Category: Sam Omatseye

As political literature goes, the memoirist is king. He is what former United States President Theodore Roosevelt calls the man in the arena. Whether as president, governor, or a highflying party apparatchik, they plunge, feet and head, into the quicksand of human theatre, screaming, daring, fighting, playing hero and villain. Thought and action interweave in the spontaneity of the moment. Greek philosopher Aristotle says there is no drama without action.

The memoirist is about what he did or did not do. The world is his stage. The world is also his spectator, judge, hangman, hallelujah choir. That may be at the bottom of his mind when former President Goodluck Jonathan released his My Transition Hours, a less than 200-page affair, to report his testament.

I had to hold off a comment until I read it, and what a bathetic read. Or, shall I say, pathetic witness. First, I must say it was not written by Jonathan, the Jacob-and-Esau voice and hand are palpable in this work of uneven style. I am not aware when the work started, but he had about three years to put it together. On that score, it was hatched out in giddy haste, without the stylistic acuity and attention to detail expected of a work from a leader documenting stewardship at a near-turbulent but momentous juncture of a nation’s history.

I forgive the copy editor’s flops and narrative stumbles. Such miscues have become part of book publishing here. We are also underdeveloped in that arena. I forgive, but do not excuse. I am more interested in his intervention in the matters of his transition hours. I love the title, even envy it. It is apposite, except that the cover picture is more than a little pretentious. Jonathan, in his Niger Delta hat and striped shirt, looks up ahead. But his book, with its sterile introspection and backward look, does little to inspire a rosy gaze ahead.

Four areas of the book focus the attention. They include the subsidy crisis, the Chibok girls kidnap saga, the corruption blame game as well as his landmark decision to concede the election he lost. Overall, Jonathan adopts a self-righteous tone, and his ghost writers must have received his endorsement in flaunting an Olympian rectitude, as though Goodluck Jonathan, a no-sinner, reserves a divine right to bully his fellow nationals who know little about how to carry their heads in a topsy-turvy world of Satan and never-do-wells.

There is hardly a tone of humility from a man who introduced himself as an Otuoke subaltern, schooled in the moral privilege of the backwaters. He is no learner, but a bishop of political manners, imposing an imperious tone.

On subsidy, he reflects himself as a weak man who is opposed to     the removal of subsidy taking place immediately as though the date eased matters. He turns out blaming all those, include governors, who play judas on the subject. He condemns the protests and how in Lagos it is turned into a ‘carnival.’ As reporting goes, this is tendentiously one-sided. Was it not he, as commander in chief, who turned Lagos into a virtual martial law when his soldiers rumbled about town instilling terror? His tone is that of a victim. No doubt, Buhari has not done much better on this matter. But President Jonathan never makes the case either in politics or economics for his action. No cerebral logic or play of statistics or engagement of social forces. It is like a third-rate reporter recounting an episode.

Jonathan boils with a livid spirit on the Chibok girls saga. He blames the Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima. Curiously, Shettima’s name is never mentioned in the chapter. He kept referring to “Borno State Governor,” as though he forgets his name. This is a malice of omission, a malice against name and subject. He was challenged by Shettima about the report of the Sabo Commission, a thing that reflected the shallow reporting that pervades the book. Shettima said: “The panel also held investigative meetings with heads of all security agencies in Borno State including security formations in charge of Chibok. At the end, the panel submitted it’s report directly to President Jonathan on Friday, the 20th of June, 2014 in Abuja. President Jonathan has refused to make public the findings submitted to him. I was expecting the findings in his book but he has deliberately swept that report under the carpet.”

In spite of Shettima’s attack, Jonathan has done little to respond to the Borno State Governor’s point. Again, he did not give us any response to the charges of his denial that the girls were abducted, asking questions about the teachers, et al. He says his wife was shocked, but never addresses her press conference, the goings-on in the minds of himself and his wife when they invited the “prinspa” and others who “waka come” in one of the worst public performances in the top office of the land.

He sometimes forgets in the book that he was the chief security officer of the country. He admits soldiers were around the state when it happened and were working on the abduction. Yet he cannot explain how they bungled the matter and allowed the girls to be carted away for hours and over a hundred miles across the state to the border.

After a boring sojourn on Nigeria’s corruption history, he eventually makes a crack at intellectualism, almost denying that he said “stealing is not corruption.” He manoeuvres in vain. He says he was elevating the definition of corruption. He meant stealing alone is not corruption, alluding to how dictionaries define it. If he never said stealing is not corruption, he might have made a point. He tries to say that he meant stealing alone is not corruption. It was an act of intellectual flailing, a big failure. He never really addresses the real issue of corruption, including the nitty gritty of the charges against his stewardship. But I would concede he did well by introducing a technological check in money paid and received in government. But it never stanched the leaky purse.

On his transition, he is at his best when he narrates, if superficially, how he arrived on the decision to concede to Buhari. He does not want to reveal what his aides said. He merely says they gave alternative suggestions. Yet, he implies he was rigged out and INEC was unfair to him. He conceded even if he probably won. It was a half-hearted surrender.

Yet, you cannot take away the courage that went into the decision, and I believe him when he says his political ambition is not worth anyone’s blood. I hail that.

The book is, otherwise, a fraud, not only in its omissions, half-truths but also in a missed opportunity. It is also a fraud for not acknowledging who wrote it for him. Hillary Clinton’s writer has been unveiled even though she never wanted to give her credit. If you don’t push the book as a collaboration, modern memoirists reveal the ghost. It is part of My Transition Hours opacity that he hides the authors. The content is angry, shallow, condescending and inevitably imperious. We hope he will write a better book later.

 

Gunshots in Akwa Ibom

An Akwa Ibom State, we saw a governor act as though a gangster. In a democracy, how could Udom Emmanuel lead armed thugs to the State House of Assembly. The irony is that he had a majority there. His armed men shot and turned a democracy chamber into a scene in Good Fellas, a movie of brooding murderers and malicious chaos. It was also a case of hypocrisy in the State House of Assembly. When the APC man, Asuquo Achibong moved from APC to PDP, the house did not sack the man. They clasped him into their bosom. The shoe is on the other foot and suddenly they go to court to sack one but cannot wait out the legal process before sacking others.

The five erred in trying to impeach a governor without the numbers. But when a governor goes about destabilising proceedings with thugs, then our democracy is in peril.

It is a fashion statement. But not the sort when a girl dons jeans beneath a flowery satin top. So, in between, a belly button sizzles the eye of a lustful onlooker. That is fashion statement, human style. Curves, hips, the rise and fall of bosoms, the tints of skins, the half-bare shoulder or thigh and the half-vivid ideas they suggest. These images mark out a fleshly, material domain.

Parents frown and play cop of the corporeal. Not for them the wisdom of world-famous designer Hubert De Givenchy that “the dress must follow the body of a woman, not the body following the shape of the dress.” The former applauds licence, the latter obedience. So, such parents could ground the daughter or confiscate the attire.

In this case, it is fashion statement, God style. If the sinner’s eye courts body contours, the scarf smothers it. Hijab shields the female body from the chic, from the concupiscent contortions of the streets, the classroom, the office, even the mosque. The parents are the fashion police and enforcers. The couture is from heaven. How dare any human, school or government stand in the way of the holy command. That is what is sizzling beneath the burner of education in Nigeria. And, of all places, the Southwest.

While the Osun case has backed a retreat, we are seeing its potential cauldrons in Ibadan and Lagos. The International School, Ibadan has shut its doors over parent odium. They insist their wards must wear hijab to school in pursuit of their right to free worship. Others, including Muslims, on the school board say ISI is a secular body and it cannot brook a religious war within its walls. It is also a private school, so it is not beholden to the arguments of a public institution.

In Lagos, the Court of Appeal has already ruled in favour of hijab, and the Lagos State government seems to have bowed ahead of the Supreme Court verdict. So in Lagos, hijab is it. At least, for now. If we are to follow the directions of the court so far, it would mean that the ISI case may be settled in favour of the hijabists unless it sees the school as a private affair.

It will be the case of the rule of law. It is not just a case of a person who some see as fanatics, but as a test of our democratic credentials. Is it right for the hijab to swish side by side the Christian, the atheist and the Ifa worshipper?

It is not as simple to say the hijab is just a religious statement. Its supporters say it is a way of life, it is a mark of social and cultural identity, so a school or a government office cannot stop such expression. To them, it is an expression of freedom. To stop them is to stop their right to express themselves as units and exemplars of the democratic tradition.

They are democrats, too, if they call in their hearts for a theocracy, a government by God. In the United States, the gay rights movement has spurred Christians to deny gay services in their businesses in pursuit of their religious freedom. The far-right Christian says he has the right not to hire a gay or lesbian or transgender person or retail wedding cake to them because they collide with his beliefs. He expresses his religious liberty by denying gays any services. But the Supreme Court ruled against him, and everyone who does not sell wares to gay couples would have committed a felony.

It was a slim victory. It was the vote of Anthony Kennedy, who has now retired from the Supreme Court, that tilted it in favour of the progressives. I don’t know if the case will win under the post-Kennedy judges.

It shows how faith can be a delicate point even in the definition of freedom. Those who disavow the hijab case say this is a secular society. Every school has rules, and the rules apply to Muslims as they do to hijabists and ifa worshippers. They can wear their hijabs outside school, but not within the four walls of the institution. The argument has been made that the uniform is a Judeo-Christian attire imposed by colonial Britain. But that is wrong. The uniform takes its root in western Europe, not Israel. Their schools are products of their own culture, even though we cannot take away the Christian influence. In school prayers, curriculum, etc, we see Christian influences. Even those have ebbed away substantially since Europe and the Americas have fallen under increasing liberal prejudice.

If we pit ourselves as a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society, it does not profit us to bring religion into the public space. Hijab cannot in any way be seen as a mere way of life. Non-Muslims do not wear hijab, so it is a distinctively Islamic wear. It does not just signal a culture but a belief, and bringing it into the classroom is to stamp it on others as a special fashion. But it is a special fashion. Hence in ISI, some Christians and other religions are threatening to wear their own religious codes to school. What this promise is an anarchy of fashions. The hijab, the celestial white and the traditional hues will turn the school to an odd kaleidoscope, a platform of colliding colours and clashing designs. The students, rather than go to school for studies, will mimic what model Kimora Lee Simmons meant when she said, “always dress like you’re going to see your worst enemy.”

In ISI, it is a private school, and they have the right to enact and enforce them. But in a public school, we should tread gingerly. If a girl that has worn hijab all her life is asked to defrock, it’s like going naked. Private and non-Muslim schools can enforce hijab rule, but if we bring that rule to the public space, we shall have a problem that is beyond religion on our hands. When only well-heeled Muslims can afford to educate their kids in private Muslim schools, we run the risk of educationally disenfranchising poor kids who would rather stay home than go ‘naked’ into a classroom.

The danger is flooding society with so many young girls without education. It may dovetail into boys as well as the same parents would disavow their boys from infecting their minds with western education. The Southwest may now run into the northern problem of the girl child without education. This is not just a judicial problem, it is also a cultural problem and a social booby trap. We know how Boko Haram started. We should be wary of planting a mullah on the streets because we denied him a root in the classroom.

We should understand that we are trying to educate our kids, not indoctrinate them. We want to enlighten them. They are not in school to “dress to kill.” Those wearing Hijab wear it all day long, in and out of school. No other segment of society does it. It did not Islamise society 10 years or 20 years ago, why would it do so now?

It is because our minds have been abused over the decades. We have politicised religion and where faith has been innocent, we have planted suspicion. The battle should not be against wearing hijab, but against suspicion. The fanatics on both sides, though, have not let calm settle over the controversy.

Jesus said the poor will always be with us.

Nigeria fulfilled it last week. We thought we had scored for the indigent with a new minimum wage. But it is still the same maximum weight on the dispossessed. It is the wages of upper class sin with organised labour in cahoots.

Labour thrashed about like an enraged elephant. The government begged. 0ver N60k was the first bargaining chip. They chipped it down to about half, and the labour leaders hailed themselves as the kings of the little guy. Of course, they are kings of the little guy, not for the little guy.

They are all riding the poor, both labour and government. They also put into the mix the legal opprobrium that says every five years we shall review the wages. We are just a nation that brings on the people after the horse has torn away. The people cannot even ride a horse or a cart. They have to walk to death as the contraption barrels into a dust bowl in the far distance.

We increase wages in tandem with two things. One, inflation and cost of essentials. Two, the economy’s productivity. Tragically, we have one, that is inflation. The other, which is productivity, should trigger the wage rise. The economy is anything but productive.

Yet, the poor man is poorer. His health limps. His rents soar. His transport costs strain long treks in place of a seat in a prostrate bus. He cannot pay school fees. The impact spirals all over the economy. So does he deserve a wage increase? Yes. But that is the wrong question.

The question should be, does the economy provide for wage increase? The clear answer should be no. But the poor man who nearly suffocates at night from power outage looks at Abuja and the well-feathered men at the top. They live the life of flamboyance and opulence, and turn the poor into prayer warriors and citizens of heaven. The Jerusalem here on earth is gone. It is like Apostle John’s proclamation in the Revelations, Babylon the Great has fallen! Our leaders are whoring like the prostitute. So the poor would rather go to heaven and leave the powerful to the abundance and glamour of earth.

What labour and government have agreed is to give them the illusion of the whore. They are the rich man giving Lazarus the crumb. Lazarus is so happy. Better to be crumb rich than stomach empty. It is the Hobson’s choice of the Nigerian masses.

It is the perfect illusion. The economy is in such bad shape that even the state governments that cannot pay less than N20k have now agreed to add more than half. It is an easy win. An easy political victory for labour, and easy triumph for the governments.

Labour goes and tells the workers, “we have been faithful servants. We have warred and won against the whores of power.”

The government will tell the masses, “we have agreed to what your representatives bargained.” The people, in their grand lie, will say, “thank you for listening to us.”

But who is deceiving whom? Pundits say it is better to increase wages and the government should get the money, whether by scavenging, borrowing, etc.

We all know it’s all a lie. The federal government may be able to pay, but most state governments cannot. Most private concerns cannot. The minimum wage does not apply out of government anyway. There are many workers in private firms around the country who earn less than N10K a month, and they are happy just to  leave the home each morning. How they survive and move from day to day is a subject for research. They are the trapped.

Tomorrow will come, and the crisis will rock. The governors will say they cannot pay. No one will provide the money, and labour will yell in bad faith.

But the faith is without works. More clearly, without work. There are some things we ought to do to guarantee a five-year wage review, and also to make it workable. First, we must tackle waste. Corruption and waste go hand in hand in this society. That explains why a few are so rich that they afford for one meal what many spend in a month.

The present anti-corruption war is the best we have had, even if it is not fundamental. It has not addressed lifestyle. And the judiciary, for all its self-scrutiny, is still very loose. The second point arises from the first, and that is a merit-based system. Reward those who serve and work, not those who doodle as loyal courtiers, flatterers and sycophants.

But all of those cannot work without a federal system where the units account for their own income by tapping their own natural and human resources. For instance, every local government has a mineral resource. Is that not enough to keep the nation working rather than allow brigands to dig up our gold and kaolin and bauxite and fatten their purses at our collective expense.

That is what I mean by productivity. An economy that has not put itself in a position to be fertile should not be craning for lush fruits on tree branches. The N30k deal was faith without works. Or shall I say, faith with cunning, or cunning in the name of faith.

We merely put off the evil day. The poor will return to their poor wages. We started this with the Adebo Award, and we had Udoji Award and a few more such cynical bribes over the decades. But the poor did not improve in welfare. They had a month or two of swagger before inflation subdued them.

The poor will again lament, and scripture was right when it said, the destruction of the poor is their poverty. In her book, Nickle and Dimed, American writer Barbara Ehrenreich investigated America’s poor by living with them for a year. He detailed with chilling details how most of them have no pathway out of their misery. It is the bane of capitalism.

Capitalism brought wealth and ruin. Because of its potential for human misery, the welfare state was born to counter the depredation of communism. At the end of the Second World War, many European countries flirted with soviet-style communism, and that compelled the Marshal Plan. It saved capitalism, and it was about that time that the idea of the minimum wage came into being. Capitalism has had a great and brutal triumph for decades until the crash a few years ago.

The problem now is inequality, and it has grown worse and difficult to reverse. One of the best books in the past half-decade, Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Piketty, has stressed the urgency of treating inequality. If it is so serious there, can we wonder why someone is struggling to pay N30k when someone else buys a piece of cake with tea at that amount. It tells us how poor we have made ourselves because we have oil and too many drones growing fat.

 

Watch out

While we are yet to settle the dust over the Osun dancer, the nation ought to pay attention to the certificate saga in Adamawa State. The Governor, Mohammed Jibrilla Bindow, is being sued for perjury and forgery by an NGO, Global Integrity Crusade Network for not stating the facts about his secondary school certificate results. They sue him with lying and that he presented different certificates when he ran for senate and subsequently for governor.

This is an interesting development. We may recall that like some other APC primaries, the Adamawa story was intriguing. It was first an indirect primary until they opted for an open one. The result gave victory to Bindow, while Mahmood Halilu came second and Nuhu Ribadu third. The losing duo publicly disputed the polls and called it fraudulent.

This is not Ogun State or Imo State when the jury has flushed out the governors’ choices. This is different, potentially an earthquake for a sitting governor. It’s brewing in the court. Watch out.

A pond is not a place for glum news. A host to fishes and nourisher of a neighbour of green lands, flowers and trees, it evokes romance. The worshipper sees God and even the atheist exorcises demons. Winds stir the water. Sunsets subdue it with tremors of golden colours, and sunshine with a velvet of hues. It is more a tapestry for the dreamer than observer.

There the flesh is weak, the eyes glaze, the ear succumbs to the harmony of water and birds. There also we now hear of sadness. A retired general falls to civilian bands. A soldier without arms. It is not the sort of news you look for in a pond. But in Nigeria, as the racist philosopher Pliny predicted about Africa, something new always pops out.

The pond, on the outskirts of Jos, was not just a body of water. It is now a water of bodies. Yet no one saw the remains of Idris Alkali in the water. The killers gave a decoy. The car, a corolla, was soaked in the water. The army saw his clothes, but not the man. The criminals committed the crime with despatch but had no rhyme. They left evidence: clothes, car, shoes.

But the other quality of the story is the veneration of the water. Local women became divine activists of the pond. Half-naked and deviant, they protested to the army. They may not be mammy water in the mythical sense. But by virtue of their devotion to the pond, they were mammy water in flesh and blood. Even if death walked into the water, the soldier’s eye and gun should stay off. It was a water too sacred for the temporal truth of investigation. Gods lay in the water. It was poison for human step. They drank the water for sustenance and healing. They kept it like a sacred forest. It overthrows the Christian idea that warns not to touch the unclean thing. In the traditional world, you should not touch the clean thing. The Christian feels superior to things. The traditionalist feels inferior. That inspires the song, Babalawo mowa be be. (Priest I come to beg). To beg to reduce things the subject must not do to live a safe and happy life.

The army defied tradition. Soldiers have always been taught to fear no such thing. The so-called Bini Massacre probably would have been averted if Captain Philips and his men dreaded the dance and visuals of ritual on Benin streets when the white man dared one of Africa’s flourishing empires. Canon fell to cannon. Gods fell to guns.  With colonialist rage unhinged, the Oba Ovonramwen was eventually captured. But it was not in Benin alone, but all over West Africa.

In the book: The West African Resistance edited by Michael Crowther, our historians documented this tension between faith and weaponry as state after state collapsed under the firepower of the Europeans. Similar myths engulf the soldiery of late Brigadier Adekunle, aka Black Scorpion, during the civil war. I met him once and asked him if he disappeared as the legends claimed. He laughed it dismissively as efforts by humans to mythicise what they cannot understand. I learned from Alabi Isama’s classic, A Tragedy of Victory, that Adekunle was hardly in the teeth of battle.

Sat Guru Maharaji paid a visit to The Nation a few days ago, and I put this question to him to showcase the fragility of our supernatural claims to superiority over military hardware. Sat Guru, with aplomb temper, said it was because the Africans did not get the right principle. I asked, so all of them missed it? And what was the principle that only he seemed to know? I said he seemed to be answering a question of mysticism with mysticism. But he was not one to faze.  He probably thought I was a secularist upstart.

In Jos, the army upended the locals. Video shows how the car was pulled out of the pond. It turned out the army had more work to do. They probed and eventually identified some culprit who confessed the body lay in a shallow grave. The pond is apparently a host to human ferocity. Other deaths have occurred there, evidence other car parts, human parts, clothes, etc. It is pond of mystery.

The intriguing part of the story is the breath-taking professionalism with which the army followed the investigation till they found the remains of their lost colleague. I have yet to excavate from our history any investigation with such painstaking attention to detail and alacrity. It shows we can do it as a people if we want. If the soldiers pay such diligence to the investigation of other crimes in the country, like the butchery in Kaduna and many episodes of the Fulani-locals imbroglio, we should have been a nation of law and decency. Boko haram still skulks and devastates in the North east, if in sporadic barbarism. The so-called herdsmen-farmers clashes have substantially gone under leash, thanks to some of the work the Buhari administration has put in place, especially with the deployment of Russian aircraft, Mi35. But the violence has mutated to highway robbery and a slew of kidnappings.

If what the army did in Alkali’s case is done in the judiciary, in education, in tackling random violence among us, the country would have been happier and healthier.

Alkali was just a retired soldier on his way to Bauchi. But a rash of young men, around expired mines, mounted a barricade. Was he a target or an accidental victim? Some arrests have been made.

This is not a story to slow down. In view of revived violence in parts of Plateau State, a new law is being drafted to try  local criminals locally. The idea is to avoid the bureaucracy of Abuja.

This is the second major step of Governor Simon Lalong on security. The first was to install a template for peace that worked for all of three years until rogue elements sullied it with bloodshed. The template is remarkably still working in most of the state, and it should be a work in progress.

The law, as the Governor has indicated, is in the state house of assembly. Speed is of the essence so the criminals can meet the furious majesty of the law. Just like other victims, Gen. Alkali also should get justice even in the silence of the grave.

The pond will now be avenged. It has lost its innocence to sacred savagery. This is different from the Walden Pond that Henry David Thoreau wrote lyrically about over a century ago, a bible of the environmental movement that preceded President Theodore Roosevelt or Rachel Carson’s 20th century masterpiece, Silent Spring.

We want the pond to return as a body of water, pure and peaceful among leafy bowers and throaty birds. It should not be a water of bodies.

He walks like a teen. Short, eyes alert, his feet and arms crackle as though the fellow is about to leap in and out of his labour attire. Unlike his days as governor, he has no beauty, no svelte figure beside him, to chasten his speed. Sometimes he rails, sometimes he cajoles, but often with a visceral brutality. Some party members hold their breaths until they are about to lose them. Welcome Adams, goodbye wheeler dealer. Oyegun now sulks in silence.

When he stepped in as APC chair, no one expected him to carry on the mercantile drollery of his septuagenarian ancestor.  No under-the-carpet, shadowy politics. Adams Oshiomhole could not have promised anything else. His labour past, a soldierly profile in the trenches of aluta, presents him as a sort of contradiction in politics. The activist meets the cunning. But such contradictions are good when put to good use.

“Do I contradict myself,” asks the American poet of democracy, Walt Whitman. “I am large. I contain multitudes.” Adams is an example of a strong man in democracy. The view often is that a strong man is bad for democracy. Since it is an ideology that privileges the collegial over hubris, it is wrong to think of a big man in a system of popular persuasion.

But history has given us many. Churchill. Washington. De Gaulle. Lincoln. Ghandi. Mandela. Awolowo. They are not big because they bully. They do not wield guns or rally mobs with blood in their eyes. They fall into what Max Weber describes as charismatic figures. They draw their strengths from moral example, intellectual power and courage. They are not like Franco, Mobutu, Hitler, or Mussolini, the sawdust Caesar. They exploit what Rousseau called the collective will.

The good big men give the ideology role models. They are a sort of contradiction of royalty in the society of equals. They are big because they are like us. They ride on us. They do not ride us. The rise from us, not in spite of us. They are the sort of man Lord Jim aspired to be in Joseph Conrad’s novel.

So, Adams is playing that sort of game in the APC. He is bringing sanity to the decay that Oyegun left. His ancestor brought the party to the brink. It did not help that the real leader of the party, President Muhammadu Buhari, looked on as elements like Bukola Eleyinmi Saraki, became a fifth columnist until he was naturally cauterised. Or a man like Dogara, who became speaker because of the northern guilty conscience about northern Christians being marginalised. Dogara cannot win a senatorial race in Bauchi State, yet he tries to challenge Governor Abdullahi Abubakar in a duel in which just one punch will fell him.

He is not always elegant. He does not have to be. His diction is sometimes uneven for the purpose. But it is not a game for accurate shots. Some misses are acceptable as long as the main goal is within sight. On his watch, a new idea has shaken the Nigerian political history: the open primaries. It has scared many, especially some governors who cannot stand the popular test. And we have seen that even when it was not open primaries, it rattled some who lay regal claims to political offices. The concept has opened the eyes of the party to a new way of politics. They have seen the forbidden fruit, lush primaries that provide the people’s wish. If not exactly the people’s wish, something close to it. A hint of progress.

When such men emerge, we confront obstacles. Hence the stories in some states, like Ogun, Zamfara and Imo. In Kaduna State, Shehu Sani has failed to make his way, because the dwarf governor, Nasir El-Rufai has turned himself into a monarch. But it is not only the story of a hectoring chief executive, but also about Sani’s sometimes juvenile outbursts in the course of his brief senatorial stewardship. He may not return as senator. He started a fight with a man when he had not sized up the foe to understand how much firepower he had to duel him down.

Well, Sani the activist overpowered Sani the politician, and he may be sharpening his tool to return to his old trade. His naivety has given us some nuggets, though. Through him we know the pay and moral payload of our lawmakers. It was an extraordinary moment in our democracy. He blew the wind to a hen’s behind and we saw all the muck and bumps. No one denied, and he did it without shame or shamefacedness, and without drawing alienation. He kept taking the pay. He was like a man who carted away the loot after confessing to his iniquity. But we shall remain indebted to his tainted honesty.

The story of Zamfara, Imo and Ogun are examples of how not to be a big man in a democracy. Ibikunle Amosun has been crying like a three-year-old, just the age of the party in power. Amosun, who has carried on like a little Pol Pot in Ogun politics is amazed how suddenly he has become an underdog in his party. The father thinks he is roaring. The children are asking why he is crying.  He does not know that there is a difference between a Kabiyesi and elected governor. He sees himself as his excellency kabiyesi Amosun. He saw the grandiose emptiness of Daniel’s reign. He brought his own and he could not even own it.

Right before his eyes, he looked at a primary that upended his candidate. Out of illusory confidence, he had accompanied Akinlade to the mosque and proclaimed, in vacuous prophecy, that he would accompany him in the next Sallah as a friend to the governor. How soon he became a false prophet.

He also took a real kabiyesi to see Mr. President without telling him the purpose. Well, he did not know that Buhari is not one to fight for anyone who is not Buhari. This is Buhari that Amosun always wanted to stand beside for photo ops. The story is told that when other governors were with the president, Amosun would jostle his way through his colleagues, brushing them away to create a path for himself to stand beside the big man. Where is the camera man!

Okorocha’s story has been well documented in this column. It is not that his in-law cannot be governor. He should let the people agree with him. But he wants to be the wrong big man in politics. The same with Yari. Yoruba will say Oti yari o. (He has turned desperate). INEC has disavowed any APC candidacy. The big men are seeing, for the first time in eight years, that they are just human.  Shakespeare describes such a person as “proud man, dressed in a little brief authority.”

They are trying to act in the philosophy of Plato that “might makes right.” In the slavery era, Abraham Lincoln declared that “right makes might.” It is that right that Adams is clutching and the Amosuns are crying over.

 

Kanu and his dog

 

Kanu the ethnic entrepreneur surfaced at last, in the land of David. Pictured with his skull cap and swaddle, he thought he was the ascetic hero. But he is the coward who revealed himself at last. He may think he is Odumegwu Ojukwu, who fled after the civil war. Ojukwu earned the right to a second act, although what anti-climax he became. He came to NPN, and wanted his people to support the very cabal that tied them in blood and tears for 30 months. At least, he was with his people for that long, and he died in the graces of many Igbo for his heroics during the war.

But Kanu started wailing about his dog, and it was its only name he remembered, not his suffering followers. This is the man for whom some died, and others, including a famous lawyer and constitutionalist, called a hero. He is how not to make an epic. He jolted a country to tempest and ran for cover.