The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Every inch

    Every inch

    There has been a lot of ballyhoo over the ways of the late Awujale, especially what many of his critics say were indiscretions, that the king stooled on the royal pool. I ponder why such objections have not taken cognizance of irony of the age.

    We live in modern times, crown a modern king and expected an ancient custom. It is the contradiction that we must expect. We crown Christian and Muslim kings and expect fidelity to traditional deity. A king cannot be king if he cannot exercise unquestioned authority.

    What is more important, king or culture e? But that may be the wrong question. Maybe it is whether we can have a king of the future. If we cannot, why do we want a society of the future, with the daring of technology, the atrophy of obeisance, the primacy of reason, the sanctity of rebellion. We applaud all of these, and when a king does it, we shout haba! English history  throws up this contradiction. King Henry VIII abandoned tradition to divorce his wife to marry a svelte vision in Anne Boleyn, defied the Catholic Church and formed breakaway Anglican Church. He at once exercised royal power and defiance. In the 20th century, Edward the VIII did not challenge tradition but abdicated the throne when he preferred regal beauty to regal throne by marrying divorcee Wally Simpson.

     Did Awujale fit into Shakespeare’s line in King Lear: “he is every inch a king.”? In Julius Caesar he writes, “he who dies pays all debts.” Many who comment on Adetona know little about him.

    Below is an excerpt of this essayist’s 2017 review of his autobiography. Enjoy.

    The oba, a tall, robust, charismatic figure, told a story of some of his interactions with the Owu chief. Having written it, he made no bones about howling after the fact. He had written it, and he moved on. Seven years later, the Owu chief is whining and wailing.

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    Oba Sikiru K. Adetona Ogbagba 11 is one of the underappreciated talents and virtues of this age. Perhaps because he heads what we all know as an anachronistic institution, we tend to undervalue what political scientists call “soft power,” a term coined and popularised by Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye.

    He does not need to hold political office, or stand behind an army tank, or be a governor, to wield influence. He had to exercise the force of courage, honesty and the principle of fierce independence.

    It is interesting that, in spite of the ballyhoo of the Owu chief, the Awujale routinely ignored him. News reports say the Owu chief has apologised. It had better be true. The man is not only older than the former president, the Awujale has earned his octogenarian credentials, not by years but the exercise of his dignity.

    The book, titled Awujale: the autobiography of Alaiyeluwa Oba S.K.Adetona Ogbagba 11, unfurls his forthrightness. If he has lashed out at OBJ in the book, it is a little lazy, especially of our media critics and journalists, not to have plunged deeper. Many have restricted themselves to where he narrated Obasanjo’s witch-hunt of GLO chief executive Mike Adenuga. But the monarch has been quite fair to Obasanjo. We all know, Adenuga was targeted in an exercise of hypocrisy when he wanted the same man to help build his Bells University.

    The Awujale worked with Obasanjo to push the presidential candidacy of Professor Adebayo Adedeji during IBB’s quicksand transition programmes. While opposing his actions in government, he praised him for constructing roads that gave access to Ijebu land, and stood against those who wanted to dislodge him from office.

     He had called Obasanjo Judas and made it known he called him so in a meeting in the buildup to the elections that selected him to run against Falae. Yet, in spite of OBJ’s failing, the Awujale thought for the sake of the country and stability, Obasanjo’s rift with Atiku ought to end in order to save democracy. Newspapers ought to pay attention to books as news, not as vapid material for inside pages but virile aspects of our conversations. It is a reflection of the philistinism of today’s news organisations that many of such gems pass us by.

    I was also struck by his sense of balance in the Ogun State governorship sweepstakes. Ever a stickler to be nonpartisan, he said when Gbenga Daniel indicated he wanted to be governor, he advised Daniel to wait out Aremo Segun Osoba’s stewardship. But he didn’t. The Awujale stayed neutral. But when Daniel stormed his palace for a visit, he insisted that he would not attend to Daniel unless he stopped his supporters from throwing invectives at Osoba outside his palace. Daniel reportedly obliged.

    His Awo story also should have made news in 2010 when the book was published. He implied Awo’s AG and UPN resisted dissent or intellectual independence. He said he had doubted Awo’s socialist credentials and wondered if he was a socialist, why was he so wealthy he would not part with his properties as Mahatma Ghandi did. Awo had replied that he would if the society agreed to have full-blown socialism. That was not the same thing with Ghandi. Ghandi led by example. Awo wanted the mass example to lead him.

    During the western crisis, he had tried to play peace maker, but neither Awo nor Akintola obliged. He wondered why Awo wanted everyone in Ijebu-land to line behind him uncritically while he wanted others from other ethnic groups he competed against to abandon their ethnic leaders for him. His tale with Awo dovetailed into his crisis with Chief Bisi Onabanjo, who had dinner with others downstairs in his house with Awo, while he asked him(Awujale) to wait up to an hour upstairs. It began a friction that, once Onabanjo became governor, he deposed him as Awujale. This is the same person he had predicted would betray him after showering hospitality on Onabanjo in London with free accommodation, meals and transport back home when he was sick.

    He even offered to resign as oba when Diya succeeded Onabanjo after the military coup. Diya would not reinstate him even when the courts ruled against Onabanjo. After his military bluster, Diya had to acquiesce because the man said he wanted a plebiscite and if 90 percent or less voted against him, he would resign, support his successor and buy him a car. In spite of this, he eulogised Onabanjo’s exploits as governor.

    He also stood with the NADECO chieftains. He was openly called Oba NADECO and he even hosted the meetings. He had warned Shonekan that he would be dislodged as interim leader and history would call him a traitor.

    He knew very early to enjoy his reign, he had to be financially independent. Chief Odutola had wanted to teleguide his reign as he had done the predecessor. But Adetona resisted him. He launched into commerce and pried himself loose from the antics of government wheel horses.

    This is a good book, not a great book. I had craved his fresh observations of men like Awo, IBB, Abacha, Shonekan, Tafawa Balewa, Oba Sijuade, Adenuga, FRA Williams, etc. He had more than cursory interactions with them and must have greater insights than he revealed.

     Abroad, he met with Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, etc in the Middle East. He mentioned them in passing. It is not his fault but his editors’. They could have debriefed and opened him to bigger revelations.

    The book is uneven, showering details in some areas and stingy in others. But it is a book that gives a window on a man of character, aware of his position and did not take anything he was not ready to do away with on principle.

    Remember he was the only Southwest monarch who did not mince words to Jonathan when dollar softened his peers.

  • Inheriting Buhari

    Inheriting Buhari

    As former President Muhammadu Buhari lay, wrapped in his final shroud, in his tranquil bed, some politicians started to exploit the man’s afterglow. That afterglow, in quest for a better word, I would describe as his crowd. Some will call it his structure.

    Before he passed on, some cynical politicians did not offer the man a peace in his hearth. They turned him into a shrine of sorts, as though by bowing and flattery they could automatically take over what Boss Mustapha described as his 12.3 million followers.

     Especially in Kaduna, they became dubious pilgrims powered by messianic self-delusions.

    The man did not give them what they sought, especially some of them from the north who appeared to be his faithful servants, including former Kaduna State governor, Malam Nasir El-Rufai, Abubakar Malami, etc. They shrouded themselves as his inheritors, the custodians of his legacy, the messengers of the might he left behind.

    The same fellows should have asked a pertinent question when the man died. Where were the 12 million folks in his funeral hour? Where were their tears and where were their wailing agonies on the streets? They should have known that the 12 million exist, but they do not exist under anyone’s umbrella anymore.

    They are there for the taking. They have been there for the taking even before the man died, or even before the man left office.

    If Buhari was a man of integrity, it is now clear that integrity is not enough to govern.

    He was a rose in a sty, but a rose cannot extinguish a sty’s scent.

    That is what we are left with. The 12 million expected much from their man who was known as Sai baba. But two things account for why that crowd is now there for the taking.

     One, according to this reporter’s investigations, the northern streets expected him to unleash a campaign against the high and mighty who oppress the talakawa. They waited in vain.

     “The northern poor loves you when you deal with the rich people,” a fellow told me from the north.

    But more important is that the man had a vision to help the talakawa, and that accounted for the formation of the humanitarian system under the charge, initially, of vice president Yemi Osinbajo.  Buhari was sanguine about this project, and it included, among others, conditional money transfer. What happened to the billions that Buhari devoted to the rescue of the poor?

    That is a query his men, especially the former governors of the north, must answer. And this must include, his aides and ministers who were associated with this project.

    Much of that fund did not enrich the poor.  Rather it alienated and further pauperised the northern talakawa.

    The template was wrong from the beginning. They did not tell president that, to reach the northern poor, they did not need to depend on conventional banks.

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    The vice president then who held the ace did a lot of work visiting the communities in the south. If it did not pull weight in the south for all the investments, how could it have done well in the north. There was a palpable disconnect between ideas and people.

    The reason was that most states in the north have too few bank branches, and it became almost impossible to reach these people. In the south, some states have bank  branches enough to dwarf five or six states together.

    Take away Lagos or Abuja, but just look at Delta and Akwa Ibom. Both states have more bank branches than 10 northen states put together, except perhaps Kano and Kaduna. Yet, a lot of money was allocated, year-on-year, for this task.

    National Assembly investigations revealed that much of the money was not accounted for, and it led to a wave of angry rhetoric. Yet, the northern governors who held the key to saving it did not rise to the occasion.

    Buhari’s aides also were dead from the neck up. N-Power, the name we knew it by, was impotent for the throng in the north.

    The poor had hoped, and Buhari believed. But in the end, hope and belief collapsed on the incompetence of politicians whose devotion to their boss’ ideal was cynical and self-serving. That was how the big, swirling masses lost gusto and became disillusioned.

    Before his death, Buhari was aware of this and his comments reflected a sense of acceptance that he might have done things better. He took it as a man.

    So, when he received these slobbering, fawning politicians in Daura and Kaduna, he was aware these same politicians were undertaking a futile search. They were in phony worship of a shrine but they had betrayed the deity.

    In the last part of his reign, Osinbajo had to be decoupled from the humanitarian project because the operators had failed the ideal.

     Buhari reorganised it, but there was no zeal or integrity among those who took over. In the end, they alienated him from his beloved folks.

    So, when a man like Boss Mustapha speaks of a 12.3 million crowd, he should look at the mirror because he was, as the government’s scribe, in the centre of connecting his boss with his crowd. He failed, and woefully.

    It is the way of charismatic folks that once they leave, their followers are like sheep without a shepherd. The followers are no longer there for plucking.

    Whether it is Awo, or Sardauna, or Mandela or De Gaulle or Josip Bros Tito, once they depart the stage, no one claims their followers.

    They are open to new ideas, new entreaties and entrances, new wooers, new charismas. They are fresh clay waiting for new moulders.

    So, those who say they belong to the CPC, and they inherit his followers, have no sense of history. When he left ANPP, did the party not become a ghost? It was his charisma, his spiritual face, his magnetic carriage, aura of rectitude that pulled the crowd. The CPC folks should stop deceiving themselves.

    Again, men like Atiku and their new ADC squatters should not forget that they are following a phantom, not a crowd.

    They are inaugurating the new form of politics that may be termed the politics of absent crowd. Nothing demonstrated this more than the crowd’s lack of eruption of funeral agony as the man passed. It should be a cause for pause, for contemplation rather than exploitation by all these politicians who have no other ideas but to walk on the man’s grave. If anything, it shows that the masses cannot always be taken for granted.

    When De Gaulle resigned as French leader, he expected to see a throng outside his window the next morning.

     His ambience was as quiet as a wilderness. He was to learn that you have to always cultivate the people. De Gaulle must have felt like the character in Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize-winning novel written decades later titled: The Remains of the Day, in which the main character thinks of what might have been if he cultivates his loved one at the right time.

     Buhari has done his bit and left, but these cynical politicians are looking for pieces.

    The ADC folks are looking for the remains of the man, whereas they should have done the right thing when he gave them the window and wherewithal to save the talakawa.  They did not sow with him, and now they want to reap. They failed, so they are finding it hard to sail.

  • Peter Obi’s RBK moment

    Peter Obi’s RBK moment

    Recently, Pitobi went on BBC to recreate the RBK Okafor moment. RBK Okafor had tried to exploit the death of Nnamdi Azikiwe, and went on television with an effusive jeremiad telling the world that the Great Zik had handed over his platform and work to him. He was teary and almost convincing. Alas, Zik was not dead, and no such dialogue happened with the Owelle of Onitsha.

    Well, Pitobi says he had a dialogue with Buhari and the Daura chieftain asked him to care for the poor. I wonder why he waited, like RBK, until his passing to make such a proclamation. He might not have visited Buhari alone.

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     There might have been an aide around, and we want to verify, so it is not like one of Obi’s fantastical China statistical claims again.  The northern crowd did not take kindly to his assertion, and they lashed out at him in torrents. They mocked him as liar and they don’t want him near their neighbourhoods, etc. There is a way to respect the dead. Exploiting Buhari’s passing is not one of them.

  • Anticlimax

    Anticlimax

    We have never had a leader like Muhammadu Buhari, and we may never have one like him again. He first stepped into the nation’s imagination as a soldier and exited as a soldier in some eyes and a soldier-statesman in some other eyes, as a bigot in some others. Some will continue to see him, though, as a man of mystery.

    Peter Enahoro, known as Peter Pan, and author of How To Be A Nigerian gave the first hint of his profile as a man of mystery when he interviewed him for his Africa Now magazine. He described him as “deceptively gentle.” Since Peter Pan’s characterization in the 1980’s, in his first time as leader, Buhari changed his image as a sublime chameleon in many ways.

     He was a military leader, civilian bureaucrat, fighter for democracy as revenge rather than as ideologue, a presidential candidate as a supposedly repented autocrat, a serial loser with a Lincolnian strain, a president who developed a cult and fanatical following who bowed on the street and drank unclean water in his name, a president who almost died in office but developed a health status that resembled a miracle before he bowed out.

     As a young man, my first introduction to the Katsina patriarch was when he was the General Officer Commanding (GOC) in Jos, and he asked the army to begin reading the Constitution to know their responsibility for the country.

    As a columnist for the Nigerian Tribune, Ebenezer Babatope warned Nigerians to look out for the man, hinting that he was not a man to take for granted.

    It was during the Shagari era, and Babatope warned that no one should be surprised if we woke up one morning and he would be behind the “good morning fellow Nigerians” accompanying a martial music.

     It happened, according to his prophetic clairvoyance, in December 1983, and Buhari, later that night, in a winsome face and beret, addressed the country as a military ruler. He cherished that number 1983.

    In 2006, when I placed a call to him for an interview, I used a colleague’s number. When we met at his suite at the Hilton, the first remark was whether I was the fellow whose number ended with 1983.

    He beamed from ear to ear with a touch of rare vanity. I said no to his disappointment.  He might have wanted to swap numbers.

    When I met him that morning, I mused on a lot of things about the man. He had not had his second time as leader. I had a belief in him that he had the discipline and aura to run Nigeria.

    As I had characterised him on this page and before I started writing for this newspaper, he would bring his spartan discipline to stanch the bleeding in the country. This was because as a military head of state he was a personage who loathed corruption, and wanted to bring the nation on the path of sanity.

    So, when he ran for president, even the first time, I thought he was good for politics. The problem with Nigeria was not only a lack of discipline, but a lack of imagination in governance.

     I thought Buhari would bring his spartan charm and blend it with men of thinking and energy on the front row while he ran the country as a czar of corruption and due process.

     And that was the anticlimax of having him at the helm. He would govern with a purifying shadow, a sort of secular priest with his aura both cheering and chastening.

    He became a president and ran it with a cabal of antediluvian ideas. With a man like Malami as attorney general espousing the idea of an old route grazing.

     He presided over a sometimes cranky and conservative government, dead of ideas.

     On the economy, he stood guard over a government that had no way to generate money except by printing and borrowing from China, among others. He gave us a debt of over N30 trillion in Ways and Means and several billions of dollars.

     He left the finances in chaos and the nation’s morale was at the nadir. In one word, Buhari should have saved the economy from the Jonathan era where the nation was in dire straits. Rather, he worsened the situation, and created an economy that had to be saved from itself.

    Buhari, in the end, turned out to be a man who looked after one man: Muhammadu Buhari. Nothing reflected this self-absorption more than when he was running for election. When in Ogun and Imo states, he asked voters to vote for him but vote their conscience on the governorship and other offices.

    He dithered on his successor. He told the world he was not interested but he tried to undercut the best man in his whole political career: Bola Tinubu.

     It was he who crafted an alliance that vaulted him to Aso Villa. Yet, he did not want him to succeed him. It was hypocritical that he did not even tell now President Tinubu that he did not want him as his successor.

    Rather he put his weight behind former Senate president Ahmad Lawan.

     It reflected his lack of integrity, and even blatant hypocrisy as a leader.

     He did not only support Lawan, he ran an election-period economy with currency and fuel scarcity that cast his APC in bad light and sought to undermine its candidate.

    In spite of accusations, he was unfazed and many saw those measures as choreographed to derail Tinubu’s presidential dreams.

     So besieged was he that he did the wrong thing by showing off his voter’s card as a mark of party loyalty.

    As military leader, he squeezed the economy in the name of enshrining a moral tone.

    In his time as civilian leader, he choked the economy and failed as a moral compass. He might have made the claim that he was a moral leader in his first time with his war against indiscipline.

     In retrospect, it was discipline without imagination or conscience. It was the same lack of imagination that throttled his way as a civilian president.

    It has turned out that Buhari loved himself too much to love Nigeria enough. He loved his faith too much to open his heart out of his prejudices.

    He visited Ibadan once as a fighter for the herdsmen, and it cast him as a bigot. He did not make much effort to defrock himself of such optics in the way he handled the herder crisis.

    In fact, the link between the herder crisis and the banditry became more potent in his time, and was soft on banditry. The bandits swaggered in the bushes and highways, and had full eight years to fatten and nurture the monsters in their souls.

    There is a belief that he did not want the bandits to be killed, so our murderers blossomed on the blood and treasures of society.

    When I was a student at Ife, I expected much from the man when he took over as military leader. It was on the cusp of a new year he took over as head of state, December 31, 1983. There was a parade on campus hailing the end of democracy.

    My throat joyed with songs that morning.  When the French revolution was born, William Wordsworth crooned, “Bliss it was that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven.” As a youth, I felt like that. Just as the revolution became a bust, Buhari’s coming with Decrees two and four hammered Nigerians out of our comforts.

    When he wanted to be a civilian leader, I gave him a chance as a man of conscience. He failed. Buhari was a tease. He promised with an air of pious devotion. He did not deliver.

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     Yet, he had a charisma and cult following unmatched by any in our history. His was a charisma of suggestion. He was no demagogue, no performer.

    If one, his was a demagogue of body language: his ramrod carriage, his no-smile and smile, his soldierly bearing, his façade of severity and disdain for materialism. If no doer, he bequeaths an example of beguiling simplicity. He was known for no extravagance, cars, houses, money show. His was an extravagance of apparent austerity.

    He was loved by both cow and man. He did less for man than cow, but cows never had a way of gratitude known to man, except men like him, perhaps.

    He was a head of herders without herding. He was a soldier but did not quaff or indulge the pleasures of the flesh.

    He was a good soldier but preferred the love of his civilian followers. Danjuma once said he would want him as a chief of army staff rather than head of defence staff. He looked a force of character but he could not translate it to those he governed.

    His following knew he could do no wrong. He might have lost some of his mystique to his failures, but if he ran for election again today in a coalition that guaranteed just a few millions from the south, no one can bet against him.

    He is a testament to the futility of the crowd as a picture of wisdom. That is why we should be wary of man who, without clear vision, capture the imagination of the throng, a thing Elias Canetti warns about in his Nobel Prize-winning book, Crowds and Power.

    History may yet be kind to him in a few areas. As president, he worked, with Babatunde Raji Fashola SAN, on infrastructure and redeemed his image by prioritising rail transportation.

    He lived a phenom and died a phenom. He was a hero to many, a man of unflinching tenacity. Even  in death, his foes have nothing but admiration, bordering on curious affection.

    Goodbye to a man among men

  • The squatters

    The squatters

    The gathering of the coalition of the wounded a few days ago resembles the 40 men who worked up a futile conspiracy against Apostle Paul on false charges and, other than false charges, they neither ate nor drank until he was killed, a waste of palate. They also laid a mockery of an ambush.

    These so-called new ADC men are not the types to neither eat or drink, although one of them made a public farce in fancy clothes by pleading hunger in a bash that cost tens of millions.

     Others among them relish their lavish dinner tables and even one of them has a Damocles of corruption hanging over his wife for billions of dollars without a month of  work. None of them would even fast except the mullah among them with a beard and a forked and profane tongue who is fattening on the image of a pariah.

    The hypocrisy bothers, but much more. It started with the squat figure among them who was shooed out of Kaduna like a bleating goat in a garden. He moved from the APC to the SDP, and asked all his fellow wounded whether with a sore head or broken knee to come over to a new place of refuge.

     He assumed a proprietary air until the owners of the land said he, an interloper, a squatter and the landlords had no place for him. He had no grassroots cred, no papers, no love.

    The habitual noisemaker turned voiceless and even meek.

    They all, the wounded, remained in limbo for days. They developed an independent spirit, and wanted a party of their own. They were not good at it as they formed a new party known as ADA, and they were at it until they discovered they had conjured up a copycat. They went back to their vomit. An existing party already had that signature. For a people trying to imitate the coalition formed by their foe and nemesis, they suffered from a bad case of caricature.

    Then suddenly, they all came together under the aegis of the ADC. All we saw was an assemblage of retirees. If El-Rufai left APC as a bleating goat, the new entrants of the ADC were bloated. Bloated as in bored with too much money and nothing else to do with their happy and delicious privileges.

    `They had hardly enjoyed their new home when the true owners, just like the SDP, told them they are squatters. They came with area boys’ swagger. They are banding together to take over another person’s property. If they are not bandits, what other word can describe them? They are the Bello Turji of today’s politics.

    They are all experienced politicians. But so far, they have shown that they do not know how to form a party. They do not know how to defect because some of them like Peter Obi have not left Labour Party. Bode George made that point of his PDP folks. They do not know how to take over a party. They are a pestilent lot.

    There is as yet no commitment to the party. Two of them, Rotimi Amaechi and Obi, gave notice that they were there because of their ambition so they announced their ambition ahead. His move to ADC is feint. He knows it will faint.

    So, Obi, who cannot leave his Obidient rabble in the lurch, is waiting for a takeover of his own. If they do not give him the ticket, just as PDP did not in 2022, he would return to his tent to embrace his crowd of hecklers. He cannot abandon them. They are his breath of life. He is just a squatter among squatters waiting to be a landlord, a self-indulgent opportunism. As for Amaechi, his hunger is a grudge match. He has nowhere to go but to bow to an inevitable crash.

    Atiku, the grand patron of defectors, has a bigger grudge than Amaechi. This is his last chance, and he is going to fight like a bear with a sore head. What we have in this new coalition are coalitions within a coalition. We have the Atiku crowd, the Obi crowd, the El-Rufai crowd and the Amaechi crowd.  When such  bacilli of ambitions coalesce, we can only wait for the end of the story. We are in the first act of an interesting drama, and the most important conflict is not their ambitions and party nominations. It is the prospect of a legal and ego turmoil that will end up like the Labour Party and PDP crises. Claims of conflicting legitimacy will splinter the organ, and everyone will realise that they are tenants of a tenant. Ralph Nwosu, a self-imposed place holder as ADC leader, will tell them, “I thought I was a landlord, but I cannot return your rent. Sorry.”

    The other issue though is that none of them has a big hold on their states or regions. Not David Mark, not El Rufai, who was shooed out, not Amaechi, who cannot hold 13 per cent of Rivers State, not Rauf Aregbesola, who can only fete Atiku to a protem breakfast, not Atiku, who has been dishonoured from a title.

    The bigger point of this so-called delusion is their claim that they are the rescuers of Nigeria.

     They are trying to play on our collective amnesia. They forget that we know all of them. This new group can be divided into two.

     The first are the Jonathan men. The second are the Buharists. These are the men who battled against each other just a few years ago. It shows us ideas have no traction in their action. The only outlier in the group is Atiku Abubakar, who has always been for everyone and for nobody.

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     For instance, was Amaechi not a Buharist? Of course, just like Malami, who  rose from fringe lawyer to attorney general. The Jonathan crowd is led by David Mark, who this time is going to show us how the poor can afford telephones.

    These two governments, Buhari and Jonathan, precipitated the crisis that the present government is trying to solve.

    The Jonathan era wasted the boon of oil and had no rubric for solving the security burden. They spent the nation into huge deficits and rolled the country into foreign exchange rut.

    The Buhari administration was a footloose amalgam of failed men like Malami, who ran the country into a spend-and-waste economy in which N30 trillion  and billions of naira in debt made the present government the real rescuer.

     Now, they want to turn the logic on its head. They committed the sin and they are calling themselves the saviour. The sinner and saviour in one breath. Jesus bore the sin without committing any. This is what made Jesus angry with the pharisees. He said they were a whited sepulchre full of dead men’s bones.

    What is happening with the coalition is a lack of reckoning, what Joseph Conrad describes as “the adventurer’s easy morality, the bravado of guilt.”

    They have committed the sin, and but are acting as though they are sinned against. They should act like real opposition and develop ideas. They have advanced nothing. What can they do better against insecurity? This administration has not solved it, but remarkable progress has been made with the dispatch of not a few bandit leaders.

    Azu Ishiekwene wrote a piece about travelling with a few editors to Zamfara. They feared the air they breathed, but they went to and fro unscathed.

    His prose was so tremulous he might have pondered on the faith that made them undertake the journey in the first place. How many bandits did Buhari eliminate, or Jonathan? The Benue and Plateau recent sparkles of death may have deviated from the progress but the facts speak for themselves in that, unlike in the past, the bandits are fighting for their lives in Niger and Katsina.  Boko Haram is also having a resurgence that is suffering quite a few bruises.

    The coalition should respond to the elimination of ways and means of N30 trillion and the billions of dollars debts. These were the burdens that these same men created in the years of the locusts.

    What they are playing is geriatric politics, the game of old men who know that the time of the end has come for their dreams. It reminds me of the chilling biography about Nazi holocaust titled: Cold Crematorium by Josef Debreczeni, perhaps the chilliest eyewitness account of that misbegotten time. He wrote of a part of the concentration camp where some people were alive but practically out of breath even though they were still alive. They were scrawny, wounded, slobbering, febrile, sterile, weak, and waiting for the grim reaper. Crematorium is hot by definition. But he called it cold because they did not need to go through the gas chamber to go.

    In the case of the coalition, time is their cold crematorium. In his prison memoirs, Soyinka called such fate slow lynching, the title he wanted to call his The Man Died. These men of different stripes in ADC are cobbled together by expired fantasies of power, and are waiting for their epitaph.

  • Mangu: A wedding and a funeral

    Mangu: A wedding and a funeral

     The North Central is smouldering, and we must worry. The last tragedy was in Mangu area of Plateau State when travelling wedding guests were ambushed and 13 people died. According to eyewitness accounts, including survivors, it was a case of aggression by locals. They did not accept pleas for help but, monster-eyed, the locals killed one after another and set their bus ablaze.

    They were coming from neighbouring Kaduna State. They were there to be merry, to share in the kinship of wedlock and joy. They did not bear arms, they bore gifts. They did not know the neighbourhood but expected the locals to be neighbours. They were visitors but no strangers to the Nigerian community. They and the locals were fellow indigenes of the constitution. They may be Hausa-Fulani but they were Nigerians. If there was conflict with the Fulani neighbours, they were not there to swear but to sup. The locals spun the hour around, even though the guests were there for peace and food and drinks and laughter.  Seeing the guests, the locals did not want to guess.

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    Wedding suddenly became funerals. The kolanut, clothes and other presents suddenly became paraphernalia of tears. They redesigned wedding clothes with blood lines. Like Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet when arrangements turned suddenly from wedding to funerals, this is life imitating art.

    Governor Gabriel Mutfwang’s Mangu was not turbulent until he became chief executive. The story is often reported about onslaught of the Fulani, and reporters have not done well of reporting the other story. The wedding tragedy is just too gruesome to miss.

    One wonders whether the governor has had to meet with his predecessor Simon Lalong, who set a template that endured with relative peace when he was governor. I think we need to return to that drawing board to avoid more buses on the burner and guests aflame.

    Meanwhile, all those who committed the crime ought to be brought to justice.

  • Bibi the butcher

    Bibi the butcher

    Wars sometimes make illusions. In rumbles and pillages, once a bullet flies, there are no innocent parties. And that was the case in the last fight between Israel and Iran. Partisans took sides. Old Testament bigots rev up father Abraham. On the opposite end, it is Ibrahim. In the west, Trump trumpets a premature victory.

    But once the hostilities have settled, we discover sober fact about modern warfare. It is not by power or might. Nuclear weapons, or the most lethal B2 Bomber, does not assure victory laps and bouquets on the streets. Putin may have more power than Ukraine. It is spending billions of dollars, many young men’s blood and its future treasures just to gain a mile of Ukraine territory. It is not winning. Ukraine is not losing.

    In Gaza, concrete rubbles bury children alive. But Hamas is still alive in spite of Israel’s endless pounding. Trump bombs Iran, but even his intelligence’s best data doubt it is a success. In modern war, stealth aircraft works but not enough. Trained armies destroy but not enough. Intelligence is potent but data can fail. In the last analysis, it is about those who sponsor the war and what they want.

    There are three main actors in this battle. Trump, Bibi Netanyahu and Ayatollah Khamenei. Who was the winner? Wrong question. What was the winner? Corruption. Who was the sinner? Netanyahu. No one has bothered to ask whether America had an excuse to bomb Iran. It had none because, by Trump’s own admission, Iran was nowhere near a nuclear threat, and so military aggression was not urgent. Was the threat real? Yes. Was action necessary? Yes. Were they taking the actions? Yes. Was Iran cooperating? Of course not. But its hardiness was not commensurate with military escalation.

    Why did Bibi – no one calls him that fancy name these days – attack Iran? Was it because of the military threat? Not exactly. It was always so even when I was a child? Even when Isael knocked out Iraq’s nuclear reactor decades ago, no one thought of escalation, like Netanyahu today.

    So, what happened? Netanyahu wanted to save his head. He was mired deep in corruption charges, and he was on the verge of losing his job, facing a scandal of trial and going to jail. He did not want that. He tried a constitutional decoy. He made his cronies in the parliament take over the job of the Supreme Court so they could rid him of all corruption charges. It led to protests that dragged week after week. Many saw his cunning. He was playing conman with the law. Israel was near a stalemate. The man had no way out of his sleaze. Then January 7 massacre happened.

    Iranian-backed Hamas goons launched an attack on Israel during a concert, and they abducted many Israelis, raped their women and killed not a few. Bibi was livid. He saw his opportunity. No one thought about a petty scandal when the survival of the nation was in peril. He was ready to invoke the historic persecution of Jewry. It was time to invoke centuries of alienation, pogroms, gas chambers, of a vibrant and God-made people gearing for another era of contempt, and he promised that the jews, as always, would triumph. He might have been talking about the Jews but it was about how Bibi would triumph. He saw his excuse.

    He invoked America’s help, and he started his onslaught on Gaza. The thing is, Hamas is not innocent. They had given Bibi what he wanted. Hamas excited Iran. Bibi excited Jews. Both went to war in Gaza. That is the cynicism of war. The butchery has been going on for over a year, and Bibi says it should not end until Hamas is incinerated. But he knows that cannot happen, and he knows that is an excuse to keep his corruption charge out of sight so long as he gives the orders. But the public relations war in Gaza is not favouring him. The hungry children, the meaningless destructions. The media spotlight does not flatter him.

    His friend, Donald Trump, shares a common enemy, Iran. The leader, Ayattollah Khamenei is another hawk who is sponsoring death and destruction around the Middle East, including the Yemen. He has also supplied long-range missiles to buoy Russia’s dwindling stockpiles. He teams up with Trump to attack Iran, so as to give the world a blood spectacle. For Bibi, he has an excuse. Iran has forsworn the existence of Israel. It wants Israel wiped out of the face of the earth. It is more bluster than fact. Bibi knows it. For the ordinary citizen, it is a dog whistle.

    Israeli launches strikes. Iran strikes back. Israel damages critical military installations, dispatch dozens of high-powered military officers and threaten the life of the Ayatollah, who flees into hiding. His mystic charisma flees into hiding. But he comes out later and boasts victory. His missiles make mincemeat of Isreali neighbourhoods, beat its defence shield, and reminds Israel that they, too, are a power. Bibi tries to underplay Israeli barbarities by saying he aimed at military sites. Yet the numbers say about 600 Iranians die while less than 30 Israeli pass out.

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    Now, the real butcher is Bibi. He makes it seem he is the victim here. Trump stops the battle after Iran hits American base in a choreographed assault in which no harm is intended. An innocent attack. Iran has exhibited its mettle. It is a warning to America that Iran is no shrinking violet. Trump calls off the war. Bibi wants more blood. But America does not. Bibi is now in a bind. What does he do next? Cook up another conflict, another scenario where he can shout dog whistles so his people do not revive his corruption case.

    That is what bad leaders do to make the world after their own scandals. They see it as natural, which is what Hungarian Nobel Laureate Imre Kertesz narrates in his autobiographical novel Fatelessness about Nazi Concentration camp, especially Auschwitz, in which he makes a bold claim that he is happy inside the mindless butchery.  The sort of claim French philosopher and author of the Plague, Albert Camus makes when he says Sisyphus is happy. It is the irony when things get so bad you cannot cry anymore. You start to laugh.

    Men like Bibi forget that we once had World War II, and all of Europe fell into ruin and rubble. A new book, The Last Days of Budapest, by Adam Lebor, tells how one of Europe’s cultural hubs drips with blood and hate until swallowed up with entropy into a rump, a once-great metropolis of civilization. The philosophy of the absurd known as existentialism took over the world, with men like Kierkgaard, Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, et al, saw the world as void and meaningless. Hitler – one man – fomented that world. That is why a man like Bibi the butcher, must be watched. Historians must like this time with men like Trump, Putin, Khamenei, and others are sniffing blood. A small player like Bibi must be restrained from tempting the big players into a conflict that can burn up the world. A small man killed an arch Duke of Sarajevo to start the First World War. A fight over pepper started the 19th conflagration known as The Yoruba Wars. Bibi cannot be allowed to exploit the Old Testament for personal scores.

  • A President and a comrade

    A President and a comrade

    One of the optics of the presidential sojourn last week was missed by the public and media, especially against the background of the June 12 remembrances. It was not his presence in Benue State, but in Kaduna State. It was the handshake between a president and a comrade. The day provided supernova episodes.

    Benue was anything but. Benue was ennui. With death and blood as backcloth, there was no other garment but sackcloth. Mourning is not what you wear, but what wears you down. President Bola Tinubu touched down in the state, and he walked to a hospital of those lucky not to be mourned but mourning as their home steers us to tears.

    Cries mingle with rage and revenge. Fear of the future is creepy with ambushes. Who is behind the slaughter? Why are they still breathing? Where did they come from? Who is sponsoring the carnage? Is it hegemony, genocide or revenge, or all? Is it ideological or an act of blind hatred? Or is it a mere show of barbarism by a horde of bigots? Or is the surge of bloodthirsty goons following what Poet Samuel Coleridge calls “purposeless malignity,” in his critique of Shakespeare’s Hamlet? What was the offence of the fellows at Yelewata, a name previously unknown to the cartography of slaughter? But blood chose to be the first to write its name and outline on map of the world and blur the pages of history? Time cradled it in its humble shadows until slaughter impaled it into a public glare.

    That was the backdrop to the president’s query to his service chiefs: Why has no one been arrested? It was a moment of rage. The bandits still lurk. The symbolism of the president’s visit is expected to ginger up the legitimate gunners against the goons in the forests.

    But sunshine fell the next day in Kaduna when President Tinubu warmed into Kaduna. His host, Uba Sani, the chief executive of Kaduna State, is often called Comrade by President Tinubu. A few days earlier, the president had conferred a June 12 honour on Governor Sani. Both were in the trenches.

    President Tinubu knew the face of tyranny. As a June 12 gladiator, he personified the gallantry, the hunger, fears and defiance of the fight for freedom. Abacha’s honchos trailed him in London and the US, after they failed to eliminate him in Lagos. He dreamed democracy and he dared the gun.

    They hounded and pounded him but failed to make him surrender. With M.K.O. Abiola locked away, he became a stout face of the struggle. He fought as a senator under the transition programme of Ibrahim Babangida.  I was the managing editor of the Concord Newspapers owned by Abiola, and I met Tinubu a number of times and reported some of his positions.

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    He kept the faith. Suddenly, he was out of sight, in detention, and at one time, the military men wanted to free Senator Abu Ibrahim, but Ibrahim would not leave the jail so long as Tinubu was still being held. The goons left Ibrahim with his friend.

    Eventually Tinubu left the country, and carried the battle to Europe and the United States, using his resources. In one of the parties held for him when he was bowing out as governor at the Muson Centre, Babafemi Ojudu – no senator then – pronounced in clear language: “When we talk of NADECO Abroad, Tinubu was the leader of the NADECO ABROAD. He was NADECO ABROAD.”

    He organized men and brought his resources to the fray. Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, at a party in Tinubu’s honour at Dr. Yemi Ogunbiyi’s house related a story he was to repeat at one of the Tinubu colloquiums.

    He said Tinubu wanted to import rice from South Korea so he could amass the proceeds for the June 12 fight. He wanted Soyinka to sign as a guarantor so as to bestow credibility on the contract. In his dramatic way, Soyinka said he signed his name and wrote Nobel laureate under.

    Governor Sani was a fighter of the stay-at-home order. He was with Gani Fawehinmi and others who fought here.

    He fought in the South and in the North. He was arrested, and some had wondered why he, a northerner, would delve into a Yoruba struggle when he could enjoy the comfort of a feudal patriarchy.

    Sani would none of that. He fought and he saw neither North nor South. He saw Nigeria. He was arrested quite a few times and suffered beatings and torture.

     He was with the Committee For the Defence of Human Rights, of which I was the founding secretary under Beko Ransome-Kuti.

     Uba Sani was a  warrior with the Campaign for Democracy. He studied engineering and business administration in Kaduna and the University of Calabar, where he bagged his master’s degree, a hint of his liberal and metropolitan spirit.

    In the wee hours, Abacha’s goons stormed his home and whisked him in his underwear into a van and zoomed off.

     No one knew who took him or where they were taking him. He might have disappeared, and in fact, he feared they might make him disappear that night.

     The van took him to a dingy jail of criminals, and there he remained underground, no contact with friends, relatives or members of the struggle until the Abacha regime fell. That was his saving grace.

    The president once praised him as a man who stood here at home to fight the bear – my words.

     So, when they met last week, memories conjoined.

     They both fought for this democracy, and Governor Sani’s efforts in the past two years is a way of telling the President this is evidence of why they escaped underground and almost went underground.

    The peace in Birnin Gwari and its cattle market are dividends of June 12 struggle. Some say, with a joy of exaggeration, that you could drive through that local government area at night with your eyes closed. The cattle market had disappeared for about a decade. The President recalled his visit to the place during the electoral campaigns in 2022, and it was as though they moved a battalion to the place.

    The skills acquisition centre has been one of the highlights of Sani’s rhetoric. He believes Kaduna should rise again as the hub of the North.

    It was one of the first thing he did. He also launched 100 CNG buses. It is a nod from an engineer governor.

    A lot could not come for mention during the trip. For this essayist, his great deed was financial management.

    He inherited a state with a pocket full of holes from a predecessor who is clutching at straws to defend his stewardship. Yet, within the two years, it has risen from the darkness and able to showcase quite a suite of achievements.

    The president is in a fight to save the economy at the centre and a comrade in his arms in Kaduna State, an uncle and his nephew in a kinship to defeat a common foe: poverty.  No two figures compel us in one photo moment as their meeting last week in a sunny state.

  • Rich but bored

    Rich but bored

    Oscar Wilde, one of the wittiest writers who ever touched the pen, wrote, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay for greatness.”

     One must agree with the bard if we look at the new political contraption in town.

      It is mediocrity trying to pay for greatness. They call themselves All Democratic Alliance (ADA). They cannot live down the APC, the All Progressives Congress, even when they want to ape it.

     Begin with the name. They are so original that they begin their own party’s name with ALL.

     In order to look even more original, they swap progressives for Democratic. They must have sincerely struggled with a third name, since they have to have a third one like APC or PDP, so they look for a synonym for Congress, and they chose alliance.

    No doubt, they are an alliance, but an alliance of mock reality.

     They are an alliance of men who have been retired from politics. They are however bored, but they are rich, so they want to spend their money to titillate their fragile egos.

    What is David Mark looking for, and who is looking for him? Atiku was shunned at Ibadan by the governors of the PDP, so they have started their party with no state governor, no structure, but the patterns of their egocentric imaginations.When you imitate, you should make the imitated look like it is imitating you. That is what literary theorists call the anxiety of influence, and Harvard literary theorist Harold Bloom, who developed the idea, described it as “relentless wrestling with the greatest of the dead.”

     These men want sumo wrestling but they have no muscles. I will concede that they are overfed, but they are no sumo wrestlers from Japan. They are more like the shrunken tree outside Tokyo. They hate Tinubu so much that they must be like him.

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    These guys are funny. The exiguous El Rufai was shooed out of Kaduna.

    Amaechi hardly clinched more than 15 per cent of the votes after his second term, eons ago. Atiku is homeless and the others are jobless, although the Adamawa man denies he is part of it.

    Trouble in paradise? They are generals without an army. They have an unknown protem chairmen known as Akin Ricketts, don’t call him rickety please. And he is not small like crickets.

    They have plenty of money to spend on party offices, and I am sure they will pay their rents.

    They may not have to pay because some of them have properties they can loan until the project dies. They have money for logos, constitution, and campaigns and registrations.

    They will add to the Tinubu trillion-dollar economy. Imitation may have its benefits after all.

     In his book, The theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen says the rich spend their excess money on leisure, hence we have country clubs, polo and golf sports, yachts, etc, so as to keep boredom at bay. Our ADA folks are embarking on malice as leisure. It is a peculiar Nigerian pastime.

    When they have lost though, and they have spent a lot of the money they have stashed away, maybe they can know how bitterness can eat up persons as Paul says in scripture.

  • Honour due

    Honour due

    Sam Amuka-Pemu’s humour is quintessential and inevitably spontaneous.

    The trade of the laugh and its exponents will strain to classify his comedy: black, improvisational, slapstick, blue, or even anti-humour? Yet on his 90th birthday, who could pigeonhole in humour what his friend forever related at the Eko Hotel where he was feted by a cross section of people, including the media and politics, from the Trojan Babatunde Raji Fashola to Information Minister Idris Mohammed to His Royal Majesty, the Olu of Warri, Ogiame Atuwatse III?

     Aremo Segun Osoba recalled the Vanguard publisher walking into his home and warning the former Ogun State governor and his wife, two years ago, that he forbade himself to hit the 90 mark. His reason? He had committed too many sins.

     Osoba’s wife restrained his funeral fantasy by weighing his many good deeds against his iniquities and assured him a portal to heaven.

     That was humour as a friend. I had also witnessed another sort when he was with his gangling friend, Isa Funtua, who often stood beside him like an Iroko beside a banana tree.

    That picture itself  presented its humour. Funtua seemed  shorter metaphorically  as he often bent downwards to seek  Amuka’s attention.

     When Funtua told me “Sam is my brother from another mother,” Amuka retorted with mock gravity, “no mind am o. When you hear him name and my own, how you go say we be brothers?” Funtua knowingly chuckled.

    Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka looked with a critic’s eye at Uncle Sam’s days as writer and described how his satiric pen built the ego of the elite while making them feel happy with themselves. Soyinka, also a satirist, did not classify his humour, but that is what I might call burlesque fury.

    It is a rage that invokes the laugh of indignation. Ike Nwachukwu, a journalist who became a general, confessed to how it was hard for the army to arrest a man who enlarged your ego and made you suspect you should be angry. He knew how to massage his message.

     This author recalled his note to me when I wrote a column on the bloody chapter of the sleepy village Okuama in Delta State.

    In the column, The Shrine of Oil, I had written, among other things, the following lines about oil as the casus belli and god behind the tempest in the footling place.

     “The god is not on earth,” I crooned in my essay. “It is under the earth and water. Oil floats on troubled waters, a sea without a plea. A viscous mammy water flirts. It is a dark, slimy, seductive and crude deity. To the god are all the sacrifices of deaths, rage, blood spills and, of course, the conflicts of tribes and the death of a village.”

    Uncle Sam sent me a note: “Grammar Boy: So “A viscous mammy water flirts…” Congrats to the boyfriend.”

    There was also the other part, the offbeat generosity, the humble, which the BusinessDay publisher Frank Aigbogun and Vanguard pioneering editor Muyiwa Adetiba told the audience.

     Don’t ever admire any of his possessions or it is yours. He once gave instanta his shirt to Dele because he liked it.

    Aremo Osoba said Uncle Sam is an arts collector who barely had three  in his possession because he has given them  away to admirers. Soyinka said in Amuka’s 70th birthday, he requested that he wanted to dance with a certain woman “who was twice his size” and his head rested on her bosom.

    He did not wear a hat to the event in deference to the Olu of Warri, and in his speech, the Ogiame serenaded his 90-year-old son, who had earlier knelt on stage. The king returned the generosity in a moving speech, and gave him a rare privilege. He could wear his hat. The king promised to give a special feather. If he had a feather to his cap that day already, he did not expect a royal one, a literal feather of rare prestige to his nonagenarian hat.

    Another Prince, the suave Thisday Publisher Nduka, ‘the Duke,’ Obaigbena, who mastered the stage called me to deliver the citation.  He also announced that the Hallmarks of Labour Foundation would present a lifetime award to the celebrant, an ambush that the self-effacing Amuka-Pemu could not escape.

    As I walked up stage, I recalled my father Moses who first mentioned his name when I was a little boy in the early 1970’s.  I never expected to tell the world who was that same man. Below is the citation, with a retouch here and there.

    Let me preface this citation with a rumination on the number 13. Some people associate it with bad omen and fear. I have news for you on a day we celebrate a titan of news. He was born on the 13th. Nigeria’s first pilot, Captain Robert Hayes, a friend and Ughelli schoolmate of the celebrant, was born on May 13th, and he marked his 90th birthday in London a month ago. Our own literary supremo, the Nobel laureate and Professor Wole Soyinka, was separated from his mother’s womb on July 13, and he marked his 90th birthday, a year ago. Even out of these shores, the tennis prodigy Coco Gauff, the black athlete who just won the French Open in a sensational comeback, was born on March 13th. I can go on.

    Rest easy, folks. Friday 13 is a day of joy and rejoicing. These personages I just mentioned are great 13 ambassadors as demystifiers, frontiersmen and fearless, our holy trinity of the 13th. They are optimists whose lives say amen and not omen. With their pluck, they conquer ill-luck.

    Our beloved Samson Oruru Amuka-Pemu, son of Pa Amuka-Pemu and Princess Aritsehoma, was born on the June 13, 1935 at Sapele, in the now Delta State, with a royal blood because his mother was a princess of the Olomu kingdom. He attended Government School for his primary education until 1948. In 1949, he was admitted to Government College, Ughelli, known by many then as the Eton of Nigeria. He was the youngest in his class. As a student, the seed of his future started to germinate. He was a member of the music club, debating society and the school Magazine known up till today as The Mariners.

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    He did not make it as a music maestro, although he hobnobbed like a wannabe with the great Bobby Benson. However, he would bring the virtues of great music, its rhythm and sonority, to his future craft. His role in the school magazine was the prophecy of his profession as he became a journalist. I cannot forget this. He was a soccer star on campus. The great journalist Peter Enahoro, known as Peter Pan, also an Ughelli schoolmate, told me he had an inflammable left foot as a striker. Think of Thunder Balogun, Messi, Dombraye, Adokie, of course Haruna Ilerika. Then imagine what our Uncle Sam might have been if he did not exchange the boot for the pen. As a ball juggler, he carried that arsenal -apologies to the gunners here – to the topsy-turvy world of the press.

    After school, he honed his skill as a reporter with the Daily Express under another Ughelli School mate, the great poet and dramatist, John Pepper Clark. But he blossomed in the then Daily Times, the flower of Nigerian Journalism at the time. He rose to become its Sunday editor, but many remember his sojourn as a columnist. We call him Sad Sam today because of his edgy writings, but his life as a columnist began with a column called Off Beat Sam, distinguished by a picture of a Sam blowing from the wrong end of the trumpet, a picture of the writer’s haunting iconoclasm and subversion.

    But his Sad Sam Column was to endure and outlast his contemporaries. It was a writing of understated bombshells, sardonic, irreverent, throwing barbs at the political and military elite in a style I can liken to the laughing gas. It hit the ribs. It ripped them apart while they were laughing. He disarmed with his verbal armory. It was because he did not only write, but he also writhed. He wrote that way because his conscience groaned with glee.

    The entrepreneur’s bug bit him and he wanted to strike out on his own. He set up a publication known as Happy Home. He was in the throes of that adventure when his friend, Olu Aboderin, and himself teamed up to set up the Punch Newspaper. Amuka-Pemu brought his acumen into the new venture, became Sunday editor and managing director. The paper bloomed, became and remains a mainstay of journalism today. His signature shines in it even this morning.

    Things went awry in that chapter of his life, and he had to pull out. Many thought  Amuka-Pemu  was done. But like Ebenezer Obey’s line, Won se b’ola titan/ ola o tan ola kun seyin o. Amuka-Pemu  rose from the dead. He was a revenant. A phoenix. Ashes, for him, was no destination. He became an iconic, unparalleled abiku of the profession. In the words of Soyinka’s poem, Abiku,  Amuka Pemu called “for the first and repeated time.” Or in the poem of the same title by J.P. Clark, he remained “on the baobab tree” of the media.

    He resurrected with The Vanguard Newspaper. The paper pursued a delicate balance between the profound and the profane, bringing to his audience new voices, audacious visual aesthetics and gender experimentation. The paper was a revolution that would later define itself as a forerunner of a new brand of daily journalism. It is still alive and well today.

    But Amuka-Pemu  is not just a publisher, writer, reporter, manager and entrepreneur. He is patron of the Newspaper Proprietors Association Nigeria (NPAN) and a founding member. He represents Nigeria at the International Press Institute (IPI) headquartered in Zurich. As a journalist, he is also a statesman. We all know his role with General Abdulsalami Abubakar in brokering peace and acceptance after the 2015 presidential elections. He is a man who never forgets his roots. He remembers his roots and he was last year decorated as a notable Itsekiri son  with the honour of Royal Order of Iwere (ROI) by the Olu of Warri, His majesty Ogiame Atuwatse III.

     Unknown to many, he is the chairman of the Sapele Boma Boys. The word Boma is a corruption of Burma. Burma boys were soldiers who returned from hostilities after the Second Word War. Amuka-Pemu and others have turned themselves into soldiers for the fortunes of their community. He is also a perennial habitue and patron of the Amala Group whose members refresh their palates every month at another media icon Bunmi Sofola’s place in Lagos.

    Amuka-Pemu is a living legend, a man who pioneered two stalwart papers still standing tall. A patriot, statesman, a grandee of journalism. With a sly tongue and deceptively shy demeanour, Uncle Sam is a reluctant patrician of the trade because he is a great practitioner.