. Not Dickson, not all the oil money could hold the state for the PDP. Dickson’s party was a prisoner of hope that fell in his own stronghold. The only man for the past decade who challenged PDP in the state has been Sylva. It looked like a hope against hope. But his fight has been a testament to tenacity, a man who glimpsed light where darkness fell and leapt into it. It was a tale of epic self-confidence sometimes put down as reckless.

    Now, he will laugh while his opponents would say, like Walt Whitman in his poem The Compost, “Something startles where I thought I was safest.” Sylva has been a small man wrestling a giant for a decade. The big man brought Sylva down several times but his back did not graze the wrestling floor. The small man wearied the giant and, seeing the sweat, sagging muscles and despair of the hulk, Sylva took advantage and threw the giant in one fell swoop. That happened on Saturday.

    Also ironic was that about four years ago, it was Sylva who was holding press conferences and making the case that he won the election but that Dickson and his men had corralled violence to undo his electoral fortunes. Dickson rallied the Ijaw nation as a mantra as though Sylva were a foreigner. The same Ijaw nation looked away from him and anointed Sylva’s anointed. It is a saga of political revenge on the back of the people.

    In the election four years ago, Southern Ijaw Local Government Area was holding a huge chunk of the voters and the parties had to go through a rerun for two reasons: Its decisive tranche of voter count, and its dubious pride of place as a whirlwind of death, ballot snatching, gunshots, fights, brawls, et al. This time around, Southern Ijaw was a relatively tranquil story for Bayelsa.

    It is also a story of David Lyon known for philanthropy and large hand, as against a governor’s reputation as a tight fist. His choice as APC candidate was a no-brainer in that respect. He was described in this column as the Li(y)on of his tribe because that is the root of David. He is known for his charisma and intense power of connection.

    His campaigns were moments of bonding with the crowd. He is also an oil magnate in his own rights, a man of wealth and the common touch.

    In Kogi, the main irony is not always an irony in Nigerian politics. He did not pay salaries. He did not connect with the people. He did not unmake a bad past of governance by remaking the state for good. Rather, he became a governor known for lack of vision. But he won not only by emphasis but landslide. This column recorded his lack of popularity. But the man boasted a huge war chest but he can now beat that chest. Is it electoral justice? His opponents said he marshalled the material and materiel of state. He won not fairly but fiercely. Einstein said: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Was that what happened? But the analysts of Kogi politics say his PDP opponent was no better. Was this a Hobson’s choice giving the Kogi people two bad choices and they followed the road once taken?

    There is also the false humility of Kaduna State Governor, Malam Nasir El Rufai begging the Kogi people to forgive Yahaya Bello for his iniquities. He said he was on his knees. But in democracy, we don’t genuflect to elect. We don’t stoop to conquer. We earn our victories.

    Both victories in Kogi and Bayelsa are victories of Buhari’s APC, and more potently a great moment for the party chairman, Adams Oshiomhole, who accumulates accolades for his party while his party foes sulk and cry. It is no consolation for some members of the APC brass, including those in Buhari’s cabinet who worked for the opposition and wished APC lost because of envy of the rise of the profiles of some of their colleagues in their regions.

    The last paradox is that in the two victories, APC was at once a challenger and defender. In Bayelsa, it challenged and torpedoed the incumbent party. No one would have thought it would be a landslide. It is one of the most consequential victories in Nigerian elections. In Kogi, they held the Alamo, if many question its strategy and tactics. It is Bello’s Kogi’s harvest.

  • Atiku’s requiem

    By Sam Omatseye

    The Supreme Court verdict was, to me, not about legalistic niceties, or the casuistry imposed on the law by those who feel rigged out of the presidency. Not the remorse or bloodlust in their rhetoric. Not even who lost or won, or the mechanistic frustration of those who would have wanted to appeal the verdict. They hope, in their fantasy, that they could court the heavens and so God is made flesh, wrestles like Jacob and upturns the ruling. Not even the assertion that the Supreme Court is infallible because it is final is any consolation.

    It is about Atiku Abubakar’s love. It is an enduring love, unfeigned but blood-eyed in battle. A love for power. It is sometimes innocent, sometimes Mephistophelian, sometimes naïve, but always distinctively insistent. Innocent in his eyes of a little boy, which is deceptive because he pursues it with the rage of the wounded, and that makes it Mephistophelian. During his campaign and elections, money dropped in huge tranches, his foot soldiers roared and perspired, ballots vaporised and arrived in preferred precincts and numbers, the men in his sanctum sanctorum devised plots to win at all cost like the argument about the phantom server. He was naïve when all seemed clear, but he still insisted he won, even when some pointed to the cunning and rapacity of his lawyers.

    Was it mere naivety or innocence when he unveiled a stylised response to the Supreme Court verdict, soaring into the moorlands of philosophy and history, and tail-gaiting Aristotle. He even made himself look like an Awolowo at the birth of a new tragedy at the electoral gate.

    In fact, three personalities come together, in varying degrees of counterfeit, in the political biography of the Adamawa Chieftain. One is Awo, the second is Muhammadu Buhari and the third Chief M.K.O Abiola. As Awo, he tries to make himself into a sort of political thinker and innovator. As Muhammadu Buhari, he wants to ride a longevity of ambition. He would not want to follow Awo in that part because the Ikenne sage was a bust in his presidential dreams. As Abiola, he borrows from the Egba money bag’s profile by burrowing into his own deep pockets.

    But he does not have the Awo prescience or depth, or even his understanding of history, nascent heroics. Awo wrote books, engaged at a high level of dialectics. He had a mythical status among his people. Nobody saw Atiku in the moon. Atiku does not even have a political slogan that enchants viscerally, like “Awo!!!” He lacks the aplomb, ascetic remove from or even affectionate contempt for the excitement of the crowd. His reference to Aristotle seems cute, contrived. Obviously somebody inserted it into his piece. To be clear, he wanted to present himself as a progressive, a thing that was out of character when he was on the hustings. He certainly had the southwest and the Biafran rabble in mind and, perhaps, Awo when he started calling for restructuring and fiscal federalism. He did that with zest, which I admired, if this essayist didn’t believe him.

    As Buhari, Atiku never had the talakawa appeal. He may be a better speaker than Buhari, and that is not what he will take. He wants the fruitful longevity of ambition, just as the scripture says, “Be thou faithful unto the end and thou shall receive the crown…” He also lacks the ascetic quiet and the protestations of rectitude the Katsina man commands. No one cries for Atiku on the streets like sai baba. No one goes to church or mosque for him. No one kisses the earth or stops the rain for him. When they see him, they see money. He is not a material-mystic hero; his appeal is materialistic.  Even when he whipped up the federalist sentiment, he did not own or ride it. He did not give it his language or presence. He became a mere contributor to a hackneyed ideology. He cried, but no one shed tears. He crooned but no one dance. He raged, but no anger on the public square. He did not have the power to change, like John Adams who said of the American “revolution was in the hearts and minds of the American people.” We cannot say anything approximating this in Atiku’s barnstorming.

    MKO was a moneybag, but also a sort of windbag of the people. He predated Fayose in his visits to bole (roasted plantain) sellers and riding okada. He was rich and poor simultaneously, dropping from the sky and erupting from the earth genuinely. He made a song of his humble beginning. With his stutter, he brought humour, even endearing gaffes, to his profile. He was a giver, a man thought to have too much money and wanted to turn himself into a compulsive donor to all good causes to everyone he met in every part of the country. Atiku cuts the image of an acquirer, lapping from the nation’s super ice cream.

    But what makes Atiku’s story unconvincing was that he is a partisan wayfarer, the Ajala traveller of Nigerian politics. He stumbles from a party to party to make fortune out of opportunity, to use his charms at any chance, all to become Nigeria’s president.

    One reason for this is that Atiku has tasted the forbidden fruit. He was vice president, and acted when Obj trusted him and opened the doors for him. Obj saw his ambition and shut it out. That scent of power haunts him and he wants it in its full glory and majesty. In the language of the young sensational Vietnamese writer, Ocean Vuong, Atiku was “briefly gorgeous” at the top. He was merely a cameo, a comet, a glorious flash.

    Hence the loss at the Supreme Court was so painful. Age may not help next time. Age, for me, is no disqualifier. But has he lost his chance. That is why his reaction invokes the following words of Shakespeare’s play Merchant of Venice: “If you prick us do we not bleed? /If you tickle us, do we not laugh?/ If you poison us, do we not die? If you wrong us, do we not revenge?” It is that sense of loss, as though wronged, that pervades his soul, a sense he has lost it forever. So, even if the absence of a server means justice is served, he will deny it. He does not want his career over. His political career must loathe the scriptural line that says: “You have a reputation that you are alive, but you are dead.”

  • Amaechi’s rail of hope

    By Sam Omatseye

    I followed the minister of transportation on a train journey from Lagos via Abeokuta to Ibadan. It was a revelation of infrastructural potential in this country. We started early, and we first took inspection of the coaches, the VIP, the first class and the general. The project has been a work of amazing disruption.

    The landscape we covered showed how much work has taken place: the clearing of forests, village and community displacements, the building of bridges, tunnels, underpasses and overpasses. We saw mud baked, narrow and big gauges, all of which witness the toil of Chinese workers with some of their Nigerian staff. Stations are under construction, like the one at Kajola on the way to Abeokuta.

    The minister, Rotimi Amaechi, raged that the Chinese had not completed work on the station as they promised. They appealed to the element: rain. Rain seemed a factor in the delay. When we reached Ibadan, work was about three kilometres short of the terminal. Why? The engineers showed the minister the soggy earth. No tracks could plug safely into the ground. The train stopped and we all walked about seven kilometres to and from the terminal, which was also not completed because of the rains.

    The train bears a speed of 150 kilometres per hour but its operational speed is 120. In Lagos it takes off from Iddo, but work is furiously steaming on tracks all the way to Ebutte Metta. Earth, gravels, asphalt yield to machines to form a chaos of progress around the city.

    The appeal to weather shows how climate change affects governance and development. Lagos is waiting for the rains to go. So is Nigerian train. Weather compromises dreams and deadlines. The BOS of Lagos, Governor Sanwo-Olu shares something with our train project: a prayer to the heavens.

    The inspection that lasted till late in the night was a labour of hope. I mused at the irony that if Buhari pulls this true, his story will be that of a man who derailed in order to build it. He had cancelled Metroline in Lagos under Jakande. Now, he is the man of rail. With Lagos and Ibadan done, they will move all the way to Kano. The villages are thankful. Some are teasing the minister with chieftaincy title. No, thanks, said Amaechi. A touching story of a community in which pupils walk a mile to school because of the project. Amaechi approved an underpass to be constructed.

    Lagos-Ibadan is West Africa’s busiest hub. It reminds me of a line in the Novel Flights by Nobel laureate OlgaTokarczuk: “Barbarians don’t travel.” They abide what is called circular time rather than linear time. We are not barbarians but with the train network, we shall be a people on the move.