The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Ghosts of plunder

    We cannot live a lie and expect the truth not to hunt us down. We are living one now, and it refers to the haunting barbarism of the herdsman. We make them seem like supermen and so we go supine. They brandish weapons we cannot match.  They move around like spirits, spectral entities that we cannot see.

    We make them ghosts of plunder. They slaughter men, women and children and we only mourn afterwards with rhetoric of surrender. They throw flames that raze thatched houses, and our IDP camps swell and swirl. Their animals gorge on our farms, and we become spectators of our own misery.

    They growl about our homesteads and our voices are stuck in our throats. They rape our women and we are impotent. And some say the system as it is works for Nigerians, and they expect us to accept.

    That is the tragedy that the herdsman has foisted on us. Yet the irony lies in the line that the federal government has projected. That we should not restructure the country. The argument is that the Nigeria will work as it is. It means the centre remains pampered and cash-rich to the detriment of the states. The geographical physiognomy of Nigeria will be out of joint. The states, the towns, the villages, the hamlets should be run as it is. But the herdsman has even changed that very structure that President Buhari, Vice president Osinbajo and others have glorified so naively.

    For the past three years at least, the herdsman has skewed what is left of the so-called federal arrangement. They have been attacking and displacing people from their towns and villages. The herdsmen are taking over people’s lands and occupying them. We have seen this, especially in the marauders’ hotspots: Benue, Taraba, Plateau, Kaduna, Adamawa, Zamfara, et al. We saw it even in Sokoto State as the new terrain of prey.

    They are not acting like the Jukuns of old, the war-like tribe that launched forays into fragile kingdoms, plundered but returned home with spoils. These men conquer and occupy. Those who do not occupy, return to the forests. So, if they have elections today, the IDPs become new blots on our electoral maps. Who votes in their villages and hamlets? The herdsmen? If the herdsmen don’t vote, at least the territories have been lost in the electoral equation.

    If people who occupy 10 villages converge on an IDP camp, shall we re-register them for elections? What of the leverage of their abandoned homes in the geo-political calculus in state and national polls? Of course, it is virtually obliterated. Ten villages will become one IDP camp, one unit. Gradually, the herdsmen will become accepted as owners of those displaced villages, and they could rename them and own them as their own property.

    So, they begin as thieves and murderers. They are accepted as legitimate owners of other peoples’ towns and villages. Eventually, INEC enfranchises them. They will elect officers to national assembly, and their bigwigs stake their rights as governors. This is restructuring in reverse, or de-structuring. The ghosts materialise as landowners. They will own the crops, turn the churches into homes, knock out the pews, pulpits and vestries, overthrow the languages and customs and impose their own. A new cartography is born. So, is the federal structure sustainable as it is?

    This is the implication, and no one should expect that the owners of the land will not rage and plot their return. It is a different matter if they arrive as legitimate migrants and occupy a tract of territory legitimately allotted to them by the local authority. Yet we know that the indigene-settler crisis takes its roots from the Babangida years when he turned a settler colony in Plateau into an autonomous local government area with concomitant political powers. The elevation from settler to proprietary rights has lit the tinder of unrest since then. The verdant peace of Jos yielded to the ominous clouds of fear and loathing in that temperate city. This can only be traced to this crisis of legitimacy.

    In a stern and unrelenting voice, Governor Seriake Dickson of Bayelsa State has warned Buhari of the implication of a skewed federal system and its implication for Nigerian security. Hear him: “It is very clear that Nigeria’s lopsided federal system and over-centralisation of security powers and the politicisation of security by several agencies are a major cause of instability and poses a threat to national stability.” He waxed poetic when he spoke of “the politics of insecurity and the insecurity of politics.”

    With the herdsmen, the lopsided structure Governor Dickson assailed is getting more so and turning Nigeria into a bonfire in waiting. We hope not.

    When Buhari and Osinbajo visited Jos recently, the Plateau State Governor Simon Lalong spoke fervently against the land grabbers, and the vice president gave his official assurance. But he used the language of a dove instead of a mother hen. A dove yields. A mother hen shields. She yields no territory in protecting her own. Osinbajo said those who have been displaced shall be returned home. He should have waxed martial.

    A mother hen would have said, those marauders will be flushed out and arrested. Weeks later, we have seen no sign that the marauders are even threatened. The governors have no powers to flush them out. Hence Governor Yari symbolically vacated his powers as chief security officer and Governor Fayose, in acerbic humour, called on hunters to hold the forte.

    “When you correct this abuse of the federal system, the governor of Benue and Taraba will be in the position to mobilise the security resources of their states…,” noted Dickson.

    So, what is stopping the security forces from deploying our soldiers to not only displace these criminals but also arrest them. Is that not a better solution than the verbal diarrhoea of some of the officers of Buhari’s government like the defence minister and inspector general of police who inspire division in the land.

    Kaduna State Governor Nasir El Rufai has said that these men’s hiding places are the forests in the north. So, we have two major places where these people hide: either in the displaced villages and towns or in the forests. If we know that, why are we dithering? There are quite a number of forests around the areas they operate. They are not what the anonymous poet described when he wrote: “Into the forest I go, to lose my mind and find my soul.” But these men have no soul to find. Why not conduct reconnaissance, deploy drones and soldiers and level the goons?  If the goons are mobile, we know the forests are not like the forests in Macbeth moved to  the impostor king. That’s why I asserted recently that it is either the government is not serious or it is incompetent, or both.

    We are in a state of war, and as Governor Dickson noted, this is the worst we have been since the civil war. Yet, we are acting like Gowon did in the early days of the Nigerian civil war when he dismissed the rumbling of Biafra as mere “police action,” until Ojukwu bared the Igbo fangs. Or in the early days of the Second World War when the Allies still trusted in Hitler’s humanity and some people called it the “phony war.” They learned the hard way when blitzkrieg growled to town with blood trails, pockmarks and fallen soldiers.

    Some churches have begun a seven-day prayer and fasting to stop this. We sometimes disturb God with our folly. The Bible says “to obey is better than sacrifice.” This sacrifice of the churches would be gratuitous if the government obeyed the constitution and did the right things, which are within its powers. If the soldiers comb out these goons, arrest and quickly prosecute them in nimble courts, no prayer will be invoked. Dickson said, “if the people are under attack by gunmen, that is the more reason why the security forces and the President as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces should lead… to repel the attacks.” The fire next time would be an illusion. But we vex our spirits.

    The prayer and fasting call reminds me of my encounter with a young man in Rhodes Island, United States when I attended one of Chinua Achebe’s colloquiums at Brown University. The young man, an undergraduate then, said when he was in Nigeria, his mother always urged him to pray over everything he did. He always followed her advice. However, since his American sojourn, he had never prayed and he had never had any problems.

    The U.S. leaders made such prayers unnecessary because they did the basic things. Apostle Peter said God has given us the things that “pertains to life and godliness.” If we do well they will redound in our “glory and virtue.” Because our government has not manifested the virtue, glory is eluding us.

     

     

  • A native returns

    SO, it’s all over. Kayode Fayemi, the donnish fellow with a guttural voice, will now return to the mound he vacated four years ago. Ayo Fayose, the governor as theatre, now retreats either to the shadow of oblivion or ignominy.

    And it was a long way coming. Like the words of T.S. Eliot in his poem The Journey of the Magi, “a hard journey” he had of it. Fayemi crouched, sulked, fought over that 2014 poll. He said he was robbed. Some believed, many doubted. The courts acclaimed the winner.  The erudite former governor seemed to have collapsed into a sort of ennui.

    But still hovering over that dreary dawn were many questions: The electronic evidence of Jonathan’s soldiers in gladiatorial electronic heist.  His political minions in a million lying tales. The birth of stomach infrastructure. Fayose as a feathery impresario and a sort of mythical tale of a returnee to power.

    Fayemi consoled himself with a ministerial toga, but what consolation. He still felt an ache. Anytime I saw him, I saw the ache in a contrived display of self-confidence, and even defiance, the sense of someone deprived. I remember he explained to me over the phone, a few days after INEC released the results, while Fayose still huffed and puffed. He said he had to concede because he did not want any “killing fields.” The ache I think is still not over. He carries it still until he is done. A big meal was at the table, but he still worked himself over the one he did not finish. Now he has the chance again at the table.

    So, while Fayose peacocked and derided him, he answered back, but his voice was somewhat muted. The narrative of stomach infrastructure rose over any rhetoric of his achievements. On my television show on TVC, just before the APC primaries which he gulped handily, I wanted him to go back to his time as governor, the charge of aloofness, of focusing an elite style over what many saw as Fayose’s “common touch.” He was not all that repentant. He had learned his lessons, but he would not sway from his task of obviating poverty.

    He is not the type to stop by a market and help women fry garri, or buy bole at the roadside, or utter imprecations at an old, ailing president. He could not do that even if it meant losing an election.

    But the ache egged him on for over four years, working the grassroots methodically and in silence, a stealth agenda to clobber the great foe of his political life. The same Fayemi who would stay away had been jolted by the necessity of victory into the humility of grassroots work. Franklyn Delano Roosevelt’s biographers have said that if polio did not paralyse him, he might not have been president. The former U.S. president, often called FDR, was too patrician to understand the common folk. Was that what happened to JKF? Was the earlier defeat an asset for his soul and political trajectory?

    But he insists he never lost, and that question remains up till now. How do we agree that he lost all 16 local government areas? But Fayose lost all but four. Yet the difference in numbers were about 20 thousand. What is clear is that what Fayemi had was a victory, not a mandate. That is critical. A mandate is an overwhelming victory. It may not be a landslide, but the difference must be emphatic.

    So, a more of the folksy heartbeat should remain with Fayemi as he remounts the throne. Few people have opportunities for redemption. But shall we say, that the great numbers that Fayemi’s opponent, Olusola Eleka, had was a vote for stomach infrastructure? That means, Fayemi must see a median between his lofty philosophy of governance and the quiet rumblings from society’s ether. Some eyewitness accounts of those who thought Eleka prematurely won chanted in Yoruba, “oju ti owo. Oju ti agbara.” Translation: “shame on money. Shame on power.”

    Yet, we cannot blind our eyes to a common story from reporters. Both sides turned election into a sort of bazaar. Money sprayed on voters. Some are saying that the people voted for the highest bidder. In Ondo, they called it “di’bo ko se’be” – vote and cook a soup. In Ekiti, the refrain was “see and buy.” If it was a battle for the highest bidder, there was no innocent party. The guilty one was our brand of democracy.

    In this age, democracy is still a bourgeois ideology. It lacks the innocence of its beginnings in Athens, a thing lamented by philosopher Hanna Arendt in her classic, The Human Condition. Political scientists say, money is the mother’s milk of politics. So, does it mean that Fayemi won because he outspent Fayose? That may be an oversimplification. But some analysts think, in an ambience of poverty, especially when civil servants had not been paid for many months, money was a great catcher.  So, are we practising cash-o-cracy or buy-o-cracy? Maybe it is one tragedy our babyish democracy thrusts on us.

    Lincoln, perhaps America’s best, often said his best triumph as president was the Emancipation Proclamation. But he could not get it through Congress without bribing. There was, in spite of Lincoln’s great morality, a Machiavellian impulse. We ought to learn from their beginning, not copy, or console ourselves that filth is permitted with the lucre at this stage of our democracy. If that is the way of politics now, it means the new rigging is not to bully the ballot but sully the mind. To rig, first rig the voter’s mind. That is the definition of rigging at source. No bloodletting. No roughnecks bearing guns.

    So, is it possible for Fayemi to ignite the common touch now.  The election shows the majority want it the Fayemi way, perhaps with the proviso that he is less lofty, his voice less granite, his eyes in softer hue.

    Fayose’s desperation in announcing the result was an act of subversion, not permissible in a democracy. It was an admission that he had lost the argument. He has opened the doors wide for his foes to floor him without a fight. He has governed with the principle of the id as official ID.

    Now, Fayemi has a chance to return. It will begin like Jesus’ return to Jerusalem in pomp. But in Shakespeare’s words, “all is well that ends well.” In four years, that is. Will the return of the native look like Thomas Hardy’s novel of that title where the novelist is not sure whether the native’s return ends in a romance or estrangement? Dr. John Kayode Fayemi has the opportunity to write that testament.

  • Barbaric

    The party system in Nigeria is still a baby. Sometimes it appears to have grown into its adolescent years, but it quickly recoils into its cot, squealing and all teary-eyed. Its greatest feature is that it is often undemocratic. But it is undemocratic because of what political scientists call the big man syndrome.

    The big man syndrome hails from our feudal makeup in which kings and princes ride over a fawning and helpless people. Capitalism upended it, but in our country and most of Africa, democracy has not rewarded the individual freedom that helps to nourish a modern state.

    But there is a reason why we have the big man syndrome. It is the big money syndrome, which arises from a milieu of crude money makers based on rent. When money comes in, choice vanishes. That is something that is going on right now in the so-called party of change as regards the delegates system.

    It is one of the landmark actions that Adams Oshiomhole will have to make as the party helmsman as the National Working Committee of the APC meets today (Monday) over whether they should institute direct primaries or go through the indirect one, which is the delegates system. The next test of this action will be the Osun State primaries for the post of governor.

    Some members of the NWC say they want the delegates system, while the others want it to be through direct primaries. But at  bottom is the question as to what is the system that best represents the tempo and temperament of the party. This idea also refers to other parties, including the PDP. The delegates system, in and of itself, is not philosophically anathema. But it is subject to abuse in a society like ours where the big man takes precedence over choice and conscience.

    If it is the democracy of conscience we want, then we should not have a delegates system yet in the country. As a so-called change agent, the APC should not put money over choice. When the primaries are under the delegates system, it becomes not a democracy in this instance. It becomes an oligarchy. A few powerful, tendentious characters corral some men and women who are arbitrarily picked to become deciders of who becomes the party flag bearer for the top office in the state.

    So, it is a unilateral aberration. But what problematises it is that the NWC is not clearly mandated to pick a particular formula. This constitutional agnosticism opens the democratic system to fraud. It becomes the decision of a few men, and often in our society, it is the decision not of a few wise men, but a few foolish men. Put more clearly, it is the decision of a few tendentious men, who want to  cow the system and crown a man who has not felt the heartbeats of the men and women in the lower rungs of the party.

    The APC constitution says in Article 20 (vi) that “without prejudice to Article 20 (ii) and (iii) of this constitution, the National Working Committee shall subject to the approval of the National Executive Committee make rules and regulations for the nomination of candidates through primary elections. All such rules and regulations for the nomination of candidates through primary elections. All such rules, regulations and guidelines shall take into consideration and uphold the principle of federal character, gender balance, geo-political spread and rotation of offices, to as much as possible ensure balance within the constituency covered.”

    The letters of these words point to an openness of decision. But the spirit is unimpeachable. It means the decision must not be rigged by a cabal of party bigwigs. It calls for inclusiveness. How inclusive can it be when only a few men, who have held the party’s artificial jugular, decide for the ordinary man and woman who must be their candidates.

    If money is the centre of this problem, it has other branches. Since money can be received and the receiver can decide to follow conscience, some party chieftains often decide to tie these delegates to all kinds of oaths. These oaths are often diabolical. In not too long ago, a former governor locked his men in an oath. If you picked the money, you also swore to an occultic oath. This is spiritual blackmail. The delegates, often beholden to this society’s aggressive superstition, cower and obey. We cannot forget the image of the party men in a southwest state carrying calabashes on their heads. Is this a modern democracy, or the democracy of the gods, of the daemons of tradition, of men who have caved in to the spirits of the dead instead of the living.

    How do we trust a system to a few men who hail the name of orisha instead of the people when they pick our governors? Some oaths are not less diabolical when the consequence is death by non-supernatural means. The oaths that force the delegates to drink blood of goats, or rams or chicken or, as some have speculated, human blood, also means disobedience is death, or some greater body or psychological harms. The men and women obey because, it is safer to obey than to sacrifice their lives and careers. Democracy suffers and the people mourn.

    It means our politics is beholden to cabals of aggressive spiritual content, and contempt for the people. If democracy is a system of popular persuasion, we need the process to be about the people. Not about a few.

    The NWC has a chance to pick apart a system of barbaric efficiency, or pick the popular will.

  • The football hero

    As the World Cup ends, it is time to announce Nigeria’s football hero. For me, its not Rohr, nor any of the players like Mikel Obi or Ahmed Musa. The hero probably can no longer kick or identify modern soccer formations. But he is a hero nonetheless. He is former governor of Akwa Ibom, Godswill Akpabio. Reason: he has given us our only claim to glory in soccer today: the stadium in Uyo. Not the one in Abuja, which has now shamefully become a political platform rather than a place for athletic display. Nor our darling National Stadium in Lagos with its great memory of players like Haruna Ilerika.

    The hero cannot be Coach Rohr, who did not believe. Months ago, a famous television broadcaster introduced him to me at the airport in Lagos. And I asked him if he did not think we could win the World Cup. He said that was too ambitious. He said some world class teams were too good to beat. He referred to Germany, Brazil, Spain and Argentina. But these teams were routed by Davids who believed. Our Rohr did not believe, so his team did not roar. Croatia, Russia, Sweden, et al, believed. Success is not always about technique. It begins with the heart. Rohr did not instil in our men the heart of a lion.

  • The “Rs”

    The birth of the Reformed APC has set a problem for those interested in the clarity of language, especially the spoilt brat called the adjective. I say so, because this new incarnation will collide with the remainers in the party. After the wave or waves of exit from the APC as we have known it, the faithful to the old order will describe themselves with another adjective: real. They will be the real APC. They won’t need to prefix theirs, but they may feel the compulsion to distinguish themselves.

    Purists of the language always warn writers and practitioners of the writing craft to beware of adjectives. They often denote the failure or inadequacy of the noun to express their thoughts or reality. With the imperatives to deploy the adjective to describe that APC is authentic – another adjective -, it is clear that the noun is in trouble. APC now stands more as a word than an acronym, just like GOP in the United States. So APC is, for sure, in trouble both in word and fact.

    The bigger problem will be for the R-APC because it has no choice but to set itself apart by using the ‘R.’ But we cannot escape the contest of ‘Rs’ as the electorate tries to come to terms with what version or what group of the party represents their interest.

    The APC that elides an ‘R’ will start with an advantage, because it is more familiar. Unless, as the speculations go, the R-APC is a stage in the metamorphosis of the disgruntled in the party. They may morph into another group or a coalition of groups.

    If that happens, APC will wriggle free of the ‘R’ wrestling, and also say goodbye to any adjective to say who they are. The adjective could be very powerful, when excavated with the imagination. For instance, Poet Samuel Coleridge says “anticipation is more potent than surprise.” The word potent comes away fresh and unexpected. But we better remember his “water, water, everywhere but not a drop to drink.” No adjective. When Soyinka wrote the lines in one of his poems, he says, “You must set forth at dawn/I promise you marvels of the holy hour.”

    The bard appropriates, in a seizure of genius ,’holy’ from the religious or sacerdotal order and brings it to the secular ritual of existence. But the APC folks may want to learn from John Keats when he wrote the famous first line: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” He had first written: “A thing of beauty is a constant joy.” His editor knew it needed redemption. Until after many toils and many days, they found the immortal lines by ejecting the adjective “constant.”

    I am sure the R-APC knows it cannot remain so for long. Just as the nPDP blossomed into APC. But meanwhile, they will want to sell themselves as the authentic APC because they believe that the real APC is not the APC of their dreams but the reformed because the party has lost its way.

    The Real APC will say they are the original and there is no point sullying the honey as it is tapped from the hive, however unclear and dirty it looks. There is no upending the original.

    So, a Saraki, or more, really, an Eleyinmi, would say his Senate clipped a wayward presidency. A Kwakwanso will yell his role in birthing the party for Kano before a Ganduje and his fellow hunters drove him, out of ingratitude, out of town. But the R-APC is merely a megaphone today. Its backers seem dead from the neck up. Speculations are running riot, but Galadima, their stalwart, is the only one with a throat on the hilltop. But Galadima is not a gladiator, but the garment seems bigger than his puny frame. We want to hear the real voices of the R-APC. But their supporters urge patience. Party intrigue is about strategic daring, not an extravagance of claptrap threats and boasts.

    What if they are going nowhere but want to throw the so-called real APC in a wrenching, gladiatorial wrestling-in-the-mud? They may not want any coalition. After all, that will mean they are being swallowed up, their idiosyncrasies lost in the mesh of the new alliance. Will they want to merge with the PDP, still wracked with discord and the flavour of big egos? The real contest is the search for who will overthrow Buhari and win the polls next year.

    We have a list, but only a few have declared they belong to the R-APC, or are even ready to challenge Buhari, who is presumably the APC nominee next year. What they are is not R-APC but the shadow of the nPDP. That group of glorified renegades whittled Jonathan’s PDP with their exit and embraced the APC, strengthening its appeal and giving it moral heft.

    But how reformed is the R-APC? Maybe the word disgruntled better captures their sentiment. Yet they were able to articulate their grievances. Pity none of the grievances really looked with insights some of the obvious failings and failures of the Buhari administration. They merely focused on patronage. Some offices they did not get, some contracts they did not corner, some egos that were left in the lurch of consultations.

    It was about what they could get. It is a reflection of how low our politics has gone that a major political upheaval is about to take place not because of what the masses have failed to eat but what the politicians want to grab.

    I had expected some rigour as they broke down where Buhari has erred. Rather than pork, they could have referred to contracts that created ripples and storms, especially with regards to the NNPC. Or about appointments, they could have looked with jaundiced wisdom at the ethnocentric charges. Or at the economic travails of the day. Or proffered solutions on security. They are party malcontents at the moment, until we see any party wheel horse abandon Buhari and pitch their tents with them.

    They have tried of late to take advantage of the bungling of the herder crisis, but they have not come with a solution. There is not an ideological breakaway, the sort we see in the west with the birth of the Lib Dems or the revival of the Labour Party in Britain, or the rejigging of the Republican Party in the U.S. under the populism of Donald Trump.

    Hence alliances are easy in Nigeria. You are not asked if you believe in their idea. They want to know if you clutch a talisman of victory.

    They failed to call themselves nPDP but R-APC, showing that they have identity crisis. Should I stay or should I go? That’s the quandary. What face are we seeing? Is it the new, improved PDP or the reformed APC? The real one will be known in good time just as Odysseus returned home in disguise. He became known when he had almost killed all the suitors who wanted to take his wife when he was away.  Will the disguise work for R-APC? Or will it look like Napoleon, who pulled off a spectacular escape from Mount Elba prison but was recaptured at Waterloo, humbled, impotent, detained till his death behind the windswept cliffs of St Helena, where he probably died of poison or neglect.

    So, R-APC is still bugged down and boggled by its identity. We shall know in time if its adjective is a plague or blessing. But they should read Albert Camus’ novel, The Plague, where an epidemic disappears at the time a writer perfects a sentence by removing the adjectives.

    So, let’s see whether the adjectives disappear or it will be a battle of the “Rs”.

    Meanwhile, both APCs are entitled to their own adjectives.

     

  • Are they spirits?

    I must first bow to the Imam who saved about 262 lives in a village during the barbarous episodes in Plateau State. He granted an interview to BBC in pidgin and was able to stay off the beasts of plunder and murder by denying that he was hiding Christians under his holy shelter. The village, known as Ingha Yelwa, had fallen under the demoniac wave of slaughter.

    About 79 bodies were buried that ignoble day in just that village as part of the bloodletting that, in some accounts, ran into more than 200 fatalities. If that story is true, he must be the epitome of the Nigerian that this Federal Government has failed to imagine or conjure among his defence team. A team chockful of dynamites of fanatics and incompetents.

    I also refer with praise to the template set by Simon Lalong, Plateau State Governor, for co-existence between the Fulani and other ethnic groups. It has worked for most parts with relative quiet and copied by some other states. Only a few reports here and there of collapse into bloodletting. But it developed a strain and we saw the fatalities. Such arrangements require good faith from all. Plateau is not an island, and where its neighbours fall under the spell of such pestilential inanity of bloodshed, such tragedies must occur. The constitution makes governors helpless, yet the Federal Government acts with impotence. Hence Zamfara State governor resigned as chief security officer.

    Not long after the Plateau mayhem, the Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association came with two voices. The one saying that the dead deserved it for rustling cattle, and the other rebutting it in cowardly, condescending language. In the rebuttal, they shifted focus to the other group known as Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore and some other shadowy bodies. They implied the other bodies may be cradling the killers. They claim they are innocent. Even as they mounted their defences, the president visited after his vice president in an unprecedented show of concern.

    This is no time for symbolism. This is the time for truth. Bloodshed has become routine in my country, and it is foolish for anyone to think that solution is at hand from the visits by the two men. They have failed to change the security architecture or fish out the killers before the courts. While we were waiting for him to sack his inept, bigoted security team, he signed off the deployment of permanent secretaries.

    Not along after that, the Berom have announced that Fulani herdsmen have flushed them out of 52 of their villages. In the same breath, one Abdullahi Bodejo of the Kautal Hore, said the Fulani own lands all over Nigeria.

    The Federal Government has demonstrated no interest in solving this crisis. First, if the villages of Nigerians are under colonial occupation by marauding Fulani, it means these killers are not spirits. They are waiting there to be caught, arrested and prosecuted. Yet we have a minister of defence with a crude, unrelieved caliphate mentality. The Inspector General of police who should be sulking in retirement disgrace defied his own president by disobeying his orders and bragging about it. The president did nothing.

    Our chief of army staff does not understand how armies operate in the 21st century. The team is lopsided to the north, yet it is called a Nigerian security team. This is a travesty.  So, why are the marauders basking in other peoples’ villages, lounging in their homes and cowing their churches to their cow lifestyles, feasting with epicurean gloating on their farm crops.

    The president said it was unfair to say that he has been silent on the crisis. He probably mistakes the jejune, soulless press releases of his spokespersons as his voice. If his voice has been loud enough, the marauders would have heard. He is an executive president, not a rhetorical president. It is not his voice we need. We need him to act. By leaving the security chiefs intact, it means he is happy with their job. Well, when they kill innocents in Plateau, Taraba, Zamfara, Adamawa, Nasarawa, Benue, et al, it is not good enough. They are  bumbling, never-do-wells as guarantors of our security.

    Recently a crop of young Christians killed a herdsman in cold blood. He was quickly sentenced to death. Over 2000 children, women and men have been despatched out of this world by the herdsmen. I don’t know of any case in court. Some 22 men have been arrested over the Plateau killings. I have heard nothing about a court action.

    The Miyetti Allah rival groups control most of the cattle men in the country. If they are sure the killers are not their men, they should clarify who are the killers. Their defence that they did not back the killings does not convince even the gullible. The position that the Fulani does not forgive or that they will revenge the killing of one man with a hundred or cattle with a whole village is not a new thing. They and their members have said this in the past. So, when cattle are rustled, they exchange human blood.

    From all accounts, the MACBAN as well as the Kautal Hore have always in the past two years been able to explain why the killings happened. Yet they protest their innocence. How did they know? Why did they not stop them or report their grievance for official response? The goons know that once they undertake their killings, there would be no consequence. And they have been proven right, even in the case of the Plateau where no one has been charged to court over a week after it happened.

    The claim that they are not Nigerians, or that they have Nigerian accomplices are charges we are waiting for. But when they are not identified by names, as Oby Ezekwesili has asked, or their biographies revealed so we know where they come from, then there is official complicity. These men are fanatics with delirium in their eyes. They are not human but savages. How can a modern government shield or coddle savages!

    What is clear is that we have terrorist organisations in Nigeria. If MACBAN says it is not them, have they been formally investigated? No evidence about that. What of the other groups? MACBAN seems to know them from their assertions. So what are we doing about flushing them out and telling us whodunit?

    The lands acquired only reminds us of Hitler’s Lebensraum, where he craved with a bloodthirsty eye for a living room for the white race. Is that not what is going on with villagers routed from their own homes?

    It is obvious these men are not spirits. But they are like flies humming over our meals because they know we have no hands and the man feeding us with spoons does not care if the flies drop their body poisons on the food.

    On the surface, we are in a state of war. But the attackers see it as conquest. The victims see it as tyranny. The government is full of excuses.

     

     

  • Big man, big brain

    It looked like eternity that morning when we resumed for the second term in class one at Government College, Ughelli. Mr. Asoro, our class teacher, was making a rollcall and when it was the turn of the smallest guy in the class, he said, “Ehimare Braimah, small boy, small brain.” He said it tongue-in cheek. Braimah had topped the class in the first term. Decades later, Ehi Braimah is still in the skies. This week he will be installed as the 58th president of the Rotary Club of Lagos, the oldest and perhaps most storied club in Nigeria.

    Braimah, who later earned his degree from the University of Benin, has been a big factor in the advertising and public relations world, listing macquee companies in his clientele and bringing to us many vintage shows that have delighted Nigerians, including Gulder Ultimate search.

    Congratulations Ehi, and more cheers as you keep aloft. I now call him big man, big brain. He is no longer the skinny kid, even if he still maintains an alert mind.

  • Mountain out of molehill

    He stands spry on the factory floor, his eyes shining underneath his low-cut hair parted on the side. He looks young but his parted hair harks back to a fashion style of the 1970’s. But with his audacious thoughts, his foppish shirt and trousers, his fascination with twenty-first century technology and gadgetry, he straddles the classic and the classy.

    He calls his philosophy Ayadeism, with a touch of vanity. But he does not apologise. He defines it as a sweet spot between Adam Smith and Keynes, and he domesticates it in Cross River State. He takes his visitor around the factory floor where he is in one breath congratulating his wizardry and, in an another, showcasing that wizardry by taking over  the job of tour guide from the foreigners he employed to establish the rice seeding and seedling plant. The Chinese watch him with admiration as he gesticulates and explains. He explains everything from how the rice is made, what kind of nutrients are in it, how they are retained, and how it is different from whatever we eat across the country. What we eat is mostly chaff. His rice seedling plant is the first of its kind in most of the African continent. Unlike what we eat and import from Asia, this rice will make our bloodstream ruddy, our body strong. He speaks with gusto as he chaperons everyone, including some visitors of the American consulate.

    He even reminds one of the word cotyledon, a word I last heard in my biology class in Government College, Ughelli. Inside the factory are tractors, storage facility, conveyor belts, rice sorting and nutrient machines, et al.

    The rice factory is part of a vast industrial zone in Calabar that Ben Ayade, Governor of Cross River State, is putting in place to stake himself as perhaps the most imaginative governor in the land in making a mountain out of a molehill.

    Half an hour later, he takes us to a garment making factory, where women sit in rows, knitting, designing, sewing. As soon as they see him, an explosion of acclaim. “Digital! Digital!,”they shout with verve.

    “What do they mean by that?” asks one of the consular staff. He feigns indifference while acknowledging the cheers. The staff, mostly widows, work in shifts, about three thousand of them. The industrial zone consists also of a vaccine making factory, the first of its kind in the Niger Delta, and the factory will churn out vaccines for common ailments in our parts, including malaria, typhoid, etc. More of such plants are in the offing, and a super highway and a deep-sea port in the 5,000 hectare industrial zone are vertebral bone of the infrastructure to facilitate business.

    Across the state, other projects are on the way, including a toothpick factory, a pylon factory, a poultry farm in Obubra, instant noodles, a vitaminised rice factory and yellow maize farm.

    Early in his administration, he hit headlines when he employed hundreds of personnel as advisers. He was ribbed as extravagant, turning government into an economy of affection. But how was he going to pay for all these? He gets an allocation of about N2 billion a month, the state lacks oil, its oil well was yanked off by the court and the money is now in the coffers of Akwa Ibom. He also pays debt every month amounting to N1.5 billion. So, how does he manage to carry out such gigantic projects when, as he claims with pride, he owes no banks and his state is not even allowed to borrow.

    In deference to the workers, he paid May salary on May 1, after he had paid April salary. He is one of the states that pay salaries on 25th of every month. He has never defaulted. Last year, he was restrained by his own people from paying December salary too early in the month.

    I ask him, how does he get the finances for this state when states with fatter pockets stumble even to pay salaries. Some are owing as much as five months, in spite of the Paris Fund bailouts. He calls what he is doing “intellectual engineering,” he says Nigerian leaders get it wrong when they think of money first. We dream first and money comes, he implies. “Naira and kobo never solved any problem.”

    Th state is known for another project of ambition, TINAPA. Shying from casting a slur on one of his predecessors, Governor Duke, he would not say it is conceptually deficient, even after I have badgered him with questions over it. Clearly, TINAPA has turned out to be a fantastic nothing, flamboyant in announcement but dead before arrival. Gov. Ayade says it might have succeeded as a concept in Lagos. TINAPA is a good concept in a wrong place. It is driven by an idea of consumption, not production, he implies. It is not Dubai, which is a major transit point in the world, feeding markets all over the world. But even the UAE on its own sustains Dubai. Calabar, mostly rural and peasant, cannot soar to such ambition without crashing.

    So, isn’t that the fate of the his industrial park? He says he did this in his first term, so it could work its way into profitability and concession it to private investors. That way, he does not burden posterity or irk the ego of his successor who might turn his industrial park into another TINAPA, which he is planning to transform into a “first-class university.” Hence he says his is a sweet spot between Smith and Keynes, where demand pull meets regulation and control.

    Ayade is an experiment in imagination in governance, to turn water into wine and mountain out of molehill. He seems on song now, and he is to be watched as a man who does not need oil to make great things. He is a dreamer and practitioner of his dreams. Just like Mohammed Ali of Egypt who was so enamoured of ideas that a historian said, “if you asked him to build a castle in the sky, he would say, let’s try it.” As Einstein himself noted, “imagination is more important than knowledge.”

    His is imagination without oil, without borrowing, without fear.

     

    Ismail Isa, Lai Mohammed and Jones Abiri

    I attended the International Press institute conference in Abuja that ended last Saturday, and a major motif was whether Jones Abiri, who is in detention, is a journalist at the first meeting with the President At the villa, the matter was raised, and Thisday publisher Nduka Obaigbena said it would be resolved, which was a more sober way of looking at it than what Ismaila Isa and Federal Government’s megaphone Lai Mohammed said at the conference the following day. Isa, who is more popularly known as Isa Funtua, ambled into the hall in his white cap and kaftan with an air of a feudal lord in his immaculate majesty. Later he stood up during a session to proclaim that no journalist in Nigeria is in detention. He spoke as though bullying. There was no room to interrogate him at that moment because of the structure of the proceedings. Lai Mohammed later said Abiri is not a journalist because he is not in the Nigerian Union of Journalists and not in any NUJ chapel.

    Yet when Abiri’s case appeared in court, the judge recognised that he belonged to  The News Weekly. To say he is not a journalist is not for the NUJ to determine. Let the matter go to court. Again, the fellow was arrested apparently because of what he published. Jonathan Rozen of the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has the court papers and is using them to make his case around the world. Our institution, the court, is mocking our disdain for the rule of law. What Abiri wrote is the province of information and journalism. If he is not, the matter is not resolved by keeping him behind bars. Mohammed implies he is held for terrorism. If that is the case, take him to court. This is not the way of democracy but autocracy.

    Isa is the chairman of the Nigerian Institute of Journalism. How can such a man who has the mindset of an autocrat chair a school for journalists. To imagine that he owned a newspaper once called The Democrat is a misnomer, an ignominy.

     

     

  • Only human

    We have often said that President Muhammadu Buhari was an unlikely figure to bestow the GCFR on M.K.O. Abiola as well as restore the integrity of the June 12 story. What is often forgotten in this mushy conversation is that Abiola was an unlikely person to earn it.

    It is the quirk of history that change springs from persons who seem remote from heroic virtue. They overthrow its classic straitjacket of special birth, superhuman physical and mental endowment and supernatural prodding. The turmoil of capitalism, rickety sway of the feudal idea and middle-class subversions have challenged such opinions. Some people thought America’s Washington had such qualities.

    So, no one thought the little general called Napoleon would stand like a statuesque figure after the crucible of the French Revolution. Churchill drink too much, railed too much and was sure to flail as leader of Britain even in peace time. He became the best British citizen of the 20th century. Ghandhi just wanted to be a South African lawyer in starchy suits. For many, Abiola was too rich, too chummy with the army, too earthy, too enmeshed with women, or even epicurean to fight a war for justice.

    Before the presidential election of 1993, not many predicted that Abiola would be a transformational president. They merely saw him as the better of two candidates. He was a rich man with international reaches. His opponent, Tofa the obscure, could not twirl a touch to the man with benevolent owl eyes, a grand stutter and a capacity for bonhomie.

    When IBB annulled the polls, few knew Abiola would stand up for his rights. They thought he would fold and fall.  Many in the civil rights community and even in the political class were waiting for the day that Abiola would renounce his mandate in the interest of peace. In fact, a few months after the annulment, an eerie silence threw up many a conjecture. The civil rights group began to slay him, and they thought he was already accommodating the brute at Aso Villa. After all, they were friends. Femi Falana was miffed at his proverbs, and said they were words of a coward. “You cannot clap with one hand,” “you cannot shave one’s head in his absence,” etc. When the ING was formed with Shonekan at the head, he said it was “an elephant giving birth to a mouse.”

    This was particularly irksome when Abacha flung Shonekan out the window and men like Olu Onagoruwa, Lateef Jakande, Babagana Kingibe, Ebenezer Babatope, et al, joined the cabinet of the bespectacled despot. It was seen as the genuflection of MKO, and it was no longer “on June 12 we stand.” It turned out it was a naïve strategy based on a trust of General Oladipo Diya, who had played a fox and conned them. His bait? Once Abacha settled down, they would restore the mandate. The shenanigan became clear and Abiola understood he trusted too much. He resumed his cry for his mandate.

    When he was locked up, some thought he would also falter. He didn’t and that is the remarkable story of MKO Abiola. Many misjudged him and sentenced him to a moral jail for a sin he did not commit. Once Abiola was no longer seen to fold and falter but stuck to his mandate, the conversation even among his critics changed. They were still afraid he might recant. The rhetoric changed recalibrating the struggle by saying the mandate was more than Abiola. Even if he turned coat, the battle would go on in spite of him. But Abiola was never going to renounce his mandate.

    He was a hero but he himself did not know it. He just wanted what he thought was right. He did not want to surrender. He had too much pride for that. Not after he was taken to a dingy cell in a police station on the outskirts of Abuja with pit latrine, as Olu Akerele, his confidante, witnessed in those heady days. Not even when he battled with heart problem and blood pressure and a back pain from the awful bed he slept night after night.

    Working with him and observing him, I often saw him as a sort of class suicide in the making. In spite of his lofty estate, he had too much of the common touch. He wore his patrician coat with cold comfort. Was he not the one who regaled anyone who cared to listen about his humble beginning? He used to dance to earn balls of eba for his family as a child. He drew on those reflexes of survival during the giddy June 12 crisis. The same Abiola, who stopped by roadsides to buy roast plantain or bole. He manoeuvred his way through Lagos traffic by hopping on an okada to attend an event because he was late. I recall writing a story once about a Lebanese family in Apapa who had suffered displacement unjustly. Not long after, one of the family members called to thank me for telling Abiola about it. I never spoke with Abiola about it. He responded after reading the piece in the African Concord magazine. He had rehabilitated the family. He never wanted people to suffer because he knew what it was to be destitute. As a publisher, he never was faraway from his journalists or staff, many of whom he knew by first names. One of the staff, Goke Odeyinka, the ebullient reporter, often disarmed Abiola once he showed up in the newsroom and they exchanged hi-fives. He never saw tribe. At one time, the major editors in Concord press were Igbo and he ignored some of the Yoruba staff who wanted him removed them, charging them with clannishness. He did not reshuffle the deck until it was time, and when he did, his main editor was Nsikak Essien from Akwa Ibom. His close aides were still Igbo like Chike Akabogu and Nnamdi Obasi. When he began his reparation campaign he rewarded Frank Igwebueze with the position of his special assistant. Abiola also attended the end-of-year party of the newspaper. It was on one of such parties in which I was emcee that he interrupted me to announce that he was interested in getting a television licence.

    At that time, he was already planning to build an estate for concord workers. When one of the competing newspapers ran into financial crisis, he asked Concord to print for them free of charge. Welfare of his workers were paramount, and he was the first to introduce competitive salaries to journalists. Dele Giwa, Yakubu Mohammed and Ray Ekpu had Mercedes Benz. Dan Agbese was to call them benzy journalists.

    I recall visiting him for an interview with Dele Momodu and Bayo Onanuga, and he told the story of his role in the tempest in Sokoto when Dasuki was dethroned by the military. He said he visited the various homes of the aggrieved actors at night and pleaded with them. “I would go to a family, and say, I know your father, he was a peaceful man. Don’t fight please.” And he would drop substantial sums of money. He did so from house to house to prevent any further firestorms on the streets.

    At an earlier meeting as a Newswatch staff, I had visited with Dare Babarinsa, and he showcased his mathematical acumen. He brandished with pride a letter he received from a professor of Mathematics from Glasgow acknowledging an error in his book that Abiola had pointed out. It was in that meeting that his late wife Simbi walked in. Abiola spontaneously abandoned us temporarily and broke into a soulful Yoruba song serenading Simbi. He danced for her and trailed her robust backside.

    It is this same Abiola, who flew only on private jets, chummed with presidents, had more money than he knew how to spend, swam in top taste and luxury. The same man endured pit latrines and isolation. Why did he not chafe? It is because the Abiola, who danced for balls of eba never left him. He never soared away from who he was. One of his favorite phrases was “make a friend a day.”

    He turned out to be a traitor to his class because he really never belonged. We know of Lafayette, the wealthy French man who helped finance the American Revolution, or John Hancock, Engels, who propped up Marx. No revolution is pure. To be pure is to negate revolutionary spirits. Hence Brecht wrote on Galileo: “no one’s virtue is complete/the great Galileo loved to eat.” He was not perfect man, but his heroics is without blemish.

  • A glorious bribe

    When people say that the June 12 crisis invested the country with fear, they are right. When they say, it immiserated Nigerians with hunger, they are also on the money. I am a personal testimony.

    On hunger, I had it. I lost my job like many others when the soldiers shut the gates of the Concord newspaper, Abiola’s publishing firm. Almost destitute, I headed to the market in Egbeda, Lagos State, to buy some meat for a pot of soup.

    At the meat section, I approached a seller, and I offered the little money left in my pocket for any slice of meat. I had not received a salary in close to a year.

    “Oga, this amount no fit buy any meat,” he said, irritated.

    I dipped my hands in the pocket and emptied it.

    “I no get any other money for my pocket or anywhere. Yesterday, I no eat meat. I no want die of kwashiorkor,” I pleaded with facetious exaggeration.

    But I looked at him, a little shamefacedly. I had struck him with my desperation. His contempt softened to affection. He flicked out his knife, and cut a huge chunk of beef on his slab, wrapped it in a green leaf. He looked up at me and handed me the piece of protein, bloodless and fatless.

    He rejected my money with magnanimous disdain and asked me to go and have a good meal. That moment and that day, the butcher was my June 12 hero. That was one of several such stories I recall of my suffering. I could not forget I had to trek several miles to draw a debt because I could not afford molue. I had to walk back, weary-legged and starving, because my debtor was not in the office. Several other stories. Many Nigerians lost their lives and livelihoods because the impunity and inanity of one man’s ambition had banished food from their tables.

    I also quaked with fear. I didn’t until one afternoon, in the early months of the June 12 crisis, Beko Ransome kuti and Femi Falana (SAN) had appeared at an Abuja court. After the session, I drove behind them curious where they were gaoled. A car zipped past me, someone inside wagging an ominous finger at me and warning me and asking me to return. A few days later, Abiola’s confidant, Olu Akerele, alerted me to two SSS cars that took turns trailing me about town. I was Concord’s managing editor in Abuja. I knew I had to leave town.

    When Buhari finally immortalised Abiola, I lamented the frailty of life. The last time I saw him, his whole being kindled like coal fire, his smile, his stride, his brio. He was in his political element challenging IBB. I had walked into the then Nicon Noga Hilton Hotel to see a news source. But when the elevator door creaked open, who was I to see but MKO himself, beneath his cap with its signature “puncture.” A security man behind him. I stepped back in deference.

    “Sam Sam,” he intoned in his guttural register. He asked me to accompany him. I was with him for hours until I retired home. He was still consulting with politicians, many of whom looked the other way later, including Abubakar Rimi. I recall him introducing me to them as “Concord’s new landlord in Abuja.” He had promised he was going to make my new assignment worth the while. That was the last time I heard or saw him.

    When Buhari declared June 12 the new democracy day, it was a bulwark against the fear and trembling of those days. It was an acknowledgement of the misery of that dark hour. Most Nigerian homes were houses of hunger. Yet, when democracy came, Olusegun Obasanjo decided to push the country into wilful forgetting, a plague of amnesia.

    He wanted us to forget the thousands who died on the streets when IBB’s and Abacha’s bullets flew in demoniac and fatal waves, the journalists who toiled in hiding to keep Nigerians abreast of the daily carnage of a dream. The News/Tempo heroes. The Tell heroes, the Bagauda kalthos who dropped forever into oblivion, the Niran Malaolus who lost liberty, the Kunle Ajibades who were out of sight, the Olisa Agbakobas deposited in gulag, the Kokoris whose acts growled like tiger, Wole Soyinka who was declared wanted. Kudirat Abiola, the intrepid Amazon, who earned the name of a radio station manned with such men as Kayode Fayemi. The station snarled fear into Abacha, IBB, and their men. He wanted us to forget the heroics of NADECO, their financier Alfred Rewane shot in a shrill night in his home. Or the late Ubani of the Centre for Democracy, known as “governor of Lagos” for his sit-at-home orders. Gani Fawehinmi now duly honoured. Bola Tinubu who escaped after episodes behind bars and became a nemesis of the state in London and the United States.

    Obj was exhibiting what psychologists call the fear of gratitude. He did not want to thank Abiola on whose sacrifice he had become the president.  As the Roman historian Tacitus wrote, “it is always easier to repay an injury than a benefit; gratitude is a burden, but revenge is a pleasure.” Obj was wrestling with Abiola, a glorious dead, with a monomaniacal zeal. Literary critic Harold Bloom, the author of the anxiety of influence, describes it as a “triumphant wrestling with the greatest of the dead.” Except that OBJ has now seen his own defeat in his lifetime. The dead woke up and gave him a pin fall. He would not let a dead Abiola be. He decided to rebury him. Now, rather than congratulate Buhari, the Owu chief accuses him of endangering his life. He needs to come out with concrete evidence. A former head of state is not expected to be flippant in such matters. Whether or not it is true, the burden of proof lies with him. Or else, he will be an agbaya who is sulking because his manufactured foe came out of his grave to laugh and party.

    Obj wanted us to forget those who abandoned the mandate, including Babagana Kingibe, a shameless and moral failure, a fifth columnist ignominy and quisling of the struggle, who has the effrontery to even accept what he did not deserve. He abandoned the mandate and even poohpoohed and mocked it openly. The award to him of GCON is, in the popular cliché, like giving diamond to pigs. It’s a dishonour to those who stood firm and believed. Or those who went to bed with Abacha like Ebenezer Babatope, Lateef Jakande, Olu Onagoruwa, et al. It was a time when courage failed many a mighty man. From “On June 12 we stand,” the phrase changed to unprintables.

    The evil genius IBB now officially joins Abiola in the back of beyond, even if his gap tooth still flashes the hilltop night of his Minna mansion. He and his annulment now belong to the dunghill of history. I thank Buhari for doing what Jonathan did not have the liver for. The Otuoke chieftain had shied from giving us the holiday, because he feared the northern vote. Yet, ironically, it is the northerner who now gives it. The north was afraid of June 12. With Buhari’s decision, they have banished the fear. They had seen June 12 as the Rhinoceros in Eugene Ionesco’s play of that name, when people feared a rhino had come to town even though they saw only dust whirls. Yet they took for granted the cuddly cat in their arms.

    Jonathan gave a tepid Unilag offer, against due process and to the uproarious rejection of both students and faculty. The northern vote he did not get and the same southwest voted him out of power. He forgot that Abiola’s victory was Nigeria’s signal moment in unity, when even a Fulani man voted out their son for a Yoruba, and Christians saw a man, not a contest between Christ and Mohammed.

    Justice Belgore wanted to be a legal killjoy, but Falana and others have silenced his lordship. Let me also teach him a law lesson. Abiola won the election, so he was in the Nigerian heart a president. The GCFR is actually a restoration of what he earned but was stolen from him while alive. So, for me, this is no post-humous award but a title he was denied of when he won the election of June 12. That is why I agree with the senate that the full result should be released. After all, Humphrey Nwosu, the umpire, had stated it categorically in his memoirs.

    Some have said Buhari’s gesture was a bribe for southwest votes. This is one of those sublime gratifications for which even the taker congratulates himself. It’s a holy act disguised as sin. Just like Achebe wrote, “You may cause more trouble by refusing a bribe than by accepting it.”