The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Perfect stooge

    Perfect stooge

    The word perfect was a perfect word until it lost its innocence. Perfect used to be pristine and flawless. So, we had a perfect soul, perfect strategy, a perfect dream and even a perfect society. Now the mind of humans has now perverted things.

    Even in the scriptures, God called for humans to be perfect. “I am God Almighty,” God told Abraham, “walk before me and be thou perfect.” But that was when the definition of perfect was straightforward.

    “The mind is its own place,” crooned poet John Milton in his Paradise Lost. “It can make hell of heaven and heaven of hell.” Because of the endless elasticity of the human intellect, we can pervert the perfect. So, we have the perfect murder, one in which the killer is never caught, nor even prosecuted. Just as we now have of the Dele Giwa letter bomb.

    Or the perfect escape, like the famous Alcataraz episode, where daredevil men manoeuvred into myth as no one has accounted for the men who were flesh and penned but turned ghosts for the rest of their lives. Or the perfect heist, like the theft of 50 million pounds from a Kent security depot over a decade ago. Or the perfect lie, like the serpent who slithered to Eve in Eden, or the perfect buffoon like Baba Sala or Mr. Magoo. Or the perfect savage like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The list goes on. It is the human capacity for invention. As the Bible says, “God has made man upright, but he has brought forth many inventions.”

    Politics cannot but inveigle itself into the fare. We just had one with a man who loves to wear a cap and sport a smile and carry the air of dignity. He has succeeded to become successful in gerrymandering. To be a stooge is not to be fool. It is a distinction. John Oyegun, former Edo State governor (if for a short span), APC chieftain, perennial hustler for relevance and now APC chairman, is the stooge of the era, a perfect stooge.

    He shot into prominence in this era when his name crested the list of contenders for the post of party chairman. He did not, on his own, have the human stature or political structure, or what scholars call the presence, charisma, or the financial chest to run for such a high office. But as a good tortoise of the African tale, he had to ride on the shoulders of others. He was humble enough to accept his acute limitations. He was not like typical politicians who exaggerate their influence. He learned to stoop. And he conquered by latching on to the structure of others to realise his ambition.

    He was faithful as an obedient servant. And that way he won, besting other contestants, including the quisling and self-indulgent Tom Ikimi, whose political obituary hung in effigy on his loss in that night of a thousand flames.

    But he was clever enough not stay in one corridor. He saw another master elsewhere. He is a perpetual obedient, and so he heard a call to service in the battle for the National Assembly. Swiftly, he joined the impunity that made “Eleyinmi” Saraki Senate President. That was the day he became a new stooge. Since then, he has played the role with great dramatic acuity. He has manoeuvred like James Bond, amused like Gringori, played the ominous straitlaced villain like hairless lord Talab Abass of the TV series  Ripples. Oyegun is no Talab Abass in size or influence but in reflected glory., etc. He has achieved this by being a serial and obedient servant.

    Give him the credit. He has perfected the art of anticipating who the master will be and how to ingratiate himself. Psycho-social thinker Daniel Goleman enunciated what he called emotional intelligence. He wrote it for those who knew how to succeed not by intellect or moral heft but by behaviour that suited the times. He comes from the tradition of the ethical philosophers of situationism. In order words, situation dictated attitude. To the just, you are just. To the cruel, you are cruel. To the opportunist, you are Paulo Rossi. That is the making of John Odigie Oyegun.

    Never mind that he has not been a great leader of the APC as an organisation in any classic sense of a leader. Under him, the party, which was a hodgepodge to win an election, has not grown into a cohesive body either ideologically or architecturally. It has been a loose bond of a body, governors at odds with party apparatchik, president overthrown by lawmakers, state organs riven by the throes of ego and hero worship.

    In Kaduna State, the small man hews down a senator’s house because he can. Meanwhile a section of the party suspends the governor in a flourish that works only as spectacle. They know it cannot work, since the party at the centre will nullify it. But tempers flare all the same. In Kogi, parallel excos headline a party in which a besieged governor hedges its power because of an assurance in the centre. In Benue, the party is in tatters over the herdsmen’s crisis, and he has no word to bring the party to harmony or, shall I say, to existence. It is virtually dead in Benue State.

    There is virtually no state where the party is not in crisis, including  Ondo State where Goverenor Rotimi Akeredolu tries in vain to paper over the cracks. In Ogun, in Imo, in Oyo, the fire is coming next time. In Kano, Kwankwaso is looking at his political obituary but he will go down with the Samson complex, tearing down the edifice with him.

    It is not because Oyegun has done a great job that he was given a year by the governors. Because he has done a great job as stooge. He served lawmakers, served the president, served the governors. But he has not served the party, and that is why the party is in disarray. Power comes from above, but chaos from beneath. Historians will distinguish him as the greatest failure as party chairman in Nigerian history of democracy since 1960. His is a paradox of a failure that gets another chance. Which is actually the way of our democracy. We reward loyalty over principle or competence.

    But the party men had to do it through impunity. They had to break the law first and follow due process after. That is, they had to commit a crime and look for a law to legitimise it afterwards. As Samuel Butler noted, society creates the crime, the criminal commits it. That was the point that Zamfara State Governor Abdulaziz Yari made after Oyegun was given another year.

    The consequence of Oyegun is that he made the party a chaos so he can have the chance to lead it. If he were a good leader, he might not have earned a full and second term because he would have made way for another stooge. His “stoogeship” he will not share with anyone else.

    Oyegun is what sociologist William H. Whyte described as “the organisation man.”  He works to keep his job by not rocking the boat, but by following rules. Whyte explains in that classic that great organisations do not innovate or make ground breaking progress with such men, but with leaders of Daniel Defoe saw as “rugged individualists” like Robinson Crusoe. Or what Theodore Roosevelt called “the man in the arena.”

    Great leaders like Awo, Mandela, Che, Castro, Churchill were rugged individualists who followed tough paths and took their associates along those paths. Oyegun has no liver, lever or conscience for such sublimity.  So, Oyegun is contented to be a stuffed puppy, squealing and barking any which way the masters point.

  • Two weddings and a riot

    Two weddings and a riot

    In the past few weeks, we have witnessed two weddings and riot. It sounds like the title of a play or novel. But it is a reality. First was the wedding of the children of the Osinbajos and the Shagayas. It sparked a mini-controversy about inter-faith tryst. But it was clarified that it was a Christian-Christian fest, and the cross and crescent did not kiss. It was good thing for inter-tribal concord. The Osinbajos are Yoruba from the Southwest and the Shagayas from the Middle Belt.

    The other was last weekend between the son of Oyo State Governor Abiola Ajimobi and the daughter of GovernorAbdullahi Ganduje of Kano State. A society wedding, expectedly. Such weddings are less about the intending couples as about their fathers and mothers who turn the ceremonies into spectacles of glamour.

    But what struck me is the riot that tore the city of Kaduna into bloodshed and hate over inter-faith marriage. The crux? The Christians complain that when their daughter is married away to the Muslim, she is forced to surrender to the husband’s belief. But the Christian is forbidden such luxury. Iam looking towards a society wedding when it is a Christian-Muslim tie up with no pious pre-conditions. The Muslim and Christian should marry in freedom. There should be no compulsion. Apostle Paul wrote that if a Christian marries a non-believer, they should abide in peace and one can bless the other. Love is the first principle of marriage, but it is lost in all the bigotry of faith.

  • Heart of darkness

    Heart of darkness

    When I visited Bayelsa State recently, the sense of home hit me as an original of the Niger Delta. As I traversed lands, saw creeks and peeped through forest barks, I sank into a state of nostalgia. The term “my land,” the word “legitimacy,” the phrase “resource control” and the epithet “state rights” all percolated me like water through the sieves of the heart.

    My feeling deepened when I witnessed the ground breaking of a refinery, the first of such in the state and that region in a generation. Whole swaths of swamp land were being translated, by cash, technology and human brawn, into a manufacturer’s hub of refined oil and power.

    As I entered the premises, I recalled what my late father told me many years ago. ‘’Oti,” that was how he addressed me, “the last time I went to where I was born, I pointed to it from hard ground. It is now water. Thanks to government greed, neglect and bigger thanks to the destruction by the oil companies.” His face was a network of furrows and his lip at its verbal tether. No more to say.

    The dozy village on the outskirts of Yenagoa drew some of the mainstays of the oil industry, including former president Olusegun Obasanjo. The Owu chief’s soulful dance on stage was an eerie reminder of his famous former dance. The stellar percussions came from an internationally acclaimed child band from Akwa Ibom. This time, thankfully, no letter of explosive proportion was unleased from his undercroft of rage. For that region, rage is no stranger. For irony, Baba’s dance in Bayelsa lacked the militant gyrations that preceded his epistolary umbrage to the president.

    But the speech that stirred the crowd came from the chief host, Governor Seriake Dickson. The walking stick twirling, heft of a figure, was for a space of 30 minutes, looking more like a spokesman for the Niger Delta, a tongue for oil for oil producers, for resource control, for legitimacy. He spoke not with the register of the creeks but indignant polish. But both creek renegades and city conformists cheered.

    No one could deny he said the truth when he thanked the President for granting the CEO of Azikel Group, Eruani Godbless, for installing the refinery. No one can deny, too, his truth when he questioned why licences were being given to install refineries “thousands of miles away” from where it is located. He lamented oil blocks given to persons who did not live there, feel the people’s entrails, thumb the pulse of their poverty, deprivation and dreams.

    No one could boo when he said oil majors were drawing wealth from beneath their earths but enjoying them in far-flung areas, in lavish life style while those who owned it only sniffed it, saw it, cringed at its environmental carnage, diseases and privations. In a similar interview with Governor Ifeanyi Okowa for my television show on TVC running on Saturday morning, the Delta State governor spoke on the decline of Warri and how the big companies, including Shell and Agip have packed up to Lagos and other safe havens. They only come to the place to tap oil and leave, their taxes are almost pittances. Agip, for instance, does half its business in Bayelsa but has no significant office there. This is selfish, cynical primitivity in the 21st century.

    The oil majors are a leech on us. As a native, I weep for Nigeria, and condemn all governments that we have had for treating the people as lost causes while they lust like carnivores for our inheritance.

    Said Dickson: “I do not know the business case that justifies the construction of expensive wells, expensive pipelines, crisscrossing rivers, creeks, rivulets and oceans from Bayelsa, Rivers, Delta, Edo, Ondo and Akwa Ibom down to several areas. I know but I don’t want to mention names. I am told that there are refineries being conceived and being built in Niger Republic.” Imagine: from Niger Delta to Niger Republic. Not a republican conscience, that move!

    This is the story of legitimacy. As Dickson noted, it is not about exclusive ownership of the oil resources. Others must be welcome to enjoy the wealth anywhere in a federating unit. But the locals must get the pride of place. This is not the case when the majority of the valued workers in the oil firms are not from the Niger Delta. They make them welders, cleaners, labourers, an act of contemptuous tokenism.

    Oil blocks go to those who have never moulded a block in the region. They see the Niger Delta like what the Jamaican writer John Hearne describes in his famous short story, Lost Country. Niger Delta is the lost country, where those who go and lust for gold but not the people’s good. It is where people go and never survive except those who control labour.

    Oil blocks put the region on the chopping block.

    If the advocates of the herdsmen’s rights to ancestral routes want to make their case, they should realise, as the Bayelsa State governor says, that “what you call an oil block is a piece of our ancestral property carved out by surveyors that you are giving away at our expense.”

    Dickson marked his six years in office showcasing some of his doings like the revolutionary Ijaw Academy, the diagnostic centre, boarding schools, roads and bridges, sprawling fish farms, all need resources to raise his people from the backwaters. They need to use their resources while they have them.

    Niger Delta is now Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Mr. Kurtz is the white man who represents the western, white interlopers, just like the herdsmen of rapine. The oil majors and their official collaborators come for the resources, while the inhabitants are dismissed as howling, dirty, ugly savages who should work for their leases and pleasure. I saw this when I visited the Niger Delta as a reporter for the African Concord, before insurgency blasted the nation. Gulf Oil, now Chevron in Arunton, was like a western suburb with electricity, pipe-borne water, television and other luxuries. The village beside them belonged to the middle ages, racked to a rump from exploitation. The youth had no jobs. The girls were whores for the white man. I wept, as I had to pass the night in a hut.

    The story of the 21st century has been about bread and blood. Those who do not belong to my blood line should not have bread. That is the savage reality of our century, and it has thrown up Trump in the United States and herdsmen in Nigeria. Both are savages who exaggerate human divisions instead of addressing fair play and justice.

  • Dapchi girls, enemy’s poison

    Dapchi girls, enemy’s poison

    Nothing can justify the Dapchi girls story, not after we were irate that Goodluck Jonathan was dancing Azonto in Kano while the goons carted away our Chibok schoolgirls. It is not enough that the President does not deny it like Jonathan or calls it a disaster. That is no solace for the mothers and fathers and the community who threw stones as Governor Ibrahim Gaidam’s convoy whirred by.

    Yobe Governor Gaidam may have displayed optimistic naivety with his first press statement celebrating the rescue of some girls. But the media was also naïve for using the word rescue when there was no narrative as to how it happened. Were there shootouts, casualties, arrests?

    I accept Gaidam’s apology but not stories of our security forces who had no inkling of what was happening in a long stretch of land. No security forces saw trucks carrying many school girls, even if we accept that they came looking harmless into the town.

    This is an era when the top men of Nigeria security forces are fighting turf wars in Abuja, while the president looks almost impotent.

    Gaidam is taking responsibility for what belongs to the DSS and inspector general of police all under the presidency. The governor does not control the police or intelligence forces yet we call him the chief security officer. Hence some of our northern governors now back state police. Facts, Charles Dickens writes, is compelling.

    Gaidam should save himself by naming those who misled his government. Or else he will bell another foe’s cat, or eat the enemy’s poison.

  • Witch snake

    Witch snake

    We must not show surprise at the lying tongue of Philomena Shieshe, the conjurer of the thieving snake. We must admire not only her lies, but the fertility of her imagination. She has put the story of our war on corruption in perspective. She invoked a maid, a conspiracy, a large sum of money, and a snake. The corruption tale has come full cycle.

    Right in the heartland of animal impunity, she conjures the most enigmatic of creatures performing the most fascinating business of humans: making money. The herdsmen in Benue State – not the cows – growl and attack and make mincemeat of man. The herdsman is in the business of killing in the name of cows. The snake was making a killing in the name of money. Both do business, but the rest of us suffer.

    The woman is like the herdsman, the snake her cows. Thirty-six million is no small sum in any currency, so she’s no small woman. We have two lethal weapons in one state: one killing humans, the other swallowing their livelihood. Philomena and her maid are not interested in striking like a thief in the night. Hers is a snake but only to the spiritual eye. As Apostle Paul has said, the natural man cannot understand the ways of the spirit. When Jesus says to his Thomas Didymus that a spirit has no flesh, blood and bones, Philomena is paying attention. We have not seen but we should believe. She can conjure in the blaze of day, in the haze and in the blight of night.

    She has learned one or two about corruption and how to mock it. She has demonstrated, through the hiss and jaw of a snake, that the war on corruption is phony. How different is her story from the reels of lies we have heard from the EFCC targets. The Dasukigate, the MainaGate, the NNPC tale with Kachikwu and Baru have had versions of snakes swallowing money. A person is charged, he says he is not guilty. He comes with a tale of phantasmagoria.

    The billions disappear. Often the stories end up in obscurity even though they are clear to all of us. When the men are detained and questioned, they come out afterwards with one triumphal lie. The snakes in our anti-corruption war are manifold. The first liar is the defendant. He says he is not the thief. He or she followed the rule of law. The more we look, the less we see. The best way to steal is not by direct putting of the hand in the cookie jar. Not in secret. But in plain sight. All who must sign, appends their signatures, all the way from to the lawyers and contractors and permanent secretaries. Yet billions are being stolen.

    The SANs are their serpentine accomplices. The case takes on are sinuous pattern. It goes to the court, it follows to the appeal court and when it gets to the Supreme Court, we think it is over. But we have only just begun. They were only treating a superficial part. The substantive matter is still hanging and hiding like the billions. Like the snake, it takes a path back to where it seems hidden. How many corruption charges have yielded jail terms since 2015? Like Philomena, the snake has swallowed the money, but no one can see the beast. What you cannot see, you cannot hold.

    We started the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) to spike the serpent. But because it is spiritual, no one can strike it. A number of cases have followed the pattern of the swallowing snake. The Saraki case that has gone up and down, right and left like the adder on the alley. Or Patience Jonathan, who says the late mother owned the money and the EFCC is showing disrespect for our heroine past for her labours of love and profit in this land. Or the case a few years ago when top SANs defended two colleagues allegedly caught in the bribery scandal.

    Our money often assumes a lot of paths like the snake. They are stolen in Abuja or any state capital. They take a route to the bank. In the banks are many turns. It goes to a vault in Naira, meanders through files, and desks, slithers up to the offices of the bank directors and hisses in a disappearing act into another currency in the forex department.

    It reaches Europe in Euros, or goes to America in dollars, or other climes in their own currencies. They blend with the environment, look lush like the greenback of American dollars, or tawny like the desert sands of the Middle East. We search for them here in our banks, lawyers defending their thieves, whereas they have changed form and home. The “pepper has rested” elsewhere.

    In the case of Philomena and the N36 million, money is a spirit, it takes wings and disappears – into the bowels of the snake. In a few cases, a snake is caught. We applaud ourselves for such rare heroics. Like in some cases where some money has been returned to our coffers. But snakes have a way of escaping, like the re-looting of the Abacha $500 million. A big snake had vomited that. But another has swallowed it again.

    Nor is the snake the only victim of our lies. The goat, the stubborn mammal, bleats lies. Not long ago, children often lied when they failed exams and did not want their parents to know. They claimed, “Baba, I passed but the goat ate up my report card.” We may think the goat harmless unless when it sinks its teeth in an errant piece of yam. But the goat made news in 2009. One was prosecuted in Kwara State for stealing a car. The police arrested the goat, claiming that the real thief transfigured into the bleating beast.

    The Nigerian incident was foreseen by French writer Victor Hugo in his famous novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame. A beautiful woman, Esmeralda and her goat are arrested and hanged for sorcery. The author was taking a swipe at the Spanish Inquisition for canonising violence in the name of justice.

    For the witch snake, Philomena was only mocking us for our hypocrisy. If billions disappear on apocryphal tales from politicians and get away with them, it was time shadowy citizen gave us a witch snake with a conjurer’s twist. The latter was provided with good humour by Senator Shehu Sani, who materialised with snake charmers at the JAMB office.

    But snake charmers, by their nature, are also phony. They cannot charm a snake in the bush, only the ones they bring to the show. But our people steal strange money, so we need a new breed of snake charmers. EFCC does not seem equipped for this, not with their lawyers, or our SANs sans honour, or our judges on the take.

    We have been happy to take what we can from the looters, even if they are small compared with what the witch snakes have swallowed over the years. As they say where I come from in the Niger Delta, ‘at all, at all na winch.’

     

    The bard and the trance

    Writer Wole Soyinka gave us an interesting word last week to describe President Muhammadu Buhari. I am still trying to figure out what he means by trance. Does he mean Buhari is in an ethno-nepotistic trance, which means the spirit of his ancestors have so overwhelmed him that he sees only people from his clan  when doles out appointments? So, he is president of Nigeria, but that trance makes him see Katsina even when he is supposed to see Owerri? Is that why he asked his Benue men to embrace his neighbours?

    Or is he in a religious trance, and he sees only men and women on Friday prayers and when Sunday comes he rejoices Friday has come so soon, and so appoints as though it is a one-faith country? I am not sure that trance is always a good thing. What we need, if we are to believe the bard, is to look for men who can exorcise that spirit and bring our beloved president back to earth.

  • Camouflage of carnage

    Camouflage of carnage

    We saw truth and reconciliation in Rwanda, after daggers flew and a bleeding. In South Africa, it served as a rebuke of a monument to prejudice, the worst since Jim Crow in the United States and the era of slavery and slave trade.

    Truth happened to fling the door open for reconciliation. In Nigeria, we have never reconciled because we have never come to terms with the truth. We are cousins in perpetual contention, ever learning but never coming to the knowledge of the truth, apology to Apostle Paul.

    Anytime a controversy engulfs our country, the first casualty is truth. When truth is buried, solution stands afar off, watching us in the impotence of disbelief. The herdsmen are one such tinderbox, and it is biting the nation’s fabric while we bicker.

    The reason is easy. While it is spinning mourning clothes in many homes, it is bringing bread to the table of others. Some feast but others see them as beasts. The feud festers. No one wants to take responsibility for the bloodshed.

    The herdsmen have become a source of great confusion. Some say the herdsmen are doing the killings. Some say it is not the herdsmen doing the killings but the Bororo Fulani, who are now jobless. Some say the same Fulani who have fled drought and famine from Mali and Niger and Chad have lost cattle and livelihood. So they roam our lands to steal cattle and herd them to Lagos, sell them and buy arms.

    The question is, why do they buy arms? Why are they angry? What did the locals do to them that they have worked up such wrath in their breasts? Why are they so blood happy, so appetized for other’s flesh and innocence?

    Some others say the herdsmen are angry because locals steal their cattle? But it has been proved more often that the cattle rustlers are more Fulani than locals. If that is the truth, why did 73 caskets of Tivs and Idomas cascade into the earth the other day?

    Is there some sort of misunderstanding between the killers and the victims? When the president, in his invidious naivety, ask the Tiv elders to embrace their neighbours, was it because he was out of tandem with the reports of his security officers in the DSS? If so, why has he not called for a comprehensive report?

    Even the DSS did not help the confusion when it asserted that it was the terror exports of the Islamic State working their furnace of faith in our communities. The Inspector General of Police, authoring an imbecile and wild tale of fiction, said it was mere communal misunderstanding?

    The minister of defence came out fuming the other day, and reeled off what many saw as an act of fanatical umbrage. Speaking without wisdom or knowledge and certainly without respect for his position, he sanctified the killings. He spoke with the hysteria of a hyena who eyed raw meat and blood dripping, and drooled for the prize. It still astounds me that such a human could say such barbarous inanity and be retained in office. He may be echoing the serene and vengeful piety of his fellow travellers. Otherwise, he ought to be arrested and questioned if he was in on the slaughter. After all, a Benue State DPO was arrested when seven Fulani were killed in cold blood.  If Mansur Dan-Ali says modernity has blocked the grazing routes, and so we expect the herdsmen to rebel in rage and rapine, so what does he know? Yet this is the minister of defence, acting with a footloose tongue and bloodthirsty register as though his job is not defence but offence against the people.

    If the people doing the killings are actually the foreigners, why did we hear the Emir of Kano and the Miyetti Allah explode in the defence of the herdsmen? Why did the mourners of Benue not receive the sort of condolence and sympathy they deserve, except meaningless routines of “sorry” that few accepted as genuine?

    If we send soldiers to keep the peace, it will work. But what we shall see is not peace but pacification. That was the favourite word of the British when they mowed down local resistance to their colonial rule. They imposed silence, but peace never thrived until they left.

    It is interesting that some of the Middle Belt leaders do not blame the “normal” Fulani herdsmen for the slaughter about the country. In my interview with the President of the Middle Belt Forum, Dr. Bala Takaya, a few points came out. He does not blame the herdsmen for the assaults but two culprits. One, what I will call the “shadow herdsmen.” This refers to the nomads from outside the country who steal cows and herd them as camouflage for carnage. In the interview that will air on TVC next Saturday morning, he contends that they pretend to be herders while they bear both arms and cows.

    Two, he blames the security forces in the country. He says they know the truth and wonders why the president continues to preserve them in their offices. What he has said contradicts what the Benue State Governor Samuel Ortom has filled the air with. Ortom is wagging the dog’s tail. He has been an abysmal failure as governor, owing about a year in salaries and presiding over Makurdi that still looks only a little better than a village in the 1980’s. The herdsmen crisis is an opportunity to ride to a second term. It is a boon for him from the enemy.

    All these stories tell us that the public has no clear truth to consume on the crisis. Hence we may not reconcile. We can never love each other so long as we doubt each other. Shakespeare wrote in his famous play Hamlet: “Doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt I love.”

    We are not in a place of truth as yet. So, we cannot love, and without it reconciliation will elude us. So what is the truth? Is it Bororo in nomadic bloodthirst? Is it the real herdsmen but a few bad eggs? Is it some powerful forces up north in animal rage in defence of their cows? Is it ISL? The truth does not have to be simple, but we should know the facts. As Oscar Wilde noted: “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” We have closet truths. The south truth, the north truth, the Christian truth, the Islamic truth, the middle belt truth, the DSS truth, etc. The deaf walls reign. We are hiding in camouflages.

    We have read reports of not a few herdsmen arrests. Why not prosecute them in public, get their confessions, trace their roots and lineages? I believe the security forces and their leaders owe us this much for the peace and concord of this nation. If they don’t, then Buhari should follow Takaya’s suggestion and fire them. The nation of over 100 million people is bigger than a menagerie of men inspired by a fringe ideology.

     

  • Our son the minister

    Our son the minister

    The Minister of Health, Isaac Adewole has puzzled a few people. Why has he not resigned when under his nose the president restored a man he fired for corrupt practices. Usman Yusuf was suspended as the executive secretary of the Nigerian Health Insurance Scheme. He is still under investigation. But Adewole has kept a cowardly mum since.

    The man may be following the trajectories of a play written by Paul Ugede titled: Our Son The Minister. The whole family wants their son to take up the job as minister but he says he wouldn’t because they want him on the pedestal not to serve the people but family and friends. Adewole would not resign because his family would probably think him a fool. They will lose all the celestial glories of office: cash, travels, luxuries and prestige. The minister in Ugede’s play knows that ministers may be called honourable but many lack honour.

    In other societies, Adewole would not need to resign because Yusuf would be ashamed and sulking in the shadows over his public iniquities. While we call for Adewole to resign, what of the iniquities of those who restored him and the shameless boldness of him who agrees to return to his pedestal of shame?

    As Achebe wrote in A Man of The People, who would spit out a sweet morsel that good fortune tossed in his mouth! Adewole will be a hero if he resigns, but this is no longer a clime for heroes, but hero-worshippers. In a country of Igwe, Baba gan, Ranka dede, we cannot find heroes. Adewole will not resign for the same reason Yusuf was appointed. OBJ’s nepotism charge only gained traction, especially when eight other people from other parts of the country who were suspended from the same agency are warming their chairs at home fattening, farting and hoping against hope.

  • Not less

    Not less

    His family gathered around him in a Lagos hospital, including his elder brother who is now an emir. After days of funeral fears, they thrilled to see him in bed. Some would not chat, others chattered. The man sat erect on the bed but he did not respond. He knew something was amiss. His visiting relatives were puzzled.

    He knew a few moments later what he feared when he started to recover. He had lost his sense of hearing, significantly. Tanko Al-Makura experienced the first signs in a bout of fever. He was attending Abacha’s constitutional conference in Abuja. It was the days of zero party, the dictator’s dubious experiment in democracy.

    Doctors zeroed in, and thought it was malaria. Later they diagnosed him for typhoid. Chloramphenicol came to rescue as the routine cure of the time. it turned out to be lassa fever. But before they could realise it, it had complicated into his hearing loss. He lost 70 percent of his ability to pick up a sound.

    The story of the Nassarawa State governor rose to public eye when he took part in a thousand-man march in Abuja a few years ago to raise awareness to a segment of society to which few pay attention. Not governors, not senators, not presidents, not even columnists.

    This week the state is playing host to President Muhammadu Buhari to open what will be the first of its kind in West Africa: A school for all kinds of disability. Those who cannot hear, see, walk. It also includes those like the governor who have partial abilities. It is a school, not a healing house. The lame may not walk, the blind may not see, and the deaf may not hear. But the point of the Comprehensive Special School in Lafia is to heal what is even more important than the senses: the mind. Greek philosopher Socrates said our senses deceive us, so we should place more premium on sensibility rather than the sense. So, we should think, and that was the beginning of what philosophy teachers call the Socratic Method.

    But the story is not just that it will admit about 400 people from around the country at the start, or that it is well-equipped, or that its free, or that it has recruited teachers who have graduated in special education. It is to muse on how or whether leaders with disability can transform their shortcomings to the greater good of society.

    What Al-Makura is doing is to remember his privilege. As I recall, perhaps he is the first governor we have had with disability.  Or maybe he is the first to confess it and rid it of its stigma. But does a leader with disability come to terms with it and turn it to the good of all?

    Some have it in office, others have it at birth. Al-Makura had it when he was 37 years old. Could he have shown this level of compassion if his ears did not fail him. Although he claims he had always shown compassion, we may never know if he could have built this sort of comprehensive institution.

    We had the story of Ibrahim Babangida when he was head of state, and IBB was then called Maradona, in homage to the football baron who wriggled through defences with his magic feet. IBB was called Maradona because of his pollical sleight of feet, playing conman with his decoys about his transition programme. The late Ogun State governor Bisi Onabanjo tagged him Maradona. It stuck. IBB caught an affliction in his leg. It was called radiculopathy.

    He left for Germany and he returned healed. IBB had suffered something serious. A press photographer caught him once frowning as he writhed in pain and reached down to the painful leg. But it did not change IBB as a ruler. He was still cynical about democracy, still egoistic about power, and he still clamped down on democrats. Maybe he might have redeemed himself if he built a hospital or showed some compassion for the vulnerable around us. IBB was not moved by his own disability.

    The former Yugoslavian leader and world war 11 hero, Josip Broz Tito, was held down with a bad leg and had to be amputated. In a country riven apart by ethnic woes, his sense of compassion stung the country together, he did not  love the Slav more than the Croats or Muslims. His sense of humanity for the father of non-alignment became even more acute, according to his biographers. He died a uniter and man of the world.

    In the United States, presidents have shown great empathy because of their handicaps. The founding president George Washington, a general, and the man that led the Americans against colonialist Britain, had a drawback as a child. His was an acute learning disability. Some of his biographers say it accounted for compassion even as a slave owner. For his time, he was liberal, giving many rights to his slave and freed all of them at his death.

    John F. Kennedy hid his from the public. But historians now say he was sick and that accounted for his sometimes scrawny looks. He was permanently on medication. JFK played important role in the birth of the civil rights movement that his successor, Lyndon

    B Johnson was to turn into the Civil Rights Act. JFK’s sister also suffered permanently mental illness.

    Perhaps the most acute of such stories is that of Franklyn Roosevelt, who suffered from polio. The leader who beat Hitler and introduced the New Deal during the Great Depression, had a patrician bearing because he was born to the country’s upper crust. Historian Doris Kearn Goodwin says his polio helped to humanise him and gave him the common touch.

    What Al-Makura is doing, should hopefully, bring more attention to leaders and empathy. Even though the president will open a comprehensive primary health care centre in Kwandare and a market first conceived in 1996, the highlight is the work for the least appreciated among us.

    We must treat them as we treasure legacy in the fashion of a father to his disabled daughter known as “poor fool” in the Nobel Prize winning novel A Good Earth by Pearls Buck. He treated her specially unlike the patriarch Kennedy treated his daughter. They are our equals.

    As autism spokesman Temple Grandin noted, “I am different, not less.”

  • Dakuku plays the blues

    Dakuku plays the blues

    As Boko Haram has retreated as an army and played up its cowardly role as suicide bombers, the militants in the Niger Delta raised their voices as if to say, “we are still here.” They are about to break the deal since the days of Yar’Adua and return to the violence of the creeks. Why, of course, because oil price is on the rise!

    That bring our attention to the security. As Conrad said in his famous novel, The Secret Agent, the first condition of wealth is security. An agency that comes to mind is NIMASA and the man that comes to mind is Dakuku Peterside. The last time he stole public attention was when he released the annual revenue. He joined Ishaq Oloyede and the customs chief and Senate tormentor as the executive who brought up annual revenues to unprecedented highs.

    Dakuku may have to step up his game again in the area of security. Our pipelines and oil rigs may be endangered again. Our part of the world witnesses the highest piracy attacks in the world, 50 percent of kidnapping, with seafarers as significant victims. His agency now has a few strategies like the acquisition of new aircraft, helicopters and vessels as well as greater alliance with the navy and air force as well as an array of equipment. It is part of what is called the Blue Project or Blue Economy. Dakuku is playing the blues for the maritime economy.

    As the price of oil tops $70 dollars per barrel, we should prepare for the irritants of prosperity. Here If Dakuku made the wealth, we expect him to secure it.

  • The Obj dance

    The Obj dance

    In war, when the enemy camp keeps quiet, danger looms. When Obasanjo dances, expect a letter bomb. When he was in government, his foes fidgeted because, within 24 hours, impeachment dangled.

    In the military, surprise is a stealth bomber. The enemy with superior army and armoury can fall to bombs from the blues. Neither the President nor even the public saw the Owu chief’s latest incarnation of public rage.

    As President, he danced with a senator’s wife, and knifed the fellow, Chuba Okadigbo, hours later with impeachment as Senate president. He even sweetened the dress rehearsal for another senator at a party by tossing a piece of cake in Adolphus Wabara’s mouth. It was a mockery of homosexual romance. The next day, his fellow senators dismounted him.

    So, when Obj graduated with PhD from the Open University, he had to dance. In his life, PhD has not always meant a doctorate degree. It means pull him down. He loves to lionise himself by bringing down foes in high places. Since he vacated office as military head of state, he has ripped apart others from Buhari down. His book, My Command, was an egoistic trip in self-promotion.

    The video portrayed the old man spinning on the dance floor with his wife. His feet looked lithe, dabbing about with the lightness of a teenager. With something like bole (roast plantain)  in hand, he embodied an omen: his impish smile as he moved from one part to another in a magisterial sway of the dance floor. Obasanjo does not know an innocent floor or dance. Muhammadu Buhari was to find out soon in his epistolary umbrage. The Owu chief is the most dangerous dancer on earth. His dance beats the Oro in Yorubaland or agbasa dance in Warri or the others around the country. They don’t rattle presidents.

    Obj’s interventions never sheds new light on the state of the nation. It sheds new light on the scheme of the old man. He did not say anything original in his verbose, long-winded sentences. But he summarised, ironically, the state of the nation. There is a certain mood of reluctant gratitude that cheers to the public heart when an Obasanjo intervenes. He takes advantage of some facts. Unlike other former heads of state, he is articulate. Two, he knows how to spice it with a certain dose of what the Hausa people call dan iska, a reckless guttersnipe’s bravado. But his carries a high dose of respectability. He is sincere in the words, and that is the danger. But he is not sincere in his motive. Obasanjo often flips out a two-edged sword: one side to the opponents’ chest; the other to clear the way for his agenda.

    So, when he says Buhari should not run again, he reflected the mood of a significant swath of the land. When he says, the man runs a nepotistic style, you just need to look at how he recruited men of the SSS and wrapped it around his Katsina roots. Or why he has failed to rejig the security apparatus, or why he asked his Benue elders to embrace their neighbours after herdsmen’s rapine.

    When the Okikuola says Buhari’s health disqualifies him, he is referring to the lack of transparency in the publicity of the state of his physical wellbeing. He is no doctor. He has no inkling what the man’s health is. But he exploits public ignorance for good effect.

    He excoriates the President with lethal broadsides on the war on corruption and needles him about Mainagate, perhaps the most burlesque act of official buffoonery. It is anti-corruption laughing at itself. How an attorney general becomes the anchor man in defence of corruption is perhaps, like the NNPC saga with Baru and Kachikwu, the most foolish emblem of self-indictment in the government.

    So, Obj knows how to fight. But we can even see, in his false attempt to be a hero, that he was not fair on the subject of the economy. He did not get the word out that Buhari has stabilised the naira, boosted our foreign reserve, galvanised our agricultural production and reined in the vanity of imported excesses, such as rice and toothpicks. He should have highlighted these while showing that the statistics point in the right direction. But statistics are not satisfaction. The table graph of high performance does not translate to the luxurious aroma of the dinner table.

    But what is more important in the letter is Obj’s solution. He says he wants to start what he called a third force. I laughed when I read that. The first time the idea of a third force was mooted was when he was in charge of the Nigerian Army in Ibadan during the civil war. Wole Soyinka had advanced the idea to him with the late Biafran soldier, Victor Banjo. Obasanjo, playing the fox and military toady to his bosses, frustrated and paralysed the move. Soyinka relates in graphic detail those sly and heady days in his memoirs, You Must Set Forth at Dawn. So, Obj took that term from his arch foes, Wole Soyinka, and wants to appropriate it to himself. Does he believe in the third force, his coalition of the willing Nigerian, called the CN?

    Obj’s public life has not been about building. He has been about taking. He never worked for any triumph of his life. Benjamin Adekunle worked the Third Marine Commando into a heroic machine. The swashbuckling commander was fired on the battle field and redeployed. The war was almost over. Obj, who took a bullet in the buttocks, took over and claims the credit for winning it. He became second man in command to Murtala Muhammed. The fierce general was overthrown. Obj enjoyed the benefit, his army fatigue immune to even the smell of gunpowder.

    He was in jail during the Abacha junta. He was released and everyone, including IBB, begged him to run for President. He won even though he mocked NADECO and other forces that fought and died to flush out the military.

    Obj has been an opportunist and a beneficiary of other people’s sweat. He is the Paulo Rossi of Nigerian political history. He is sweatless in struggle but he wears the crown. He has never lost because he has never gambled. He has been like the opportunist tiger who takes over the carcass of other less-sinewed cats.

    So when Obj came out to lash out at Buhari, it was all in character. He installed Yar’adua, knowing of his imperfect health. Yet, he came down on him before the man succumbed to illness. He descended like a predator bird on Jonathan because, as a source told me, Jonathan was not listening to him. He tore his party card in an extravagance of public disavowal. Yet, he knew the Vice President he gave to Yar’adua.

    Now, Obj has never built anything in his life, except relatively sweatless projects, such as Otta farm. The throne has always been ready for him. He asked Buhari to dismount. But he has always mounted free horses others trained and decorated. Even in pushing for a third force, he says he wants to “join.” A founder does not join. The use of that word is a Freudian admission that it is a strange territory for him. He is the vulture, not an eagle. He does not kill, but waits and whets his appetite until the meaty prize arrives. He did same in the third term bid. He baited and waited. But when it failed, he played Peter and denied any hand in it.

    He said both PDP and APC are now cesspools. He wants a third force. But where is he going to get the so-called new breed? The bigwigs of APC will not leave their party. As Achebe wrote in A Man of The People, who will spit out a sweet morsel that good fortune has tossed in his mouth. Many top APC men are happy and “chopping.” The PDP guys are not happy. But he already condemned them. If he succeeds, then Obj will have turned opportunism into a genuine trophy. Just as he took the term “third force” from Soyinka as a form of revenge. Or is he going to build a party of malcontents. Can malcontents rescue a nation of discontents?

    Lai Mohammed’s response was cynically self-celebratory but did not address the issues of nepotism or MainaGate or other matters of moral temperature. That was a clever copout written with the African backhanded deference to age, but not without a jibe. So, if Obj said the right things, the question remains, is he the right person to say it?