Category: Sam Omatseye

It did not seem to belong here. Not in a democracy, where President Muhammadu Buhari has vowed to be penitent and born again. He had pulled off the soldier’s slough and replaced it with the flamboyant sobriety of the babaringa.

I recalled the famous world press conference and the martial flourish of his fury: “The press? I will tamper with it.” His face, screwed into a scowl, promised coals of fire.

It brought my mind to the nervous days of the soldiers`         .  The Daily Trust of all newspapers was shut down. I scurried to read the news item that triggered the episode. I didn’t see anything and I know enough of this business to detect what harms national security and what endangers the army in the maelstrom of war. The report contained nothing sudden, nothing surprising. It did not endanger the soldiers.

I learnt the top brass of the army had met with some editors and provided them perhaps classified information about an impending sortie. If that counterattack involved a massive troop deployment on land and in the air, and its intention was to retake Baga and a slew of territories Boko Haram had corralled in the past weeks, I don’t see anything classified about it. It did not speak of operational details like time of each ground attack, routes, names of officers, types of weaponry, etc. most of the story is familiar, and a backgrounding flavoured by the reporting of the past weeks.

Eventually, the army did attack, and took back some of the territories including Baga. Journalism often has to be wary not to play the tortoise that knows too much and sets its own house on fire. Journalists also understand that they need a country to survive in order to perform their duties.

But the tendency in this profession is for those who think they know more than the professionals to tutor us on the limits of liberty. Boko haram had unleashed a gale of attacks resulting in the outpouring of Nigerians onto the main towns, especially Maiduguri. A state of bloody augury had engulfed the state, and the army had been caught off again. An Mi35 fighter jet had fallen, soldiers eviscerated, army posts sacked. Nigerians were on edge again with images of the slaughter and rapine of the Jonathan era. A sense of our military collapse terrified those who had thought we were past these moments of anxiety. “Something startled where we thought we were safest,” wrote novelist George Lamming. Safety had given way to waves of ragtag butchery again.

In these circumstances, did we not expect the army to launch counterattack, and had the military not assured Nigerians they would regain the lands, and was that a massive attack what should follow? Was that not what Daily Trust did?

Those who defend the army in one breath for rage over the publication should understand that the Daily Trust story did not endanger anyone, including our military. It only reported a coming offensive, without reports of details and strategy. Even well-known armies, including the United States, have been known to even announce strategies ahead of war. For instance, Collin Powell as the chairman of Joint chiefs of staff, belched out ahead of the Iraqi war under the late George H. W. Bush: “Our strategy for defeating the Iraqis is very simple: First we are going to cut them off, then we are going to kill them.” The details were a different kettle of fish.

Now Buhari ordered the army to lift its siege to Daily Trust. From the presidency’s reaction, it was obvious the army acted without consulting the commander-in-chief. He may be a repentant soldier, but his lieutenants need to follow Buhari’s credo when he was a GOC in Jos. Then he defied his boss in Lagos and asked soldiers to start reading the Constitution of Nigeria. His officers need to read the Constitution. The officers didn’t on the Daily Trust matter and they should have known that this is a democracy, and press freedom is tenet. The army was trying to divert attention of its failures on an innocuous news report. They focused on the hoodlums and sacked them, and that is great news, and it shows that we need discipline from the army, not punishment of editors.

What is more worrisome is that this lack of operational or strategic discipline is creating two contrary trends in Borno State. One, is the massive work of Governor Kashim Shettima’s infrastructural repair and renewal, the educational rebirth, and a new mushrooming of housing projects going on in the state, especially since the Buhari administration took charge and won a breath of victory that prompted an earlier infantile boast that Boko Haram had been defeated.  Is it the roads and highways that had been done?

What is more worrisome is that this lack of operational or strategic discipline is creating two contrary trends in Borno State. One, is the massive work of Governor Kashim Shettima’s infrastructural repair and renewal…

The schools like Yerwa Girls Secondary School with ecstatic young pupils in an ambience of new, air-conditioned classrooms, and tiled floors and walls shimmering with new paints? Or is it a school also in Maiduguri that Governor  Shettima wants to name after either Angela Merkel or Michelle Obama? A school of hostels, quadrangles, bullet-proof doors, dining blocks, kitchen, air-conditioners and fans, high walls that would make a Chibok girls redux a suicide attempt.  Schools like these are all over the state. What of the housing projects that have been all over the state to absorb the many displaced citizens of the past years of depredations.

This explains why Shettima spoke with liquid eyes to President Buhari on the Boko Haram torments and the fear that all the billions of Naira, imagination, physical exertions of the past few years may dissolve with onslaughts of the zealots. Shettima’s likely successor Umara-Zulum has been in the trenches as the commissioner in charge of reconstruction and must be aghast at the omen of war flushing out all that he has risked life and limb to achieve.

On network television, Shettima noted that the urgency of handling the war on terror. We recall he once said in the Jonathan era that our soldiers were outmanoeuvred, and outrun by the enemies. Today, with huge resources deployed, many analysts want to know what happened. It is still a conundrum to many.

The war on terror cannot be won by just arms alone, even if we need a lot of it. It cannot be won by soldiers alone, although we have too few of them. We must look at whether accountability of money and men is taking place. Are some people not seeing the war as cash cow?

Knowledge is a principal weapon of war. We need to have our intelligence to work. The attacks have come because they surprise us, a la Metele. So, we don’t want the riotous rhythm of gains and losses. Today they come and conquer. Tomorrow, we ache and take back. It is the sort of thing that philosopher Friederich Nietzsche has described as “eternal return.” We have been through this before and we may go there again. That is not the way of progress.

Suddenly the villages fall silent. The old tale has been overturned. The long nights of plunder.  The raffia-roofed, mud-walled houses on fire. Old men and women lumbering lazily in tragic mockery of fleeing. The air sultry with the smell of death.

By first light the next morning, body counts recount the tale of the night. Corpses of children, mothers and fathers lie in bushes, in homes, on the streets. The houses, roofs gone, walls down, lie prostrate puffing out wisps of smoke in envy of chain smokers.

That was routine for about two years in the loin of the country, that is the Middle Belt. For about half a year, not much of these acts of murder rend the ear. What happened to the herdsmen-farmers conflict? How did it move from a crisis that would never end to the one that we are about to forget? Why is no one addressing this salutary trend? Why is even the presidency mute over the development?

The fear ended without a conference. There was no conference where both parties met, and no sort of armistice led to putting the arms at ease.  Is it a case of a coward who is happy that his tormentor disappeared and would not even probe whether the demon died or just discovered a new victim?

We called it Fulani herdsmen/ farmers crisis, and it became a vexed nomenclature when the northern governors objected to the inclusion of Fulani. Then it was herdsmen’s crisis, or herdsmen/ farmers clash. But after a while, even the Miyetti Allah called the herdsmen Fulani, and it was no longer in doubt the identity of the culprits.

But we had other narratives. The Agatu incident with its heart-rending number of casualties became a marker with the Miyetti Allah wrapping itself in defence of its kinsmen. Then those who shied away from the Fulani word, including cautious and polite commentators, felt free to call them Fulani herdsmen. We have also known of the IDPs, the waves of Nigerians in Benue and Plateau and Taraba and Nassarawa huddled into camps in dread of the shadows of death.

When the Benue leaders visited the President, he replied in cynically unpresidential language asking them to accommodate their neighbour. Then it was the cool defiance of the Inspector General of police who would not station himself in Benue as the President ordered or, shall we say, begged. It is not as if the presence of a top officer makes a significant difference. It is the quality of discipline in the Force and charisma of the leader that drive efficiency, not necessarily his location.

We cannot forget also the defence minister who condemned modernity for building houses and highways to occlude the routine tranquillity of the cattle’s canter and gallops. Then of course the agriculture minister who yelled in subservient gusto that the federal government had done something for the farmers but nothing for the herdsmen.

At one stage, even the Emir of Kano joined the fray, and his language carried the fiery zeal of an ethnic partisan, reeling out numbers of Fulani victims that no one has been able to prove, since the onus lay on him. Then the confusion suffused the story as to whether they were Nigerian Fulani herdsmen or herdsmen from outside the country. The president even chipped in to hint they may not be Nigerian herdsmen, even if they were Fulani, a perspective that apparently tended to expiate the guilt of locals.

While this storm of recriminations endured, the killings flared on. One of the high moments was the mass burial undertaken in Benue where it was not clear whether the politicians were more interested in trading politics with the funeral or showing sympathy with the beloved. But tears and coffins abounded to dwarf any sympathy for the government at the centre.

In many instances, the story was that the people could not return when sacked by the bandits. Pressure fell on state governors with neither resources nor power to rebuild the fallen villages. The story even trended that the bandits had taken over the sacked villages, turning the churches into homes and fattening on sumptuous feasts of their farms and kitchens. In order words, they became armies of occupations.

Yet a good thing happened, when an imam, Abubakar Abdullahi risked his life to save hundreds of Christians in the rocky retreats of Yelwa Gindi Akwati in Plateau State.

What all of this show is that we are a scandalously uninvestigated country. We need to have evidence of who the real killers are. Was it a case of a herdsman penitence? A lot has been attributed to the Russian fighter aircraft Mi35, and that could have significantly deterred the killers. But what killers? Were the killers herdsmen or just bandits taking advantage of the blood spill between herders and farmers and making an imbroglio of it.

The herders did not go into hiding. We see them every day, and never with guns or AK47. Even the herders are not seen as insiders of the Fulani clan. They are second class citizens in the north and I would like to see their lots addressed with the same verve deployed to defend him. It seems it is the conflict that has revealed the hypocrisy of the northern elite in its treatment of the herdsmen in the same way the al majiri is consigned to the bottom of the totem pole. Nomadic education as a solution came only half-heartedly, and it seems a century ago when Jibril Aminu pushed it to the front burner.

Is the herder more sinned against than sinning? We have heard the clash with farmers for years. How did it escalate to a remorseless bloodbath? To what extent was it a case of cattle rustling triggering vengeance? The Fulani have said if you kill one, they kill a hundred in revenge? But was the rustling the only reason for the deaths, especially in communities where nothing of the sort happened like in Yelwa Gindi Akwati?

In my television show on TV Continental, late president of Northern People’s Congress, Bala Takaya insisted that the killers were not the regular herdsmen and that they came from outside the country. When they herded, they used the animals as cover. The killers, he insisted, were not herdsmen but shadowy impostors.

In Yelwa, for instance, they came only for Christians. It is important to not only quietly enjoy the burst of peace, but to reach the bottom. Bishop Kukah once said that we never solve any of our problems. We just move on, although ironically he wanted us to move on to other things on the Jonathan corruption saga. But he has a point. We should examine it. Where are the hoodlums gone? I suspect, without evidence, that they morphed into robbers and kidnappers. Such crimes are easier than razing down villages. They can strafed by Mi35 as they make away on foot or motorbikes.

If the killers are mainly bandits, does it mean the herds were innocent of most killings and deserve our apologies? Were they like the animals in J.P. Clark’s  Fulani Cattle “so mute and fierce and wan/…not demurring nor kicking.”

If we don’t get to the bottom, we stand the risk of meeting them elsewhere. Or is it why Katsina and Zamfara are now escalating into emergencies?

 

READER’S RESPONSE

Thanks for your courage to cover a man of courage, Imam Abdullahi Abubakar. It is not for nothing that they gave the top honors as Hon. Fellow, Nigerian Academy of Letters. Congratulations.

Samuel Adeniran, Lagos.

 

Agbaje the monopolist

IN a recent television interview, Jimi Agbaje says no PDP youth is qualified to be governor of Lagos. Or more charitably, he didn’t see any young man or woman. That explains why he is the one who should run. Agbaje, the PDP candidate for Lagos State governor, should listen to himself. He is the one who accuses his opponents of overtaking Lagos. Yet, in his own language, he is a monopolist of power in Lagos PDP. Secondly, for a man who says he wants an inclusive government, he is dividing the society along generational lines.

The last time, he pitched the contest as an ethnic one, pushing his party and candidature as an Igbo versus indigenes affair. Now it is not only ethnic but also generational. He is fighting his ethnic group in an unblushing hint of a quisling and divider. Now, he is setting himself as contemptuous of youth.

Agbaje has not always known how to verbalise language in a campaign. Sometimes, he comes across as juvenile and, at least, unreflective in his diction. To be sure, Agbaje once used to look youthful, and of course handsome. Maybe he does not know that times move and once ruddy young men turn hoary. He may just learn that when he accuses others, people are listening.

He should not trade in hypocrisy and hope that a gullible electorate will buy in.

Before embarking on the journey, some locals said it was not far from Jos. Maybe 30 minutes. They may have been right if they reckoned with the landscape. The vision ahead promised booby-traps of bumps and body aches, even in a Toyota Land Cruiser that subdues rugged terrain into peculiar expressways.

A contrast to what I had always known of Plateau State, with its breath-taking verdure, arboreal paradise and climate imported from Eden. The road to Yelwa Gindi Akwati was bald and ferocious with its dips, sways and rises on a rocky ride. Past tin mining sites, past monster rocks, riding through sand-clogged streams, the air sometimes crisp, sometimes a riot of dust.  On mine sites, the graders lay still in mud-spattered cradles. Wealth lay beneath but everywhere you looked, poverty snorted. Someone remarked it was the scar of a failing federal system. Plateau State Governor Simon Lalong has lamented how rogue oligarchs with brigands siphon its mineral bounty.

Peaks and valleys drape our vehicle with lights and shadows as we ride up and down the ragged road. We navigated a clump of trees here, a lone mango tree here and row of pear trees there, sometimes stunningly lush and some fading out of glory, all like sturdy fingers pointing to a baleful firmament. Also a cluster of grassy lawns had lost their lustre, but remain as insistent green carpets defying a birdless sky and an arid stretch of undulating land.

“That is the first house they attacked and killed people,” a guide said, pointing to a mud house. The blend of thatched and zinc roof, black from fire, scattered all over a broken wall. We saw quite a few of such houses. It happened June 23, when a band of renegades rattled into Yelwa Gindi Akwati about 4pm with AK47, and undertook an orgy of killings and made a bonfire of homes. Their targets: Christians. That village also tenanted our hero.

In the midst of this barbarous temerity, an 83-year-old man stood for God and humans. He opened his mosque and his home. All who could enter he would defend. He had no arms, no brawn, no army. He, a fragile old man, with a soft voice and granite heart, asked the mosque to be locked, including an adjunct mosque. The mosques were filled. The overflow headed to his home of about five rooms. Men, women, children, all took shelter with their faith and an imam as their anchor. The goons came. The man stood at his door, between the militants and the helpless beings. The sky burst with rain, and the imam fended them off with a plea. His mien appealed to them to save the souls.

“I didn’t say anything to them,” he told me. “I was praying in my heart and looking at them.” The men were hooded, and spoke Hausa, Fulani and English, he said. As he stood before them, he tripped and fell. Rather than step over him, they stepped away, banged at the door of the mosque as well, but also left. All the lives were saved. Most of them Christians, as attested to by the Birom I saw there and his fellow custodians of the mosque.

Were they 300? I asked. He said they were so many he could not count. I entered the mosque. If it was crammed full with people lying on the floor, it could have taken five hundred. It was not only Christians from his village but also those who fled there from neighbouring communities, including a place called Ex Land.

In a region where Christians and Muslims have been reported to be at daggers-drawn, where the so-called herdsmen and farmers only met in blood puddles, this imam bucked the narrative. For daring to disdain his personal safety for others and valorising human life without prejudice to religion, Imam Abdullahi Abubakar is In Touch Person of the Year. Because of him, hundreds of Nigerian men, women and children, secure a second chance in a year of wanton waste of sacred lives under the slaughter of ethnic and religious militants.

He shunned the apocalypse of religious conflict and embraced peace now. Much has been said about our shero, Leah Sharibu, who stood her ground and would not surrender her Christian conscience on pain of death. She is my runner-up, as a story of innocence and assertion of human resolve over the pressure of zealots. She represents the insistence of faith and human right.  The Imam staked his life to save hundreds of children like Leah and fathers and mothers. She tempts sectarian fealty, while the old man hails over borders.

Abubakar is a universal spirit. The Christian zealot will see remorse, the Muslim fanatic will find a new path, the atheist will coddle human pathos. He was a man with true evangelical zeal. A puritan of love and peace.  A partisan of harmony, not sects. He is not like the clerics who yelled for revenge, some in churches and others in mosques, cutting human society in cleavages of faith and murder.

He did not abandon the Christians because they serve a different deity. “We are all children of God. Both faiths want peace.” He said. He counters the narrative where Christians in the United States bar Muslims from their country, and radical Muslims in the Middle East rape and slaughter Christians, where in North East, Boko Haram turns blood-filled eyes at The Holy Spirit, where a minister of defence is howling for grazing routes. Also a misguided president utters a wry plea for neighbours to accommodate each other. Mass deaths, mass burials. Dusk rapines, night raids. Families in disarray. We had all these where a man said no to slaughter, and yes to life.

He truly affirms the template of harmony set up by Governor Lalong to foster peaceful co-existence among people between Muslims and Christians, Biroms and Fulani, among other tribes. On the issue, he said only those who don’t understand God create trouble.

Abubakar moved there like other Hausa-Fulani folks have done over the decades. The village has been a model of inter-faith harmony and even marriages. He arrived there in the early 1950’s when the Sardauna became the premier of Northern region.

“The Christians welcomed us and gave us land,” he said. “We have lived together in peace ever since.” He noted that the Christians gave them the land where the mosque was built and they even contributed about N60,000 to build it. He also said those who preach hate between the religions have not studied the books.

“I have read the Bible as well as the Qur’an,” he asserted. He read Hausa version. He spoke through translators. He said he saw many similarities between both faiths, and he read about Jesus’ miracles and all the stories, especially in the Old Testaments. “Jesus was mentioned about 25 times in the Qur’an and Mohammed five times,” he said. So he saw no reason for any frictions.

Unlike many clerics, Christian and Muslim, who never face the ultimate test of faith, Abubakar excelled. In the novel Middlemarch by George Eliot, a young man who was undertaking a training to be a cleric raised doubts in the minds of some young women. A character said, “He would be a great hypocrite. But not yet.”It is like what Prophet Isaiah says of the weak,’’the children came to the birth, there is no strength to bring forth’’. Until a cleric excels like Abubakar, the potential of hypocrite hovers. Few are chosen.

As for courage, he has no equal in the year. He even turned down the government’s offer for protection. He deserves one of our highest national award.

He wanted to be a soldier and fight during the civil war. However, he had to remain at home to nurse his ailing father. When he died, Abubakar became imam.

My second runner-up is the Russian fighter aircraft: Mi35. It is the machine of the year. I called it the bird of praise earlier in the year. It is the reason the so-called herdsman has fallen silent. The aircraft could have tracked the killers in Yelwa Gindi Akwati, who came on foot and ran away. It complicates the narrative that all the spasms of violence came from herdsmen. Most must have been from bandits who exploited the herdsmen crisis for criminality. But the Mi35 can lift up anywhere and land anywhere, if not as nimble as the American Apache. We did not make the machine, but it is made for peace in our land.

They acted without the epaulettes of elders or the gravity of the name the law embossed on them. They could not distinguish themselves from the agberos in the motor parks. They kept at it even when it was obvious that they had chosen to be juveniles in an adult environment. It was as though they envied the world of hooligans and had craved a part in that theatre of the macabre. Politicians work with thugs and roughnecks as a matter of routine, and sometimes they cannot distinguish themselves from their brutish errand boys. They acted neither distinguished nor honourable.

They saw the budget presentation as an avenue to ventilate the venality of the street, the unrestrained rabble of the fake revolutionary. Their voices were brusque, their noses flared, their emotions gushed like barbarians, their feet unleashed in stomps. They might have jumped if there was room. What they could not attain in space, they accomplished in the filth of language and rascally gesticulations of their uncouth hands. The legislature is a platform for tasteful rhetoric, not abuse; for heroics, not disgrace; for ideas, not juvenility. It is the people’s chamber of thought and conduct, not a cesspool of brigandage.

They are the bedbugs of our democracy. If you are not in bed with them, they give you bedlam. Rather than being civil, be evil. In place of cheer, you jeer. Don’t be human, try primitivism. To boost their profile, they have to boo.

Then some of them say it was all spontaneous. Really? The placards erupted miraculously onto their hands with curse words gleaming in ink. The spirit of the chants about “freedom come” sprang on their collective lips at the same time, just like David said in the Bible that “the spirit of God spoke by me and his words were in my tongue.” These hecklers must have fallen under some strange power, a secular, caveman’s anointing. They did not practise the acts we saw on the NASS floor, even though we all know they held a meeting the previous night to derail the budget presentation by President Muhammadu Buhari. In the Poland of the Middle Ages, historians described their legislature as “divinely ordained confusion.” But the Nigerian show was neither divine nor ordained.

Those who lost the first argument find solace in the virtues of democracy. They say the ideology abides chaos. They quote the fellow who soiled the solemn air as Obama addressed the joint session of Congress. But even his fellow Republicans scowled at his scandal. Joe Wilson of the South Carolina had shouted “you lie” when President Obama pointed out the glories of his health care programme. Vice President Joe Biden shook his head, but Obama strode on unscathed.

The House passed a resolution condemning him, and Wilson placed a call to the White House to offer his apologies and Obama graciously accepted. In our case, we are preening in iniquity. It was the first time a president would be presenting a budget to a joint session with a leadership from the opposition. It hoisted a chance for historic fraternity. Other nations would exploit such rostrums to make history and adorn the archives. When we make history, historians and posterity recoil like last week.

In the United Kingdom, a fellow uttered a slur and was cautioned, although he denied he used that word. That was because mouthing indecent language is anathema, even though mild interruptions and even occasional shouts, mainly murmurs, are permitted. But not trafficking in foul words like “liar” and shameless shouts of “no” when the president lists some of his doings. In the House of Commons Procedure and Practice, Second Edition 2009, the rule says, “the use of offensive, provocative or threatening language in the house is strictly forbidden. Personal attacks, insults and obscenities are not in order…”

The onus lies on the presiding speaker to restrain the “spontaneous” outbursts of erring lawmakers. Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki and bumbling Dogara conspired with their silence. They did little to register their disdain for the Neanderthal effusions of the fellows. I have decided not to name the hecklers today. They belong to the night of first ages, apologies to Joseph Conrad in The Heart of darkness. Those who think we have improved from First Republic barbarism, and we have benefited from the insights of history, only had to assault their eyes and ears with the drama of the absurd by the politicians.

What were they heckling? Was it the N-Power programme that is common knowledge? Was it the onset of work on the Second Niger bridge? Was it the rail work between Lagos and Ibadan that overthrew the headlines just as Buhari was delivering the speech? The guys were not happy because he did not sign their electoral bill and he had chopped off some of their thieving proposals in the budget. If they objected to Buhari’s claims, they have other avenues to show it. They could even devote a session of the house to it.

The difference between the British parliament and the American is also pre-ordained in the architecture of the chambers.  The American structures its Congress with rooms between the seats, and it allows the lawmaker to speak as though on a stage. It means more dignity to the lawmaker and respect for decorum. The British is more claustrophobic, and lawmakers tend to sit closer and it could mean intimacy as well as intrusion in another person’s space. This format could encourage uncomfortable conduct.

In spite of the British example, and in spite of shouts, the duty is with the speaker to subdue any tendency to temerity. But we claim to copy the American presidentialism, and the case of Joe Wilson summarises the way to go. But some of the errant lawmakers are still congratulating themselves. Eleyinmi Saraki flayed the budget without even condemning the show of shame.

The theatrics has paid attention more to the antics of the lawmakers than the sublime subject of how to run the country in the coming year. The budget is so important that that session is the most important rite in our democratic almanac.  It is about how do we educate our kids, feed the poor, repair and build roads, heal the sick, soar with the high and mighty nations in the world. Yet we turned it into an alawada epic, grown men ranting and chanting like inebriated masquerades in a village festival.

Even when Buhari paused to tell them, mock-flattering, half-scolding, that they were better than that, they saw no need to abate their nuisance. He also told them that the “world is watching us.” They were lost in their imprecatory lust. They were irredeemable in their foul rhythms of gutter and guttersnipes.

The president presented himself with dignity. His aplomb showed that in spite of his fabled temper, Buhari knew how to rise above the absurdity of the day. Neither in gesture nor words did he sully the dignity of his office that afternoon. Rather it was the lawmakers who undermined the cathedral majesty of the presidency and the nobility of their offices.

Once when he referred to his work in Bonny, he paused when the sound of liar rang out, he looked at the heckler with an inflamed eye, and continued his work. It was a glimpse of Buhari the GOC who defied his army chief Garba Wushishi and asked Nigerians to start reading the constitution.

The errant lawmakers should apologise, not only to the president but also to Nigerians for selling this democracy short with their ill manners.

Over his Atiku romance, the Owu chief has declared that he is not neutral. He wanted to show that he is still in political bed with the Adamawa titan. But he shocked no one. Obj has never been neutral in his life. He has acted as the hyena who did not kill but would take over the spoil after the cheetah has killed the heifer. He is the historic cheat who purloins credit for other people’s toil. Here I take a look at his public life and break it into five acts, like a Greek play. In the last act, I pose a question.

Act one: the beginning of cynicism, or the loss of innocence

He would call it his civil war exploits, but it was a war he exploited for his personal gains. He appropriates the cauldron years and calls his account My Command with an air of proprietary vanity. In his book, it comes out more as ego trip than a trip to the past, a sojourn of alternative history. Adekunle won the war. Obasanjo wore the crown. He demonised the man who commanded the Third Marine Commando, all the way from Warri, through the Niger Delta to what became known as the battle to deliver the OAU of Biafra: Owerri, Aba and Umuahia. Adekunle had laid down the strategy, deployed resources and even preened before OBJ replaced him. Obj, as graphically presented in Alabi Isama’s book, the Tragedy of Victory, wandered away on an Israelite journey while the mainstays of the division with the help of stalwarts like Alani Akinrinade were battering Biafra to surrender. He came back and took the glory.

Act Two:  Stooping to conquer.

After his boss, Murtala Muhammed was assassinated, his first speech made him look supine. His look like a mouse made one wonder if he ever held a revolver. But he was stooping to conquer. He knew his allegiance to the cabal, and one of the highlights was to sell out his countryman general who had come to him to point out an inequity in the country and the armed forces. Obj acted as though he was obliging. He called one of the architects of the inequity and put his kinsman in an awkward position by asking him to repeat what he had confided in him. That was the virtue of his loyalty. He also was happy he did not have to hand over to his kinsman, the Ikenne sage, and he stooped to a perversion of mathematics in the court of law. We can remember 12 two-third of 19 states. He became the first to hand over power through mathematical failure. A democrat of flawed arithmetic.

Act Three: Anxiety of Influence

Having retired to the arboreal calm of his farm, he suffered from a fear of irrelevance.  His successor would eclipse him. No one would remember Obj anymore. So, he evinced the opposite of what the literary critic Harold Bloom designated as the anxiety of influence. Bloom defined it as the relentless wrestling with the greatest of the dead. It meant writers – and political historians have also borrowed it – would try to imitate the great personages of the past and make it seem those personages were copying them. It is a time-honoured tradition of continuity, what some Brazilian critics did in the first half of the 20th century and designated it cannibalism. It was a great way to eat up the flesh of the avatars of history. In Obasanjo’s case, he wanted to fight the future titans, his “children.” In this case, those who succeeded him. Some critics called it PHD syndrome. Meaning Pull him down. Maybe that is why he wanted to have a proper PHD. He always wanted anyone who became head of state to look bad so he would look good. Never mind that those who succeeded him always found a way to make OBJ look heroic. Remember SAP with human face? Aikhomu mocked him by calling for SAP with human leg, and human arm, etc. That was also the time he went into epistolary battles and wrote his books, including My Command.

Act Four: the dancer

When he became civilian president, he was called Baba. He saw himself as the father of the nation. But it was a father of vengeance. He wanted to be like God, who said, “vengeance Is mine.” First, he set up EFCC to hound his foes. It was also the first time the phrase “heating the polity” became routine in the land. He became a sort of modern butcher. Remember Odi and Zaki Biam. It was his own definition of low-intensity murder or genocide. He became a portentous choreographer, a dancer of misfortune. People learned to fear his happy hour. Especially when at a party. He danced with a certain fellow, and the next day he pushed him off his chair in the legislative chamber. He danced with a senator’s wife and the next day, Chuba Okadigbo was history as senate president. He did not pay for the pounded yam. He tossed cake in the mouth of another legislator, Adolphous Wabara, in the mockery of homosexual romance. The next day, Adolphous was gone.

He also taught us some ‘area boys’ language. Remember “do or die?” In deference, again to our bard, this is not a beatification, or even beautification, of the area boy.

Then to top it all, he wanted to be president for life, at least for a third act. Money changed hands. But unfortunately for him, power also changed from his hands, apologies to MFM church.

Act five: reinventing innocence

Since baba failed as Baba, he went back to his default PHD. Pull Him Down. God so kind he has a proper PHD. In religious knowledge. But in the Bible, we are told that God has made man upright but he has come forth with many inventions. This man is trying hard to reinvent himself. He gave us ‘Umoru’ Yar Adua – when he knew that Umar was not in good enough health. So, he could not outperform him in office. And just for insurance, he gave us our dear Goodluck Jonathan of the shoeless provenance in the hope that he would be his pooch and poodle. Alas, the pooch pushed him aside. So, he went back to his vomit and made an open and extravagant flourish of tearing his PDP card. He joined a winning team and felt flattered to be called a navigator. But he navigated a craft already near the shore. He had jumped off a sinking boat where he once oared like a prince.

Again, the ramrod general has given him the same treatment, so he is going back to his vomit – to Atiku, to PDP. And the same PDP folks he jettisoned, he now wants to jet to power again. Obj would really want to succeed because this is the first time in his career he would fight a battle. He is not playing the hyena over the cheetah’s spoil. If he loses in 2019, it would be the first time his illusion would be shattered. He would have grabbed the spoil of poison.

It would mean at the end of the battle, he will have no crown to wear. He would look at the other side laugh and caper. An unfamiliar position even for our Owu chief. His illusion of being a winner over the past acts will be without evidence of a trophy. German philosopher Nietzsche loathed that scenario. “Please don’t destroy people’s lies, illusions because if you destroy their illusions, they will not be able to live at all,” he wrote. In her classic The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton quoted an old man who fell into misfortune in his twilight hour: “For pity’s sake,” the man cried, “don’t destroy my last illusions.” Obj must be aware of this scenario. If he loses, he would be losing his innocence at 80.

This will be the unravelling of the failing patriarch. He will fight hard to keep the innocence of his age.

 

Agbaje and the ethnic card

Jimi Agbaje is bringing back his past foible. He noted in the past week that he is still a harbinger of ethnic fight in Lagos, by characterising his APC opponent, Jide Sanwo- Olu as a candidate against the Igbo. This is not only opportunism, but a rascally way to turn a true contest into the mud fight of Yoruba versus Igbo. In the last fight, the pharmacist rallied his supporters into the lagoon. We want responsible campaigns, not appeals to bigotry. Sanwo-Olu replied him with finesse, and would not go down the mud blast with him.

If all Agbaje would do is return to his 2015 formula of a Yoruba man fighting his kinsmen by rallying another ethnic group, he has shown he has run out of imagination. Mr. Agbaje, is senility at 60 not too early? You saw the scorecard in 2015 and the bad blood.

Not many want the ‘Buhari double’ saga to sag. Even now, some still believe it is all a ruse, and that Muhammadu Buhari is no more. We are in the era of el Sudan, and an impostor is on the throne. We have dressed the presidency in borrowed robes.

Not even his assertion, in faraway Poland, should suffice. It does not matter that the impostor story originates from an impostor, the ethnic entrepreneur and phony Biafran, Nnamdi Kanu. A fake in charge of an original. He is a mockery of the French writer Jean Cocteau that you have to “copy in order to be original.” After all, who better to fake an impostor story than an impostor himself, a past master of the art of deceit. Kanu did it to manoeuvre himself back into the dubious graces of his fans and gullible followers. But like all fakes, it will fade.

But why did the story develop such resonance, even among some ordinarily discerning folks. First, the mainstream media ceded the narrative to Soyinka’s millipedes of the internet. The story took on a virile momentum, and editors acted as though it was a quiet squirm in the sewer. The alternative media is teaching many gate keepers that they can no longer be smug about what makes news. Hence I wrote a column on the doppelganger story a few weeks ago to break the cold spell. While newspapers and television outlets froze, the social media fizzed. A schizophrenic reality.

The other point is that Buhari’s health story was not the first affliction in high places. Such illnesses have always been bungled by befogging the facts. When late president Umar Yar’adua took ill, the so-called cabal scrambled to concoct media miracles to bring the late president to health on the pages of the newspapers. They advanced apocryphal stories on the man’s well-being. When they didn’t, they kept silence over important details. They pushed reality from the hospital to the people’s imagination. Yar Adua was healthy if the public wanted him to be, or sick, or voiceless, or dead, or limping. In the public imagination, there were many apparitions of the late president. Each story had its own integrity, its source, its doctor’s report, its picture, its sound. You chose your own.

It was not limited to him. Three governors of that era had illnesses of the public imagination. Chime of Enugu State, Imoke of Cross River State and Suntai of Taraba State. Like Yar Adua, they were hospitalised abroad, and the Nigerian masses became concocters of medical fairy tales. When Buhari took ill, facts also became victim of the febrile fancy. Most people did not know what was wrong, and neither the presidency nor his close aides were forthcoming on his diagnoses or prognoses. Again, fantasy upended facts.

So when Kanu wove the story that he was dead and therefore a double, it played into the pattern of past fiction. The thoughts of those who believed he was dead or dying had only to be born again. So when columnist Olatunji Dare penned a satire, a cleric fell for it and read it as a straightforward piece. Dare, famed for his satirical missiles, had to issue a clarification. For those who have digested his writings over decades, it was no mystery.

Yet, the fact that we have in the past been left in the dark about our leaders’ affliction is no excuse not to examine the facts before making conclusion. As I noted in the past, many wise and discerning persons did not ask enough questions. Who was Sudan, where did he come from? How could the vice president and everyone in the cabinet be so blackmailed? When Franklin Roosevelt was president, he was a cripple and led the world against Hitler and tyranny. But most Americans did not know. But his illness was no scandal, and those who saw him in the pre-television era knew about his affliction but the media was quiet.

But in the day of social media, such conspiracies of silence cannot hold. If Sudan were real, then we all would know if we wanted. But we cannot deny that if Buhari had been transparent on his health when he was in London, his Poland denial would have been unnecessary. It is a lesson in media and communications.

The third reason why the story took a power of its own is the human fascination with ‘the other’ since the origin of time. Even prominent leaders, especially tyrants, have been known to have doubles. Hitler had his, so did Franco, Mussolini. Recently, Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi reputedly had their own doppelgangers. Yet, when it came to it, no serious enemies fell for the doubles. They have often been an amusing spectacle in history. Hitler had many close shaves, including a bomb that went off on his conference table. His double operated with ease, but not the real person. The point is, doubles are imperfect. They cannot replicate the original fully.

In fiction, they have often come as psychological tales. In the novel titled Despair, prose spirit Vladimir Nabokov weaves a story of a person who commits murder because he thinks his lookalike would be arrested. But the person is a look-alike only in his eyes. Other writers have looked at it, including Robert Louis Stevenson in Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Or in two great works of Oscar Wilde, his novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray. In his play, The Importance of Being Ernest, the name Ernest is not his real name, like Sudan.

The idea of the doppelganger originated in German folklore, and it taps into age-long obsession with the double, including the idea of the alter ego. We have had the Cain and Abel story as well as the Chinese yin and yang. The other is often associated with bad or evil, like Frankenstein or Dracula. Wilde’s Ernest wanted his double to be free and sensual. “Hell is other people,” said Jean Paul Sartre. Hence some who believed and propounded the Buhari double thought it was a way to nail him and his image. Buhari was probably right that they wanted him dead. But I don’t believe everyone who believed in the double had such intention. The evil was also planted by lack of communication when he was ill. Psychologist Otto Rank, however, thinks it is a human way of coping with death. If we create a double, like the soul, we live forever.

The fourth reason for the story’s power was political. Buhari returned with so much fervour and physical well-being. His strides, his strength of voice, his body language. So some believe it was more than a miracle that such a weak man should transform to such a sprightly state. His political enemies who visited him in the few days before he returned home saw him, and knew it was him. A word or two from them could have quelled it. It paid them for a Kanu and his men to stoke the false fire. And they felt warmed by the heat. So, his foes may be wondering in their minds and saying to the president, “how dare you be you!”