The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • A tale of two governors

    On a walkway in front of Ali Modu Sherriff Primary School, a girl of about nine appeared. Fatimatu, a Boko Haram orphan, frail and cherubic, stepped into the presence of Kashim Shetima, the Governor of Borno State.

    She was not attending the school, which was overlooking the street. Shettima named the institution after a man who boasted that his people, including kids like Fatimatu, could never know he was a failed leader because they did not read newspapers.

    It is time to muse on that man, and how the biography of one man can make a difference, for good and ill.

    Borno then was not what Borno is. The signs sang in low register, but the omen was stark. Ali Modu Sherriff was governor, and took his position as shepherd like a peacock. He belongs to the class of cynical men who want to lead in order to diminish. He had no joy for posterity. He had no plan for it. So he disdained prosperity.  It is not too clear today if his cynicism came from breeding or from a contrived sense of contempt.

    But Sherriff loved to be sheriff, and that meant he was both cop and governor. He had to be a democrat. He did not love that. He embraced tyranny. He was no hypocrite. He is like the hawk in Ted Hughes poem, Hawk Roosting, in which the hawk has no penitence about preys. Except that Sherriff’s lack of hypocrisy opened him up to the sort of hubris that would have sainted him if he were a pretender.

    Such persons are a metaphor of leaders as crisis. Sherriff was a crisis as governor, and it began to show not when Yusuf, the licenser of Boko Haram, was murdered. That happened later. It was when he said that he did not care what the newspapers wrote about him because his people were illiterates.

    He took refuge in ignorance. He knew, so his people didn’t. Prophet Amos said “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” Sherriff did not care because he thought they would remain so forever. He probably wanted to fulfil the wrong intent of Prophet Isaiah’s lament: “The leaders of these people cause them to err; and they that are led of them are destroyed.” He wanted to be like the Roman emperor Nero, who wanted to wipe out all Christians. When asked what history would say of him, he replied, “By the time I have finished with them, history would not be sure if they ever existed.”

    At least Nero counted on a literate world in future. For Sherriff, history did not count. Not long after, the unlearned boys crystallised Sherriff’s idea, and so Boko Haram was born. They said Western education is sin, or haram. Sherriff’s idea had taken root. The army of the ignorant had been unleashed. He was the philosopher as portent, the prophet of mayhem and disaster in the land.

    The young who could not read looked for family. Yusuf gave them. Those who had no roof over their heads, he gave shelter. Those who were hungry, he gave food. Those whose libido burned around their loins, he gave wives. He created an alternative society. He had formed a mini-theocracy, an army of the Almighty. It was a coalescence of the underclass. His crusading ardour paid off with Boko Haram.

    Sherriff had degraded Borno into a failed state. It failed because of many things. Principally it failed because he made himself into a feudalist in a democracy, and because he did not think his people deserved to be enlightened. Awolowo’s free education, a generation earlier, shed light on youth. Sherriff afflicted his people with moth-eaten minds.

    While Awo’s seed fattened the west with prosperity, Sherriff’s bred a colony of monsters with killings, rapes and rapines. His successor Kashim Shettima served as Zenith Bank’s general manager and posted the most transaction – of up to one billion naira a day – in any bank branch in the country. It was now the wasteland. A wasted mind gave us a wasteland.

    That gives us an irony. The same Shettima became governor, and recently named a primary school after Ali Modu Sherriff in Maiduguri. It was, also for irony, when he was inspecting the school that Fatimatu came along and Governor Shettima insisted to his commissioner of education that she must be admitted to the school. Fatimatu is now a Boko Haram orphan of hope.

    Who knows, from that seed of an hour, Shettima just planted an eternity of potential geniuses. Fatimatu can be a Marie Curie, the famed physicist, or Chimamanda, or Yaa Asantewa, or Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, or Benazir Bhutto or Margaret Ekpo. In the school, a Fatimatu would not want for breakfast, or a soap to wash her body, or a bed to sleep on or a notebook to solve a maths problem or stroke out a thoughtful essay or an electric light to study at night. She will not suffocate in a sweltering weather. She would not fear for VVF or assault from oversexed adults or a prospect of premature betrothal.  A boarding school with modern amenities will nurture, comfort and protect her.

    The kind of Borno State that Shettima is bequeathing is a state of renewal. In spite of the smouldering zeal of Boko Haram, the state is in its best ferment. It is now a state of a new adventure. It reminds one of Joseph Conrad’s graphic capture of England in its age of adventure. In his Heart of Darkness, he described the men as “hunters of gold, or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of the spark from the sacred fire.”

    Fatimatu was like the girl in Jim Crow America, who was guided to school in the 1960’s because American racism forbade anyone to illumine the black mind. In Fatimatu’s case, it is a culture epitomised by Sherriff and his fellow travellers on a Neanderthal boat.

    But unknown to him, men like Shettima had already been unfurled in Borno, and the same democracy we lament will ensure that girls like Fatimatu will bloom in season, and this is the season. And she will fulfil what Conrad wondered when he wrote, “What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! … the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.”

    So, from the ebb, the Fatimatus will float to a great unknown. Even as Shettima is about to bow out, his successor, the tall, self-effacing work horse of a professor who sold firewood and drove taxi to fund his education, will take that task to the next step. Babagana Umara Zulum, the Marshal Plan Governor-elect, will now ensure that the Fatimatus will not be what Conrad calls “a lurid glare under the stars.”

    Sherriff represents all that is wrong in the north and Nigeria. Shettima lights up the antidote. The choice is ours. Emerson said, “There is properly no history, but the biography of great men.” Whose biography beckons us?

     

    For Omo-Agege

    The air is still frenetic in Abuja, especially now that the battle for the leadership of the Senate absorbs the nation. One of the positions taking prime spot is that of deputy senate president, and it looks good for Senator Ovie Omo-Agege. He should get it as the top person from the South-south. He has been around, and his recent victory at the Court of Appeal affirms his legitimacy. This caps a second victory, the first being his tiff with the Senate leadership under Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki over some rowdy men in the Senate, especially when they had no evidence against him. They were trying to blame a security lapse on a man who walked in at the same time.

    Senator Omo-Agege

    We need a Senate of responsible engagement with the presidency, not an adversarial one. The Saraki Senate has been an impulsive hawk, seeing enmity first before progress. It was fight for fight’s sake, and Omo-Agege has been a contrarian voice against that mind-set of instinctive pugilism. We don’t want doves for doves’ sake as lawmaker, but we want the people first.

  • Forest of thousand demons

    It is time to think about a penance for oil. A time to say sorry, and genuflect for the evil we have done to black gold. It was first the victim. Now, it is no longer just the black gold. It is now a god, a sort of wild, mighty and vengeful deity haunting us.

    It is not like the African ancestor, like Ogun or Oya, or some of the goddesses of the sea in African and ancient myths. Not Poseid on the ferocious Greek sea god who raked up storms and tossed martial ships. Our oil is a god that will not wait to be an ancestor before showing fangs.

    It is mocking with mordant joy our lack of fidelity to the federal idea. We decided to draw up the exclusive list in our grundnorm and made minerals a privilege of the centre. The power elite did not want oil for the Niger Delta owners. For rape mineral, oil, they dwarfed the rest.

    Oil was king, and it had to be beheaded. It was queen, it had to be raped. But no one knew it was a god. They killed it before they worshipped it. Oil also raped the budget. So, all other minerals were left. We scavenged black gold, even though we had the real gold in a number places in huge deposits, including in Osun State and the blood-gurgling effervescence of Zamfara. We had – and still have – bauxite, limestone, kaolin, silica sand, quartz, iron ore, red clay, bitumen, asbestos, marble, gemstone, glass, ball clay, etc. in every local government area.

    But we ravished the imitation of gold. Black man, black gold, black god. The black man in Nigeria plays black god to black gold. We punished the locals who embowelled it. Their farms, their pristine fishing waters, their trees, all defiled like the oil. The licensees and licensers were not local giants but greedy trespassers.

    No, the black gold was easy and they conquered it. They built corrupt empires of personal palaces, home and abroad, or rode in posh cars and corralled concubines or harangued harems. They left the Niger Delta poor and broken, of course not without local quislings.

    Now the god is angry. It has sent its curse all over the land. We are seeing it now in the north where the young are taking over the orgy of rape. It is the tale of two banditries or barbarians. The first banditry was stylised like a bejewelled beast. They asked the white man to come. The idea was hatched in ties and suits and babaringas and agbadas, et al. Officials sanctioned it with soldiers and police. Courts and government agencies anointed it. People went to school to fortify this. Churches and mosques sanctified it and blessed the carpet baggers. They spoke good English, flaunted outlandish accents. It is banditry as refinement and refinement as banditry.

    The other barbarians are howling or shrieking, or dressed in half-torn tops, their faces dripping with grubby perspiration, their biceps greasy with soot. Now, in Zamfara, and along the axis of bandits, we have a good number of them, running rampant. They mine as though entitled. It has taken the bandits for us to know that this thing called mineral wealth is rampant in the land. They say they serve god and brandish the holy book, but they serve gold more. All those who enjoyed the flamboyance of oil wealth cannot even travel without trepidation around the north.

    The bandits now are like the tenants of Fagunwa’s Forests of a thousand daemons. These are not daemons, though, but demons. They are operating from forests and the list of the forests is like an apparition. Kamuku, Kuyambana, Kagara, Gando, Fankama, Fete, Dumburum, et al. in other places, forests are an asset for wealth and glory. Here forests hoist blood and gore. They are ambushing the rich and powerful.

    If oil was left to locals in the spirit of true federalism, all the minerals would have enjoyed the same status. And state governments would have developed the minerals in their own way, enriching their peoples aplenty rather than leaving them to a federal government that only understood how to drill. In Plateau State alone, Governor Simon Lalong told of a man who earned more from mining the state than the state’s total revenue every month. Yet the president said the Nigerian structure is all right.

    When many called for restructuring, some thought they were immune in a state of injustice. They are now victims. Frankenstein monster. The foraging of minerals, especially in states like Zamfara and Niger, is only just beginning. The eruption of young men who could acquire jobs and run quiet families is also about to envelope us.

    The barbarians of refinement gave birth to the barbarians of savage revolt. It is a tale of barbarians versus barbarians. Who is worse? It is hard to say. The word barbarian has been bastardised over the ages.

    We may say they are barbarians. Attila the Hun did not see himself as barbarian, nor did the Norsemen or Magyars in Europe, nor did our ancestors who were displaced and defiled by the colonial overlords.  Nor were the Berbers of North Africa whose name was mangled. Definitions may accuse us, just as Nobel Laureate Coetzee showed in his novel “Waiting for the Barbarians,” where the barbarian is more ambiguous in the story of the locals versus colonialists. Or in Soyinka’s Madmen and Specialists.

    The best evangelists of restructuring are the bandits in the north. They are not wearing cassocks or wielding tesbiu. They are calling for it by banning the rich from taking ostrich rides on Abuja-Kaduna highway, by kidnapping the wealthy, by taxing farmers and rustling cattle, and ripping open the earth for minerals.

     

    El Rufai’s Napoleon complex

    Far be it from me to dabble into definitions of Malam El Rufai as a short man driven by fear. I will not denigrate his gubernatorial “briefness” as OBJ did in his book, My Watch, where he ran the man down with a rhetoric of contempt. I will not compare him to Oscar, the dwarf in Gunter Grass’ novel Tin Drum, who crashed everything in sight by screaming. A public desperado banging his shoes to gain attention.

    I met him the other day at Eko Hotel, and he called me a “journalistic terrorist.” I shot back and said he was a “gubernatorial terrorist.” And I am right. But first, a short history of betrayal. He is the serial genuflector, who knows how to bow and betray. First, it was Atiku Abubakar, who could do no wrong. Done with him, he swivelled to Obj on his knees. His “royal briefness” did same to Yar’Adua. His great mentor is now Buhari, who tolerates him like a worshipful pest. He said he retired four godfathers but is too cowardly to name them. He knows his claim is apocryphal. I don’t know of any godfather in Kaduna. We know of Kaduna mafia, but that was a metaphor for northern military oligarchy now expired.

    El Rufai
    El-Rufai

    He said he wanted men of the Bridge Club to amass cash to unseat Lagos godfather after a tendentious question from his fellow traveller Muiz Banire. He said he would encourage his folks to woo two million of the five million on the voter register who didn’t vote and win them over. Really? In Kaduna where he earned about one million votes, over 3.9 million persons were on the register, and over 1.5 million did not vote, more than his votes. How could he determine that if they voted, he could not be a former governor today?

    He spoke as though Lagosians are morons. There is a reason why they vote the way they do. Is Lagos not ahead of Kaduna in development, far and away? Other than bulldoze his foe’s houses and deploy statistics to divide Christians against Fulanis, he has not made glorious headlines. He was one of the few who quietly plotted to push his presidential candidacy when Buhari was ill. Here is a man who spent fewer times praying for his mentor when he was ill than he spent plotting to replace him. And did I not see him many a time at Bourdillon and Freedom House in Lagos where he paid obeisance to Tinubu, because he wanted something. Now, the same man who paved the way for a platform for him to be governor is now a sinner? He knelt under Buhari, who reached down to raise his hand. Buhari should watch out. Someone he is feeding might bite his fingers.

  • Waging the peace

    The young man up north is potentially a keg of gunpowder. And it is not his fault. The girl up north, on the other hand, is dangerous just because she is powerless.  The girl child harms by doing nothing just as the boy harms by doing everything.

    The girl does not go to school, does not fight on the streets, does not wield a gun, or even rail at a devious parent.  Yet, she marries before she falls in love; she weans a child before her womb is ready, understands rebellion but cannot read. She is the anti-hero who must watch and suffer tyranny and even dare to enjoy it. She is a victim by being the bait and bearer of suicide bombs.  She is an unwilling serpent; he a battering ram.

    The boy is testosterone. He is a vascular boil. His veins run fire and fury, even cold fire. He is angry and lets the world know it. The girl child recalibrates her rage into acts of obedience. She achieves a sort of loss of memory through work of obedience. Hers is a revolution of obedience. The young men are revolutionaries of rebellion. They hold the gun; they slash machetes in the air and through throats. They have no relationship with remorse.

    The north is witnessing a generation of angry young men. England had such a generation once, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and they did not tear away into orgies of primitive slaughter. They were Promethean in nature, and they fought in words and turned the society into self-awareness. One of the writers who embodied that movement of angry young men was John Osborne, who wrote a scathing play called Look Back in Anger, set symbolically in the life of a couple who must implode because of what they knew about themselves and their pasts.

    In the north, the rage has a strange physiognomy. They have faith and murder on one side. On the other, they have mammon, or material greed. Also with murder. It is a rebellion of god and mammon, where both are demons in solidarity. While in the northeast, we see the use of religion as a platform for dissent, in Zamfara, it is gold. It is even a corruption of the fight for justice. It is like Mr Gould in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, where a search for social justice is subverted in a banana republic style by some men who seem sold to the devil. Gould is a corruption of gold.

    So, the protest is half god, half goods. So, god and mammon become the canvas to overturn all that is spiritual and temporal. They do that by pillaging for the seductions of temporary delights. That is why some of the roads up north that used to be easy passages are now infested with kidnappers. Human beings of the high class now have to surrender some of their loot for freedom. Henry James in his great novel, The Portrait of a Lady, defines wealth as the ability to exercise freedom. The kidnappers abduct the rich so they can use it to gain freedom. It is a contradiction the goons can live with.  The flame is hotter than ever with bandits having their run, and the government triumphing more in rhetoric than on the ground.

    On the god side, they have changed the narrative of the Koran to fit their sense of history and their line to enlightenment. Peace is now violence. Submission is now subversion. Love is now hate, like in the scene in Romeo and Juliet where one of the love birds say, “my only love is my only hate.” Or in the words of Satan, once an archangel, forswears righteousness and proclaims, “all good to me is lost.”

    Those who want gold want it for themselves. It’s an age of talakawa awareness. But the danger of the approach so far by the Federal Government is that we think the answer to violence is violence. We have been spending billions on war, but we cannot gain peace by war. We can only gain it by love.

    Love is the scarce commodity in this narrative. Not love in the mere sentimental sense. It is love as work. The great example of that is actually going on in Borno State, where Governor Kashim Shettima has unleashed a great legacy of wooing the poor and disenfranchised. His weapon is education. Recently when Bill Gates visited Nigeria, he noted that education and health care are the pillars of development. Historian Tacitus noted this centuries ago.

    Shettima has been at work. He has done that especially well in the building of primary schools. A visit to some of them open the eyes to what a governor can do even with limited resources and, especially, in times of war. The schools occupy large expanse of land, each classroom is air-conditioned. They have boarding houses. The issue of boarding houses go straight to the heart of the crisis. The boarding facilities command the envy of even first-class universities anywhere. Some of the students, especially girls, are Boko Haram orphans. The boarding houses are not just for school time, but even on holiday periods. Since they have no parents, the child’s home is also the school.

    In one of the schools, the quote from Malala heralds you: “With a gun, you kill a terrorist. With education, you kill terrorism.” Just as Governor Shettima inspects one of the schools, a girl walks around, and the governor holds her. She is probably eight or nine. She is a Boko Haram orphan. Her name is Fatimatu. The governor calls the education commissioner and says the girl must be accommodated in one of the schools.

    “If the girl is not in school, very soon somebody will set her up for marriage,” lamented Shettima. That is the sort of danger the girl child faces. The schools are not all the governor has done. In a two-part series titled:Borno Diaries, I had recorded is transformative work in all sectors. Yet after spending about seven hours inspecting his doings over a year later, I saw an explosion of brand new work I did not include in my earlier instalment, including the schools named after Kingibe, Modu Sheriff, Buhari, Kachallah, etc. Massive models of learning.

    Is it the utility factory that produces everything from yarns to bags, to pipes? Or is the hospital that has the best diagnostic equipment for MRI in West Africa, and the biggest for breast cancer diagnostics? Or is it the green house that is setting the stage for disruptive agriculture? And Shettima was once a lecturer in agriculture.

    The schools are models for anywhere in the country, and each of them occupies thousands of pupils. They are fed in the schools. He even built a school for the Bororo Fulani. It met resistance initially, but now it is getting oversubscribed. The schools have a teaching technology called Kayan. It turns the teaching board into a sort of computer, and it helps the teacher convey knowledge. It is novel and ground-breaking.

    That is how to turn violence into opportunity. It is not by piling up a contractor’s dollars in a babaringa. Shettima is no doubt a star of his generation, and he has done this in defiance of a rage of young men. Shettima’s war is a revolution of peace. We have been spending billions on war, with tales of corruption and diversion of funds. Recently a video went virile of soldiers served rice without meat or fish. We buy aircraft and we multiply deaths. Knowledge is the game changer just as the movable type unfurled the industrial revolution, the Renaissance, Reformation, rise of cities, the burst of mass newspapers and ultimately the revolutions that began with the French. Knowledge brings trouble before it brings peace.

    The novelist of the absurd, Albert Camus, once wrote that “peace is the only war worth waging.” That is Shettima’s legacy.

     

    Lifeline for Chairman Chukwu

    It was not easy for me to see Christian Chukwu in a picture last week. He is reportedly ill. He is a Nigerian hero, and he brought pride and glory to his country and also his club Enugu Rangers in his prime. Such persons ought to be nurtured and preserved. It was cheering though that Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi rallied support for him

    Christian Chukwu

    and enabled Chukwu’s friends to render support. He also gave him a job in the management of the Rangers International just as Fashola did for best of them all, Haruna Ilerika. Efforts like that opened the way for Femi Otedola to donate $50,000 thousand to enable him travel abroad. We still need you, Chairman Chukwu, one of the most charismatic defenders we ever had and an all-round gentleman.

  • The castle

    IT is an emblem of what northern Nigeria is becoming. Kajuru, a few months ago, was alien to many people. But it has registered its name in blood and fear. We know it for its many predations, of herdsmen versus Christian neighbours, of vain recriminations, of government impotence. Machetes slash, guns blare and huts burn. In the aftermath, human flesh roasts like forbidden suya.

    It is a narrative where whodunit is not as important as who won? The answer is: My people, or your people. But all of them are supposed to be our people. That is, Nigerians, fellow Nigerians. Yet, what put the whole matter in telling potency was the recent tragedy in a castle.

    The Kajuru Castle is a tourist fascination, with its towers, medieval architecture of breath-taking archways and quaint rooms. It nestles on a rocky hill and offers a guest a view of its scenic efflorescence of gleaming pools and verdure. But last week, blood spilled and stained its ancient name, its warm air and memories, its rocks and pristine facades. Mooney Faye, a white woman who worked with an NGO as well as Matthew Ogwuche, were the two souls who fell from the brazen bullets of bandits.

    Yet, what happened in Kajuru Castle is not merely about the loss of a tourist potential, or the deaths of two precious lives. Our tears for them. It is not just another tale about the frigid air of unease enveloping a northern state now increasingly prostrate from the marauding goons. It is more about a changing north, about a class struggle, about the denial of the incremental meltdown of a feudal rampart, of the passing of the torch from the old guard. But to whom? It is a north that has to come to terms with the fortitude of a new and anarchical generation of young men who would not take no for an answer, and whose only voice for such insurgency is not in turenchi or the white man’s language of oppression, or even in Hausa or Fulfulde, or in the literature of familiar northern journalism, or in the radio that is the popular agency of mass communication.

    It is a new rally of a revolutionary hue, a cry of blood and guns and machete. It taps into the root of faith and history, and it gets there and distorts and it is happy for the mangling. It is not happy with memory and so it changes it and turns it into dark chapters that inspire the young.

    Its enemies are the present leaders of the north from the monarchs to the political class. If we say, Zamfara State has refused to chill, it is because there is a mordant rage against class. They want gold and they must have it. They are no longer content with the upper class taking away all the riches and making most of them al majiris and allowing them to age as mai guards and cooks and cleaners, et al. They saw their fathers die poor, their grandfathers fade as beggars. They want the castle.

    They want the soft comfort of its settee. They want the five wives around the pool, and their children not as girls of VVF but scholars from Harvard and Oxford, who will return to the luxuries of cars, designer clothes and shoes after landing the footloose perquisites of a government agency. Not al majiris who, bowl in hand, prowl the streets for today’s crumbs of life.

    Boko Haram is part of that narrative. The rash of abductions of the rich as well as the insecurities on the highways, they all point to a new and quiet rumble. They want their own castle. From Kano to Kaduna to Sokoto to Katsina to Maiduguri. As Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima often says, “if we don’t take care of them now, 10 years down the road they will take care of us. They are the Frankenstein monster that will consume all of us.”  Hence he has responded with a suite of schools and road and housing infrastructure to set the tone for a revival.

    The castle is a medieval signature. Not only in Africa but also in Europe and Asia, that ancient architecture is the symbol of oppression but also of alienation, of the cocky comfort of medieval lords.

    So, when the goons struck the castle, they might not have known the symbolic meaning of their barbarity. The north, for one, is now running short of the big men of feudal stature who held the talakawas captive. Since the Sardauna, the men have come in smaller packages, in the form of Shagaris, Umaru Dikkos, el Rufai, Yakassai,et al. We have never had any until the rise of Muhammadu Buhari, who seemed to embody the resurgence of charisma in the quintessence of the northern sheik. Buhari was hailed and worshipped for many years.

    The 2015 election was an affirmation of the 2011 drive of the northern poor for a man of absolute charisma. But Buhari became president and had the opportunity to turn around their lots. The last election while, for any other election, would have been a commanding showing, it became a sort of let-down by comparison. Places like Sokoto and Kano and Bauchi where he rode as though a monopoly, his numbers fell precipitously.

    His myth has diminished if he is still the reigning king. His charisma has been reined in. He has four years to undo that stature. But more significantly, the exit of Buhari in four years promises no northern successor of such commanding presence. So, there is not one, no force to pass on the torch. Feudalism never passes the torch. It collapses on its two knees.

    So, the north is at a crossroads. The young are now exposed to what the west has offered, an internet and a knowledge base that do not need a college certificate. They know the oppression and they are bursting in rebellion.

    They cannot articulate what they want. They can get everyone’s presence. Will they pull down the castle? They are anarchists, but cannot spell the word. They are the feisty version of the anarchist in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Father and Son, who was asked when he said all he wanted was to pull down the system: what would you replace it with? He said, let it come down first.

    Or are they in a futile zest like the character in Kafka’s The Castle, who wanted to get inside the castle but spent all his life trying  in vain to get in. He died trying. But these northern young men have no Kafkaesque self-restraint. They would, like the young men of the French revolution, take the Bastille.

    In northern Nigeria, they are taking it down one shooting, one kidnap,  one village at a time. The signs are writ large. And scary. 2023 will tell.

     

    An Elder and metaphor

    He calls himself an elder, but did not write as one. His first name is Solomon, but he showed none of those lofty things for which that wise man was known. He was made a SAN, and he was guilty of what lawyers call red herring. His is what is called logical red herring. Strange for a SAN because when Solomon, sorry Elder Solomon Asemota, replied my column, he ran out of bounds writing about what I did not address. I pointed out that he contradicted himself by saying that CAN should wait till court verdict before congratulating Buhari. At the same time, he congratulated Atiku by showing disdain for Buhari. His elders’ forum lost their soul by seeming impartial first and taking sides later. He failed as SAN in this rejoinder, and has failed as a senior advocate of the faith. He is just like the fellow from Benue, who wrote that I erred by saying that Benue and Plateau were neighbours. Do you have to share a border to be neighbours? Are we not neighbours with Ghana? do we share borders? And I said the two states come “together without a joint.” He does not understand figure of speech and yet he is spokesperson. Hence, he is peddling falsehood about a failing governor.

  • The devil’s juice

    The cliché “to rob Peter to pay Paul,” is one the Buhari administration may be attracting to itself in the way it is treating export business in Nigeria. It is giving chockful of billions in subsidies to petroleum products, while it is stingy with grants to exports of non-oil products. Even at being stingy, it is not playing a fair hand.

    For one, we must commend the Buhari administration for reviving the policy to pay promissory notes to exporters, an idea abandoned since 2007 in the era of the Owu chief. The notes are expected to allow those who export goods outside the country pay their debts with foreign exchange backing. This will help boost the creative efforts of entrepreneurs. It will also counter the paramountcy of oil as our foreign exchange earner. Of course, we expect more jobs. Eventually it will compel us to provide more and accessible ports to engage the preponderance of goods going outside the country.

    But the federal government is shooting itself in the foot under a programme called Export Expansion Grant, or EEG. A lull paralysed the export trade and payments and locked out businessmen from the grants.  In part, it was due to corruption. Exporters, in our usual style as Nigerians, were making dubious claims, and reaping where they did not sow.  We all know of round tripping in oil. They became Paul while the Nigerian purse became Peter. The apostles collided.

    Buhari revived the system. Meanwhile exporters had accumulated loans and had been paying interests for close to a decade. This also meant exporting was a hard sell. But the system got under way when the Federal Executive Council approved payments of the promissory notes and the National Assembly gave its nod. The federal government then approved the disbursement of over N195 billion in promissory notes to 270 companies.

    But there are snags. While the federal government through the Debt Management Office says the debts, which date back from 2007 to 2016, stand at N350 billion, the Nigerian Export Promotion Council says it is N1.2 trillion.

    Well, the second issue is what in their business language is called Reverse Auction Process, or RAP. By this, the DMO says the money will be payed if only the exporters will discount what is due to them. That is not the only snag here. Where the apostle’s cliché came in for good measure is that the DMO has decided not to play fair. While some exporters had been paid without RAP, they (DMO) want others to get the rap.

    The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), the Nigerian Association of Chambers of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (NACCIMA) as well as the Organisation of Private Sector Exporters Association (OPSEA) have weighed in with others in the private sector to draw attention to this inequity.

    They have argued that such a policy is discriminatory, and the question is, who are the Pauls that are so lucky or privileged that they should be discriminated for, while the rest will now be betrayed as Peter, who betrayed his Lord?

    Now, the exporters are not yielding to the disbursement of the money because they cannot abide the injustice. Secondly, with the scale of debts acquired over the nine years, the exporters do not see the grants as relief. They have had to pay lots of money to banks as interests.

    We are not bold in our pursuit to diversify the economy. The budget devotes too puny an amount to pay exporters when there are loads of Nigerian exporters who want to turn Nigeria’s earth into foreign exchange earners. The FEC’s effort is good but does not match the high rhetoric Buhari plumes out on agriculture. We continue to worship oil, while all it does is stifle our muscles to farm as well as to launch into the new economy of software and applications et al, where many youngsters have shown promise, and we cannot seem to go beyond potential.

    Oil is in its last stand in the world. Too many countries now have the devil’s juice in the belly of their earths. In Venezuela, it is not able to stop its currency from diving and its citizens from becoming an embarrassment of refugees. When the oil finally dries, it may be too late for us. It is even beginning to seem so now. The United States has abandoned our oil. I recall in the days of Abacha when the United States was under pressure to impose sanctions on our oil, one of its obstacles was the quality of our offering.

    “Your oil is sweet crude,” a U.S. journalist belched out rapaciously to me at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in New Orleans in 1997. Apparently, the Americans’ taste bud has transcended Nigerian Sweetness.

    We don’t need to bemoan our loss of the years of groundnut pyramids or the extravagant pride of cocoa boom or the NIFOR swagger of palm produce. This is a new era of energy, and some Nigerians are trying to give new birth to originality. For instance, few know that Nigeria is one of the largest producers of raw cashew nuts in shells worldwide with an annual volume of no less than $167 million with additional potential of $115 million.

    Yet it seems shocking that only 270 exporters are in play for N195 billion that will enjoy the discriminatory payout. The news reports, however say 39 other companies will get another discriminatory N126 billion in due course.  Oil, for all these, still accounts for over 80 percent of our foreign exchange, and it fuels corruption and militancy in the land.

    Export earnings are still tame. In 2016, we lapped up a mere $1.2 billion, while in 2018 it was $2.2. A news report said remittances from the diaspora topped $24 billion last year. Many Nigerians are leaving in waves, and they give us what I can call comfort money, cash for relatives and friends. It goes to the informal economy, and we cannot as a people plan for and with it.

    That leaves us with export policy planning. Yet, we cannot do well by our exporters. We are not giving them their due or giving them big enough allocation in budgets to show the level of our commitment to export.

    What we are doing is robbing non-oil export to pay oil. It is what some have called unclothing Peter to clothe Paul. Some have called it ‘manoeuvring the apostles.’ The origin of the phrase is not clear, but some have said it was in medieval Britain when the Abbey Church of St. Peter was pulled down and its assets were given to the St. Paul Cathedral. But the Nobel Prize poet Rudyard Kipling in a poem wrote that it was “robbing selected Peter to pay collective Paul.”

    Invoking the economists Schumpeter and Keynes, he was mocking the idea that when you rob a part, you think in error that you are paying all of us. So, we want to rob export to pay oil, but oil is not really for all of us but the corrupt few who slurp the devil’s juice.

  • What kind of elders?

    When British philosopher David Hume asserted that the “corruption of the best produces the worst,” he was telling us how religion can corrode the soul. He may have written those lines centuries back. They however point inquisitorial fingers at an impostor Christian assemblage that goes by the name National Christian Elders Forum.

    This is a body I should ignore, except that they claim two important fidelities. One, they say they are Christian, which might even get a pass into insignificance since we have too many such groups around. To claim to be Christian does not necessarily grant anyone immunity against the working of the devil, according to scriptures. Many will say I am Lord the Christ, said the Lord. But this group is a band of elders.

    If, on the surface, you look at the members, you will grant them their right to age. Theophilus Danjuma, for instance, is no doubt an old man. With his grey hair and his slow, if majestic walk, we cannot doubt that his is. Ditto Zamani Lekwot, Ezeife and a few others who are in their hoary years.

    What irks is the combination of Christian and elders, and that is the imperious audacity of that assemblage. In a sense, they are making themselves into the aristocracy of the faith. If they remained there, it would be acceptable, if not right. They are, after all, entitled to their own grandiosity and pious delusions.

    But when they want to impose their worldviews on the rest of us, especially on the political front, they will have to be held to account. They did that recently when the Christian Association of Nigeria paid a visit to President Muhammadu Buhari to congratulate him on his victory in the election.

    They said through its chairman, Solomon Asemota, that the visit was an endorsement. They said it was premature and that the visit did not take cognisance of Atiku’s objection to the polls result that he is now challenging in the court of law.

    These impostor elders of the Christian faith baffle those who know the scriptures and one or two things about the rule of law and how they cohabit. But more especially if you know that the NCEF is a political group masking as elders of the vineyard.

    If the group says congratulations to the president, what is wrong with that? This writer has never been a fan of CAN, and it has over the few years served as a toady of power. But that is beside the point here. It has the right to congratulate anyone after an election. It is showing its loyalty to law. I don’t accept that you have to bow to any form of constituted authority as some Pentecostals and other faithful say when they interpret Paul in scripture. You only obey when they don’t contradict the will of God. We rather obey God than man, said Paul who, along with his fellow apostles, set their faces against the powers of the day and died doing it.

    According to Asemota, we ought to wait for the courts before doing that. This is hypocrisy. They should have been more subtle if they wanted to hide their love for Atiku and the PDP. They could not.

    Rather than leave the matter at the mere congratulations, they unveiled their rage at Buhari and that he has been complicit  in the killing of Christians in the north. This shows two things. One, that they were against the congratulations because he was not their preferred choice at the polls. They have the right to their democratic choices. But they should not be hypocrites about it. They should have said they were against Buhari. They cannot say they are for the rule of law by cherry-picking the law and institution in the land. If you are for the rule of law, they should accept INEC’s result while awaiting the determination of the court case.

    That means they have to follow due process. In their own case, they want to dictate what process is due and when. If they are against the handling of the killings in the north, that is a different matter and it belonged to a different press statement. This author decries the incompetence with which the Buhari government has handled security in the country. These days it is even worse, as though he has no idea the nation is bowing ever so tragically to slaughter and dark forces.

    He, a general who should lead the way, is reflecting a supine incapacity to secure lives. But that should be different from merely bringing politics into the matter, especially of the partisan type. Men like Danjuma now at a latter day are trying to show that they are against northern domination, or Fulani domination. Did he not make his career in the military by pitching his tent with those he now sees as northern hegemons?

    Danjuma was the man who led soldiers to the western region to put Ironsi to death. Fajuyi said it should not happen. Danjuma and his men should execute him if his host was not spared, he prayed. But Danjuma was the master of the ceremony of the slaughter that dreary dawn. One Hebron Tuti, who denied recently as a general, fired the shot that fell Fajuyi. Both men went, and that day Danjuma, in what was known as the counter-coup, anointed himself as perhaps the most frontal ambassador of the northern hegemon.

    Now he has started crying. He says his people should fight and defend themselves. When he was on the frontline his people seemed immune because their streets were tame with peace. Now, he is turning to wisdom on a latter day. He needs to retrace his erring past, his past of servile soldiery. Is he now in the league of Cardinal Woolsey, who served his king but forgot his God? He was the cardinal in those days of turbulent monarchy in England under the cunning Henry the Eighth, Anne Boleyn, Thomas Cromwell, et al. He said, “If I had served my God as diligently as I have served my king, he would not have abandoned me in my old age.”

    Now, Danjuma, in his old and grizzly years, is now a defender of justice. And what a way to do it. Asemota, who is a SAN, could not even see the barefaced contradiction of his statement. If he wanted justice, he should have known that you don’t merge two contradictory pleas in one. You cannot choose what law to obey. That in itself is a plea to anarchy.

    Paul said elders should not provoke the young. I wonder if the elders know that part of their scripture. But Danjuma and company of renegade elders should pay attention to the words of British writer and novelist that, “There is no such thing as old age; there’s only sorrow.”

    Of Saraki, Fasuan and Fayemi

    While our  Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki is still locked in an existential battle in the Senate  to reincarnate his sort of coup of 2015, at home he has no real legacy. It only shows why Otoge became Otope for the people of Kwara State. In a recent visit to the place, my first in about 30 years, I saw no legacy of significance that he and his father bequeathed.

    Fasuan

    Whether it was major roads, schools, the stadium, the Government House and the Government Reserved Area and Kwara Hotels, even the airport, they all were products of the military. They were legacies of George Innih and David Bamgboye. The one thing I saw was the Kwara State University but he had an ego to sate by that: his own. He wanted to name it after himself, but he was resisted. So he did not want to do it for the people but himself. He wanted a landmark he did not desrve.

    This is unlike what Governor Kayode Fayemi did for men of substance in Ekiti State by naming schools after them. One of them was Chief Deji Fasuan, a man who helped build the Western Region, a thinker and technocrat of the first order that is hard to see in these days of easy money and delinquent thinking. Congratulations to Chief Fasuan, thanks to Fayemi.

  • The Onnoghen dilemma

    It will intrigue not only lawyers, not least men of the bench, as well as psychologists what secrets lurk in the heart of Justice Walter Onnoghen. Is it that he genuinely feels righteous or he is acting one? Is it that he thinks the law sheds its lofty smile on his side or he has to play the role of jurist in pursuit of his own veneration?

    Or is he like the canine in the cage but has to bark and whine and growl so as to gain a berth of freedom? The big paradox is that the number one law man has had to bow out and resign. Wh did he not do this earlier? Was it that his colleagues of the NJC played Judas, and his last pillar had crumbled? We have not seen the full letter of the NJC to the president, But it hints that Onnoghen has lost the moral authority to serve as chief justice. Did he need the letter to know that.

    For, no doubt, he is between two worlds. One says he is a man of honour under the siege of an oligarchy of guileless confederates contracted to dethrone and rid him of a breadth of public grace. The other sees him as a pharisaic sophisticate who has wronged his high office and country. This group thinks he enjoys the backing of a legion of apostate lawyers and rogue politicians weeping vicariously and vigorously through him after their subversive crimes were unplugged on a stealthy night.

    But what is more intriguing to this essayist is not so much that the Code of Conduct Tribunal is tracking his fidelity on his assets declaration, or that the EFCC is on his financial trail. It is that the Onnoghen phenomenon represents the twain of the Nigerian political life. With the CCT, we see legal gunfights. In the EFCC, morality is blazing.

    Just like last week I tried to show how two consciences are at the heart of a bleeding nation, the Onnoghen case challenges us whether it is law we want or justice. If we want law, we may not have justice. If we want justice, the law genuflects to moral virtue.

    The CCT case, this writer has held, is necessary because of the EFCC.  The real matter for conscience is whether the man Onnoghen has had a dialogue between himself and conscience. But if it is Onnoghen the lawyer that matters more than the Onnoghen the free moral agent, then the resigned chief justice has not shown himself, like many like him, worthy to be on the judicial chair.

    The root of every law is a moral virtue. Society codified the laws to engineer a moral society. As French writer and economist Frederic Bastiat has noted, “when law and morality contradict each other, the citizen has the cruel alternative of either losing is moral sense or losing his respect for the law.”

    There is a sense that in the Onnoghen matter as in quite a few in the past few years, Nigeria is at the crossroads of whether we want to do what is right or we want to obey a skewed version of law. Law and morality should not necessarily clash, but they do when the society has not raised its sense of virtue. The manipulation of legal nuances becomes the crotch of those societies.

    If virtue came before the law, then it goes without rancour that morality should come first. It is instructive that the NJC recognised this and has asked the man to go because of the moral question. Many lawyers can be blind like a bat in sunlight. They see the law and nothing else. When a man says he did not remember a princely sum of money so he does not declare it, it only takes a bull of technicality to believe him.

    Gani Fawehinmi of blessed memory once said to me that if there is a case between a rich man and a poor man, “I will find the law for the poor man.” The law is thus flexible and the legal mind luminously facile. The lawyer’s mind is like how John Milton described Satan in Paradise Lost. “The mind is its own place/it can make hell of heaven and heaven of hell.”

    While lawyers quibble over whether Onnoghen was right by showing details of whether he submitted or filled a form, what is substantial is lost in the delirium. The CCT is there because primarily the EFCC makes a case.

    The United States founding father has said that the country is a nation of laws and not of men. But before the society soared to legal integrity, it had established its moral codes. The British legal system is so kinetic and fluid that in Nigeria, it will bring us to anarchy. Laws are important, but only to enforce virtue.

    When law thrives for law’s sake, we have not justice, but the triumph of state over conscience. Onnoghen has now been forced by the moral question to do the right thing: resign. He would have done good for himself and his sense of moral purity if he did it early in this controversy. But he was egged on by his obdurate colleagues.

    He would have gained time. “You can’t kill time without injuring eternity,” said Henry David Thoreau. Onnoghen knows now if he didn’t know before that he was killing time. He has injured many things, especially his image and that of his exalted office.

    Not that technicality of law is not good. We should use it for justice, not like the late Justice Scalia of the U.S. Supreme Court who saw law as textual matter – cold, dead words. People like him see the law as though without a soul. Hence the scriptures lead in this matter by saying the law is not a school master, so we judge the spirit and not its letter.

    The autumn of Ortom

    When one writes, one expects to reach literate audiences. But when we see responders with little understanding of processes or language, writers can get a little disappointed. In my column last week, The Voice of Chi, I witnessed a riot of voices talking back. But it is not the sober and cerebral dissenters I worry about, but the mutiny of ignorant pot shots that saw the piece as either an endorsement of the killings in Benue or  tears over Ortom’s victory at the polls.

    They failed to understand that the article raised important issues. One, how come we have two antipodal standpoints on how to resolve a crisis. It is the peacemaker versus the war-monger. Two, it is about how a man who exploited this was cynical and kept harping on it even when the herders crisis abated. Three, how that same man, Ortom, has done little else for his people. Ortom has a right to glow over his victory. If his people want him, he deserves it. But as a commentator, he has to turn round now and provide service to his people. I will be the first to applaud if he obliges his people.

    Or else Benue State, with potential, will be the autumn of Ortom, where all the blossoms and leaves of opportunity and prosperity will die off, and what will be left is a stark tree of hunger and suffering. Those who support that are entitled to their own imbecility. After all, democracy is not always for the wise.

  • The voice of Chi

    No greater irony in the last round of polls than the victories of Simon Lalong of Plateau State and Samuel Ortom of Benue State. Fellow columnist and member of The Nation editorial board Femi Macaulay first pointed it out in one of our casual, if sometimes luminous, dialogues on the state of the nation. In his taciturn air and often deep, grave voice, Macaulay observed it in passing, his face looking down and away. My antenna quivered and I agreed, but we said no more.

    It occurred to him that both governors stood on two antipodes. Lalong called for embrace among his tribes and faiths. Ortom dangled the spectre of fear and hate. But I have turned it over in my mind ever since.  One called the herdsman a foe and interloper, a bloodthirsty carpetbagger, a hoodlum, a savage from the furnace of human treachery. He invoked Armageddon and enacted a law to banish his group.

    The other set a template like his Lord, and called for love for your enemies, seek ways in the language of the Psalmist for all to dwell together in harmony. Hate he saw as corrosion, a demeaning virus in the affairs of men. Ortom was probably looking at Christianity and his state as practitioners of a cult, adhering to its purposes, codes, rituals and sense of exclusive community. While Lalong dreamed nirvana, Ortom said never.

    Yet both pray to the same God. We can ignore their first names as icons of the Christian faith. One a prophet smothered in beard and solemn vows and the other a leper who hosted Christ and led to an opulence of oil anointing. We can also discount the meanings. Samuel points to petitions answered and Simon indicates a listening ear.  No contrast in the biblical sphere, so that should not bother us.

    But Benue and Plateau are neighbours. In some places, their borders meet without a joint. Not long ago, they were one state known as Benue Plateau, and they played politics as one unit. I hear they make pounded yam by day and make love at night. Yet they voted differently. Benue voted Ortom, which endorsed the rhetoric of division. Lalong was going to win all along. But it means Plateau endorsed unity.

    We cannot forget that, in the high wire of the herdsman fury, President Buhari goofed into the conversation, asking the Benue elders to embrace their neighbours. So what do we make of this contradictory trends in the polls. We also saw some of that strain in the retention of Ishaku in Taraba and Bindow’s ouster in Adamawa. But nowhere is it more potent than the contiguous neighbours.

    It indicated a binary war within the Nigerian soul, like the womb of Rebecca, the mother of Jacob and Esau, where the good book says they represented two worlds, antipodal nerves. So part of us loves the hate, part of us loves the love. We are like Walt Whitman’s line in Leaves of Grass. “Do I contradict myself? Yes I contradict myself… I am large, I contain multitudes.”

    So, what voice do we listen to now? Is it the one that harries and yaps, or the lolling, mollifying rhythm of Lalong? Shall we just abide with the divided self, a thing Salman Rushdie implies as inevitable in his turbulent novel The Satanic Verses?

    Nor is it a new thing in our society or others. From the beginning of time, ‘we versus them’ has been a strain in communities. We have those who close their minds to others and others who welcome. Ortom was accused in the high temper of the crisis of exploiting it for political gain. He used it to put down the herdsmen, even sometimes when it was them and sometimes when it was mere criminals. Some have argued that the mass burial day of coffins was less to mourn than a call to electoral arms. Even some members of his own security apparatus have been accused of stoking it. He never stopped to raise its spectre even when the state was quiescent. On the other hand, Lalong would not sign anti-grazing law, once proposed and eventually abandoned the idea of a ranch. He buried the Plateau dead in peace. But he had from the beginning pursued a template for all, including the Hausa-Fulani and Birom, to work together. It did not always work, but he did not faint, even when the state erupted with blood and tears.

    Fear is easy to invoke in times of stress. But to appeal to our better angels is a risky place to tread, and it can be politically fatal. Ortom chose the cowardly and cynical path. Lalong walked the narrow path, what Shakespeare calls a walk in the night. He endured and won.

    Trump rides human fear and hate, and he may ride it again to a second term, just like Ortom. To inspire fear needs a few and simple words. To allay fears compels circuitous explanations, often seen as boring. Trump says Mexicans are rapists, drug addicts and murderers. You have to write an essay to counter. Who would read that? And the voice of conciliation is not on the rooftop, but gentle and coaxing, what the Bible calls a “still small voice.” Hence Brexit passed, Duterte of the Philippines is popular, Orban of Hungary rouses nationalist passion, and Merkel is at the bottom of the polls in Germany. Ghandi may be the world’s darling but Indians grovel at Nehru’s feet because he chose tribe over humanity. Yet all these countries are at war in their souls. Those who want embrace rage against the racists. History has shown that fear wins when the society is already on the way down and it accelerates the fall.

    The Greek orator Isocrates – not Socrates – tried in vain to work Athens to bind the Greek city states together as Athens declined. Persia was on the rise and threatened. But the parliament as if held hostage by some Greek goddess even voted out its own democracy. When they unite, societies grow. When they breed divisive ideologies, they splinter and fall. First they grow fat, and become self-important and hate others as if they own destiny. Paul Kennedy noted this in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Garibaldi held together the Italian States, with Cavour. Bismarck built the German State to its height of culture and even military prowess. But when Hitler came with his narrow, suffocating Nazi ideology, the Allies bombed Germany to its knees. Trump does not read, so he does not know that the great USA is in decline and he is helping it down.

    The voices of unity and division are speaking simultaneously as reflected in Benue and Plateau. It is like the Chi in Igbo cosmology talking to his host as novelist Chigozie Obioma delineates in his new and masterly work, An Orchestra of Minorities. What is the Chi of wisdom? Is it Lalong or Ortom? Even many in Benue State are going through voter’s remorse. Ortom moved to PDP, beheaded his godfathers and rules the roost. But the voters now know that the man had no other item to run on in the last election than the fear of the herdsman. Now the people will face the demons: no salaries, bad roads, poor healthcare with perhaps the fewest number of doctors in the country.

    What Ortom did is what maligns society. I would rather listen to a Simon Lalong, who personifies the Chi speaking to the host, Nigeria.

  • Rogue Arithmetics

    His name is Peter Obiora, not Obi. He is not a former governor or the man who stumbled on his way to be vice president. He is a judge, and he read the lead judgment over the governorship poll that declared Gboyega Oyetola as the governor of Osun State. Some news organs that had fallen under the spell of the former governor of the  effeminate voice had spelt the judge’s name as though he were the politician. Maybe they thought him one given the tendentious tenor of his verdict.

    This Obiora reminds me of a book of logic that psychologists, philosophers, educationists and lawyers have read since Robert Thouless published it in 1930. I first read Straight and Crooked Thinking after I completed my School Certificate because I was fascinated by the audacity of its title and it rested imperiously on my father’s bookshelf. I was to encounter it later at the University of Ife in the hands of law students who informed me it was a recommended text. The idea, I gathered, was to apprise law students of the wherewithal to navigate dishonest ways of reasoning and fortify their logical senses.

    From Justice Obiora verdict, I wonder if he ever read Thouless. If he read it, I wonder if he understood him. Maybe he could understand but could not withstand it except by capsizing its logic in the exercise of his work as a judge. Obiora inoculated himself against the august notions of Thouless and embraced illogic. He would have flunked out of a class that required straight thinking, and a crooked turn of mind informed his verdict.

    In the first place, he based his verdict on two main planks.  One of them nullified the rerun election after the number of cancelled votes exceeded the difference between PDP’s Demola Adeleke’s tally and Oyetola’s. Adeleke had the edge but the returning officer, based on INEC’s guidelines ordered  a rerun. It happened and it favoured Oyetola. The dancing Senator’s feet turned sore and he could only walk to the court in protest. This was not only tendentious, it was a judgment in disenfranchisement. The logic that Obiora could not withstand is the reason we had rerun elections in a few states last weekend, including in Plateau, Benue and Sokoto states. INEC did the right thing because polls are about the people. For instance, Simon Lalong won in Plateau State even though it was mathematically impossible for his septuagenarian rival – Jerry Boy – to catch up. But the governor submitted himself to the process. It is a process that Obiora and his folks did not understand. It is called the rule of law and it is one of the planks of democracy if it is executed in good faith. Aminu Tambuwal of the PDP won by a hair’s margin, but he subjected himself through the process. That is the logic alien to Obiora.

    The returning officer had the right to give democracy a full throttle. Obiora thought it was better to be arbitrary. The verdict also did something that Thouless frowned upon and he called it cherry picking evidence. According to the 273 page judgment, there was what we called in high school ‘jomo jomo to the answer’ – that is, an arbitrary leap to the mathematical conclusion.

    It seems, in a manner is speaking, he was shopping for conclusion. He cancelled some units of the polling and rendered the results null. He subtracted the numbers from the total. In the same line of intellectual bravado, he cancelled the numbers from the supplementary election. The numbers favoured the dancing Adeleke.

    No witness proved that there was any thumbprinting. About 80 witnesses came forward and stated there was no multiple thumbprinting, including the polling units the tribunal cancelled. Even the petitioners abandoned this during the hearings and Obiora acknowledged this in his verdict. Yet, he decided to cancel without evidence of malpractice or tampering.

  • Pot-pourri

    “There is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction,” Winston Churchill.

    Every election cycle throws up its own tale. And for a variegated nation such as ours where egos, culture and tribe intermix with the heres and nows of hunger and belief, we enjoy a treasure trove. No one can tell all the stories of this year’s poll in one seminal sway of prose.  Too many riches of intrigues, manoeuvres, permutations, forays and parries. They at once sour and sweeten the narratives.

    As political philosophers contend, every election, like capitalism, has its own three Cs. For capitalism, it is cars, condos and credit cards. For election, it is candidate, condition and culture. Both have C’s as if cacophony, in all its abrasiveness, contains the sound of life. In capitalism, it captures our workaday rhythm. And in politics it is a concatenation of the way we vote with its consequences. Through this triad, we can put the past month in perspective.

    It’s drum roll for winners and sepulchral tunes for the others. Some Irokos have crestfallen, ants have bitten off giants, egos deflated, some others had squeaked to victory while a few walked in majesty to wins. Bitterness has shone darkly in some quarters. For instance, some editorialists, commentators and editors have not recovered from Atiku’s beating, and continue to spew sour grapes in headlines and tendentious ideas disguised as reasoned opinions. Some politicians are sulking in silence. A few who won by brigandage are savouring savage joys. Some won by default and may recall Joseph Conrad’s words in Heart of Darkness that “our strengths are accidents arising from the weaknesses of others.” Some are moaning over wasted investments, while winners are swooning to the cash hauls ahead. Fulminating social media rodents have crept into curious silences, this column being a target of quite an army of malicious tirades over the past half year. They should have congratulated me for seeing the future they didn’t know. But like Churchill, I am magnanimous in victory. Not political victory, but intellectual victory, the sort of thrill you get for rewards for the labours of the mind.

    Today, I excavate a few narratives of the past polls. Here I try to look at a few of such in an unusual format for In Touch.

     

    CAP-sized Amosun

    The word decapitate literally means ‘to behead.’ In that sense, it may not apply to Ibikunle Amosun of the heavenly cap. We may not rightly call his fetishised headgear  a ‘skycap’ because it describes bag carriers at airports. But by the liberty that language confers, I can say that the governor of Ogun State was deCAPitated. That cap was meant to compete with the sky, so it was his sky cap, not skycap. Now in one fell swoop, Dapo Abiodun, who is taller than Amosun even with his cap on, has cut him to size. In other words, Amosun was CAP-sized. Abiodun’s triumph was the humbling of Amosun’s cap, which is a measure of his delusion of grandeur.

     

    From firewood seller to Marshall Plan governor

    In evangelising his virtues as his successor, Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima waxed lyrical. Professor Babagana Umara Zulum was not his closest friend. He was not a party wheel horse. He was in the words of Shakespeare, “cometh the man, cometh the hour.” Prof Zulum was, to follow the cliché, a self-made man. He was a grass roots man by upbringing. Though a professor today, he did menial jobs to fund his education, including selling firewood and driving taxi. His is a life of industry and perseverance, which are recipes for empathy. But he did not flaunt or make an extravaganza of this humble start, Jonathan-style. He did not even act out what Conrad calls “proud humility.” He did his job. He became the commissioner for reconstruction, rehabilitation and resettlement after the Boko Haram goons were routed back to their lairs. But the terrain was perilous and he embedded himself in underbellies of subaltern Borno that still crawled with bombs and militants. When Governor Shettima asked him to travel in bullet-proof vans, he turned it down saying he wanted to be as vulnerable as others in the trenches with him. Now, he will take charge as governor unlike General George Marshall, who retired as secretary of state.

     

    Okorocha’s Iberiberism minus Hope = Ihedioha

    Rochas Okorocha had become too familiar with power. He taught he was big enough not only to erect monument to failing foreigner but he wanted to turn Imo State house into his family nest. So, he wanted to foist Nwosu as governorship candidate on his APC. In this pursuit, he defied party chieftains, decorum and decency, and even the stirrings of Imo soul. He wanted to be deified, perhaps with a statue like the one he erected with moral dysfunction.

    So, he set his in-law as candidate of his default party against Hope Uzodinma of his APC. Between them they polled enough numbers to win. But they split the votes and allowed soft-talking gentleman Emeka Ihedioha to play Bill Clinton at the polls. A house divided against itself in Imo was Ihedioha’s divine platform to the Government House. His foes fought so he could be free. Ross Perot became an independent candidate and split the Republican votes to hand the presidency to a man from a town called Hope.

    We should not forget that Okorocha will be the first person in history of this country who will be declared winner of an election to the Senate but who would not attend the ceremony to receive the certificate of return. Okorocha returns home. It is still curious what happened there since INEC has yet to tell the nation the full story of how a man who could not family-arise the Government House has kept mum over his non-victory. He delivered neither himself nor his successor. Iberiberism struck him back like a cobra.

     

    The Kaduna megaphone

    Nasir El-Rufai was a loudmouth in his first term. Now that he has nobody to account to, how much cacophony awaits our eardrums?  The man who threatened other countries with Armageddon, talked hegemony about the Fulani, undermined logic, divided Muslims and Christians, denigrated the Pope in explaining why he did not pick a Christian as deputy. This same man would have been an entertainer if he were not governor, like a dark and scary minstrel.

    With his dwarf frame and almost imperturbable mien, El-Rufai refreshes like garlic on a wounded tongue. This man who bulldozed two senators out of town cannot be said not to have done well in governance in other areas, including education where his implementation of the feeding programme gained traction as well as tackling of the al majiri programme. But governance is as much about decency as in putting food on the table. Here’s hoping that the man will abandon his juvenile spirit for a mature temperament. Or else he might leave the state broken and ablaze.