Category: Sam Omatseye

For theatre, he stood amidst young men and women.  He was not only the tallest in the room. He was the oldest. The young, swathed in smiles, applauded his septuagenarian hands on a document. He was giving the generation of those on his left and right the right to topple him. The gangling man had proclaimed it with the flourish of a signature. Henceforth, no one should gaggle the young.

Yesterday, the youths railed at President Muhammadu Buhari for labelling them as indolent. Today, they are ill at ease when he signs a bill allowing them unseat him. He was aware of the dramatic irony when he quipped that he did not want them to edge him out of the high chair.

What does the average Nigerian youth think about the bill? Is it a gratuitous gratuity? Is it a new dawn? Both political parties have intervened on the matter. The APC sees this as a new dawn to the young. Some see it as presidential mea culpa to the new generation after thrashing them with a rhetoric of condescension. Others, especially the opposition, see it at once as bribery and intimidation.

Was the law necessary? Of course, anything that beckons brotherhood and inclusiveness is a good thing, especially in an age of Macron, the feisty and liberal exemplar of France, and Sebastian Kurtz, the 31-year-old, also feisty, if insular, leader of Austria. To bring the young is to stoke the energy of a new shoot. They are brash but inventive. Red-blooded with rosy thoughts. Reckless but sunny. Bumbling but bubbly. Adventurous, radical, edgy, greedy for change.

This implies new dynamism for any society. But is it also good? Youth can ruin a society or redeem it. Youth played a role in our independence.  We can refer to the role of The Nigerian Youth Movement that rattled the British colonial power. Young women like Margaret Ekpo in the Aba Women’s Riot, or Funmilayo Ransome-kuti in the Abeokuta Women riots, a saga that sizzles in Soyinka’s Ake: Years of Childhood. Wild Christian, his mother, dynamised a narrative where Soyinka was an epistolary messenger of a revolution.

Youth gave us independence. Zik, the lyricist of the age, gave us not only oratory but invested the movement with a soul. Awo, who was to challenge Zik, expanded the arsenal.

But that generation also brought disappointment. In his Memoirs, President Richard Nixon opined that men like Zik and Nkrumah frittered away their energies fighting for independence. When it was time to govern, they only gave failure. Even Zik, who had soared with his Zikist Movement, denied them. The same  Zik, who claimed his life was threatened. Hear him: “Sir Gerald Whitley plans my assassination. I go to the “bush” whence I came. But if it is the will of providence that I should go by the bullet of a European assassin, I go with supreme confidence and spiritual satisfaction that I have served mother Africa to the extent of my physical ability.”

Now these people were democratic. They rose on the popular vote. Yet, just like prime minister Tafawa Balewa and the upstart Aminu Kano from the north, youth ran in the veins of power. But the skein did not flatter their generation. The first decade of independence reeled to and fro with blood and corruption. Strikes erupted and politicians upended republican principles. Indeed, the nation unravelled, and what did we see? Young men from another segment of society who torpedoed the state. Nzeogwu and his men plucked out civil rule but imploded. Overshadowed by ethnic charges, a flux resulted in power in the hands of Yakubu Gowon, another youth of about 30. He was challenged by another young man of his generation and age bracket, Odumegwu Ojukwu. Brash could not mollify the waters. A 30-month war of brothers sullied the land.

The nationalist elan and the distress of the 1960’s came from the youths taking the stage out of volition.

With the civilian agbada and army fatigue, the nation tumbled. Gunmen flared up to teach civilians the disciple of soldiery. But it foundered because the army was already infested with the nation’s inner rottenness.

IBB imbibed the maggoty legacy and turned it to cynical and sinister use. He inaugurated new breed politics. What IBB faced then, the Buhari “not-too-young-to-run bill faces today. IBB knew the handicaps of that generation: money, structure, experience. What followed were young men who became puppets of the old, a marionette politics. Before long, the charade peeled open.

Sina Peters, who just turned 60, sang “asiko awa youth re o. E ye binu wa.” (This is the era of youths. Please don’t begrudge us.” He applauded his generation – also mine – saying “the young shall grow.” It was all a farce.

Our political structure is not made for the young. To run, you need a “structure.” And structure works on money, often money stolen by the old in power. This is the hypocrisy of the system. It is also a system that sees rigging as guaranteed to scupper the young, even if the young person is popular.

Gramsci announced the political society to illumine our understanding of the power of politicians and their hegemonic demons. They can use their money, influence and therefore ideas to suffocate a society. Nor is it a Nigerian thing alone. Trump tapped on populism because he had the money.  Obama added effervescence to the system but he was above 40. Centuries ago, in Britain, William Pitt the Younger became prime minister at 24 but that is rare anytime. The ancient world witnessed a contagion of young men in charge. Some of them were scandals on the throne. Nero, Caligula, Tiberius, et al.

Yet, a big irony yawns. More Nigerians can now run. But the triumph is in theory only. That’s the tragedy.  Youths have the numbers but who owns the numbers? That is why critics say that democracy may be about numbers only when the majority owns it. When such scenario often yields the mob. Mobs yield to strong men, like Napoleon after the French Revolution. Majority does not necessarily translate into power. Hence Einstein said that “not everything that counts can be counted.” The bill, for me, is not a watershed moment but only a paper victory.

Professor Biodun Jeyifo, my former teacher, is a critic of world renown who has used the agency of Marxism to periscope society, especially Nigerian. Last week, he did a good job analysing Soyinka’s Death and The King’s Horse man, acclaimed as the Nobel laureate’s best work. But he claims that the play is “fundamentally not about a clash of cultures … definitely not a drama about the irreconcilable antagonism of two different races or peoples.” He also quotes the author who would not have anyone interpret his work as such. Soyinka, a clever writer, knows how to choreograph the interpretation of his work. He succeeded in browbeating many a critic, even those of Olympian stature. The mighty Jeyifo reflected this in his otherwise wise piece in his weekly column in The Nation.       A work can be interpreted any which way by anyone depending on his worldview and the evidence he or she marshals  from the work. When the British wears a masquerade and a Nigerian policeman is afraid to address him, or when Pilkings does not want the king’s son to commit suicide, etc, you see clear signs of culture clash in which colonial authority tries to interfere in an entirely Yoruba cultural pride. Not I, says Omatseye to anyone who would impose a view of a book. Roland Barthes announced decades ago the death of the author. Long live the reader.

The position that the play yields other points of view, even more potent ones, about transitions, about person versus tradition, quest of glory, the seduction and mystery of death, etc, are grandly realised by the author. They may even appear on a greater scale in the author’s thematic quest. But culture clash is inevitable as a powerful string in Death and The Kings Horse man.

As the APC takes its congresses away from the state, the party titans are looking towards the national convention. It was a hubbub of rancour and parallel congresses exposing a maelstrom in Nigeria’s ruling party. But only a few states had it together, and one of such is Plateau State. Before the congresses there were candidates who were expected to raise parallel dusts. Thanks to the mollifying hands of Governor Simon Lalong, it turned out to be an event of harmony.

Candidates agreed to work together within the party. It is with this sort of pacific skill Lalong has brought to his state a relative tranquility while the region bows to the killings and depredations of herdsmen.

No one of note has borne the title of Owelle since the great Zik. That is perhaps the genesis of Rochas Okorocha’s delusion of grandeur. Maybe he believes he is equal to the Owelle of Onitsha. To his credit, Okorocha has not made such a grandiloquent claim in public, although we know that he believes in himself enough to want to be Nigerian president.

Were he a more sober man, I could have designated him the Cicero of our time. For if you hear him take to the microphone, the governor of Imo State is no small orator. He commands the stage, sports a supernova smile, even if he looks sometimes like a refinement of coarser beings. With wit and sometimes syncopation of sentences, he can hold you spell bound. He, however, turns out to be a Cicero counterfeit. He has neither the Roman politician’s girth of knowledge nor his immersion in philosophy.

What is happening to the Imo State governor is not a defeat. It is not a shellacking, as some writers may want to invoke that beaten word. I can only reach to my childhood to see what might be a semblance of this sort of misfortune. When you are a governor, you choreograph a ward congress, and deploy your men and resources, and then you go to sleep. You expect to be woken up to the routine glory of your victory. But when you go belly up instead of a belly dance, I can only compare you with humpty dumpty, the mighty one who had a great fall.

The only burlesque of the sort I can recall in our history goes back to the days of IBB when he, in his peevish manoeuvres, tried to foist a political system on us. It was a system called Option A4, an open ballot system where voters lined up behind their candidates at the polling station. In Ikorodu, a candidate had paid and mobilised his voters. But at the time to cast ballot, the man, in his showy damask, saw he virtually stood alone while his opponent’s line ran like a spectacularly long python. The diminished candidate saw his people on the other side. He yelled in suppressed hysteria in Yoruba: “Eyin enia mi da?” Translation: “My people, where are you?”

That only happens when you think everything is made for you. You think everyone was born for you and they slave for you. Okorocha thought so, and he was mightily disappointed. He saw that his deputy governor, his senators, including Osita Izunaso, had swept him into the Imo River. He was drowning when the result was unveiled. What he expected was not what he envisaged. He must have been miffed. After all, barely a month earlier he had donated N100 million  and 27 vans to the same Imo State APC.

He had done quite a number of oddball things in Imo State. Was he not the one who declared a three-week holiday and asked his people to surrender to the revelry of Christmas while the rest of the country was still moving from day to day in productive work? It was the same Rochas, who asked civil servants to quit work on Thursdays and Fridays in order to concentrate on the farm.

Even then, we did not see the burlesque figure in the making. He was, after all, doing some great work, like distributing N100  as monthly allowance for students, cancelling PTF fees and levying all adults N3000.

We cannot forget that Okorocha knew his people well enough to want them to be happy. And ribs pulsed with joy when he asked his sister to head a ministry of happiness and couples fulfilment, even if as a good listener to the people he had to readjust the name of the ministry.

We were all still searching for formula to express our gratitude to him for volunteering his sister when he decided to show us he had had a long plan to make his family everlasting in Imo State. He found a lowly man to marry his daughter and then, in a puff of magnanimity, asked the boy to do the state a favour: be the governor.

He must have been surprised that some people misunderstood his goodwill. He believed most of the people wanted his boy who was his PA, even less so, his house keeper, to lead his people from poverty to bliss. How dare anyone challenge his goodwill! Not even the priest. His men have described the Catholic Archbishop of Owerri Diocese, as plotting mischief. They said he wanted to intimidate and blackmail the governor. Okorocha ought to learn from what happened to his predecessor. It is not too late to act. But he is still  like an ostrich preening in the dark. He should not kick against the bricks. As a famous idolater who erected a statue for a disgraced man, he expected his people to worship him in kind.  He knew a prophet is without honour in his home hence he honoured the South African Zuma in faraway Imo. He may be quietly invoking the Lord.

Okorocha had a sense of his hollow power when he started running about for refuge. He ran to vice president. No answer. To the president. No succour. He cannot run to the APC National Working Committee because he has to contend with not just Izunaso but, of course, Oyegun, who now sees him as one of the first to abandon him when Buhari chose Adams over him.

Okorocha has a cousin in literature. He is Malvolio in Shakespeare’s play of mistaken identity, Twelfth Night. Just as Izunaso, Rochas’ deputy and others lulled Okorocha with a false sense of grandeur and control, so four characters gave Malvolio, the house keeper, the illusion that the great lady Olivia was in love with him. He poked fun at them. The puritan became pompous and boasted he would become the leader of the household. One of his quotes could fit Okorocha. “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.”

What Okorocha has been doing would beat many brewers of fiction. They could have described them as over-ornamented, rococo and out of joint with Nigerian reality. But politicians often make our imaginations look tame and lacking in creative audacity. But from what we have seen in the APC congresses, there are not a few politicians who have outsize sense of their own reality. We have seen this all over the country from the northeast to the southwest. Some who began as humble have grown fat like pigs of megalomania. They overrate themselves because some money has come their way.

Many of them are now fringe players in their own parties. But Okorocha is the only major mainstreamer who is now drowning. A few were quietly humbled, even if ego still troubles them. Even though Okorocha fails, he will still not give up. Maybe he thinks he is a prophet not loved by his own people. Does he have a messianic complex? He will fire on in a replay historical fascination with failure in what a critic calls “insistent fatality,” which we find in grander characters like Oedipus, Okonkwo and Macbeth.

Thanks for the honour

I want to express gratitude to Nigerian students for voting me their favourite columnist/writer. It was a process that lasted six months across universities and polytechnics. It makes me self-aware that I am also under scrutiny by the young, who also read serious material as against the general and often misleading position that they traffic in vanity. Or that they are lazy or defined by the flimsy lifestyles of the yahoo boys. I am now more conscious that it is not just the intellectual cream of my father’s generation who adorned me with honorary fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters that are important. But also the young who take their future and this country seriously.

It was all about the photos. They say photos don’t lie, but those photos exposed the lie of our democracy. INEC unveiled a report last week saying it had nothing to do with it. They were photos of boys voting, underage, innocent, deployed as soldiers of a dubious ideology.

They streamed the social media. They were in long lines. If they were not children, they could pass for a queue of pigmies. But the faces, beatific and guileless, gave them away.  They had thumb prints, posed before cameras, tossed papers into ballot boxes. An air of official sobriety clothed the march. But they did not have the bravado of guilt. It was the naivety of righteousness.

Everyone blamed the kids. The kids gave the votes away to the other party. First it was the PDP. That was in 2011. The second time around, in 2015, those who were in the opposition now benefited. Suddenly, those who triumphed in 2011 now fell in 2015. They turned critics. They had become losers. Those who howled foul in 2011 kept mum in 2015. APC would not shout because a big morsel of meat was in its mouth, apology to Achebe.

They accused the fathers of the boys. They accused INEC for registering the underage. The election was rigged from genesis. The game was over before the whistle blast.

The sapient element of the report is that the voter register was the same for both PDP and APC, but the results were manipulated. And the agency was the boys. Get the boys and give them papers, fake, fart, warts and all, count them and write the numbers and give them to INEC. Who would know?

Here is a paragraph from the INEC report: “It is on record that during the course of the 2015 General Elections, a particular political party called for the cancellation of the results of the election in six states (Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Bauchi, Jigawa, and Gombe) based on the allegation of underaged voting. Our investigation revealed that the core of the register used for the 2015 General Elections is based on the 2011 voter register. Interestingly, candidates of the same political party won the governorship elections in all six the states in 2011. There was no problem with the register at the time but when they lost in 2015 the register was the problem.”

According to the report, INEC can only do so much when the political elephants brush their way through the process and stomp on everyone on the way. What triggered the investigation was the conduct of the 2018 local government polls in which the Kano State Electoral Commission, rather than INEC, presided. INEC says the Kano State umpire did not use its register. But more fundamental was that we use human beings to destroy a system. More painfully, we use the innocent to soil an innocent document.

So, the boys were innocent. The register was and is also innocent, to all intents and purposes. But here is the irony. When the innocent boy interferes with the innocent document, we have corruption. So innocent plus innocent equals rigging. It was the sort of worry that made Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky write off civilisation in his short piece, The Man From the Underground. He said one plus one is no longer two but the beginning of death. In the same way, innocent boy plus innocent register equals no democracy but the death of democracy. The good has lost all confidence. It is a metaphor for Nigeria where we all talk of the good. We are anxious to go to church and mosque and pretend that we are actually a godly nation. It reminds me of a line in Bertolt Brecht’s play, Mother Courage: “whenever there’s a load of special virtues around, it means something stinks.”

What we witnessed in those elections in the north, including the Kano examples, is the deflowering of the northern boy. It is like Alexander Pope’s “the rape of the lock“. Sigmund Freud would call it the castration of the little boy. He is the one who has historically been used to commit evil in the north. They are the boy wonders of our elections.

It is the almajiri, who has no food, no clothes, no home of his own. The almajiri who walks the street, in rain and relentless sunshine, barefoot, worn-out bowl in hand, forced into a street minstrel. The almajiri who cannot read or write or make out any literate word in English. He cannot understand the lay of the land unless his elder tells him. They tell him to wield knives and kill and cause some of the tempests in the north, targeting those who do not sound like him or believe like him, or share the same morning cry to worship.

He is the metaphor of the manipulated. Almajiri is not a word for all boys. It is the word for the boy whose parents are poor, alienated and illiterate in a feudal tyranny. They are the ones Balarabe Musa has wept over, that Bala Usman serenaded. The boys of the rich are not called almajiri. They don’t need bowls or the beggar’s talent. They are clothed from wardrobes in London, Paris and New York.

It is the almajiri who morphs into a Boko Haram and swoons over the fertile flesh of Dapchi or Chibok girls. It is he who is easily won over into bands of hatred. He kills but does not have a chance to process his hate. He hates because he is asked to hate. He is not even allowed the naivety of the soldier that W.B. Yeats laments: “Those that I fight I do not hate/those that I guard I do not love.”

Northern boys get ruined before they become youths. In the south, the young are ruined systematically into angry militants. In the north, the young have faith in God and the elder. In the south, the young have faith only in themselves. Both are ruinous.

In INEC’s report, we see how the little boy becomes a tool of lies, a fool for a lie called democracy. The political elite of either political parties use the boy to install a system that will make him a beggar for life. He has no chance to learn and choose. He only follows.

The Buhari visit to the White House last week was a Trump card. It was his own circuitous way of making a mea culpa after calling countries like Nigeria “shit hole.” We fell for it. He took advantage of Buhari’s presence to gain a photo op and sugar-coat his conscience. Our president helped Trump’s cause when he said he did not believe the “shit hole” allegation. It was a power show as well. After all, we had to say thank you for giving us a line of jets that was also big profit for the Americans and those here who brokered the deal. It was a way to sooth a crisis back home over why the planes were acquired without due process. It was the triumph of diplomacy over naivety. Trump card won.

He was the master once in the state. Now, he is neither home nor host. But hostile is what he will call the treatment he is getting. Ali Modu Sheriff can no longer play sheriff anymore in Borno State. He must be chafing at his impotence, his peripatetic paralysis, a rolling stone gathering no political moss.

After playing a futile role as headsman of the PDP, he is now like a herdsman looking for pasture. He wants to return to the APC. But resistance awaits him from the party he once called home, a party he played a part, however dubious, in bringing into being.

We should look at what kind of a returnee he is going to be if or when he actually morphs into an APC man. Is he arriving in the penitential humility of a prodigal son, where everyone, including himself, acknowledges the extravagance of his wayward past? Or shall we say he will come as the golden fleece metaphor in traditional African society where a son or daughter is financed to study abroad? They return as the lone figure of enlightenment now ready to impart knowledge and bring prosperity to the subaltern quiet of the village. Is Sheriff the political version of that man of enlightenment?

Or is he like Jephthah, the biblical war hero who must pay with the pound of his daughter’s flesh, a humongous sacrifice, when he returns in the flush of victory? Shall we compare his return to that of Odysseus, as recorded in Homer’s The Odyssey, who must fight a battle of disguise? The chiefs in the village have turned themselves simultaneously into suitors and watchmen for his beautiful wife, Penelope, and are hoping to slay him as he berths.

Or shall we say he is the new Ojukwu of the APC northeast? Ojukwu returned after exile to an ecstasy of embrace from his folks in eastern Nigeria but he got a pardon from an opportunistic northern elite who turned this jubilation into an ululation of a political funeral.

So, where do we classify the bid of the Kanuri man who is like a public desperado banging his shoes to gain attention? His biography will help to situate him.

When he was governor, he started his notoriety. He was a poor performer and the media rasped him for undermining his pact with the people. He scoffed at the media and said his people did not read newspapers because they could not read. The media could write as much as they wanted but the people, in their ignorance, would not move in their deference of him, the governor.

But it was because of him that Boko Haram erupted in being. He did not educate the people, so they fell into the wiles of Mohammed Yusuf, who turned the sect into an alternative society. Where Sheriff’s Borno could not feed them, he gave them food. When they could not get shelter, Yusuf tented them. Where they lived alone, he gave them wives and a platform to breed their kind.

Sheriff became the harbinger of intellectual darkness in the northeast. Yusuf died and the group, now indoctrinated and empowered, unleashed venom on society. He did not feel any remorse. He saw himself as a man with good to give.

He duelled with Kashim Shettima, now helmsman of the state, but failed time and again. Governor Shettima was trying to repair and restore Borno. Sheriff fumed and wanted his successor to return the place to its antediluvian rot. In those years, especially under the inept Jonathan, Boko Haram soared as a bird of prey and Borno gradually turned into a wasteland.

He had formed an army of bigots and bandits. Yet he was not ashamed to join the APC and thought he could edge out the governor, so his goons could continue in their lifestyle of fanaticism and murder. He tried in the state and in the centre, but the new party was not going to bow to this sheriff. He eventually read the message and entered into a bargain with the enemy. He moved over to the PDP. He was an opportunist who wanted to ride on the party’s chaos. He was well-heeled, and PDP was still treating its gaping wound from the Jonathan defeat.  He was now suffering from a delusion of grandeur. They needed his money. He obliged, and thought by the time the party wheel horses were ready, he would have pocketed the PDP.

For a while, he was the top man of the party. But the wily party chieftains were bidding their time, waiting to recover from the APC spanking. When some of them, including Wike and Fayose, felt the party was ready, they battled him in conventions and in the courts. Eventually, they showed him the door. The party shunned him first. But the law did not save him.

He no longer can abide the humiliation in PDP. So he is coming home. He evinced the following qualities: incompetence, opportunism, arrogance. So where do we place Sheriff in the classic stories of heroic returns. Not as prodigal son, because he has demonstrated no remorse. He is no golden fleece as no one in Borno sent him on a journey of impunity and chaos. He is no enlightenment man. He fathered ignorance and darkness in Borno.

He is not Jephthah as he was no political war hero and he is not a type to sacrifice precious possession for principles. He is no Odysseus either. He needs no disguise and he cannot win his way to the party even when his fellow travellers like Gbemi Saraki have returned. Nor is he Ojukwu, who needs a pardon.

Where does he fall then? He belongs to the character in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, who wants to return home for love but finds herself an alien. So, Sheriff is a returnee as outcast. He comes to Borno to his house, not political home. He is like one suffering from political sokugo in Cyprian Ekwensi’s Burning Grass. We hope against hope though that the man will give up. Such men don’t give up until they give up.

Adams 2, Oyegun 0

Finally John Odigie-Oyegun will bow out as APC chairman. He will give way to Adams Oshiomhole, the former governor of Edo State. But it was not the first both men will battle in recent times. In the battle for Adams’ successor, Oyegun wanted a different candidate who went belly up against the present governor of the state. That was defeat number one. Now, the second one has now happened, and it is rattling him in his geriatric time, a man in about his eighth decade on earth. I hope the man will keep quiet and quit playing stooge at this age.

The first combat between the two men was through proxies. Now, it is a contact sport and we are seeing Oyegun go down the mud. So, we can say Adams has floored Oyegun both at home in Edo State and abroad on the national level. I think this is enough humiliation for the perfect stooge.