The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Authoritarian democracy

    We cannot call it a coup. Not in the classic sense, although the symbol of power yields its pride to a raft of never-do-wells. For those who have the time to see the video, it has a whiff of comedy. A senator walks in, the whole chamber in a routine stir of lawmakers in pre-session mode. Some are chatting, others about to sit. A halo of a smile here, a shadow of a mood here, a hand gesture there. A few others, like Ovie Omo-Agege, are dabbing to their seats. That is not funny. It is the stir before the storm. Until, of course (or curse), the sudden burst of a light-coloured shirt on the high table.

    In a parody of an athlete, he lofts the mace like a trophy, and trots up the steps. Somebody is stealing democracy. There are more lawmakers than hoodlums. But they cannot hold their own against a democratic felony. They cannot fight for the people’s system. They look on, paralysed, dead in the limbs, spectators of their own misfortune. They become like stargazers as though watching aliens vacating a hallowed room. Ben Bruce exercises common sense and knows better than to stop the hoodlum.

    They who have too much money. They who fatten on allowances, a la Shehu Sani. They whose homes are a fable of luxury, whose cars a motion of dreams, who eat without work, peacocks of a bedraggled republic. They gape on while the ragamuffins leave.

    Not far away, outside the building, Senator Solomon Adeola, otherwise known as Yayi, gets into a drama of his own. He is shoved into a vehicle owned by the thieves but luckily forces his way out minutes later.

    So, shall we say this is a mini coup? The removal of a mace is not necessarily a change of government. Unless we recall what happened in England centuries ago when boisterous Oliver Cromwell storms the parliament in the throes of overthrowing King Charles. The lawmakers are sacked, and he sees the mace, standing, with nothing of its grandeur. “Take away that fools bauble, the mace,” he orders giddily. He smashes the symbol through the floor.

    Our lawmakers soon found their tongues. They who could do nothing about an hour earlier. They suddenly waxed into rhetoricians for the public good. They started speaking for democracy, for the rule of law, for the restoration of the mace. They bore the outraged beauty of the law. News reporters who looked but did not see immediately announced that Omo-Agege brought the thugs. A certain lawmaker in Babaringa also thought so, as he kept gesticulating in suppressed indignation in Omo-Agege’s direction. He, too, had looked as the visitors brushed off with the gem of authority.

    The Senate elite suddenly felt righteous against their foes. The police arrested and freed Omo-Agege, who has sworn he did not bring the bad guys. I called him and asked him what happened, and he said he came to the Senate on his own. He said he was not so foolish as to deposit chaos with thugs in the first law chamber in the land. He believed he had been suspended illegally, and the cases of Ndume and feisty Dino Melaye had proved that no lawmaker had the right to suspend his or her colleagues. He came to the chamber to affirm the majesty of the law of the land.

    What occurred to me as the news unfolded was not so much the impunity of the young men, which is reprehensible. The senate elite was getting a bite of their own lawlessness. Was it not the clique led by Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki, who hatched out a coup in the dawn of this 8th senate? They gloried in the rascality of that pre-dawn disorder. They now suspended a fellow senator. But worse, they evaporated a democratic group’s right to exist, because they supported Buhari over the order of the 2019 polls. They asphyxiated the right to assemble and associate.

    This is a lawmaker’s case against the law. The senators led by Eleyinmi were irresponsible, brutish, and a constant threat to the sanity of this democracy. They head a democracy but their minds hark back to the caveman’s malignity, to a bumpkin’s logic, to the morality of a soldier of fortune. The Eleyinmi of Village Headmaster bowed to the Oba’s restraint. He subscribes to what French president condemned as “authoritarian democracy” rather than the “authority of democracy.”

    Questions still trail what happened? How did the man get in and beat up a sergeant at arms? How did they miss the array of top security in the country? We need to know if it was carelessness, and that needs to be punished. If the IGP got away from disobeying the president’s order, the SSS persons who let this thugs reign ought to be put answer to the law. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “if one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.” Some of the participants in this drama have told the truth without knowing it.

    A question has arisen as to whether this was a response to the call to fire the service chiefs. Yayi had led the chorus to dump the service chiefs who have been coddled for no reason by the president. The service chiefs have outlived their stay in office. Winning teams often are allowed to stay because they are doing a good job. But this set of chiefs are a bumbling lot. They cannot secure us against the foes of herdsmen and the resurgent Boko Haram.

    So many are asking questions and so few answers. If this turns out to be a continuing war between law makers and the presidency, then it is not a way to go about it. It only shows that democrats have lost hope in democracy. Just as the dominant party, APC, has acted as though under the spell of the army era, our democracy has not flagged to exhibit its culture of the diktat.

    One of the intrigues of this country and its democracy is how we wheel from one cycle of bad judgment and incident to another as though nothing happened. The drama would soon fizzle out and our consciences and memories will be numb again to tragedy.

    In a sense, we are like Oscar, the anarchist dwarf in Gunter Grass’ novel Tin Drum. He, like us, never gets tired of shattering things because it seems to change nothing. So, we enter a new week, thinking a new lease has arrived and we need new drama to reawaken our thirst for adventure.

     

  • Mistaken identity

    The tenure elongation crisis in the APC is not a crisis of democracy. It is a crisis of identity. We claim to be democrats, but we act like soldiers. The crux, though, is that we do not accept that we are acting like soldiers because we wear agbadas, gavels thump in parliaments, presidents wave at crowds, governors succumb to term limits like other lawmakers, and political parties, not military cabals, determine who runs for office, everybody canonises a book called the constitution.

    This façade makes us think we run a republic. But the APC decision, which was upstaged by the president’s announcement to run for a second term, has revealed again that we run our parties as a chain of command. But first let us look at the decision of the Odigie-Oyegun National Working Committee that says that the members cannot have tenure elongation but would not resign. Is that not a farce? If they are to remain in office, it means they will choose who organises the congresses and convention, and eventually decide who will become the electoral umpires in the election to party offices in the centre. Oyegun would now pick the sort of person who cannot compromise his ambition to prolong his stay as party chairman.

    In law, it is described as being a judge in your own cause. You pick the referee and then you decide to be a player. It is the very nature of political corruption. If Oyegun and his fellow travellers follow that pattern, it would imply that the APC has a caretaker committee by other means. Oyegun and co would have choreographed their return to office by undermining a fundamental principle of law. How can that stand in the court of law if it is challenged?

    If the same people preside over the nomination of Muhammadu Buhari as presidential candidate, how can it be different from the case in Kano where APC picked a candidate that did not stand the test of law.  It was sired by a caretaker committee. The PDP reaped where it did not sow. The court saw to that. The PDP played hyena and picked up the carcass that the leopard just killed?

    Some governors, spearheaded by Ondo State Governor Rotimi Akeredolu, want it this way because it guarantees their stay in office for a second term. They are in calm waters with the perfect stooge Oyegun because they believe if a crisis erupts in their state primaries, Oyegun and his bleating disciples will play ball to the governors. After all, he has shown himself a lamb. He did it in Kogi and Ondo, and he has a proud trail of obedience.

    This sort of impunity in the APC is not an APC epidemic. It goes to the heart of the military-style politics we run. Nothing explains that more than the powers granted to the National Working Committee. We saw same in the PDP when it held sway in the centre.  When Rotimi Amaechi won the governor  primaries in Rivers State, Obj crippled it because his candidacy had “K-leg.” His party’s NWC, always beholden to a party master, was swept in line. Amaechi challenged it in court and the Supreme Court ruled in his favour and Omeiha was evicted from the house another built. The more storied one happened in Imo State when Ifeanyi Araraume won the party primaries but Obj, working with the NWC, rejected his candidacy for a third-term maven Charles Ugwu. The court reversed the NWC action, so Obj and the NWC knew the game was up for the PDP.

    He played harlot and struck a bargain with Ikedi Ohakim of the PPA. Ohakim would benefit from the party structure and win the election on the condition that he would jump ship to the party of supremacy, the PDP. Obj’s wish prevailed.

    The PDP also had the sorry tale when Timipre Sylva was governor of Bayelsa State, and when it was time for the primaries, he had to contend with Goodluck Jonathan. President Jonathan was a foe of the tall and gangling chief executive of his home state. It was a circus after the primaries that took place and a few wise men had to decide. Eventually, the NWC had its way, and Governor Sylva watched helpless as his sway was dismantled in Bayelsa.

    Most politicians hail the concept of federalism. Even the APC that advocates federalism for the larger political infrastructure in the country has failed to see the beam in its own eyes. It cannot see that it does not have a federal party. It is because our political elite is still under the throes of the soldier. Just as governors crawl like beggars for monthly allowances, so the states look up to the NWC for matters that should be settled in their units.

    The governors would not bake a stooge like Oyegun if primaries need the assent of a few men in the centre who know nothing about the sentiment, will or aspirations of the locals. It is so this time because some  governors are not sure to win their party primaries. States like Kaduna and Kogi fear backlash. Even if they win, they want guarantees because even victories will throw up tempests.

    But the way out should not be an overarching diktat from the NWC but decision of a court of law. If the primaries are disputed, the court, not a few partial men, should weigh in. In the last gubernatorial primaries in Anambra, a certain gentleman who did not win the primaries wanted to exploit money with the NWC in the centre. Reports show that they did not yield to him but he had unloaded a whole lot of money into the coffers of individuals of the NWC.

    The real tragedy is that our politicians do not see the evil of the NWC because we think it normal for a few people to dictate to the states. It is military hangover. We are under a mistaken identity that we run a civilian democracy whereas our politicians are soldiers who cannot shoot a gun but can shoot down a candidate at will. It is the sort of mistaken identity Shakespeare mocked in his Twelfth Night when a boy is mistaken for a girl and a Malvolio thinks he is Olivia’s lover. It is a blissful illusion we suffer, and the Olympian impunity of the NWC is the great example that our politics might have left the barracks but the barracks has not left our politics.

     

     

     

     

  • Adebanjo: Not my progressive

    Ayo Adebanjo has drawn quite some attention over his 90th birthday. Some columnists, including the folksy Reuben Abati and Segun Adeniyi, have gushed over the man’s progressive credentials. I congratulate him on his nonagenarian lamppost. I am also ready to congratulate him for his battles in time past, duelling the British, standing beside Awo over the western region imbroglio, suffering the claustrophobia of jail terms in the turbulent 1960’s, being a warrior, however muted, during the June 12 maelstrom.

    What some, including many political stalwarts, have left out is that a man should spend decades pursuing one goal and then turncoat in a later year. People see such birthdays as moments to slobber and flatter, especially for a man in his hoary years. Not this writer. That is what I cannot congratulate Adebanjo for. He was part of the unblushing train of Goodluck Jonathan. He was in bed with the Otuoke chieftain who embarked on a dollar junket in the southwest to buy the Yourbas, including some of its royal fathers and its Pentecostal deviants. Adebanjo stood by this man who played out a drama of permissive morality. The Yorubas, ever discerning in such matters, buried Jonathan in a ‘no’ vote at the polls. Adebanjo should not have become part of Jonathan’s amen choir at an age when his wisdom should have served as a lamp of experience for a misguided generation.

     

  • Gospel according to Leah

    What image does Leah Sharibu conjure in your mind? A young girl in the grips of the fanatic?  A girl innocent, virginal in faith and mind? Or a naïve soul bewitched by her Christ? Or shall we compare her with the suicide bombers her age, except that she does not holla in the name of Allah, or carry her belief without the weaponry of a bomb. She wears no hijab, has no wardrobe to screen her apocalyptic toy and does not need to walk through a market to finish off her infidels.

    So, everyone has their Leah. To some, she is the untutored zealot. To others, she is the fool in wolf’s clothing. For me, Leah Sharibu is the rebirth of the apostolic era. She manifests the purity of faith. She also telegraphs a message to our politics, especially in the age of Oyegun, where we twist betrayal as nuance and celebrate harlotry.

    Her parents may have mused over the fate of the first Leah, the wife of Jacob. Just as the Boko Haram goons hate her, Leah was not the preferred wife but Rachel. But she it was who eventually earned favour. She birthed the line of priests through her son Levi. And later, he gave us Judah, who we trace to David, and Jesus. She bore the seed which was prophesied to Abraham: “By thy seed all the families of the earth will be blessed.” She, who was not comely, suffered but she eventually sired the seed of salvation.

    That was the power of Leah. Maybe the parents thought this. Maybe not. But it is potent that, at age 12, she invokes Jesus at about that age, who rebuked his mother when he was jousting the scholars of his day. Quipped the Lord: “Shall I not go about my father’s business?”

    She is more apostolic than most of the pastors of today. How many of the showy clerics will risk their lives of luxury today under gun-handed duress and insist on Christ? Will they not remember their soaring ecstasies in private jets, the dreamy languor of their palaces, the doting worshippers, their wives’ and children’s wardrobe obsessions in the tony districts of Manhattan, London and Paris? They could easily abandon the austere examples of Paul, Peter, Matthew, et al, and embrace Peter the betrayer rather than Peter the Rock.  The apostles died either by beheading or hanging, a brutal ending. Such apostolic faith highlighted Robert Bolt’s play titled: A Man For All Seasons and celebrated the piety of Thomas More.

    It was an epoch when More stuck to principle when Henry V111 chose romance over God to cut off England from the Church of Rome.

    But our pastors would seek forgiveness later on when they are strapped on their cosy seat in a bombardier headed to an evangelical mission in a Los Angeles suburb. In a bombardier financed by tithes and offerings and maintained at a cost that can pay off the school fees of a thousand poor students stranded at home.

    Leah is the true believer. She may not hold that sort of belief when she is 30, or even 70, but she has given this country an example in principle. A principle executed in innocence. She decided to deny herself, take her cross and follow her conviction. She is not the sort of suicide bombers hoodwinked into suicidal bloodbath. She did not ask for the temptation. She did not ask to be kidnapped. She was an unknown little girl masking her convictions in her anonymous life, when she walked to school, listened to teachers, obeyed her parents, visited the market, worshipped in church, played with friends.

    As The Nation columnist Gabriel Amalu noted in his commentary recently, she disavows the easy morality of her generation who crave the quick fix. She is of the type who would work and earn it. She does not fall into the corrupt class of the ‘yahoo yahoo’ wastrels, who would earn nothing but own everything.

    Today the elders should look at the young girl. A man like John Odigie-Oyegun, Muiz Banire and Governor Akeredolu and other enablers of the perfect stooge, should learn about principle from them. Jesus saw little children like Leah when he exhorted: “Suffer (allow) little children to come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

    When the law says one thing and a selfish interest the other, it is only the spirit of Leah that can prompt a person to stick to what is right. It is the spirit of truth, of inflexible devotion to what is proper and decent, and put at bay the breast of greed and the impulse of tyranny. The APC is in the entrails of its battle for moral identity, and those whom I described last week as the scavengers of power who want to turn law into an excuse for personal elevation are being disgraced in public. The worst of it is that they are showing no shame, an increasing slur of our society. As an African proverb says, “where there is no shame, there is no honour.”

    Governor Akeredolu is now pleading nuance. He forswears ever calling for tenure elongation, only effluxion. That’s a gyration that will make only fools feel giddy. It’s like saying you want it half full but not half empty. If Oyegun and his men remain, is that not elongation by other means? That is not the spirit of Leah, who said it in unambiguous terms. Mr. Governor, we are not deaf. We heard you all along.

    We are still waiting for leah. Those who brokered the freedom of the other Dapchi girls and left out the narrative of Leah Sharibu should know that we want her back in one piece. She is the story of her generation. We want her alive, not a martyr. We want her back, in the embrace of her family, who gave her a great name and she has lived up to its billing. Leah of the Bible was not beautiful but her soul was. That is what we seek when she comes back, we want her to live like the Nobel Prize winner Malala who survived the furnace of her captors.

    We want to see her grow, show examples for her generation, show her human flaws and strength and become a living evolution of moral growth in a flawed society. Martyrs enrich societies but save us the true nature of their humanity. Mandela grew up to an old age, a symbol of strength, principle, and self-control. So was Mother Theresa, whose serenity of vision and activities etched in us the possibility of human tenderness. That is why we want her here, to breathe on us the spirit in her soul.

  • A politician again

    It was the first time the president became a party man since 2015. He had been playing president since he was sworn in. Muhammadu Buhari just realised that his famous mantra about being for everyone and for no one was a fantasy of idealistic perversion.

    You cannot be for and against simultaneously. You cannot bring to politics what Achebe describes in his A Man of The People as the “niceties and delicate refinements that belonged elsewhere.” Buhari is not a young starry-eyed idealist like the Odili in Achebe’s political novel. Faced with the tumultuous reality of 2019, he knows he has to align or fall. He has chosen an ally and thrown his weight in the ring. Where else to do that than the hot button issue of the APC. Whether to align with the perfect stooge Odigie-Oyegun and his bumbling governors or stick with the beckons of the rule of law and Asiwaju Tinubu.

    He chose the latter. He became, to all intents and purposes, a party man. He announced himself an APC wheel horse again. He has to be and he has to show temper and take a risk. He had shut down early in his flush of victory in 2015.

    He was quiet when Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki overthrew his authority as party leader, tossed him to the dumpster and took over the legislature in cahoots with the enemy party. They also defied the party spirit de corps and rules of the law chambers.

    Buhari caved in with silence, and his silence emboldened the hawks who beat their chests in public and in the shadows for riding their way over the law and decency in a nocturnal subversion. They became great and majestic in impunity.

    We welcome back Buhari into party politics. But it was politics that drew him more than he drew politics. He is in the throes of a second-term dynamic, much less than he enthuses over the turmoil of the soap box. Buhari is an example of a man who loves power but loathes the way to its tower. He does not love the smooching, the coaxing, the sly manoeuvres, the underhand rhetoric or the Mephistophelian intrigues.

    So, he shied away from its entrails of a pig. Now, he has to step into the sty. Buhari is now ready to get dirty, the so-called mister clean must swim with the sharks and soar with the hawks. Where there are carcasses, he must abide the vultures.

    The president shocked not only those who supported the elongation of Oyegun’s stay but those who had flayed it. He said Oyegun should not get a year extension. The party should subject itself to the law. He was saying this is a nation of laws and not of men. It is not about Oyegun or what the governors want. It is about the groundnorm; it is about a principle higher than the giants of the party.

    But the party titans who coddle the perfect stooge have fallen into a strange position. How do they openly confront a sitting president, especially one who has not rattled them into an open fisticuff? He has not played an Obasanjo, who bullied governors into sheep of bleating obedience nor a Jonathan, who rallied them with powerful aides and the dangle of carrots.

    No one is sure how Buhari will fight an intra-party warfare. Is he going to coax, or bully? An excellent reporting from The Nation’s northern bureau chief and one of the best reporters of this generation, Yusuf Alli, unveiled the drama in the dark room of the APC. Muiz Banire and Governor Akeredolu, both enablers of the stooge, argued against the rule of law and for Oyegun’s extension.

    Both SANs found it difficult to counter a resurgent Vice President, Prof Yemi Osinbajo, also a SAN, who entrapped them with a precedent. He cautioned the duo of Akeredolu and Banire not to be carried away by their fervour of the gerrymanderer. These men are not passengers of the law. They are scavengers of power. That makes them no better than the Jonathan-era governors who wanted 16 to be superior to 19. They wanted to subvert the rule by overturning numbers and falling foul of simple arithmetic. In the APC case, they are trying to make a rule through fiction. They are trying to dethrone the rule of law with a precedent. But Osinbajo reminded them that a recent precedent in Kano makes a mincemeat of their own precedent. The APC hierarchy is facing a precedent of law versus a precedent of impunity.

    The precedent of law took place in Kano APC when the party, just like Banire, Akeredolu and their cohorts, decided to impose a caretaker committee. The Kano State House of Assembly candidate that resulted, Dorawa-Sallau, was rejected by the Supreme Court. The PDP candidate who came second in the election was handed the legislative seat. Kano APC has been sulking since. The implication? Buhari could win the 2019 poll and the Supreme Court could give Aso Rock to PDP. I can see the PDP smacking its lips. It is APC’s worst-case scenario since the Supreme Court cannot upturn its own precedent.

    You can understand why a Buhari becomes a politician again. No one wants to be an Esau giving his birth right to Jacob. Osinbajo told his opponents that retaining Oyegun is a risk they don’t want. That is one impunity PDP will be praying for. If that scenario works, PDP will be an agbero who reaps where he did not sow.

    Hell has no fury

    Pope Francis recently denied that he foreswore the existence of hell. The report went viral. What he did not deny was hell but as a place of fire. Of course, there is hell in the words of scripture. But it is not a place of fire. It is one of the great errors of orthodoxy. The Pope probably teased it and chafed cowardly at its backlash. Christians have accepted an orthodoxy they cannot defend in Bible. When God created the world, he did not create a place of fire? If it was so important, Moses, who wrote the Pentateuch would have told us. Hell in both Hebrew or Greek means grave or bowel of the earth. The phrase hellfire in translation from Gehenna was what Jesus referred to in Mark about the place where the fire never stops. It was a perpetual place of sacrifice outside ancient Jerusalem. The children sacrificed died there as against the concept of eternity in fire. He even used the phrase “if your hand offends thee, cut it off” as metaphor since the kingdom of God does not accept imperfect beings. Again, why did Jesus go there? He himself said he would be in “the belly of the earth,” for three days just like Jonah was in the belly of a whale. Amos wrote that when God’s wrath comes, some people will “dig into hell.” If hell is the place of punishment, why will the wicked have to dig if it is prepared or why would they go there if it is boiling? In revelation, John says “hell and death were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.” If hell is fire, why will it be cast into it? Second death is different from the first mortal end in this life. To paraphrase Shakespeare, hell has no fury. Not to a God whose mercy endures forever.

     

  • ‘A lot of man’

    Recently I had a conversation with a few political junkies over an event in which Asiwaju Bola Tinubu was going to be the toast. A fellow appraised the crowd size and quality and remarked, “that crowd is a lot.” In reply, I quipped, “Asiwaju is a lot of man.”

    We witnessed that March 29 as we have done in the past decade at the colloquium held to mark his birthday. This time it was his 66th. The event is seen as a sort of political tourism in Nigeria as well as fest of ideas, a pause to test the pulse of the nation.

    But for many, it is a place to be seen. The political who’s who attends. Governors stroll in, and so too their aides. Ministers waltz in. We could not miss the rollcall. For governors, see the list: Aregbesola, Akeredolu, Tambuwal, Abubakar, Ajimobi, Okorocha, Amosun et al. The ministers could not be missed even in their backrow: Rotimi Amaechi, Kayode Fayemi, mouthy Lai Mohammed and bellwether Babatunde Raji Fashola, also former governor of example in Lagos and a moving spirit behind the colloquium. Of course, the host governor Akinwunmi Ambode. The traditional rulers from Ife to Lagos were royally conspicuous. Also political wheel horses like Segun Osoba. For the second time, president Buhari was unmistakable in the birthday, although it was his third appearance if we count his 2015 attendance.

    The vice president stole the show as he ribbed the Jonathan-era corruption. His most potent attack being the N1 trillion heist that could have constructed most of the major roads in the country as well as the Second Niger bridge.

    It is Nigeria’s momentous individual birthday fest, for the powerful to smooch and preen. It was for a lot of man, the Jagaban.

  • Not like Jacob

    They returned to town like holy gangsters. They rolled in a wave of vans, laughed like cynics, brandished guns like an army of occupation, were hoodless in bravado and heedless of time in their reconquest. They did not fire a gun, but the town’s ears still echoed with their shots not long ago. Those shots that crippled the town, cowed any resistance and spirited away the nubile girls were enough memory. The people remembered them as warning shots when the outlaws returned.

    The Boko Haram goons at least deposited a huge number of the girls. But they acted as though they came to do the town folk a favour. They even took time to evangelise, preaching with the unblinking eyes of perverts. They were God’s impresarios. The Dapchi people waved in gratitude and some witnesses say the locals saw them more as heroes than our own soldiers.

    They fell in love with their conquerors. This is not strange. Rape victims have been known to adore their abusers. Like in the novel Season of Crimson Blossoms by Abubakar Adam Ibrahim where a woman falls for a robber in the north. Nigeria is an example. The British conquered us. Today, we worship the ground they walk on. We buy their clothes, their cars, their architecture, worship their gods, mimic their accent, flaunt their language, crave how they sing, where they sleep, how they govern. So, why should we expect a different attitude from the Dapchi people when their tormentors came calling again and returned their daughters they abused.

    Before the federal government takes credit, we should remember Mama Boko Haram who early gave us a hint of negotiations. Some conspiracy analysts begin with that. How come she quickly spoke with them and how quickly the girls have returned. The defence minister promised two weeks, and within a week they were in their parents’ bosoms. They also say, the soldiers were allowed out of town so the girl heist would work like a clock.

    They say it was all planned by the Buhari government to ridicule the Chibok girls fiasco and lift PMB as a rescue-in-chief. In an election season, what a blast! But is that enough argument? I am not buying. Those who peddle such conspiracy theories are giving this administration too much credit.

    It takes a quality of subtlety, sleight of hand and despatch to pull off such a plan. This administration does not have such qualities. This is the sort of thing we expect of a government with a James Bond temperament. This is a stiff-necked administration. They don’t ply sly. They go straight. They lie with sieves in their mouth; the truth leaks as they speak.

    If they organised the heist, it would mean they asked the soldiers to leave town, left the girls at school, cleared theBuhari  way for the goons to take the girls away. It would also mean they are that mean to their girls. This administration may stumble, may say the wrong things about herdsmen, and allow a clannish, perfidious sense of entitlement to fester. But I don’t see them working with the Boko Haram Group. It is a tendentious fantasy.

    Some past soldiers earn such cynical credits. The gap-toothed general, of course. He could have been accused, even if he could not do it. The tag, Maradona, reflected a circuitous sense of scheming. The Buhari crowd does not do circles.

    They did not do circles in the case of the Maina Scandal when the truth blew open like an offence of a GSS2 schoolboy. Neither the defence of the ever-bumbling attorney general could save the matter. Only a team that lacks cunning declares  IPO a terrorist group but not the herdsmen and their supporting groups.

    It is saying nothing about ethnic entrepreneur Kanu’s whereabouts whereas his colleagues are choking behind bars. The government can abide contradiction without blushing. It rolls behind bars the zealots of the Shiite Group in the north and locks up EL Zak Zaki even though we claim we are in a democracy. The idea of the rule of law is touted almost daily and with meretricious grandeur by spokesman Lai Mohammed.

    It is this sort of administration that will lie that it paid nothing to Boko Haram when international sources that know even said how much was paid. And only such an administration will show nervousness about it by arresting a journalist to disclose a source of information. They did it as though afraid that their close-knit circle had been infiltrated by newshounds.

    They also locked up former national security adviser and kept him behind bars. Everybody knew that it was against the law to keep a person in captivity when a judge has ruled against it.

    So, the Buhari administration does not really commit its sins like a James Bond. They quickly get caught. They are not capable of this sort of sleight of hand. They carry their hypocrisies on their sleeves.

    We have seen such things in the past. Recently, Obama plotted Osama’s execution. Obama is an intellectual. He also paraded his cabinet with subtle persons. He goes through serpentine routes. When the Bay of Pigs failed, many could not doubt that a man like John F. Kennedy, who confessed his love for the James Bond novels, was behind the attack on Castro.

    Richard Nixon did not like the Chilean leader Allende and worked his exit. His chief envoy Henry Kissinger said in character: “we cannot fold our arms and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its citizens.”

    Reagan was a swooping hawk. He invaded Grenada and took responsibility for it, and he expected the world not to believe him when he said he wanted to preserve American lives. His successor George Bush kidnapped Panama strongman Manuel Noriega. What do you expect from a former CIA chief?

    Disguise is a great feature of such moves. As a Jacob you must play Esau without getting caught. I am sorry, they don’t have such a Jacob. Meanwhile, let us wait for the release of the other girls, including the Christian faithful Leah Sharibu.

     

    Wild, wild Nigeria

    Theophilus Damjuma speaks with a sort of regal air, his eyes popping always as though about to issue a command. He carries the awe of a general that has, however, been diminished over the years because of what many know about his forays into filthy lucre. A business man and general do not mix nobly. Yet when he speaks, he whiplashes the wavelengths like the command on the walkie talkie. He did that last week when he delivered a vote of no confidence on an army of which he was once a chief. The army he led to foment a famous killing around Ibadan and despatch a government in the centre. He even after retirement became the exponent of army coups after they happened. He became a sort of general emeritus, a model in rebellion and paradoxically in discipline. In social circles, some saw him as a soldier and gentleman.

    When he said the soldiers are no longer neutral and everyone should take care of themselves, he delivered perhaps the most devastating blow on the government on this issue. I had wondered why it had taken this long for the man to speak. He spoke with fire and disdain, and he made it clear that we have lost confidence in the ability of the army to defend us. They are trading with our security and peace. The implication of what he is saying is that we should all arm ourselves if the army is looking the other way. He is advocating a balance of terror. If I am armed, you will think twice about coming to my home or neighbourhood. It may be your death march. Clinton armed the Muslims against the Serbs to end the Bosnian war. The Itsekiri-Ijaw bloodbath did not end until the Itsekiri built up their formidable arsenal. The Cold War did not boil over because of mutually assured destruction. No party was going to survive a war. So, the armouries were big but mute.

    Danjuma was warning that the scenario of everyone to himself would foment a wild, wild Nigeria. Better to avoid that. Wild, wild west in the U.S. afforded everyone a gun and a battle. It was a Nietzschean world where the superman won. If that happens here, we might as well say goodbye to Nigeria. Danjuma’s warning should be heeded before the curtain falls.

     

     

  • Yusuf and his brothers

    It was a sign with an enigma. Against the backdrop of an empty street, on a white, slightly billowing sheet, its words conveyed a mysterious injunction: EVERY BENUE YOUTH IS A YUSUF. The young men who held the sign imparted a look of protesting sobriety. The president was visiting to mourn their state’s dead. The young men were picketing. The nation’s number one citizen was ensconced in meeting with Governor Ortom and other heavyweights. The youths walked like outcasts outside.

    A funeral air had draped Makurdi again over 73 deaths on whose behalf mourning ceremonies have mounted on mourning rituals. Enter governors. Enter elders. Enter opportunists and rhetoric. Enter Obasanjo. Exit common sense. The sadness has become more political than tears. More funeral than funereal.

    But who is Yusuf? In the Christian ambience of Benue State, you are bound to see more Josephs than Yusufs. But, in spite of the look of quiet defiance, it was a call to brotherhood. We have had two significant Yusufs in our recent history. One had it as surname, and the other as first name. The former’s name is bound to violence. Mohammed Yusuf was the founder and trigger of Boko Haram. The other Yusuf was unknown until he became a victim of violence. An apolitical violence, a violence of leisure and commuting, on a bike that tossed him to the headlines. The nation learned that he is Yusuf Buhari, the son of the Muhammadu Buhari of Aso Villa. Thankfully, the violent Yusuf is dead, although his ghost hoisted flags, wields guns, kidnaps young girls and hides bombs in nubile bosoms.

    We want to exorcise the Yusuf of violence and embrace the Yusuf of healing, of a rebound from the territory of death and mourning.

    Suddenly, we had two men with antipodal backgrounds bearing the same name. Shakespeare would have chuckled with his “what is in a name” quip. The Benue youths could be saying that their young are also like the president’s son. The president’s son fell and rose up. He whipped up sympathy, was whisked to a hospital and when that did not suffice, he flew to Europe. A sycophant not only ran a newspaper advert to show a heart of flesh for the president, a minister received the healed son of his Excellency at the Airport. A burlesque show of official duty worthy of a comedy of errors.

    But the protesters are saying that their youths never enjoyed such compassion. They are saying, when did anyone pick up any Benue youth who was maimed, or on life support, and exhibited the same quality of care or concern? None of them went to the hospital abroad. No minister visited them with anything close to the concern that Yusuf enjoyed. Fewer consolations than visits to IDP camps.

    In a sense, they were also thanking Mr. President for coming. He had been flayed for not coming when tempers rose and tears flowed like brooks. But he has come at last, and they had an opportunity to say “thank you but remember us. We are like your son.” They must have had in mind his remarks to the elders for the president to live with their neighbours. The neighbours are like Yusuf. It is a call not only for compassion about herdsmen on the prowl, but a more national call for accommodation. About appointments, about jobs, about healthcare, about a sense of national belonging. They are also addressing him as a father, a plea of sons to a patriarch. About taking lawmakers with reckless N13.5 million monthly allowances.

    Significantly, though, it is a call across faiths. Yusuf is a Muslim. His Christian counterpart is Joseph. The Koran and Bible have a similar story of the same person. It is not the province of this essay to say who stole whose story. The plagiarist, who will stand accused of holy fraud, is a subject that has engaged historians, theologians, priests and scholars.

    Few insights can rival a series of novels titled, Joseph and His Brothers where Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann recasts the tale in entrancing passages that compare with the most ambitious of all novels, War and peace.

    The story has a young man accused of a coat of many colours. That may lie at the bottom of the story of the sign on the Makurdi street. A coat of many colours is a rainbow coalition, a metaphor for a nation of varied outlooks. The Afemai, the Fulani, the Idoma, Tiv, Kanuri, Yoruba, Itsekiri, Igbo, Ijaw, etc. They are the many colours in the coat of Yusuf. If every Benue youth is a Yusuf, it means every Benue youth is human, and should enjoy their creature comforts.

    Yusuf or Joseph was a victim of violence. Just like Buhari’s Yusuf and Benue youths. His brothers threw him for dead in a pit. Some Benue youths did not survive the onslaughts of the marauders, but others who did want a lifeline. The brothers thought he was gone for good and a father who did not understand what his brothers were doing mourned a son who still had his life intact.

    So, the president should go beyond his kinsmen around him and find the truth about sufferings in the land. He exhibited a “warm,” childlike naivety when he confessed that he did not know that the inspector general of police had flouted his order to remain in Benue State. He promptly issued him a query. I wonder how many of such acts of disobedience abound in the presidency and cabinet. Yusuf or Joseph’s father Yakubu or Jacob relied solely on facts from his sons. He trusted them too much. He might have saved him from the pit if he had other ways of knowing.

    But the youths are a metaphor for the vulnerable. The children who could not hide, the old who could not run, the women hunched over by rapists. They are also Yusufs. It is also for those whose houses are now ashes, whose livelihoods are history and their hopes lie like the wastes of their farms.

    But hopes flash on the horizon. If Yusuf Buhari rose from the perils of a bike accident and is up and about, then the Benue youth and other vulnerable Nigerians can cheer. After all, the Yusuf of the Koran and Joseph of the Bible rose from servitude to be served in the palace. Yusuf Buhari is in the palace today, so the Benue youth and all Nigerians aspire to such luxury. If not exactly in the palace, at least they should live in a country where all are treated equal in jobs, beliefs, tribes and associations.

    The sign was thus a good sign that calls to mind Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter. A girl carries a permanent sign on her chest to draw attention to her sin, but in the end, it is pricks the society’s conscience and hypocrisy. The Benue youth’s sign holds similar power. It is either we see it as a rebuke or a call to harmony. The choice is ours, especially the president’s.

     

     

     

  • Soldier envy

    Ike Ekweremadu is not a colourful man. He is not like a Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki, who once buried his extremities in his voluminous agbada in homage to the Village Headmaster hero. Neither is the number-two man in the Senate blessed in the art of rhetoric. But you don’t always need such attributes to stir attention if you can string words together that unleash fireballs.

    So, the deputy Senate President, with his bland looks and undistinguished diction, hinted that the temperament of our politics may provide temptations to the martial impulses of the men of the barracks. Our wish, though, is that the barrack habitués forbid Oscar Wilde’s notion: “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it…I can resist everything but temptation.”

    Ike was at the receiving end of quite a few flacks. But so was the late Gani Fawehinmi, who saw the vainglory of the political elite with nostalgia for the men of the gun against whom he had railed and duelled more than any politician alive.

    But what first struck me was that Ike was not looking inward enough. It is not that we were courting the soldier but that we were already the soldiers. Before we lay claim to being democrats, we were soldiers and we never made the turn to popular will. We have acted more as the cousins of the barracks than we probably know. Even Ike should have looked at his position. He did not get there without a coup. He and Oloye’s scion mimed the soldier. They plotted under inky darkness, hatched and announced in a dawn of impunity. Party decorum was ousted. Legislative regulations out the door. Those who live in legislative houses should not toss stones.

    Even if the soldier handed us a limping document as a constitution, we saw ourselves in the mirror. Ugly, subversive, circumlocutory, corrupt and cowering to the worst of our culture. Rather than improve it, we looked at it as a pig at a sty. We embraced even if a vocal minority has continued to hack away at its fidelity to the era of the gun.

    So, we are suffering from soldier envy. The Obj era was that on many occasions. First, we brought quite of few of such men into the body politic. Obj, Buhari, Danjuma, Mark, IBB et al. They held the reins of state. The horse of politics neighed in obedience. We heralded from behind. Obj became the baba of politics and relished it as though he were a general of democracy, abiding that contradiction as he spoke and dished out policy.

    If the soldiers hanged Ken Saro Wiwa, Obj responded with the Barbarity of Odi. If IBB created and collapsed political structures, we also had ours. We had to trump  Plateau State House of Assembly and impeach a governor with a fraction of the members. The state of emergencies in a number of states told us our politicians were not only in love with rascals, the centre was happy to rack them to pieces. Obj’s great tool was the war on corruption. He had what historians call Richard Nixon’s enemies’ list. He had the governors who did not flinch at his Neanderthal habits. Not only governors but also lawmakers. He had a ravenous appetite for ejecting leaders of the National Assembly. Politics was like death march for his foes.

    The guillotine list was spectacular. Chuba Okadigbo’s case still rings from his grave. He also removed the PDP chairman who is now agriculture minister Audu Ogbeh.

    He brought the language of warfare to politics and designated the 2007 polls a matter of “do or die.” Lagos polls of that year survived the bandit huddles and the then governor of example Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) became helmsman while the Owu chief gawped.

    In this era, we have seen quite a few dalliances with the ways of the soldier. Sambo Dasuki, who lived by impunity under Jonathan, is still behind bars against court order. El Zak Zaki is probably asphyxiating in detention even when the law says he should be out. They are no different from the fates of Decrees Two and Four victims who languished behind bars at the mercies of the same Muhammadu Buhari and IBB.

    It is not just these very stark examples. We are seeing the examples in the way politicians act in office. State houses of assembly have become zombies of the governors. Local government chairmen act like little monarchs while a few governors carry themselves as though they have attained what Chinese leader Xi just secured for himself: lifetime in power. They forget, as the Greek poet wrote, “as streams are, power is.” Former United States President Bill Clinton was asked about one of his great marvels about power. He said, “time passes.”

    A governor recently showed me a quote he works by and keeps him humble, and that was the line from a person who accompanied the Roman emperor in the midst of hurrahs and adoration. The person whispered in the emperor’s ear: “You are just a man.” Tyrants like Caligula and Nero flushed such wisdoms aside. Many of our governors forget that until they are out of circulation and no one stops to stoop at their clay feet anymore. They walk the streets in the solitude of solicitude.

    The tempestuous governor of Kaduna State hews down the house of a senator. He owes no one any apologies. It is his power and he uses it with a flourish. Our politicians forget that the first principle of power is restraint.

    As Russian playwright Chekhov wrote in his great play The Cherry Orchard, a “giant should not use his power like a giant.”

    Herdsmen are on a rampage. They hold guns and kill innocents. In Abraka, a farmer was gunned down while his wife fled. Some governors sponsor militias in self-defence. A party gives its chairman a year extension without the backing of the rules. They will make the law to canonise the crime.

    The greatest military quality of our democracy is power centralisation. So, all the resources flow from the centre. Our democracy is like the military chain of command. When Ironsi promulgated decree 34, he was accused of centralising power. But his critics in the military and civil society who took over since have felt in love with Ironsi’s iniquities. So, we have a democracy that envies the soldiers sway and majesty.

    We are like the character in Ford Maddox Ford novel, The Good Soldier. A cuckolded man watches with envy as a man makes love to his wife. We are in love with our conquerors, the army. In the same way we love the white man. First, he conquered us, then we are trying to outdo him in his own competencies: the way he dresses, eats, makes money, organises society, wars and even dies.

    Ike and his political elite should first purge themselves of the soldier’s way.  We don’t have to worry so much about their return. The ghost is already in the house. You made love to her last night.

  • Shettima antidote

    The Dapchi girls story is beginning to retreat out of the Nigerian mind, just like the Chibok girls. What I cannot understand is that no one saw all the vulnerable girl schools in the north and thought about protecting them. I saw a good example of how to protect them in my visit to Borno State. The schools are fortified with strong and active military presence.

    Governor Shettima is building an array of model schools, 40 at least, that show that you can send your daughter there and go to sleep. One of such schools in Maiduguri is in an advanced stage of completion. It is a school with bulletproof facilities. The classrooms are not only fitted with air conditioners and fans but also with bulletproof doors and windows. Ditto to the dining rooms and the hostels. The school is billed for 1,300 girls. Gov Shettima wants to name it after one of four iconic world women: Angela Merkel, as the leader of the free world today with Trump’s abdication; Michelle Obama for her poise, integrity and revolutionary role as first lady and her role in Africa during her reign. She also gave international momentum for the search of the Chibok girls. Maya Angelou, the great American poet, African American role model and the poet laureate at Clinton’s inauguration. She has been a great encourager of African letters. And Oprah Winfrey, whose role in women’s empowerment is second to none around the world.

    No renegade band can break into such a school without being entrapped. I hope the presidency and other northeast governors learn from Shettima.