The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

LKJ’s other side

The roll call of attendees at Lateef Jakande’s birthday party was an apparition of the Yoruba elite. Weak, wizened but worthy, the first civilian governor of Lagos looked fairer in the 90th. No past governor, or political bigwig who attended the event spoke without awe. He is a man of legacy.

Perhaps the person who captured his acts with dramatic presence is his present successor, the BOS of Lagos, Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu. Microphone in hand and almost leaning over the sitting grandee like a grandson, Governor Sanwo-Olu said “I was 14 years old when you became governor of Lagos.” He presented himself as a model beneficiary of Jakande’s genius.

Few people live to see their legacy as superfine as that of the Lagos chief executive who mounted the chair he left behind. Governor Sanwo-Olu is the democratic bloodline to the throne just as a monarch swims the natural bloodline of the biological fathers. He is gradually coming into his own as he repairs the brokenness of the past few years: roads restoration, discipline, traffic, et al. Governor Sanwo-Olu must be contemplating Jakande as one of his exemplary ancestors.

So are many today looking at the man of modest lifestyle, infrastructural disruption, educational beacon and welfarist populism. But Jakande was not only about his transformational doings as governor. Before he was governor, he was a journalist. No mean one at that. He was, however, an Awoist, a man who exemplified the Yoruba sage and soldiered with him in crypts and sunlight. He wrote and edited and was even custodian of his ideals as the steward of The Nigerian Tribune. When Awo was jailed, Jakande suffered with him in his temptation behind bars.

So, today, it is that aspect of Jakande that fascinates this essayist. It is a narrative subsumed in the avalanche of accolades on his nonagenarian birth mark. What is the quality of Jakande’s courage? We saw it as he soldiered as a young man beside and behind Awo. He recorded with flair and perspicacity the toils and agonies of Awo’s trials. We saw him as governor fight for programmes mocked by his adversaries. His cancellation of the school shift system was revolutionary in the city. Yours truly attended an afternoon school.

He mushroomed the city with schools to bring every ward to learn in the morning. His NPN critics called them cowsheds. He soldiered on. He built the largest number of housing units ever in Nigerian history by any government, whether federal or state, within four years. He opened what we know as the Lekki Corridor today. He was a seer as an environmentalist, pioneering a day off to clean the city. We cannot forget another act of prescience: he began the Metroline Project, to plumb the city with rail transport to ease a metropolis of bourgeoning population. Buhari scuppered it but later apologised.

His profile overspread the nation. He was called the action governor. In Yorubaland, and among the progressives, he was called Baba kekere. He was austere in manners. He abhorred the magnificence of office. He lived in his modest home, rode his Toyota Crown, was not drawn to the vanity of travels abroad, or the extravagancies of official boasts or swagger, was never a fop even for ceremonies. He loved his confectionary, Tom Tom, as if he needed something sweet that also reminded him of the bitterness of human suffering. Baba kekere means literally the little father. It, in earnest, meant the heir to Awo, the father of Yorubaland and politics.

How was it that Jakande never rose to take the crown as the leader of the Yoruba? One, it was a question of charisma. He was a doer, not a charmer. He was no orator, not an absorbing conversationalist, though a deep thinker and practical man. He was not an impresario in political gatherings. He was an organiser, but not a broker. Hence when he pushed the candidacy of Femi Agbalajobi, his name made Agbalajobi a top contender but he was eventually toppled. However, the big challenge came after Abiola’s June 12 mandate tested the Yoruba mettle. Jakande joined the Abacha regime, just as Olu Onagoruwa and Ebenezer Babatope. They joined not arbitrarily, but as a way of putting the June 12 men in government as a transition ploy until the dream was realised. Whether it was an act of hopeless gamble or naivety by Abiola and his men has become a question for historians and political scientists. In his autobiography of reportorial rigour and voyage in Nigerian history, Chief Olusegun Osoba recalled in his book: Battlelines, that even Abiola saw the June 12 struggle as already a financial pressure and thought it necessary as a respite that his followers joined the junta.

But Abacha did not flinch. Abiola eventually mobilised and the sweep of Yorubaland and other progressive redoubts in the country decided on a battle-to-the-death against Abacha. When Jakande and others in government were asked to leave the junta, they refused. Here lies the question? How could a man called the heir stand on the other side instead of in the vanguard? Was it an act of discretion or a sellout?

Read Also: Buhari greets Lateef Jakande at 90

The issue then was that Jakande, Babatope and Onagoruwa thought they were under watch, and if they tried to show any sign of disloyalty, they would be razed to death. The story of Ibru, who almost died from the Junta’s attack, was a case in point. But the counter story was that quite a few others who were not in government were being chased all over the country, including Enahoro, Soyinka, Tinubu, Osoba, et al. Some appointees escaped out of the country.

So, was it because they thought they were under special watch, more acute than the others? The late Gani Fawehinmi fumed often that his bosom friend Onagoruwa was cohabiting with the goggled despot. Together they had asun (special delicacy) and pounded yam and travelled out of town on many weekends.

Some said suicide was the option. But not so for others who risked all and slipped through the famous NADECO route? Was it because they lacked cunning? Courage without cunning is futile. Maybe they had too much cunning and so couldn’t dare. Jakande has paid since for his choice or dilemma. He has never been embraced in the inner sanctum of the Yoruba. His echo may have been heard. His name was hardly invoked, and when he was invoked, he was never beckoned. He never once was a steersman of the southwest breezes. He has remained in the quiescent fringes of the rumble of Yoruba politics since 1999.

In Yorubaland, politicians always pray not to commit what the Bible designates as sin unto death. In other parts of Nigeria, Jakande would have risen into a myth-like status. In the Southwest, however, his clay feet loom large. It is because the Yoruba are an ideological race. Onagoruwa in death was not washed of the sin. Neither is Babatope, whose voice once had the virility of a town crier. Jakande seems to enjoy some grace. Maybe a part of the Yoruba heart heard Mahatma Ghandi’s words: “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.” Part of this is his work in Lagos. But it is a genius of development, not of character. Today people see him the way historian Thucydides writes of the great Pericles: “We have not left our power without witness, but have shown it with mighty proofs.”

But it is because his genius did not translate to courage in the tough hour of his people that he did not soar from Baba kekere to baba. That is the flipside of the great LKJ.

Sylva for oil man

As the President contemplates his cabinet, a few sensitive positions call for scrutiny. One of them is minister of petroleum. Since Kachukwu is not in the reckoning, a name that pops into mind is that of the former governor of Bayelsa State, the spry and lanky fellow, Chief Timipre Sylva.

His politics as a Buhari partisan and his resume with oil and politics qualify him aplenty. He has been in the epicentre of the oil producing region. He is also the most senior Buharist from the Ijaw nation. He was a Buharist before the word was coined when the former general was in the doldrums of presidential ambition, and few looked his way. Sylva gambled with him then.

His appointment will show Buhari as one who rewards loyalty, a point some critics are apt to point out. As special assistant to former oil minister Daukoru, he was a go-to man in planning and conducting the most transparent oil bid-round adjudged to be the best ever in Nigeria, generating over a billion dollars in revenue for the government.

During his time, they ended the chaos in the supply and imports of products by establishing the PPPRA. As governor, he conceptualised the Amnesty Programme, the signature achievement of the Yar’adua administration. He is the oil man of the cabinet. So let the man who has successfully patrolled the terrain be made petrol man.

July 29, 2019
Eye in the sky

Professor Wole Soyinka may not think it, but he asserted a literary irony in his recent intervention on the problem of security in the land. He said the issue seems to have overwhelmed the president. In his famous poem conceived when the bandit was not even conceived, he wished travellers safe trips.

The famous lines read: “You must set forth at dawn/ I promise marvels of the holy hour.” Anyone who travels across the country today knows there is no holy hour in Nigeria. The poet’s prayer had a prophetic insight. Every cleric craves the comfort of such supplications.

Years past when Soyinka published his memoirs, You must set forth at dawn, I discussed it with a few gentlemen, including former Osun State Governor Rauf Aregbesola. The former governor rooted the poem in a Yoruba prayer for dawn travellers. He recited the lines to me and a few others with gusto.

But not all who read the poem would see the holy hour as pertaining to morning travels alone. In the Roman Catholic tradition, the holy hour refers often to the night. Some Anglican churches also observe this often at night.

It derives from Jesus’ night of prayerful watch as his crucifixion loomed, when he said, “My soul is extremely sorrowful, even unto death.” At that time he bemoaned his apostles for their faithless sleep. So, if Soyinka’s holy hour was in the morning, others know it at night. A few people could observe it anytime, since Apostle Paul warned that it did not matter whether it is a new moon, a holy day, et al. They are “a shadow of things to come.” Even before his nightly watch, Jesus was known once to have woken up in halcyon times at dawn to pray.

Today, there is no holy hour for the traveller. So no marvels, except when by a miracle you arrive home without incident. The bandits have murdered sleep, so they don’t spare the night travels. Night is the holy hour for many saints. Even Mother Teresa of Calcutta observed her holy hour every night. Many Pentecostals burst into songs and prayers in night vigils. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the ghost of his protagonist was “doomed for a certain term to walk the night.”

At night, the traveller’s eyes are like the owl. They see without guarantees. During the day, the travellers’ eyes are alert like the owl’s. But the owl does not see in the light. So, the traveller looks but does not see until the marauders erupt for the kill, like the unfortunate case of Mrs. Olakunri, who was cut down around Ore.

So, we do not pine for holy hours until we destroy those who have murdered sleep. What we need is not just night vigil or day vigilance. What we need is a strategy to deal with problem. Rather than weave solutions, many have turned it into political weaponry.

We can look to a recent past for one of the solutions. While the federal government idea of sending soldiers to the highway looks reasonable, it is no more than a Band-Aid. It only stops them from attacking where the soldiers are within sight. As the Igbo proverb shows in Things Fall Apart, Emenike the bird says the bird has learned to fly without perching because men have learned to shoot without missing. The posting of soldiers will not arrest or stop the banditry. It only rots and develops pus.

I recall the days of Kashim Shettima as governor of Borno State and the birth of the civilian JTF. These young persons came into the fray because of the failure of institutionalised intelligence agency. These civilian young men and women were recruited from the communities, and they knew who was a peacemaker and who was a militant. They began to flush them out, and even engage them in fights. When the Nigerian Army was failing, and losing strategy and spirit to duel the marauders, the civilian JTF stood in the gap. Their exploits have been underwritten, and they deserve their stories to be properly documented as models of heroism and community protection in a time of crisis.

Eventually, some of the practitioners were seen to have been underage, and the structure abused in parts. It however does not detract from its essential virtue as a civic powerhouse during the firestorms of the Boko Haram insurgents.

We can have the equivalents all over the country. First, they know their communities. They can be recruited and serve as intelligence gatherers for the police, the NSA and other bigger structures of state.

Secondly, it is a ready way to tackle youth unemployment. Many idle youths would easily join. A place like Zamfara State could use such a structure. The gold mines are wasting away. With the youths fishing out the hoodlums, the gold mines with proper work can turn the gold into structured means of wealth than can employ the youths with the return of normalcy and peace.

Again, the great weapon in all these is information. No war or crime-busting is executed without the use of information. War spies played more role than weaponry in a number of big wars in history, including the Vietnam War, the First World War and Second World War. What we need in this instance is the technology of the drone.

The drone is the weapon of the future. They are not manned, but they see what the human eye cannot see. They can also operate as stealth machines. They hover out of sight but see all. They are the modern-day eye in the sky. All we need is to buy and deploy them all over the forests of a thousand demons in the country. In the southwest, in the north, in the east and south-south, we have big, vast forests. They cannot be scoured with men on foot. Soldiers may follow their evil trails, but the forests are too vast for such labour.

Within hours, the drone would collect information and flash it to the situation room. Immediately, military action can be deployed. It could be a sortie from helicopter gunship, or if within striking distance, the soldiers can get there and dislodge or arrest the goons.

The drones that can do these are not too expensive for a government that has spent so much on security with relatively little result. The fact is that the service chiefs have not accounted, naira for peace, what they have done with our humongous billions on security.

We need civilian JTFs to complement the drones. Until then, peace will be a pie in the sky.

July 22, 2019
El Rufai double talk

It is not in his character to be tame or modest. On that note, Malam El Rufai did not surprise. There is something intrinsically disturbing about the Kaduna State governor’s penchant for attention. He seems to be banging his shoes like a public desperado. He is like Oscar, the character in Gunter Grass’ Nobel Prize-winning novel, Tin Drum. He shatters glasses when he screams. Like Oscar, El Rufai is the smallest in the room but his voice equals anarchy. He has become the Nigerian Napoleon without the heroics or exploits.

So, he did it again. He employs a rhetorical decoy. He wants to appear to be indicting his region, and so appear a nationalist or patriot. The great writer Samuel Johnson probably had the likes of him in mind when he described patriotism as “the last refuge of the scoundrel.” There were many false nationalist in Johnson’s Europe that boiled and cooled simultaneously as nations formed and dissolved in his time. So, El Rufai says the north is poor while the south is better endowed. But he cancels that out by stirring northern irredentism. He says the north is honest, implying that the south signifies duplicity.

By that very double face, El Rufai committed what psychoanalysts call a Freudian slip. He articulated clearly what he thought he was doing in opaque words. There are far too many people who cannot be conned, not least a person like this writer who knows enough about the nuances of language like anybody on earth. He was trying to achieve two things at the same time. He wanted to appear as an authentic Nigerian while retaining his quintessence as Fulani warrior. In doing both, he failed, and achieved neither.

He feigns the rhetoric of brutal honesty in a camouflage of conciliation, and a camouflage of conciliation under a rhetoric of brutal honesty. He wants to show he loves the north and south, while saying at the same time he loathes the north and south. It makes him lukewarm, neither left-handed nor right-handed, neither hot nor cold, what the God of the Bible says he would spew out of his mouth.

Those who know him see the root of this divisive language. He is eyeing the top post in the land. He wants to also sort of pacify those who excoriated him for overstepping the miry earth of Lagos politics. He wants to play godfather while trying to behead him. He was dazed by the backlash, and now the fellow has spun a cobweb for himself by trying to be a northern authentic without undermining the south, which he must embrace in order to gain traction in the 2023 sweepstakes.

But this man threw stones without shielding his glass windows. In pushing the divisive aspect of his words, he forgot that he has been a divider in chief in Kaduna politics. Was it not the fellow who dared the Christian by flushing out his Christian deputy and projecting a Muslim-Muslim ticket in a time when the state citizens are on the opposing sides of the holy books? Was it not El –Rufai, who became a master statistician when the Fulani herdsmen and the Christian neighbours were locked in a blood duel. It was like the conflict that Spanish playwright Federico Lorca wanted to resolve in his masterwork Blood Wedding. The two Fulani and their neighbours are locked in a sort of blood wedding because Kaduna is their wedding scene but only bloodshed separates them. Yet rather than bring love and marriage, he stirs passions and buries petals in blood.

He has been unable to make himself a man of the people, and to win an election as he did never made him a beloved. He is a cynical politician who knows how to exploit the foibles of a slight majority to win an election. That is the sort of crisis in the west today. Conservatism has been redefined by demagogues and wayfarers of dark impulses. They appeal to barbarian fears and tribal fantasies. They win just enough votes to make the society miserable. The crisis of Brexit today in the United Kingdom is fraying the nerves of the first great modern liberal state. Now, they are hoisting fears rooted in their natal past. Theresa May is the second prime minister victim of the fear of Europe, and blacks, and Muslims, and Asians. They want to hide in their own sewer. Boris Johnson will take over without any specific idea how to free Britain from the joy of a united world. He is likely to meet a deadlock, and put his country in a web of negotiations without a solution.

El Rufai indicted the northern elite when he said his region has fallen far behind the south in poverty, education and other indices of development. He should know that he has been part of the pampered elite in the past two decades. He has been a stoker of bonfires of backwardness. He should have gone further to name all the men who made this happen.

He is a feudalist who is pretending to be a democrat. He has fattened on the spoil of this decadent ideology, and he will do well to name himself as one of that privileged men who would not trade the marble palace for a pigsty comfort with talakawas. That is the hypocrisy of the age.

The Kaduna State governor ought to understand that he cannot hoodwink Nigerians with his rhetoric of hate. We have seen through him. He cannot show that it is not actuated by presidential ambition. The nation does not crave men who divide at this time of ethnic incineration. He worked in the shadows when Buhari plotted himself as his replacement in case the worst happened. So, we know the ambition is is still alive, and so is his hate.

Hail to the Duke

Many call him the Duke. I do, too. Nduka Obaigbena first popped into my consciousness as student in Government College, Ughelli. He had brought a famous musical group known as Osibisa to perform on campus. Who was this student as entrepreneur? I did not know him in person. I just wondered at his audacity. Later, his cartoons known as Lekeleke flourished in The Nigerian Observer. The cartoons had a mordant, irreverent tone. He was my senior at Ughelli, and I forgot about him until I learned he was already working with the world-famous Time magazine, posting Nigeria as spotlight. That was followed by a dramatic magazine called Thisweek, with the line “The world according to Nigeria This week.” It was journalism as innovation. He called it “a generational statement.” It was also the golden age of the magazine. He brought together some of best and brightest in the journalism firmament. And some of the best investors and technocrats from Gamaliel Onosode to Chief Hope Harriman. It reigned for a while, and beautiful was that reign.

Some thought he was done. Then came Thisday, a newspaper of innovation, and it has projected a distinct voice, even if not always salutary to some. He has brought a panache to journalism, the back page, the aesthetics, the front page as advert, the gloss on Sunday, the vision of the newspaper as not merely a newspaper but a communication organism. He has his flaws, but Obaigbena is a rare spirit in this generation, who has embossed journalism with milestone acts that few can equal. He just turned a young 60, and I say sixty cheers to a genius.

July 15, 2019
Busola’s equivalent

Questions will linger, even when it seems the cause celebre is over. No affair of the heart, especially where sex roils, ever fades into the grave. Even when it is only suggested, without a scintilla of proof, it overruns the human imagination. Hence writers and movie directors have steamed movie screens and pages with the forbidden romance between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. Why? Because sex is the only deity without a shrine. The shrine, however, is not tactile. You cannot touch. It lurks and frisks in the heart, eluding even the owner of the heart.

In its name, war theatres have burned, bullies roared, mansions erected, kingdoms rose and fell, dictators trembled, patriarchs bowed, families atrophied, fathers betrayed son and daughter, father defiled daughter, father cuckolded son, son overthrew father. Sex stalked the best tales of history. Josephine and Napoleon and the Napoleonic wars. Anthony and Cleopatra and the Roman epics. Gowon and Edith, Ojukwu and his re-enactments of David and Bathsheba, all in the Nigerian civil war. Even the birth of the holy of holies, the Church of England, was powered by the fiery loins of Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn. Many suicide bombers would be earthly saints if they didn’t fantasize about the many virgins swirling in the hereafter. Even MKO Abiola, our great June 12 hero, was nothing without his pacts with his flesh.

Even in literature, tales fail where sex does not perspire. Homer’s The Iliad was all about Penelope, Okonkwo’s machismo would fall limp without his escapades, Soyinka’s Death and King’s Horseman will faint if the protagonist did not rethink the lush loins he was vacating. The great writers, Flaubert, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Conrad, Dostoyevsky, Sophocles, Euripides, all paid homage to sex.

So, when Busola Dakolo added to this human obsession, it only proved that the shrine was all well and good in our country. Some say they believe her. Some say she made it up. Those who believe say her story says it is not only hers but also of others, all those who have erupted into the public space with personal accounts of Pastor Fatoyinbo’s sizzles in the dark. Why, some said, did she set him up? Why did she come down in her night gown with all its prompts and temptation? Why did she drink the Krest? Why did she go to her home after the corruption? Why did she wait for two decades before blabbing? Why give him another opportunity for pelvic explosion on a car bonnet?

Whatever happened in that alleged dawn of rape and Krest, what her doubters must realise is the pedagogy of the oppressed. That is the education of Busola. A defiled person is not a normal person after the fact. If she was raped, why did she not scream at the time? Remember that this was the man she held in awe, a sort of divine rescuer. He came to replace a deadbeat dad, who was never around. He came as God’s messenger to her life. She also knew the man was a “redeemed cultist” with all the fear and trembling.

She was not only cowed in body, but also in spirit. She was therefore a dazed person. How was she to confront this defiler? How was it not her fault, she would tell herself. She would, in that subjugated cast of mind, want to seek validation even with her conqueror. She would want him to tell her she was not a bad person. That way she would keep going to him, and not only him but other men. Maybe, somehow, she would realize that it was not her fault.

That is what her traducers don’t know. Humans bond with their oppressors. They go back for comfort. It is the tyranny of oppression that the oppressor’s greatest asset is not the conquest of the body but of the spirit. According to Busola’s account, the man first conquered her spirit, therefore earning her trust. Conquering her flesh was a forgone conclusion. So, once the spirit submitted, rape was easy, even in the cosy intimacy of her home that he apparently frequented. He knew the comings and goings in the household, so he also plotted his comings and goings. This also happens in marriages, where spousal abuse is routine, but the victim remains trying to redeem themselves with the abuser, hoping they would find absolution. Singer Tina Turner suffered for many years under her husband, and she did not know she had great legs until she was free. It is such freedom that Busola sought and found elusive.

Her sort of oppression is commonplace in the realm of politics. Donald Trump is a great modern example. He would not have won, if he did not have the support of women, including suburban and educated ones. They saw protection in a man who has shown open contempt for women in word and deed. In the patriarchal age, who delayed suffrage for women, was it men? NO. it was women in the United States who fought against women’s rights icons like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

The man, who would soon be United Kingdom’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, or BoJo, has never had a reputation for treating women with respect. Recently, he had a row with his girlfriend and his neighbour had to call the cops. Not long after, he posed on a lawn with the same woman, two of them feigning a smile.

The Russians have for about a century lived happily under one tyranny after another, but they would go to war to defend their oppressor. Is Kim’s North Korea not an instance of such power of one man over a people for generations? Same applies to Filipino leader Duterte, who jeered, ‘’so long as there are many beautiful women, there will be many rapes, too. Or Brazillian leader Bolsonaro, who mocked a woman that ‘’I would never tape you because you dont deserve it’’.

Father bequeaths it to son. In Nigeria, have we not seen people vote for the same person over and over even with no example of progress. They weave myths about the personages, and they believe everything they hear and dismiss facts evident before them.

Eventually such powers fade, but before then, they bow before their oppressors until the light comes. It happens in politics as with the men of God. The men of God use miracles, as though miracles are the real evidence of God’s presence, when the devil also can do miracles. Even Jesus dismissed them as workers of iniquity. If they focus on the weightier matters of the law, they would distinguish the phony from the true.

The people who suffer avidly under such politicians and prophets are the political and pious equivalents of Busola Dakolo. But like Prometheus in Aeschylus’ play, Prometheus Bound, suffering is for a while. In the Greek sequel, the man seeks freedom by reconciling with Zeus. But centuries later, an English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, rewrote Prometheus Unbound, making the man obtain freedom by rebelling against the gods. That is the recipe Busola is seeking, to rebel against the man who played God in her life, for decades.

Rousseau had an answer that resonated in the French revolution. He exclaimed, “force them to be free.” That, perhaps, is what Busola is doing for herself.

Roach of democracy

The last time I wrote about Rochas Okorocha, I described him as seeking to be a post-governor, his own version of a dual mandate, apologies Lord Lugard. Hence, he is still running ads on television about his heroics, as though the baton has not changed hands. If you go to Imo State, you will wonder how the man governed a state with such lack of restraint. Forget about the university he built for himself while in office that looks better than any in the state or region, even though almost completed. Forget about the statue of a failed South Africa leader he erected on the same pedestal with Ojukwu, the Igbo preeminent hero. Also forget a secondary school he called Rochas College of Africa he carted away from the state’s broadcasting corp., or the estate he built or his wife built while he was in office, the poshest in the state. And forget that he erected a hand statue, named Akachi, pointing to heaven beside the estate. Forget that the exco chamber is like a civil war relic, cobwebs and cracks, from neglect and he held his exco in a place that looks like a beer parlour.

One of the endangered roads

What I could not get over were some roadworks that endangered his fellow citizens. A few of them had shown deep craters as though bombed. They were built without due process and without proper blocks and rods. I saw two bridges in Owerri that Governor Emeka Ihedioha has shut off awaiting proper investigation. On one bridge, I met staff of the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria (COREN) who had warned Okorocha not to toy with Imo lives. Parts of the bridge have dipped under pressure, the hole not revealing any proper rods.

The man said he had finished the work in Imo State, maybe for himself. And he eyes our presidency. Those who coined the phrase delusion of grandeur had not seen his type. He also built tunnels that many road users are avoiding, because they look like disasters waiting to happen. If the roads and bridges are restored, Gov. Ihedioha would have been saved Okorocha the spiritual consequences of disastrous blood guilt. He confirmed we have Roaches of democracy in this land.

July 8, 2019
Everyone a Bororo

So many are antsy. So many are angry. But so few know what RUGA will wreak when it spins into a reality in the South. In the social media, fire and brimstone are flaring daily.

Facebook is aflame, splitting the nation as Words are now swords. They are cutting tribes and faiths apart to the marrow. Twitter is quiversful with its darts. WhatsApp groups grieve and gang up. The RUGA idea is coming across as a welfare scheme to herdsmen. Many perceive it as a ploy to give the Fulani a hegemonic edge over the rest of us.

The federal government says it is voluntary. The Taraba State, by its rhetoric, expresses fears that it is a fiat. Benue State streets are in the early stages of combustion with placards of protests over RUGA settlements in some local government areas. So much is the fury that even the Vice President has had to dissociate his office from the scheme without condemning it.

The federal ministry of agriculture coiled away from a scheduled press conference. The most apparent silence is from the presidency that would not state in clear terms what it thinks about what the rest of the country is thinking. Suspicion has wired the country. The augury is inauspicious.

My own take is very simple. I call it a tit-for-tat federalism. If the federal government would unfurl billions of the nation’s resources to help a group set up colonies, or what it sees as autonomous settlements for a group of economic and ethnic adventurers in other lands, let’s democratise the idea.

You can start from my ethnic group, the Itsekiris in Delta State. We are stately dancers, our language is lyrical, our pride stout. To the best of my knowledge we live in every part of Nigeria. So, every Itsekiri man and woman who lives everywhere ought to be given a parcel of land in very state from Sokoto State to Ogun State. A budget should be assigned to us, so we decide what we want to do with it. Our cuisine is delicate and benumbing, and we can start to evangelise the great and vibrant epaulets of the Itsekiri values. We can teach locals of our proud history, the majesty of our dances, the brilliance of our imagination, build schools dedicated to Dore Numa, Nana and others, revive our architecture and show how that great tribe overwhelmed much of what is called the Niger Delta today. We can proselitise how we dared the British in the 19th century with the genius of our generals, ethos of our nationalist virtues, a mammoth blockade that paralysed the British almost out of their wits. Professor Obaro Ikime, alumnus of Government College Ughelli, where I also attended, will have his book on this subject revived with a special fund to sell this noble heritage of which we are proud.

Then, of course, the land of Kaaro Ojire will also come up with its template. Although quite a few vocal members of the group have called for a true brand of federalism, they know that people of the Yoruba stock, just like the Fulani, abound not only all over the country, but also around West Africa. They too can ask for their own lands, where some of them can set up factories and industries, from fabric to complete chain of the agricultural process that stretches from farm to factory to the market. Few know that they make Kolanuts. It is the nut of unity. They make it, the Hausa-Fulani consume it, the Igbos divinise it.He who brings kola brings life. The Yoruba brought Kola, and the life of unity. Why not make it a national treasure with federal funding? The Yoruba, always with imagination, can do a lot to change the flavour of the economy. After all, the Southwest is the wealthiest region in the country. Why not give them the lands by fiat so they can also colonise a few territories and import its commercial wizardry to the benefit even of the citizens in Kano or Kebbi?

Igbo kwenu! Known for their “trading” tackles, we can use much of their genius in turning two Naira to two billion Naira. They have been doing so without federal dollars. This is the time to take advantage. After the civil war, the Igbos were left to their own devices. No one gave them money to start businesses. They returned to Kano, Kaduna, Lagos, Port Harcourt, and within a few years, businesses whirled into profits.

Imagine if Governor Ikpeazu’s idea cruises under a national impetus.The Abia State governor has been in the forefront of galvanising anonymous Igbo geniuses in Aba. He wants to make their inventiveness into cottage industries first, and later flower into bowers of commerce. A lot of federal support can import these youths of promise to every state, so those products that many see as imitation will become the envy of the originals. After all, that was how Japan and Taiwan became Trojans of global commerce.

We cannot say enough of the Edo. Forget the impunity of its governor with a contrived legislature. The Edos, also a mini-Nigeria, have been a bastion of arts and furniture, an industry also troubled as the herdsmen are troubling us. Imagine all the geniuses in Edo furniture have money to design and carve chairs and upholstery, instead of the millions the elites pay to import. Also the western world swoons over Edo artworks, from Oxford to Berlin to New York.

The Ijaw, with fishing acumen, ought to enjoy special allocation, so they go all over the country to fish. Even where there are dry lands, we can make artificial lakes. Where the lakes are abandoned, we can revive them in places like Kano, stock them with fish and allow them to grow into fishing centres all over the country, whether in Borno or Benue.

With this federal arrangement, no one would pitch any hate at the RUGA plan as hegemonic or fulanisation. It will be either mutually assured benefit or destruction between south and north, between tribe and tribe, between faiths. Either an embrace for warmth or suffocation.

In the north, the sabon gari will have special funding, just as the Hausa quarters like the one near my childhood church in Warri will enjoy same. RUGA as a ploy will become a ruse. This way, we can reinvent the Bororo lifestyle by making every tribe a sort of Bororo.

Bard as wayfarer

Since we are in the mood of satire today, let’s refer to a master. Just before the COZA firestorm, Professor Wole Soyinka spun a tale of a modern-day wayfarer online. In a business class cabin, Soyinka had occupied a seat, before a youngster, described by oil baron Tonye Cole as all biceps and tattoo, appeared and asked the prof to leave his window seat. The man insisted in spite of pleas. Soyinka rose for him. The picture of Soyinka on the seat with the shadowy face of the impudent fellow is on facebook.

A fellow claimed he was the one and that he had a charming chat with the bard, and the bard told him he would do the same if he were the young guy. He also reported that he went to research Soyinka, implying he did not know of him, and he claimed to be a teacher at a faceless university abroad. Soyinka responded to Mo Abudu that he had no such exchange with the fellow and they never even spoke. No one is sure if the so-called report and the name are fiction. Some rude fellows applaud the man of biceps, while wise men and women said he should have shown respect and left the prof there. He is not only Soyinka, he will soon be 85. Here comes the classic. Soyinka turned the episode into a work of art. Here him:

“I don’t know how much airlines succeed in raising for their charity drives through those envelopes they distribute to passengers into which their captive donors are exhorted to deposit their loose change before disembarking. Such monies are then distributed to worthy causes all over the world, especially in the pursuit of health. What I am convinced of is that they would generate a hundred times more if they were creative. For instance, they could impose a fine on passengers who take the wrong seat on boarding, even for a second. One can only rejoice in the thought of such benefits to humanity in its efforts to eradicate all kinds of diseases, especially malnutrition, and ensure the supply of nutrients that prevent the premature onset of brain impairment.

Those who permit themselves to be persuaded, even for one second that I, Wole Soyinka, having wrongly identified a seat number like millions of travellers all the time, and all over the world, would then attempt to consolidate the error in any form, through act, word, gesture, qualify to be the first beneficiaries of this vastly improved humanitarian policy.”

The bard, with a playful self-indictment, mocks all those who have made a storm out of a seat change. Especially the part about “brain impairment.” Kudos Prof. Your words set forth like dawn.

July 1, 2019
Barbarians in the House

In the days of the Owu chief, a stink was inaugurated. He endorsed a kangaroo act in the Plateau State House of Assembly in which six out of 24 members of the House impeached a governor. By that farce, the Obasanjo PDP had sanctified a rogue process.

It told Nigerians a legislative monster of that sort could pass muster. Lawmakers took notice. It signalled the end of a governor and the genesis of turbulence in Plateau State that has taken the coming of Governor Simon Lalong to quell.

But the stink has already pervaded our politics. We saw it in Anambra State, and Oyo State, ever turbulent, embossed its own signature of impunity before Ajimobi’s era. The trend went national, though. The APC members of betrayal teamed with the minority party to overthrow the party process and worked with the clerk to elect Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki as Senate president. The rot continued.

Like effluent in the sewer, it has remained in our legislative unconscious. Fast forward to June 2019. First in Edo State, the drama of the absurd. Governor Godwin Obaseki canonised a House where nine, some say 11, members out of 24 met and elected a speaker and his deputy. So absurd was it that one of them came sartorially unprepared in a pair of shorts. A hurried impunity.

A few days later, Bauchi State caught the contagion. In the case of Edo State, the party was divided against itself. The Bauchi episode replayed the Saraki script. Eight PDP members colluded with two APC men and the sole member of the New Nigeria People’s Party to elect an APC man as speaker and a PDP man as deputy, just as Saraki and Ekweremadu paired in that dawn of Abuja conspiracy. APC in words, PDP indeed. Just like Obaseki, Governor Bala Mohammed inaugurated a house of barbarians.

The Edo drama has pitched the state governor Obaseki against his anointer and national chairman Adams Oshiomhole. Adams said what happened in Edo ran counter to republican principles. I agree. The Governor defended himself by an appeal to state party supremacy. Speaking through his spokesman, Obaseki said Adams countervailed the principle of natural justice. I laughed at such grandiloquent appeal to high ideals to support a gangster act.

If Obaseki yielded to party supremacy, he was kowtowing to a hierarchy of miscreants. Was he telling the country and the good citizens of Edo State that democracy is a Hobbesian enclave? He is supping with the devil of tyranny. Has he forgotten that as governor, he is the leader of the party? Why is he hiding under party supremacy of barbarians? Does he not know that he makes himself into a political jellyfish by inaugurating an illegality and hiding under the cover of the people, a raft of party apparatchiks who bow and tremble before him every day because he controls the state’s mammon of unrighteousness? Is he hoodwinking us? Obaseki cannot even have the boldness, however shameless, to take responsibility for his action.

He has had a lacklustre tenure so far, but if he wants theatre, it better entertain and ennoble us rather than appeal to what theorist of drama call the absurd. Shakespeare, Rotimi, Soyinka have quite a few of them. Bringing such alawada acts into governance does not enshrine republican ideals. It holds it up to mockery.

Even during the days of Adams as governor in 2014, the Jonathan men split the House because Adams was not playing fool to the mavens of the PDP in Edo State. I called it “presidential meddlesomeness” on Channels Television’s Sunrise show. Today, it is gubernatorial meddlesomeness in Edo. The guilty man is Godwin Obaseki.

The Bauchi story is a case of a minority governor who wants to use a strong arm to impose his will. Governor Mohammed ought to be careful. He has less than 10 men in the house who want him. He is flirting with impeachment Damocles. He may not know it. The people who made it possible for him to mount the throne cannot stop the legislators from coming down on him. But more importantly, the Bauchi story is about an APC flirting with political self-immolation. The APC, especially kingpins in the centre, did not like the former governor. In plotting his fall, they may have lit the tinder of party implosion. It will be interesting to see how events will unfold in the coming months.

In Edo and Bauchi, we are witnessing the sore wounds of political malice. And none of it has to do with the high calling of democracy. They are the sort of problems that come from planting the wrong seed. Its contagion is what we have today. In his novel, The Plague, the French writer Albert Camus shows how rottenness can overtake a society that allows the wrong ideas and attitudes to fester. In Central London in the 1850’s, what became known as the Great Stink overwhelmed the city. The sewer was clogged with human waste and industrial effluent and the tranquil and blue beauty of the River Thames we know today was a miasma of waste that discharged smell and gave the people cholera. The famous scientist Michael Faraday described in a letter to the The Times thus: “”Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind. … The smell was very bad, and common to the whole of the water; it was the same as that which now comes up from the gully-holes in the streets; the whole river was for the time a real sewer.”

That is the sort of problem that city bore. The parliament was forced to act when the odour choked them in session. The great legislative stink did not start today. In Poland of the Middle Ages, a writer called the parliamentary rabble, “a divinely ordained confusion.”

A parliament is the church of democracy. It should not become cult of mayhem.

Drones for drones

AS we contemplate the fire and fury of banditry in the country, an opportunity has presented itself with the election of Simon Lalong as chair of the Northern Governors Forum. He set up a formula for peace in his state that his peers copied. His colleagues will do well to encase it into the battle plan against the hoodlums of gore in the region.

No plan is perfect, but if he was able to turn it for most part to the good, it calls for optimism. Yet, he needs the centre to help with resources, especially in the area of technology. Technology is the great counterfoil to evil in this age. It is a weapon we can deploy either for war or for peace. Ekiti and Ondo States now use drones to comb the forests. In Ogun State alone, Imoke Forest is as vast as the city of Ibadan, and the Opara forest is three times as big. We cannot flush the brigands out the old way. Yet the forests in the north are more numerous, sometimes vaster and more lethal. So, Gov. Lalong will need modern drones, of the sort that Iran shot down to dare Trump. It will combat the drones of the forests, lazy men hiding under faith and tribe to commit murder. With Lalong’s strategy and Federal-sponsored technology, the brigands will be yesterday’s wound. It is drones against the drones.

June 24, 2019
Abiola’s contempt

It ennobles the souls of citizens. It does same also to that of our nation. We can look back and pick out a genuine hero and canonise him. Nobody in our history at once encases the paradox of Nigeria and deserves it like Moshood K. Abiola. Flawed he was. Flawed Nigeria is. And flawed the personages who fought and fell for the cause in those heady years.

Abiola’s daughter carolled the feeling in the tendrils of our hearts. Perhaps the most engaged, but certainly the most cerebral of MKO’s offspring, Hafsat posted a line to President Muhammadu Buhari. She warbled: “if anyone had told the Abiola Family that it is you who would do us this honour, we would never have believed it. You honoured my dad despite the relationship between you and him. You touched my heart. You even apologised for the annulment that you never caused.” She also apologised to President Buhari on behalf of her family “for whatever sin he might’ve committed against you and your family. Please forgive him.”

Even those who watched Abiola run, did not expect him to fight. He was wealthy. He lounged in luxury. He had never fought a battle in his life except for money for himself. So many thought he was a coward with a big pocket. He was no leader. He was going to sell the nation to international capital. In fact, Falana mocked in the beginning of the struggle. He said Abiola voiced out the proverbs of cowardice. You cannot clap with one hand, etc. He was in IBB’s bosom. He loved the soldiers. He was the army’s candidate. He would surrender once the soldiers said so. He had financed the hurly burly of power. He enabled what Fela called “soldier go, soldier come.”

But as time boiled on, Abiola morphed gradually from the avatar of the peacock class. He never yielded. He wanted his mandate. Few believed he would last. The man had money to make. Some said he had women to mate. He was a world traveller. His private jets were pining for the skies.

Even after IBB yielded, and there was some accommodation of Abacha, some said: “you see, we said it. He has capsized.” But they forgot that he wanted to see if they could coax the goggled brute into a democrat. Enter Jakande. Enter Ebino Topsy. Enter Olu Onagoruwa. Some others could not agree on terms and declined to be part, not because they did not want it. It was a strategy that Tony Annenih heard from M.K.O. himself after he had asked Abacha to overthrow Shonekan, who was too coy to stand for June 12. M.K.O. said if you are going to Kano, it does not matter whether you fly or go by road. Proverbs like this sounded like cowardice. But it was Abiola the pragmatic.

When the experiment failed, Abiola and others who did not enter the government, recalled the progressives from the cabinet. The morsel had melted in their mouths. They would not vacate power. The die became cast.

Abiola uttered the Epetedo declaration. The battle began that would eventually send many faithful into the trenches. The night battle was fierce, and when lightning flashed in the rain, we saw those who were on the side of the people and those who were not.

The story of June 12 was a narrative of manoeuvres, of cowards and commanders, of traitors and tyrants. But it was a human story. Hence the story of Abiola and Buhari. Buhari never was an Abiola fan. He never was a June 12 fan. He did not like IBB and he wanted him out of power. When meetings roiled in Ota, when OBJ acted a statesman, Buhari went there and made clear all he wanted was to nudge IBB out of power. Once IBB stepped aside, we never heard from Buhari again until he became a player in Abacha’s regime.

That was Hafsat’s point. Abiola was on the side of IBB. They were always friends. When Orkar coup threatened, Abiola was one of those who planned to flee the country. But when it failed, he appeared in rosy visage in Dodan Barracks in a solidarity visit. If IBB overthrew Buhari, it was because Abiola, among other factors, was behind him. Buhari could not be happy with such a man who supped with his foe.

That is why the June 12 holiday came from an unlikely source. Buhari and Abiola are shaking hands across ponds, between the living and dead. While Abiola lived, such warmth was anathema. It is a conversation like the liminal exchanges in the Booker Prize-winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. When alive, Abiola thrust his hand from his sheaves of agbada to the khaki men. That spelled him doom. Wisdom, they say, belongs to the dead.

Abiola became a hero not because he wanted it. Dele Giwa became one in spite of himself. Heroes do not come in neat packages. Churchill is perhaps the greatest British leader of all times, but the cigar-chomping, alcohol-friendly dump of a man with the wit of an angel hated Indians for fighting to be free. He even voiced out a racial slur on the great Ghandhi, describing him as a “half-naked kafir.” He gave empire a bear hug. He didn’t want colonialism to end. “I did not become the Queen’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire,” he crooned.

Thomas Jefferson penned some of the elegant words of the Declaration of Independence. In his homestead, though, all men were not created equal when they were slaves. He even overpowered a black belle, Sally Hemmings, who sired him a child. Even George Washington, perhaps their greatest leader, only wanted his slaves free after he was dead. De Gaulle had hubris, Napoleon was a nepotist. Even civilisations have Achille’s heels. Greece, the ancestor of democracy, embraced slavery. Ditto their modern icon, the United States. Soyinka famously described Ojukwu a fop, but the bearded rebel is Igbo’s preeminent icon. Paul wasted the Church, but he became its greatest exponent.

“No one’s virtue is complete,” wrote Brecht in his famous play, “the great Galileo loved to eat.” But that was Abiola, the quintessential Nigerian hero. He loved his parties. He loved his money. He clothed himself in the vanity of modern attire. He comforted himself with many women. He even cuckolded “lesser” men. If he was fiery in libido, so was he for justice.

It took June 12 to let us know that. Real heroes do not prepare for it. That is why I disagree with the words of French diplomat and wit, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand. He said, “Love of glory can only create a great hero. Contempt for glory creates a great man.” Abiola was a great hero because he was a great man. True heroes are not idealists of fame. They just want to get things done. Abiola did not want to be a hero. He just wanted to be president. But when he faced the challenge, his principles triumphed over vanity.

So, were others who fought. Men like Kingibe fell by the way side. Even kola Abiola, who is now voluble, was absent when others like Enahoro, Tinubu, Soyinka, et al sacrificed. Kola should have told us concrete things he did other than “consult.” Where was he when Bagauda kaltho died, when people like Yours Truly were under surveillance for my work for his father’s newspaper, The Concord Press, when men like Alex kabba escaped the gulag and hid in U.S. embassy before fleeing abroad? Kola was too cosy a creature, hence his father did not even, by his own confession, want him involved. What was his contact with NADECO?

Buhari did not like Abiola, but Buhari hated IBB. He might have allowed hatred to consume him. He didn’t. It might even be that he adopted June 12 to spite IBB. But if IBB is a bigger enemy than Abiola, it is because Abiola was a metaphor of big idea. Here lies Buhari’s big heart. Heroism is never a straightforward tale. Abiola is a hero for his contempt for glory, but weakness for principle.

Kudos to her

Senator Oluremi Tinubu’s place among the dame of Nigeria’s achievers must attract more than cursory attention. Some see her as walking her husband’s coattail. Her great achievement was not just winning a Senate seat three times, but fighting what she called a gentlemen’s club. She has been vocal and engaged. Few know that many an artisan and menial skilled workers in the Lagos and Southwest had free training from her foundation, from cook to mechanic. But for me, her iconic works are for children. One, every year with a festival of songs where, amidst melody, kids eat and drink to drown the year. Of course, the Spelling Bee, an extraordinary score for literacy in the land. Her hall of fame status is kudos to an elegant woman with a heart for gender, the dispossessed and the generation in the bud.

June 17, 2019
Posterior governor

His antics bring to mind the description of King Leopold of Belgium in the 19th century as the “big-minded man in an insignificant kingdom.” Or what Shakespeare said of men who have grown too big for their status. The English bard described such persons as “man dressed in a little brief authority.”

Even out of power, Rochas Okorocha seems to be angling for a new position in Imo State. Such a position, for want of a better word, is “post-governor.” Others of his set are content to fade as “past governors.” He cannot be post-governor because the position is anathema not only to common decency but also to law. I would rather call him, in a burst of magnanimity, a “posterior governor,” which ossifies him in the back seat, in the shadows of Imo State politics.

Rather than depart in peace, he still revels in tumult. He says he left N42.5 billion in the purse, yet he had not handed over to his successor, Emeka Ihedioha. He started acting like a post governor, dictating what the money should be used for. He broke it down his comical way. He said N8.1 billion should go for the payment of salaries and capital projects. Was he referring to salaries he did not pay, or capital projects he did not do or he did not do well like a bridge in Owerri that he installed without rods. A death trap, a commissioned murder weapon against his own people.

Whereas even less than a month in, Governor Ihedioha has set in motion some road work, in spite of the fact that the handover notes reached him over a week after Okorocha departed power, or power departed him. He said he left N5.2 billion for pension arrears; the megalomaniac did not want to pay the pensioners these past years. He was not only magnanimous to the old men and women, he was also so kind to the incumbent governor that he handed him all that money and wanted him to take the glory. The question, though, is, why is he praising himself like the proverbial lizard who fell from a tree? I thought he wanted Ihedioha to get the glory, so why is he announcing it himself? He said he decided to leave it to his successor, especially the man who bested his in-law who was a parody of democratic candidature.

He said he loved education so much he left N7.6 billion to renovate schools and his heart so beat for the subaltern Imo people that he bequeathed N21.6 billion for rural roads. How many schools did he renovate in eight years? How many rural roads did he pave, or liberate from the wilds of dust and bushes? This man is playing “post governor” by rhetoric, and governor after the fact – a speechifying Excellency. By making himself a “a post governor,” he is admitting he did not govern while he was on the throne. A “post governor” who could not hand over to his successor. Even vehicles of government are not available. Governor Ihedioha still acquits himself in his own vehicles. Okorocha is basking in a rumour of his own arrest. It was a burlesque show of pre-emptive strike, to strike the EFCC before EFCC strikes him. Who knows, maybe EFCC is not contemplating him. The EFCC announced that he was not arrested. Was anyone afraid?

There was some hoopla of a shame of a monument that was being brought down. Maybe some of his ardent lovers still live in the past. They probably think Zuma’s legacy is so beautiful. Or maybe some lovers of Imo want his monument down.

Whatever the case, I believe the monument of Zuma should come down. It is a disgrace. Maybe Okorocha wanted the monument as an indirect monument to himself, so when people see the monument decades from now, they would ask, who put this here, and the answer would be “one Okorocha, who was governor.” It is a comedian’s conflation of legacy. His “bromance” with Zuma, be it homo-erotic or hero-worship, belies all the heroes of Igboland from Zik to Achebe. He did not refer to some of the rumpus he left behind. The doctors went on strike, and the new governor has put that to rest with the spirit of a peacemaker. Ditto to the state polytechnic that now smells like an olive branch because the new man is not like King Leopold. The same thing cannot be said of the man in Ibadan, who hit the wrong strides as though manically returning Oyo State to the tempest that Ajimobi quelled.

Okorocha wants to be a monument, because he is not monumental; if he is monumental, it is that he is a monumental failure. He is a perversion of what the Poet Lord Byron said of Greece after it had lost its glory and empire: “Immortal but no more,” or what the same poet wrote, referring to legacies that should expire: “I am more fit to die than people think.” An Okorocha would be what writer Walter Raleigh called “a monument to dead ideas.”

Governor Ihedioha has said the man did not hand over. Okorocha never had anything gubernatorial to say to that. Okorocha is still wounded by his loss, his inability to perpetuate family ties in Imo democracy. He was one of the headaches that APC party chairman Adams Oshiomhole had when he wanted to turn democracy into family entitlement.

He acted against the Igbo grain. He wanted also to be a royalist in a democracy. Maybe because he had lived in the north for much of his life, he became a feudalist who wanted to impose a king. The Igbos resisted it against the white man. Now they have overthrown it with the thumbprint on Election Day. By doing that, the people of Imo State embraced republicanism over royalty and decided they wanted a new man. It did not make sense for him to start playing governor. He is in a dream, and he probably thinks his delusion of grandeur would help him out.

He should allow the new man to settle and do the work the people set him out to do. He cannot overthrow the people’s mandate. He probably thinks he is one of the best gifts to Imo State politics. He once flirted with Nigerian presidency. He belongs to the poor class of political elite that Shakespeare loathed in his famous play, Hamlet. In that play, the tragic figure defined the politician as “the one that would circumvent God.” He said it while viewing a gravedigger holding up a skull. Shakespeare meant that power is vanity. Okorocha should learn that. He could not hold anything sublime while in office. He could not keep his commissioners. He could not keep his deputy governors. He could not keep his lips shut.

Give them to Lawan, Gbaja and Omo-Agege

SOME have objected to Femi Gbajabiamila being speaker on the ground that the vice president Prof. Yemi Osinbajo is the number two citizen. History shows that when the persons are competent, there is no issue. Even if balancing is desirable, competence is inevitable. When Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe was the number one citizen as president in the First Republic, who was the Senate president? It did not matter that the Onitsha man parleyed with Nwafor Orizu, an Nnewi man, as Senate President. In the Second Republic under Shehu Shagari, Dr. Alex Ekwueme was vice president when Ume Ezeoke was the number four citizen as speaker of the House of Representatives. When Jonathan ruled the roost, Ike Ekweremadu was deputy senate president and Pius Anyim was secretary to the federal Government. In the same way, no one objects that the president is from the north as Lawan wants to be senate president. And no one should object if for the first time, a south-south figure in Ovie Omo-Agege becomes the deputy senate president.

June 10, 2019
The army in us

IT is 20 years but this democracy has more traits of adolescence than manhood. We are still like the title of James Baldwin’s novel, “Going to meet the man.” The man in our democracy still eludes like a tantalising fruit in a mango tree.

In this country lurk anti-democratic demons – the reign of monarchism, the shadow of the strong man, the corruption of money, the fear of change. But hanging over all these is the spirit of impunity. It hangs like the sword dropping blood in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It haunts us like Banquo’s ghost.

But no other way to look at it than the power of the soldier over our lives. It is not for nothing that two of our four presidents in the past 20 years were soldiers. Obj and PMB were not only soldiers but were military heads of state. It is like the double episode of the rapist who becomes so gentle, the victim agrees to wed him.

But the evidence of the rapist overshadows the marriage. Nuptials do not erase character. Character appropriates marriage. That explains why we still love the king, or will confer us with chieftaincy titles. And we still embrace the strong man. With these two traits, we loose ourselves in the allure of money and resist change. It began with Obj, whose martial background was too strong to let go. He saw himself as the father, or more appropriately, the baba of our democracy. He ruled rather than reigned. He took advantage of the queer power of the centre in a federal union. The states could not and cannot stand on their own. So, the centre serves as the receptacle of indulgences. Every governor comes, bowl in hand, making the states the al majiris of our democracy.

The other civilians saw the baba as a model. Even Yar-Adua fell to it somewhat, although he was hemmed in by illness. Jonathan followed, and his rhetoric of self-indulgence and defiance were only a rung lower than that of Obasanjo. His regime stole with flourish and ostentation. The British press celebrated our spendthrift elite on London streets. Our purse was like a broken dam. Obasanjo hid the corruption of his time by blackmailing his foes with the EFCC and ICPC. Offence was the best defence. He even wanted to perpetuate himself in power with a third term.

PMB has defied calls to follow court orders. El Zakzaki and Dasuki continue to languish in detention as though the courts were impotent. Even now, the Navy is holding 40 civilians captive. Barrister Femi Falana (SAN) has been yelling that this cannot be permitted in a democracy. Persons are held in detention both in vessels and underground of their facilities in Abuja.

Falana has written a letter to the president on the matter, but the impunity festers. Rather than charge the persons to court, the Navy has acted as an arbiter of justice. It has challenged Falana to take them to court.

The military overhang is imperious and increasingly a presage of darker days. Soldiers in advanced societies have joined democracy and subjected themselves to republican values. It began with Cato the Younger in Rome who relinquished his fidelity to tyranny and devoted his life to republican virtues. He became a counterpoise to Caesar and died of suicide for the cause. He became a role model to America’s first president George Washington.

Cato was the first major figure in history to turn soldiery against tyranny and sow the seed of the democratic idea. Hence the Poet Jonathan Mitchel wrote: “Great in the council, glorious in the field.”

We have had in the modern era soldiers who became statesmen. Too much blood in Napoleon’s hands, but he inspired a generation of European young, even spawning a literary classic, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. We have had others like Churchill, De Gaulle, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Tito, Eisenhower. De Gaulle kicked against democratic pricks of the French and sparked a youth revolt that birthed a new republic.

Soldiers can make good democrats but they have to take off their martial sloughs first. We see it in kings and generals, even democrats.

We saw that recently in Kano in the battle between the emir and the governor, which demonstrates the power of history over impulses of change. But more dangerous now is the appropriation of impunity by the civil society. The power elite have no monopoly of violence. They have begun to imitate their masters. If their masters cannot slough off their military fatigues, the street and bush hoodlums have decided to tailor their own uniforms – in their minds. They are not trained. They just became ragtag armies of impunity, laying waste our resources, kidnapping the innocent, holding ransom the governor and the well-heeled.

If the martial strain in our democracy is not checked from the top, we shall suffer it from below. This is not a democracy of obeisance. A constitution monger of the French Revolution, Abbe Sieyes once said, “power from above, confidence from below.”

Those in the nether regions of society are not seeing it that way in the country. Those from the top think they are immune to the heart cries of the poor and vulnerable. They are daring the power elite. The power elite now are afraid.

Democracy cannot be said to have failed altogether. We have had it unbroken for 20 years, and that’s a record. Democracies do not start perfect. They work with myths. The American was rooted in the idea of Manifest Destiny with the founding father. The French rose from the three Rs of the 1789 revolution. The British picked it up from the Magna Carta. A nation fails when it forgets its founding myths. Athens rose on its myths until it flourished and fell victim of hubris. It forgot its myth of Daedalus and Icarus, and its legislature abolished democracy. It prioritised man over gods. “Man is the measure of all things,” said Protagoras.

Nigeria does not even have a myth, a rallying emotion. Not Awo, not Zik, not Ahmadu Bello provided it because of interplays of suspicions and jealousies that still plague us today. The army coarsened it, and has haunted us since. To save our democracy, we must first kill the army in us, and throw up leaders that will look beyond those ancient burdens.

One tusk for Lalong

I visited Jos a few days ago, and it heartened to see a city back to the semblance of its old bustle. It was not just because of the sanguine weather or the variegated fruit fest from grapes to apples. It was an opportunity to visit its Wild Park. What drew my attention to it was Governor Simon Lalong’s adoption of the elephant and male lion. His wife Regina adopted a lioness. The park heralded one with its row of pine trees, giving the sense of natural ambience of animals.

I met the elephant, ruddy, young and full of life. I befriended it as my guide Thomas Artu encouraged me to feed it. I gave it a stalk with fresh leaves. It concentrated on me as I handed it the food. It sealed our bond until I moved on and saw a variety of animals from the sprightly Jackal to the opportunistic Hyena. The python coiled ominously. The ferret’s eyes menaced. The lioness in its massive cage and fresh fur ignored me peevishly and swaggered to shelter beside a wall. Recently a lion escaped the zoo. According to Artu, the cage was not properly locked, and it slid out to meet the keeper with a goat in hand. “The lion was born in the cage and did not know anywhere else. It was only fed with goat and went after the goat while the keeper fled,” he said. The lion did not go far, but crouched in a nearby bush until the security forces “quelled” it. I saw a 260-year-old tortoise, many a crocodile asleep and the predatory bird known as Marabou stocks. The park houses 102 buoyant animals in an eight square kilometres expanse.

As he adopted those animals, Governor Lalong immediately had offers from persons, including two white men, who wanted to adopt. . Each cage will bear the name of the adopter. He thinks as peace returns to his state, the parks are a way to highlight tourism, wealth and normalcy . I agree.

June 3, 2019
Suicide

It cheers the heart that an old general adds a word to our political vocabulary. Not since Adelabu of what Soyinka calls the Penkelemesi years, the grand loquacity of the great Zik, the pompous orations of Mbadiwe and local vintage of Akintola’s phrases have we seen coinages for the ages.

It is regrettable, though, that when Obasanjo conjures a word it turns out to be Fulanisation. But Obasanjo lacks the glamour of those men of literary legacy. The Owu chief has drawn flaks and combative praise for characterising the waves of northern banditry, including Boko Haram, as Fulanisation and Islamisation of Nigeria.

Before we go into the merit of this assertion, we must know that Obasanjo is a bitter man. Few know that the 2019 poll was the Owu chief’s first major loss. For a man of his age, Cicero says it is his “play’s last act.” He had been a serial winner. He had been blessed with opportunism. He had been like the Italian soccer striker, Paolo Rossi, who was absent in the game until he had slivers of chances. When he had them, he scored. Others toiled, he basked like quicksilver. Obasanjo had been a sweatless conqueror. He reaped where others sowed. The scriptures capture the old man’s legend thus: “One man builds, and another occupies.” Obasanjo had been a tenant with a landlord’s certificate.

He must be in a giddy state today. He is in an unfamiliar time warp. The old man is in a daze. His hilltop palace must be lowly and lonely these days. He thought Buhari would win the last election. But he had no choice but to dig in with Atiku, the old foe whose friendship he had publicly laughed to scorn. The scorn is now their fair-weather reconciliation, their Judas kiss. He had fallen out with his former army subordinate. No more salute from the highbrow of the tall inferior. The Owu chief was cornered into the opposition.

Not like in 2015 when he made a public extravaganza of tearing a PDP card and later welcomed fawning APC invitees. He gambled and lost this time. He has lost his old battle gears, his vivacity of a pugilist. If he dances now it will be a play of self-mockery, like what Samuel Becket designates as risus purus, a laugh laughing at itself. Roger Rosenblatt calls it an abysmal farce. Obj seems to have found his voice somewhat, and in an unlikely place: a church.

It tells how low many so-called men of God have sunken. Rather than make the church a sanctuary of holy writs, it has morphed into a pedestal for political jobbers. If Christ comes to earth today in the flesh, he would whip many of them who think glamour overtakes sobriety of spirit. Nowhere in scripture supports a politician preaching on the podium. What qualifies them? A part of society that has been, for most part, no role model for us except to rig elections and purloin our wealth and misgovern us.

It was because of this that the concept of the two luminaries was developed in the Middle Ages. One is the luminary of the secular world, and the other of the spiritual. It was derived from the scripture when God created two luminaries, one for the night and the other for the day. The medieval age used that concept to distinguish the church and state. They are as apart as what Nobel Prize-winning Poet, Rudyard Kipling wrote in his ballad, “East is east, West is west, And never the twain shall meet.” It is a violation of the holies like idolatry, and Paul said: “Come ye from among them, and be ye separate.”

The Owu chief’s claim of plots to Fulanise Nigeria is not sincere. I thought he knew more about that because he himself was Fulanised. Was it not them he ran to when his people rejected him in 1999, and they vaulted him to be president? Was it convenient then to be Fulanised? Did he not betray his kinsman, General Olufemi Olutoye, as recorded in Kole Omotoso, Just Before Dawn, when he orchestrated his premature retirement? The man had drawn Obasanjo’s attention to the lopsided projects and attitudes of the military government. Rather Obj called in Shehu Yar’Adua to the office and asked Olutoye to repeat his complaint before his Fulani friend.

The same thing I wrote in an earlier essay about TY Danjuma, who is now grouching about the Fulani. His rise in the army was at Fulani behest. Would he deny that today? He and Danjuma are now born again. This is no less than a cry after the fact. Obasanjo’s words could resonate with Buhari’s critics because Buhari also opened the window. His security team is lopsided for the north. Yet, the same security team is impotent, and lacks the imagination, resolve and architecture to tackle the mayhem around the north. Buhari once asserted in anger that he is not partial. He has to show it beyond words. When his SSS chief was removed, he chose a retired man from Kano and pushed away Seiyefa Matthew, an Ijaw man, who was acting. Yet, others in acting positions from the north tend to get the job under him. Not Seiyefa. Obasanjo saw the smoke and screamed fire.

Yet we know that the problem of the north is not just about fulanising or islamising us, if that has always been an agenda. What we have today is different. Even Boko Haram is not Fulanising. The partisans are Kanuri. They want to Islamise, but the targets are everyone, including the traditional elite in the north. They want to purify Islam, according to their own lights.

Yet, as this essayist has noted in the past month, the problem is class revolt. It may not have been articulated, but the actions are clear. Those who seek God want gold first. Ask them in Zamfara. They are the poor who hate the oppressions of the feudal north. The al majiri are now targeting the mai gidas. If it is islamisation, who are the victims in Zamfara in their gold rush? Who are the victims paying fines in order to go to their farms in the Sokoto and Kebbi axis? Is it not a threat to food security? Are they collecting money to Fulanise or Islamise the Fulani? Who are the big guns who cannot now travel the routes from Kaduna to Abuja, and the highways between Kano and Sokoto? Are they not Fulani and Muslims? It is high time we realised that the failures of the feudal north is coming to terms with the subaltern rage of the common man.

Obj raised a false alarm because he knew he had committed political suicide in his hoary age by siding with a team that lost. Winston Churchill said, “The trouble with committing political suicide is that you live to regret it.” Obj’s one suicide is haunting him, and he is regretting it in public by saying the wrong things. He is not having a last hurrah.

Ajimobi’s hurrah

During the presentation of my book on Governor Abiola Ajimobi last weekend, the Alaafin of Oyo, Oba Lamidi Adeyemi 111, showed how monarchs can display class and erudition. While presenting the book, the Alaafin spoke with luminous quotes and historical allusions around the world. He articulated ideas of democracy with a fluent tongue. He also revealed how Ajimobi related with him, speaking of the governor as a man of principle. He said any time he brought matters he wanted resolved, they debated. Yet there was never one act of rancour in their father-son relationship.

Ajimobi

So, those who saw the Obaship tiff in Ibadan as Ajimobi’s contempt for the institution missed the point. It was the perfidy of those who had no liver to own up in public what they assented in private. As a man of courage, Ajimobi stuck to his principle. The same obas will become royal armies for governors in due course, and they will realise that he simplified mobilisation of the people in a quicksand city like Ibadan. A story of his forthrightness shone through in Ajimobi’s remarks about how he became managing director of National Oil. The company’s fortunes had dipped and the European directors came over to ask why. The local directors were blaming the market. He kept mum until one of the white men asked him to talk. He blamed the managing director. He said that on pain of being alienated and fired. Some of his colleagues had said same in secret but were dead from the neck up at the meeting. Rather than lose his job, Ajimobi was picked as one of two persons to interview for the top job. General Yakubu Gowon, chair of the board, told me he recommended him because he was the best of the directors. My book, The Architect and Builder of Modern Oyo State, puts his legacy in context.

May 27, 2019