The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Deaf wall

    Deaf wall

    The cow moos past. The herdsman belts a whip. He does not look at you or even acknowledge you. As you think, he is mere savage, no literate tongue, no keen gaze, and immune to your latest fancies: a tv show, or happening tie, femme fatale, or the high-end restaurant even if his cow ennobles the cuisine. For you, he is here to sell his cows. The space between you connects you in fact but not in spirit.

    You think him an outback barbarian; he sees you as a showy and interloping infidel, even though his nomadic feet sweep through your backyards, highways and, of course, farmland.

    He has a concept of you as you do of him. Yet in between, no dialogue. You think he is a seller of cows. He knows you are wrong. Cows are mere emblems of his identity. He does not only think you don’t want him to earn a living. He thinks you don’t want him to live.

    He thinks your highways and your cars and your backyards are incarnations of the devil. They disrupt the rhythms of his peace. Too much population. Too much technology. Whither his way of life? His way of life is not just to sell cows. His way of life is the cow, but it is also to move in the woods, to twirl a stick, to follow the scent of history, the path of his forefathers, amidst lush, dewy grass, under a sky’s merciful blue and grey rage of torrents. He eats on the go beside his alter ego the cow, watches his maker blaze his trail from one arid land to another rich pasture. When in a grip of a carnal zest, he deposits his tumescence on the go, sometimes on a naïve nubile or deposits a child like the unseen parent of the protagonist of Ayobami Adebayo’s novel, Stay with Me. He follows his spiritual lead more than a commercial deal.

    When we say the herdsman’s life is about the cattle, he wonders why we don’t get it. That is the crux. We are facing the deadly impulse of antiquity in the age of cell phones and Instagram. Whither twitter? That is the challenge of the age when an Emir of kano reels out figures of the dead in what should be a moment of funeral sentiment, when Miyetti Allah yells out self-righteous indignation that smothers the grief of the bereaved, when the president tells the Benue elders to accommodate their neighbours when they are counting their corpses.

    If we say modernity is right it is because we see it as inevitable. If they say the herdsman is right it is because they see him as unchangeable. When unchangeable confronts the inevitable, 73 souls expire in a night raid in Benue, a farmer plops down in Ogun, a political chieftain waddles away with his captors in Ondo, Americans and Canadians are whisked away in a fatal abduction in Kaduna, a head herder flares up in a press conference, a Mambilla Plateau draws blood on its scenic swath.

    Do we know the herdsman? Does the herdsman know us? Does any of us care? A deaf wall has sprouted between us, and we inhabit our own echo chambers, luxuriating in the eloquence and sonorities of our voices.

    For many of us, the herdsman is one image. To them, they are more complex. Why was it that in the past when the herdsman held a dagger in his pouch, no one was afraid? Or when he had a dane gun, it was perceived as self-protection. They held it in the event of game or peril from a savage beast. But not now. It is because society has evolved from a place of trust, and that is one of the narratives lost in the crisis.

    As Kaduna State governor Nasir El-Rufai has said repeatedly, some of the killers are Bororo Fulani. Many of them are now jobless because of another factor of modernity: capitalism. Some big men now own great numbers of cattle and employ fewer herders. As the machine is depriving workers of jobs, capitalist thinking is driving these boys into unemployment and ominous despair. They are thus Hobbesian candidates: angry, alienated and dangerous. The have sticks but no cow to whip. So, they head for our brood and blood.

    The herdsman and his sponsors’ claim to not want change is therefore self-serving and hypocritical. The business has changed and created an army of vicious young men. And this leads to a yet unresolved piece of the puzzle. When the herdsman clashes with a local in which his cattle consume farm crops or a herdsman is killed, or cows are rustled, a reprisal follows. When it erupts, we don’t see any trace of the offended herdsman. We see new men, guttersnipes armed and raging like a pack of hyenas. The question is, if the herdsman is innocent, how come such waves of attack come after they leave in anger?

    That is the sort of question I want El-Rufai, our security agents and even the Miyetti Allah to unravel. The next question is, who arms them? Are the employed herdsmen not in cahoots with marauders? These episodes of weaponised outlawry cannot come from jobless criminals if there is no backing from well-heeled men. Is there a connection between the owners of cattle and the weapons in circulation, or is there a shadowy force yet undiscovered in a reign of rampant barbarity in the country?

    We cannot solve this problem by planting ourselves behind a deaf wall. It is because we have not decided to talk to each other but at each other that we are at each other’s throats in a state of incendiary paralysis. No dialogue has begun. No trust yet. Why, for instance, did the Afenifere and the Ohaneze go to Benue State to condole the bereaved and the Arewa Consultative Forum was absent? Were they invited but turned it down, or were they not invited at all? Either case points to the deaf wall wailing on both sides.

    As I noted last week, this is a time to cooperate and not compete over who spews out the fiercer rhetoric. The Yemi Osinbajo panel makes sense. But I suggest the Plateau and Nasarawa models where mutual understanding precedes template. Since independence, we have had many panel reports in the archives and we seem to worship them as monuments, although they give us opportunities to make monuments of our lives. The choice is ours.

  • Feting Fafowora

    Feting Fafowora

    Ambassador Dapo Fafowora retired from the editorial board of the Nation newspaper and we feted him as only a man of such honour and erudition deserves. He is 77, and has served this country with distinction. First as a career diplomat culminating in the United Nations. He was the president of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, a commissioner in Osun state, amidst other engagements. He is an honorary fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters. From The Nation’s inception, he maintained a back page column until late last year. In his clear, persuasive style, he illumined many of Nigeria’s contemporary issues. His contributions to our editorials are so unique, we can only try in vain to replace them.

    But what many do not know are his sense of humour, his disarming humility, his anecdotal repertoire of our country and its elite, and a gregarious soul. He knows how to throw a barb without a hint of being mean. Amidst wine, food and banter, every member of the board rose to pay tributes to him. And laughter was a recurring theme of the afternoon. I started the event by saying facetiously that he was going, among other things, because of the “imperatives of biology.” But Professors Adebayo Williams and Ropo Sekoni cut in impishly and asked, “do you mean ‘old age?’” Laughter. Both men taught me literature at Ife and their former student was not going to get away with verbal cunning, a sleight of a phrase.

    Everyone had a unique thing to say about him. Eventually when he rose to respond, he also had something to say about everyone, unveiling his free flow for devastating humour, laying waste rib after rib. Yet on more than one occasion, he almost broke down in tears, his tongue seized, his eyes moist. We had to clap to bring the old man back to cheer.

    We are all going to miss you, Ambassador, but you promised to pop in once in a while. We shall hold you to that account.

  • Eye for an eye

    Eye for an eye

    I don’t believe that hell is a place of fire. The scriptures are vivid enough. Hell simply means the grave or death. But it boils only in the fancy of those who view God as eternal terror, which negates David’s notion that “his mercies endure forever.”

    This is no theological column and so would not pry into the interstices of scripture.

    Believers of hell conjure a huge phantom fire, an inferno of justice that demonises our Maker. Even at that, we lack the patience to wait, so we make our own hell here on earth. John Milton who wrote Paradise Lost believed in hell but he also confessed to the seduction of human mythmaking. “The mind is its own place,” he sang, “it can make heaven of hell and hell of heaven.”

    We have thus pre-empted the afterlife and fomented our own hell. Today, the incarnation of hell is one word: herdsman. The bad ones are the very nature of the devil – sly, wily, deadly. First they give us meat, then they make mincemeat of us. Their herds cannot speak, hate no one, are whipped about as they cry in pain in rain and relentless heat, are delicious, bought gleefully and greedily, lavish our feasts, nourish our body.

    But the herdsman is often wordless in spare, nondescript subaltern wear, whip in hand, face without expression, sometimes stooped, or sitting watching the mammals munch away on verdant fields.

    The sombre vista of caskets in Benue State last week signalled a Tiv funeral hour. The same happened in Taraba, as my friend Bala Dan Abu documented during a visit to the swaths of slaughter. At night they fell, were shot, slashed, in searing bonfire. But the Tiv and their leaders carried their dead, in brown boxes, laid them to earth, tears pouring down as though from cloudburst. The emotion was no less grim in Taraba.

    But the herdsman does not want to be seen when it does ill. He is a barbarian with guns and machetes and a coward with murderous eyes. He does not strike in daylight because that is the province of the brave. His cowardly rapines rattle at night because his deeds are evil.

    Like Mephistopheles, the herdsman concocts a reason to shed blood. They even deploy a grander word: rustle, even if it is the right word. For them, it is human blood for cow, homo sapiens funeral cries for the moos of cows. This is a perversion of exchange, a macabre tit for tat.

    For believers either of the Koran or the Bible, this story contradicts the well-known divine exchange. In the two books, Ibrahim or Abraham loves his son but is poised to slaughter his son in divine obedience. But at the nick of time, the animal materialises. The maker says no to human sacrifice. He provides the animal for the slaughter. Ismail or Isaac lives. Man cannot go for ram or cow.

    In traditional religion, it is animals, including fowls, that go for slaughter. In Achebe’s Arrow of God, a cynical priest feeds his family with the spoil. Even when humans are used for such sacrifices, we call it savage.

    The irony of the human exchange for animal slaughter came up graphically in the novel, Museum of Innocence by Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk. A 12-year-old is forced to deal with the horror of a human struggling to survive a car crash on a day when all of Istanbul is a slaughterhouse of rams. The spectacle of a human sacrifice becomes so horrifying for a people who happily kill rams in the Feast of Sacrifice.

    This herdsman’s logic is called false choice or equivalence. The debate is going the wrong way in this country. It should not be about justifying the killing of humans. Neither, too, should it be about playing down the criminality of cattle rustling. For sure, the stealing of cows is real. According to my investigations, the cows are ferreted away by a collusion that cartoons how our political and bureaucratic elite make away with our resources without ethnic or religious discrimination. To steal the cow, you need somebody very close, a Fulani who is not a herdsman. He works with a Hausa and a native of the middle belt village. In quite a few cases, a traditional ruler is the kingpin. The cows are “herded” surreptitiously to a waiting truck by these emergency herdsmen who are not often Fulani. The truck is manned and driven, not by a middle belt person but a southerner and the animals disappear.

    Some traditional rulers have become rich, owning mansions and flashy cars. One of them was arrested and forced to release a truck of cattle whose heist he had organised. So, the story of cattle rustling can incite a man who travels miles on foot in heat and rain. But how does a cow stolen amount to human blood? Not just one human, but whole communities reeling in blood and tears. The rustling is a misdemeanour, but the murders are caveman cruelty. Murderers have no place in human civilisation. The rustler should be prosecuted and jailed. The murderer-herdsman should be sentenced to death, or life imprisonment.

    The other level of exchange was the blame game. This was between Benue State Governor Samuel Ortom and the Nasarawa State Governor Tanko Al-Makura. Ortom said his neighbour governor Al-Makura was hoarding the goons. Ortom was nervy, teary and out of sync with reality. The same Awe Local Government Area that Ortom said the herdsmen were hiding is the same place Al-Makura is giving food, clothing and shelter to his fellow Benue citizens who escaped the Herdsmen’s noose. Ortom ran to Abuja to cry. Why didn’t he call Al-Makura and resolve the matter without the hysteria? A leader should be calm, especially aplomb, in times of turbulence. The Nasarawa State governor did not pay him back in his own brutal fantasy. Rather he is working with other governors and security chiefs to tackle the problem.

    The other exchange was time. Call it grandstanding. Town crier Ayo Fayose gathered hunters to recreate the Ekiti Parapo brio in a 19th century throwback. The picture is like a scene in a period movie. But he roiled a martial spirit against what might or might not be an impending invasion.

    An eye for an eye has pervaded the country because of failure of leadership. Agriculture minister Audu Ogbeh reflected the mindset called the pedagogy of the oppressed. He was thinking like his oppressor when he said we have not done enough for the herdsman. Ogbeh is too old to show such facile and infantile wisdom. His call for colonies makes no sense except he wants the people to colonise the areas. Some governors are not ready to give up their lands.

    The problem can only be solved, especially in the middle belt, by following the Plateau model. Open grazing has shed much blood. But to ask the Fulani herdsmen not to graze does not solve the problem without a clear institutional framework. Otherwise, it is a declaration of war. But Ortom did not want war, and he shouldn’t. Before anti-grazing law we had violence. With it, caskets crawl. So, it is not about law, but alleviating distrust.

    That was the point made by Plateau State Governor Simon Lalong, whose model has mellowed his own state. He brought every group together in a state of 53 tribes, including the Fulani, and they agreed on a cooperative formula. So, his goal is to stop open grazing but he wants to be sure other conditions are right first. He said the right thing, though misunderstood for emotional and partisan reasons. He said he advised – not warned – his fellow governor Ortom.

    A state of war cannot resolve this crisis. Even if it does, at what cost? The herdsmen and the Miyetti Allah are not spirits. Why can’t they sit together with others and find a solution? This is where leadership comes in. Also nonsensical was the rhetorical levity from the Inspector General of police who dismissed the crisis as “communal.”

    Leadership is absent from the centre. The presidency should learn from Governor Lalong and lay the template for cooperation, not distrust. Gandhi said, “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Without a template, bloodbath will persist, and we shall continue to treat each other like the person who would not accept a gift shirt from a naked man.

  • Process is restructuring

    Process is restructuring

    Then a year opens with sobriety, it sometimes portends a glum ending. But what a better way to start than with humour, and we had that with two important events. The first was the appointment of board chair persons and members. Those who flayed Buhari for being mister Go-slow had to shut their lips. The man delivered with over a thousand names.  They shut their lips with a sort of laughter leaking out like fart of the corner of their mouths.

    The critics had nothing to say except to thank him for also humouring them with significant features. One was good news. Some persons became chair persons of more than one board or even members of more than one board. This differentiates this government from that of Jonathan a few years ago. When Jonathan opened the year with double fuel price increase, some hailed it as double portion. It was snide humour. They rang up the Christian lingo. Everyting na double double. No one was laughing, except the marketers and insiders of the government on the take in the new largesse.

    It was back-handed humour, devastating, anti-democratic, cynical. Now, it is a different kind of double double. This time the people were spared that back-handed odium. The double portion belongs to a few, those on the board. The rest of us are not on board yet. Even though in democracy, all should benefit, at least some people are getting their double, double. The rest of us are awaiting the double, double, although we are seeing such in the cost of living.

    The other beneficiaries are the dead. Democracy is not only about the living. It is for everyone, whether alive or not, so we can embrace the dead as bosses. When Jesus was buried, some women went to the grave to look for him on the third day, and the angel appeared and asked: “why seek you the living among the dead?”

    Usually no one goes to the cemetery to wake up the dead, but to bury them. Except of course, we want to do some miracles. So, it has happened, we have not sought the dead among the living. We have actually woken them up. Senegalese Poet Leopold Senghor would be ashamed of his line, “O dead who have always refused to die.” In this case, they died and were spirited them out of their graves.

    The dead are always with us. The past is not past. This is a new version of zombie. Not the one Fela bequeathed. The Abami eda gave us a foolish, sheepish toady, following after every instruction. These ones heard the voice and they were going to be ogas.

    We should not pretend we have not had zombies in office. They are sometimes called ghosts, or ghost workers. They occupy positions, and only appear at the end of the month or other special occasions where largesse flows. They get salaries, allowances, even travel to the United States, even though no immigration documents embrace them. How can you document a ghost on an air plane. The government pays for the airfares and hotels, but that is it.

    It was so in Lagos until Asiwaju Bola Tinubu became governor and audited the system. When the government called for all the ghosts who did not come physically to get their salaries, the ghosts or the dead shrank back to their cemeteries.  So the living were found among the dead until the audit. Hence Buhari was angry and he wants the dead to be sent back to their graves. They have been in limbo.

    The last feature was an act of generosity. While party faithful were waiting to be appointed, the list contained some PDP chieftains and sympathisers. Loyalty is sometimes not as important as perfidy, especially if you like one or two of the outsiders. If you do good to those that are good to you, you don’t show love, said Jesus. May be that is why those who suffered for the party should take a back seat and let the enemies enjoy a little. That is the quality of mercy, which as Shakespeare said, “droppeth like a gentle rain upon the place beneath.”

    The other new year gift was the president’s speech. It said many things, but we must say from the tone that it appears he just was elected six months ago. I make that deduction from the way he started listing plans about railways and power and agriculture, etc. But the most important part was that we should focus on process rather than structure. I blame the speech writers only a little. No one should be too worried about those lines.

    The speech writers who wrote against restructuring did not understand the history of structure in politics and governance. So, I say, Nigerians should forgive the writers for they know not what they write.

    The idea of structure in political iconology became serious in middle 20th century with a term called structuralism, when French philosophers defined it as “structure is more important than function.” With Claude Levi- Straus leading the way, it became championed by what historians call the gang of four, Jacques Derida, Louis Althuser, Michel Foucault  and Roland Barthes. They showed so much fidelity to structure that they exposed the imperfection.  A new movement called Post-structuralism followed and it showed that even within a function – like a process – is a structure. That is, there are many structures as there are functions. A structure is not dead. A process is a function, so there can be many processes. Those familiar with Hegelian dialectics understand why even sociologists and political scientists believe that structuralism is now an intellectual dinosaur and anachronism. So, if the speech writers called for process then it means they are asking us to interrogate the structure.

    To call for process in that speech is to commit a contradiction of questioning the present structure. A process is dynamic. That means the structure is also dynamic.  Structuralism has been sentenced to death by intellectuals as rigid and ahistorical. Hence another French philosopher Jean Piaget said: “there exists no structure without construction.” Any structure that is experiencing construction is going through function or processes and is therefore being restructured. Without knowing it, the speech writers made the president to call for restructuring. Chikena.

     

     

    In Touch Awards concluded

                   Family of the Year

    That award goes to the presidency where the DSS and NIA did not see eye to eye in the homestead. The EFCC became the area of battle, and DSS called for Magu’s job not to be approved while the NIA wanted him. The president seemed unable to bring this disarray under control. The also-ran was the PDP, who fought a big fight between the Makarfi-led faction and that of Sheriff. Even when Sheriff lost the battle, the party turned on its own flesh during the convention and alienated the vital sector of the electorate: the southwest. A piggish fellow in a gubernatorial garb dismissed the southwest as a factor in the electoral sweepstakes.

                Fashionista of the year

    That goes to Senator Dino Melaye. In a bid to show he did not go to school without a certificate, he donned a graduation gown in a burlesque show as though a ceremony was on to now graduate him. This is apart from his various appearances as an internet impresario in lurid and other extravagant colours and combinations.

                 Town crier of the year

    The winner is Ayo Fayose, Governor of Ekiti State. He cried and many are surprised he did not get hoarse. His biggest threnody was when President Buhari was sick and he said so many unprintables. He even tried to invite himself to London not to see the queen but the President of Nigeria. He even claimed he had the medical report. He strangely was quiet when Buhari returned in a blaze of new health.

     

  • Ghost of the year

    Ghost of the year

    The year never ends until we chronicle its kingpins of comedy, those who unveil its underbellies of humour. The real humourists, though, are not persons who go out of their ways to crack our ribs. They make us laugh just by being themselves in the routine glories of their days. And they could even be genuinely appalled at our amusements. They are not I go dye O, or that tribe of humanity who write out skits or jokes with a view to the punch line. Anything they do is a kaboom of laughter. They take themselves seriously while we keel over. But we never cheer them on, and they hate us if we do. The stages are not artificial. There are no paid audiences, or advertisement jingles to invite us to their acts. Ironically, they are funny because they are sad. The best comedies, whether it is Shakespeare’s AS You Like it or Soyinka’s Jero Plays, hint at the visceral pain inside us. Through them, we mock ourselves.

     

    Ghost of the Year

    The winner is Ben Murray Bruce. This was a year we neither heard from him nor saw him. He was like Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. When he became senator, we did not hear enough of the oyibo media mogul. His debut act was the Silver Birds Awards in Eko Hotel. He decorated himself as the common-sense commoner. He would disinfect Nigerian politics and governance of its grand follies. He had come that we may have senses and have them more abundantly.

    In line with his cult of common sense, he would pooh-pooh first class flights, forgo the fancy craze of luxury hotels, patronise the local humility of Innoson-made cars. In a flourish of the lowly, an Innoson car sat without proclaiming itself in the hall in a parody of a dealership. He sported a face of mock gravity that hardly concealed his cheerful vanity, as a revolutionary recruit of the Nigerian political elite.

    But he had a giddy fall from his common-sense horse when AMCON revealed that his Silver Birds had been one of Nigeria’s whited sepulchres, a phony, slivery shine over a cadaver of debt, other people’s money. So, the bluster about injecting sanity in a body politic adrift was all a lie. At the Silver Birds Award night, then Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan of Delta State saw perfidy in his claims and wondered if Murray-Bruce would muster the guts to make such a bluster half-way through his tenure. Uduaghan did not even know that the man would be a ghost. Silence, they say, is golden. His is ghostly.

     

    Artist of the year

    He is an orator with a supernova smile, but the man beat any contender as the artist of choice. With his statue of another comedian from another part of the world, Rochas Okorocha, sometimes described as Owelle, is our artist of the year. He gave us a statue of Jacob Zuma, the dancing ecstasy of a politician and parody of a leader of South Africa. Okorocha’s imagination tucked away the bust of the Madiba or locals like Achebe, or Azikiwe or Ojukwu because the Imo State governor wanted to amuse us. No ribs would stir at sculptural tributes to those men. He made his point, and the headlines bustled across the country. No less inspired was this from the bowel of Sigmund Freud: “Zuma’s erection, Okorocha’s pains.” If the Freudian power is hard to miss about a man who wanted his people to be so happy, he appointed his sister to promote its ministry.

     

    Worshippers of the year

    During the Middle Ages, a cleric and intellectual Peter Abelard asked the question, “when did God become man?” You only had to watch the video of celebrants when our dear president Muhammadu Buhari emerged after months away to take care of his health. The streets in some parts of the country erupted in raptures with adorers for his return in good health. The videos were unmistakable in their pious adoration. Men and women were flailing in worshipful reverie. On a roadside, a woman fell to her knees in rhapsodies. Not just that, she bowed many times with her forehead pasted with dust from its trip up and down the ground. Another person poured water on the ground and drank it. It did not matter if a person had defecated or urinated there before, or any other sort of impurity.

    This was worship that trumped any in the church or mosque in the whole year. They were answering Abelard’s question over 500 years later. They were saying that in 2017 God became man in their president.

     

    Dancer of the year

    A tragedy foreshadowed it. His feet must have wobbled and collapsed when his brother, the charismatic Isiaka Adeleke, passed on.  But he was asked to fill his brother’s shoes in the Senate. To do that, he found his dancing shoes. On soap boxes, his dance moves prophesied the thrills to come. But polls were serious, and he had to win first. Win he did. And the dance floor was never the same again. From the victory stage in Osun State to the church in Atlanta, Demola Adeleke, the roundish, pot-bellied happy senator was at it. He stole the show anytime and every time, and he found many times to dance. He made law-making into choreography. His heavy frame yielded to the nimble flow of his rhythms, sometimes led by his paunch, or head or even feet, his face lit up as the crowd allowed him room to roam. As a metaphor for his colleagues, he had no rhythms in ideas on the Senate floor, where even his waist did not spin. His nephew, the well-known singer Davido, waded in and described the thespian senator as Nigeria’s Michael Jackson. He probably has a point because the senator’s middle name is Jackson.

     

    General of the year

    Nnamdi Kanu had his secret service. He had his soldiers. Earlier in the year, he declared that he was going to war. No compromise to Nigeria that he described as a zoo. He was an Igbo general, he told himself, although he wore a cap that was a phony version of a man he would not brook: Obafemi Awolowo. Maybe because he envied him since Awo also went behind bars for treasonable felony. Kanu was that megalomaniac. He also had a sort of spectacle that had the rims that mimicked the Ikenne sage – sort of. But no matter. Kanu was pictured mounting a guard of honour. He played host to some mighty men of the east, and he began to see himself brushing shoulders with Buhari, his gaoler, in short order. Not until Buhari ordered the routing of his men, who had no resistance or a whimper of a prayer or even a war plan. The worst of it was the disappearance of Kanu. No one knows where he went, or how. The general even has no troops to remind us he once swayed in the east. What a war commander!

     

    Banker of the year

    He did not need a licence. He had no banking hall. He had no interest rates. Neither did he have a staff nor attend weekly meeting with other banks. Neither the CBN nor the President nor finance minister knew about him. Yet he had enough to float many a start-up, inspire a school project or even change a town in Nigeria. The bank had no name. Unlike others, the bank did not welcome anybody except the owner. It was perhaps the first secret bank known in Nigerian history. Under the control of Ayo Oke, and his wife, it had $43.4 million, 27 thousand pounds, and N23.2 million. It makes Ayo Oke, the former DG of the National Intelligence Agency, the banker of the year. It makes where the money was domiciled the apartment of the year. That is apartment 7b of Osborne Towers, Ikoyi. It was so important that a governor accused a minister of stealing the state’s money. No evidence. But it was good theatre.

  • Jerusalem, Jerusalem

    Jerusalem, Jerusalem

    Donald Trump knows how to rouse his base, and I thought he did not attract hallelujahs outside of his American stronghold until his Jerusalem decision. Nigerians, many of whom instinctively loath the toupee-crowned phony of the United States, have managed to embrace his Jerusalem bear.

    When he decided that the U.S. was going to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, I began to hear Christians applaud him. Some saw Trump as a godsend, fulfilling the destiny of prophesy. So, suddenly the man who loathes other creatures of God, who believes only whites matter in the divine system, who does not read the Bible, has become a vessel of God?

    The Christian right in the United States agree with him. But they have no reason other than that Jerusalem belongs to the Jews and that it is their home.

    They ignore the bloody consequences of moving the headquarters from Tel Aviv, where most countries domicile their embassies. Jerusalem is under dispute because it berths the temple of the Jews and mosque of Muslims, both Palestinians and Israelis lay claim to the place. To reach an agreement has been impossible.

    The last time hope rose above rabbinical malice was under President Bill Clinton when he parleyed with Prime Minister Ehud Barack and the late Yasser Arafat. It was a high-octane summit. The eyes of both men oiled with peace while at home war loomed. In the end, Barack’s concessions were not enough for peace with the Palestinians. Barack lost his elections that paved the way for the hawk-eyed Netanyahu, who has not seen a Palestinian he does not hate.

    Since then, tension has become the normal between them. Firestorms of rage have never ceased. The belief among Christians that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel has nothing to do with the scheme of the Christian God. It is only those who do not understand the scriptures that pay homage to the illusion of a Jerusalem of a sacred book.

    True, Jesus rode on a donkey to Jerusalem. But it does not in any way mean it is the kingdom of the future. His death and crucifixion mean he has transcended Jerusalem the earthly. The focus of Christians is Jerusalem the heavenly.

    Hence Jesus himself cast woe on Jerusalem in his prophetic outpouring: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee; how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathered her chickens under her wings, and ye would not. Behold, your house is left unto you desolate. For I say unto you, ye shall not see me henceforth until thou shall say, blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.”

    In AD 70, the prophesy fulfilled. Jerusalem fell after a heady siege from the Romans under Emperor Titus. The Jews were slaughtered. Christians had left town from Jewish persecution. So, Jerusalem does not hold any romantic allure for the Christian of knowledge.

    The question is, has Jerusalem said, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord? NO. So why are Christians quick to embrace her as a Christian project?

    For the Christian, Jerusalem is not natural but spiritual. Apostle Paul noted that “Jerusalem, which is now, and is in bondage. But Jerusalem which is above is free, and is mother of us all.”

    There is a reason the Bible talks of heavenly Jerusalem. Paul explained that all Christians are Jews in a spiritual sense. A Jew is one inwardly, as he clarified, not outwardly.we are Abraham’s children by faith. If the Christian soul is Jewish spiritually, why should they respond to the earthly home? It is contradiction. Flesh and spirit do not concur. If you live in the spirit, wrote Paul, you will not fulfil the lust of the flesh. The attachment to Jerusalem is the (political) lust of the flesh.

    It is ultimately cynical politics. It has no bearing with the faith. The Jews in Jerusalem still regard Christians with contempt. We don’t have to pay them back in their own pride, but we should not flow with their bigotry. What we need in that part of the world is peace. Reconciliation should supervene primordial bile that neither God nor the scriptures sanction.

    What we know as West Bank and Gaza Strip today were in the Bible known as Judea and Samaria. Golda Mier, former prime minister and Netanyahu’s ancestor of hate, loved to call them by the biblical names. But Christianity is not about Israel anymore. It is about the faith of people anywhere in the world. If we understand that, a Trump will not hoodwink us into wild temper and blood.

     

    To tithe or not

    I decided to wade into the debate over tithing because this is December and Christmas season. I want to say that those who condemn or refrain from tithing, do so for the following reasons. One they are genuinely ignorant. Two, they are looking for an excuse not to spend. Three, they are put off by the extravagance and seedy lifestyle of the pastors.

    I will say the last reason may have unconsciously inspired the other explanations. Those who refrain from tithing on the ground that it is an Old Testament law have not read the Bible. Jesus in Matthew 23: 23, made it clear that while tithe is important, it is not as important as justice, mercy and judgment. But he noted that it should not be “left undone.” One word from the master should have been enough.

    Paul referred to Abraham paying tithe to Melchizedek, who was Christ who appeared to him after the Slaughter of Kings. Jesus recalled that encounter in his heated exchange with the Pharisees when he said, “Abraham rejoiced to see my day. He saw it, and he was glad.” He was glad to see him and pay him tithe. Now, Melchizedek represented the transition from the old order under Aaronic Priesthood to the priesthood after the order of Melchizedek. So, the payment of Tithe to Melchizedek means tithing transcended old testament. Because as the Psalmist noted in prophesy, “Thou are a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.”

    Paul clarified it later when he wrote that tithing is now the province of the Lord, not priests who received them. It is now an eternal offering. “And here men that die receive tithes: But there he receiveth them, of whom it is witnessed that he liveth.” Abraham tithe not to a levite but to Melchizedek signifies the permanence of the practice.

    The pastors pass away, but Christ lives. Now, some have said why 10 percent, is it not legalism? All law is legalism. When Christ came, he said he did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfil it. John wrote that the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. But that grace and truth turns out to be that we apply the law not in the letter but in the spirit. Hence, he enunciated laws like adultery which are even more stringent.

    Those who say, well, they give offering, and they do well. They are right. God loves a cheerful giver. A liberal soul shall be made fat. He that gives bountifully shall reap bountifully. Can you give bountifully when it is, say, eight percent? In fact, 10 percent may not even be bountiful if you are sincere. So, those who want to be “flexible” should know that they are even bound to give more than 10 percent. Ten percent as I see it is a sort of minimal template of expressing gratitude. If you don’t give, are you cursed? Of course not. The Christ has nailed the curse. Let no one deceive you.

    Do we have to pay all the tithe to the church? Deut 26 explains that it is for the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless and widows. Pastors don’t say this but you should split it between the church and the needy. Hence Jesus said, “if you have done this (good ) to any of my fellows you have done it for me.”

    When a pastor lives lavish lifestyle, rides jet and builds schools that only the rich can afford, they send the wrong signals. Jesus could have entered Jerusalem with the best horse, but he entered with donkey. But when people needed, he gave them fishes and bread and turned water into wine. Pastors deserve double honour not double colour or flamboyance. As Paul said, let your moderation be known to all.

  • Father and son

    Father and son

    In the beginning was the father. The son was yet in the womb when a certain Koro was misbegotten by the father Bode George. Many believed that Koro was the legitimate son and had earned the right to the cot to suckle on the milk of childhood.

    But Jimi Agbaje came in from another mother, and wanted to be the son. The father preferred Jimi because he thought he would be the right heir, the soldier he would deploy to do battle to bestow legitimacy on the family. Jimi, he swore, would unseat the dynasty and usher in a new era of father and son, one a soldier, the other a pharmacist. Who did not know that a big chemistry was afoot. The soldier suffers an injury, the pharmacist son dangles the right aid.

    This set off an earthquake for familial combo.  But not quite long after, Koro cried foul over the internecine malice of an intrigue. Legitimacy belonged not to the rules but to the winner. Jimi became the standard bearer of battle.

    So, hubris came early to Jimi, as the story went. Before the election day, Agbaje had started to assert the power of royalty. I am not referring to his threat to mount Igwes on thrones in the megacity. That has turned out to be a sideshow in the embroiling theatre. He would side-line the moustachioed George with his fuddy-duddy crowd. He had been his own prophet, and Agbaje saw that he would be the potentate of PDP in Lagos. He thought he was cruising to victory. Each had pissed in the pond between them, and a classic oedipal rage had swirled in the family.

    To worsen the tale, the family failed to win. Failure has many orphans. Suddenly, everyone knew George had divorced his son, and vice versa. The soldier father had been wounded in battle, and the son, too, had been routed. The pharmacy had no answer for the wound. So the family, in a manner of speaking, bled to death.

    Koro, better known as Musiliu Obanikoro, flailed in vain to restore his place in the family. He had no prayer, so he moved away and was embraced by the winning party. Meanwhile, father and son sulked peevishly in silence, until another warfront erupted in the PDP.

    This is the battle for the chairmanship of the PDP. If they had lost favour in their homestead, they thought they could find traction on a bigger, wider stage. After all, as the Good Lord said, a prophet is not without honour save by his own people.

    Father and son took the battle up there. George saw him as the 21st century Absalom who wanted to overthrow and slay his father. Agbaje saw himself in the innocence of Oedipus. But they both fought, and fierce was the contest. It, however, ended in an anti-climax. Neither father nor son won. They did not only lose, the party decided that their homestead had none of the beauty or majesty required to bedeck the position of party chairman.

    Father was obviously furious. He wanted that position badly. He had been a party bulwark, while he regarded Agbade as a reed. The humiliation was serious. Agbaje quietly retreated from the race. He knew it was over. Father and son, who should help heal each other, waited for their very conquerors to come to them to say, sorry. In the midst of the humiliation, one of the main men of the PDP had spoken with contempt about their homestead, the southwest.

    But George and Agbaje became the metaphor of the oedipal tension in the larger PDP. There, the fathers of the PDP, including Ibrahim Babangida, Goodluck Jonathan and peripatetic rambler Atiku Abubakar, had wanted to decide who should chair the top seat. The sons, who we know as the governors, decided to push the fathers away.

    Unknown to George and Agbaje, they had sown the seed of potential patricide in the party. They poisoned the larger pool of the PDP. The tool of battle is money. A father loses his power over his son, if he does not control the purse string. Agbaje did not rely on George for money to run his campaign for the governor post in Lagos. He relied on Jonathan and the party at the centre. George realised his impotence. He could not fell the son.

    On the bigger PDP canvas, the governors had money. The Wikes and co, had the nest, and the old goons could not match them dollar for dollar. Not even the great Atiku, who learned that the governors had something as potent as money: delegates. In the end, they governor sons prevailed over the fathers like IBB and Jonathan. Jonathan found himself fighting against the so-called “unity list.” In the final hour, united they stood. But for George and Agbaje, divided they fell.

    It is not good when fathers fall. It is worse when sons fall as well. Okonkwo succeeded in order to vitiate the public folly of his father. Abraham had faith enough to gain redemption in the eyes of Isaac. “God shall provide,” he assured his son.

    The Kennedy sons, including John Fitzgerald, saw their father soar in American politics and commerce, and it buoyed their rise. Never mind that his first son Joe, just like Awo’s first son Segun, did not survive to carry the father’s wishes as they envisioned. But father and son parted with each in blessedness of thoughts about the other. J.F.k’s biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger in his book titled A Thousand Days relates the intimacy and spartan discipline between Joe Kennedy snr and his sons.

    That was clear in George Sander’s Booker-winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, where the United States 16th president visits limbo to commune with his departed son. Biographers tell of how Lincoln grieved about him. He died of typhus. “That’s my boy who died,” he was quoted as saying when he pointed to his framed picture on the wall as a way of dealing with his grief.

    We might say that Agbaje was the Absalom and he had killed his political father. Whether he will survive like characters of Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov is yet to be seen. But the more tempting comparison is the story of Russian writer Ivan Turgenev in his novel, Fathers and Sons. He tracks a medical student Basarov who falls from idealist to a craven opportunist. Agbaje has no ideal although he brandished a phony progressive credentials in the past until the true colour pops out of his skin in their iridescent ugliness. Credentials without credence.

    The real issue is whether the PDP has the moral power to look inward and deal with its mammoth contradiction, even as APC still battles with its own existential worms.

     

    Ode to teachers

    The following paragraph disappeared in transit to this page last week, no thanks to the quirks of technology.

    “I want to thank Joe Agbro, a friend and critic of In Touch, who calls every Monday morning to critique my offering. I call him Uncle Joe. Also his nephew Victor Agbro, a friend since 1974. Special thanks also go to Olu Adebayo, a regular and profound commentator on this column, although I have never met him and have spoken to him perhaps twice over the years. Thanks to fiery columnist Louis Odion who featured column with The Sun during my U.S. sojourn, and of course Mike Awoyinfa as editor in chief.”

  • The Lalong effect

    The Lalong effect

    A sense of peace crippled me as I boarded the aircraft and left behind the crisp air of Jos. I reflected on the irony first: Jos of firebombs and fleeing feet, of internecine feud, of blood-stained fault lines and arbitrary borders and breach of borders, of prostrate streets and pious hate, of Muslims at the throat of Christians and vice versa, of official impotence, of the loss of innocence.

    Then I recalled what I had learned in three days last week in the city of fabled weather and its cosmic earth, a democratic soil that abides all fruits and vegetation from apple to roses. I had come to deliver the keynote address at the Nigerian Bar Association Week on the topic: Restructuring: A Panacea for National Development and Cohesion.

    On entering the city I had a flush of foreboding. But the genial exchanges of three governors who attended the event mitigated some of my misgivings. They were the host Governor, Simon Bako Lalong, who, in a yet understated electoral triumph, toppled the cocky mainstay in Plateau power, David Jang; Governor Mohammed Abubakar of Bauchi State and Sokoto State counterpart and the Matawallen Sokoto, Aminu Tambuwal.

    The striking moment came when Governor Lalong mounted the podium and joked that Tambuwal loved the Jos weather so much that he came a day earlier and he would not mind to stay another day. Tambuwal responded with a ironic smile and interrupted Lalong by thrusting his right hand out of his voluminous babaringa in a hand gesture, indicating he was leaving town that afternoon. The governor was making the point that the three governors were, in varying degrees, products of Jos the beautiful, the literal city on the hill.

    All three were baked in Jos. Yet they belonged to three geopolitical zones. Tambuwal from the northwest, Abubakar from the northeast and Lalong from the north central. All three blossomed as lawyers in Jos. They inhaled the weather, blended with its shrubberies and hugged the people. Their successes in that city predated and even foretold their political ascent.

    Lalong noted that Abubakar was one of a string of Bauchi State governors, including Yuguda, bred in Jos. The chairman of the law week planning committee Barrister Steve Abah said he served in Tambuwal’s chambers. I was to learn later that Tambuwal brought his team to Jos for their retreat recently.

    The point? So beautiful was Jos not just as a place where seed budded but any tribe bloomed. Before I presented my address, all three governors stamped their support for restructuring with Tambuwal reiterating that the north wanted restructuring but it must be preceded by understanding. Abubakar,  who gave a short speech aligned himself with Tambuwal. This was Jos as conduit, as the umbrella of all people, from the Fulani to the Birom to the Afemai to the Yoruba to the Urhobo. It was mini Nigeria in hope and harmony.

    I also recalled, in the midst of that morning air of happy levity, the yarns that television producer Peter Igho had spun to me about how he grew up in Jos and everyone lived together without ethnic interspaces. In his lament, he was puzzled about how that great city stumbled into the arms of bandits.

    Jos has become a metaphor not only of how we fell as a nation of economic promise, but also how we crumbled into malice. Without soliciting comments, residents spoke of how the soul of their beloved city had left them, how hate, bigotry and political egos had truncated the example of the north. They spoke with glum eyes and wistful resignation. But they ended their complaint with natal cheer.

    That quiet cheer I noted when I engaged Governor Lalong. Articulate with a sober grasp of the task ahead, he expressed how he had brought together the 53 ethnic groups in the state to agree to live in peace. He set up the state’s version of truth and reconciliation commission that encompassed representatives from each of the 53 tribes, so that it did not become a case of over-inclusion and exclusion, which would generate another round of suspicion and spilling of blood. The issue of herdsmen and cattle rustling was also resolved with representatives from both sides coming to the table to eke out an agreement.

    Though still fragile like a healing wound, Jos has moved far ahead today beyond the days when it was hard to predict a day. Many people left town, and may not return. But what Governor Lalong has pulled off with the 53-tribe entente is a model for our fractious nation. He said he was working with the Federal Government on establishing a ranch. While ranching is a marvel of an idea, there is already understanding before it comes into being.

    This shows that building institutions is a good idea, but institutions are vacant without trust. As the African proverb says, who would accept a shirt from a naked man? When the ranch comes to Plateau, it will become a technicality. If, that is, the peace holds up among the tribes. It also reifies the power of leadership. That we have ethnic tension on the national scale is the failure of leadership and trust deficit from the people. We don’t have the Lalong effect in the centre.

    Lalong has to sustain this. Jos is not just about a town. It is about its vast array of people. As Ghanaian playwright Ama Ata Aidoo wrote, “humans, not places, make memories.” We are not asking Jos to become the city it lost. We only want it to become the city it can be. “I don’t want to repeat my innocence,” noted a character in Scott F. Fitzgerald’s novel, This Side of Paradise. We can remember the past but as a resource to own the future. We will not lament in the words of the poet, Birago Diop, “If we tell gently, gently all that we shall one day have to tell.”

    Cities have fallen and were reborn. We know of London, Berlin, Paris, Warsaw. The Second World War broke their backs. They came back, reinvigorated.  Those cities lost brick and mortar, Jos’ soul became mortal. Biafra lost structures but its soul survives. The task before Lalong is not just physical rebirth but to give it new life by dismantling forever the infrastructure of prejudice. It is a state I will monitor, especially when other states like Kaduna, Taraba and Benue have sought Lalong’s formula on how he is doing it on the Plateau. The Federal Government can learn a thing or two about how a state with 53 ethnic groups in a small geographic space can wake up from a slumber of bloodshed. It, therefore, can work for the 250 ethnic groups in the country.

  • Ode to teachers (2)

    Some readers thought my last column was my last. It was only marking my thirty years in journalism, and I thought I should pay homage to those who taught me and buoyed me one way or another. In my year as a Gordon Fisher fellow at the University of Toronto in Canada, two professors made quite an impression. Abraham Rotstein, whose class on economic anthropology pried open the bowel of economics. The other, the late Alkis Kontos, who taught political philosophy with a sort of juvenile gusto.

    I remember with relish my lunch with a crop of about half a dozen PHD students at a Chinese restaurant every Friday afternoon outside the University of Toronto campus for the full academic year. I remember Mark and Serge, and we sparred over everything from political theory to diplomacy to literature. Everyone had to be prepared. I still inhale the aroma of the Chinese cuisine airborne with our uproar of debates. Thanks to Kenn Bisio and Jay Brodell for making university lecturer in the U.S.

    Tunji Bello, now Lagos State SSG, I am indebted to as the colleague with whom I have worked with the longest with such great chemistry of friendship and intellectual sparring. He even addressed two of my classes at Denver, Colorado.

    Shall I Not be grateful to all the awards over the years? I thank DAME for endorsing me four times, and NMMA also four times. I won both the same year, and both awards have made me perhaps the most decorated columnist in this country. The Nigerian Academy of Letters looked my way and made me a honorary fellow, an accolade that often goes to those many times older. My grateful thanks. Also thanks for all the awards in Europe, Canada and the United States.

    I must thank Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu for his immense role in my career, and his large heart and ability to absorb me for who I am when my pen goes wherever it must.

    I also thank her, my other half, for her soulful zest, beauty and integrity over the years. Looking forward to the next 30 years…

     

  • Ode to teachers

    Ode to teachers

    My neck dripped with sweat when I arrived home that afternoon. Feet fatigued, tongue lolling for water, I had not slumped into the sofa at home when my father, Moses, materialised from his room with a letter.

    “A dispatch man delivered this this morning,” he said as he thrust it toward me, half curious, half ecstatic. “It’s from Newswatch.” I had been about town all day, feet in and out of offices, feet on the streets, the sun presiding, my shoes shedding leather.

    Weariness left me. With alacrity I tore open the letter. I swallowed the contents in what looked like seconds. I knew it was the beginning. My career had been launched. Ray Ekpu, firebrand columnist and editor-in chief of the journalistic lay of the land, The Newswatch magazine, wanted me to see him in his office. He was responding to a personal letter I wrote him about my love of writing and my fruitless wandering in search of a job.

    “I was impressed by the quality of your writing,” he said gravely clutching my letter. I was in his office at Oregun. He showed me the letter with evidence that Dan Agbese and Yakubu Mohammed had appended their encouragement that I should be hired immediately. Agbese was deputy editor-in-chief and Mohammed executive editor. I walked out of Ekpu’s office still awed by a man who benumbed and captured a generation of Nigerians with his pen and judgment.

    Today, it is 30 years. All I want to do is give kudos to those who have made this possible. If Ekpu lit the tinder of my career, it began when I was in primary school. I can see now my teacher, Mrs. Sonoiki at Methodist School Ibadan from whom I learned the tenses. “I go. She goes. We go, etc.” I also recall the pugilistic elegance of Mr. Daramola, who would not let my syntax  stumble even while I played soccer for the school.

    At Government College, Ughelli, there were quite a few. First, the environment of the school that forbade pupil s to err either in the written or spoken word. “Howzat sir” or “how was” were epithets of derision for anyone who decapitated the English language. Prefects watched out for their own mistakes. But we learned writing not only from the English teachers, but from others in the arts, especially the history teachers, Edeyan and Eshareture. Eshareture was a dapper gentleman who spoke and expected polished phrases from us. Edeyan paced the class as though reliving the past, gesticulating and dramatising. But we had English teachers like Ogboduma and the Ghanaian Tieku, who taught us not only the technicality of language but how to marry tenses with elegance. My principal Demas Akpore brought poetry alive when he gathered us in the library and read in his haunting way the poems of Senghor, Diop, etc. Up to this day, I have never heard a person in all my travels animate poetry like Akpore’s tongue.

    But the history teachers especially made us understand that history was not just about the past, and not just about storytelling, but points. Very early, Eshareture and Edeyan dissected Mansa Musa’s exploits as limpidly as the Yoruba Wars.

    I was so haunted by them that while I waited for my admission to the university, I started to write essays every day. My father knew I loved Time and Newsweek magazines, and he decided he was going to buy me copies every week in spite of his lean resources. So, I wrote essays that no one read except myself. No day passed, including Sundays, without dashing off about 800 words. I started to read novels, including African Writers Series and such mainstays as Dickens, Thackeray, Dumas and others as I could pick from my father’s library.  One afternoon, I discovered a programme on NTA with Professor Theo Vincent. He was a master of book reviews and he articulated it. He prepared me for my feisty moments in Ife’s literature in English Department. He was deep, enthused and lyrical.

    Eventually I joined the History Department at Ife, with great zeal for a potpourri of knowledge. Professor Akinjogbin was unforgettable for the boyish way he handled his subjects. We had read him in high school, but to have him as a teacher was priceless. But in part one, all the students were enamoured of Professor Femi Omosini. He never read from notes but reeled off line after perspicacious line in his class on the social and intellectual history of Europe. He was like a star lecturer. Then a year later, Professor Olatunji Oloruntimehin taught us West African history, bringing into the subject an audacity of analysis that broke with tradition. For instance, we learned that the phrase “indirect rule” miscast the story of colonial umbrage. Professor Richard Olaniyan opened the Americas and the United States for me, with his deep insights, especially into the founding fathers and their duels with tyranny.

    A friend and classmate of mine, Osagiatior Ojo, often called me “the eminent literary figure who found himself in the wrong department.” He was referring to my immersion in literature classes. Some of my literature classmates thought I belonged to Literature until I confessed I was history major. But a few lecturers made literature beautiful for me. Dr. Folarin, a female British teacher made things clear early on. But later I was to enjoy the classes of Ropo Sekoni, Chima Anyadike, Biodun Jeyifo and Adebayo Williams. Professor Sekoni had an avuncular presence as he clarified point after point in an unforgettable way.  Professor (also now Chief) Anyadike was noted for the laconic splendour and precision of his teaching. In few words, he made everything clear. Professor Jeyifo brought a “people’s” flavour to literature that was invaluable. Professor Williams brought to teaching a poetry of rendition, and an excitement of phrasing in class and tutorials. Even when we were not assigned to his tutorial class, we wanted to attend. He visibly enjoyed his work and effect on his students. I learned so much from being his student as we met many times to discuss literature and the state of the nation after class.

    After leaving Ife, I knew I was not going to be a university professor. I wanted to be a journalist. Two persons had had a big effect on me while at Ife. The first was Dele Giwa, whose breathtaking columns inspired me and I introduced his column to my father. I recall when Giwa wrote the beautiful lines about Dele Udoh, who died from the police bullets, “Dele Udoh had many plans before his death. Dying was not one of them.” Though his prose soured and declined towards the end of his life, I still adore him as a model. He was embroiled in administration.

    The second person was Roger Rosenblatt, a Time essayist and senior writer. The first piece of him I read was a prologue to the cover story on the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. I knew immediately that he was different. I had not read anyone like him, in the flair and flow of his prose, his insights into history and literature and philosophy, in the intersection of intellectual and quotidian experience. I have had constant relationship with him since 1990 when I visited his office at Time Square, New York.  He has written plays and novels as well.

    In the course of my career, my experience in Newswatch lay a good foundation. From Ekpu I learned how to generate perspectives on stories. From Agbese, I knew the precision of editing. We called him Dan the Butcher, because of his uncanny ability to cut fluff out of a tale. From Mohammed, everyone learned the etiquette of editing. He did it without aura of a bully.

    My time in Newswatch was brief as I was called by Lewis Obi through Babafemi Ojudu to join the African Concord. Obi and his deputy Bayo Onanuga gave me the opportunity to bloom as a writer and it was there I started to write essays for publication. I look back at those years as the time I began to find my voice. I worked with Ojudu and Dele Momodu on many cover stories. The presence of Ohi Alegbe, who joined us from The Guardian was unmistakable as copy editor.

    Not long after, Tunji Bello was to impress on editor-in-chief Dr. Doyin Abiola to move me to the group political desk as deputy political editor. The years have been exciting. Turbulence came, of course. During the June 12 crisis, I was the managing editor of Abuja bureau and a colleague (name withheld) drew my attention to SSS stalking me with a 504 Peugeot and Jetta cars morning and night. I left town before they woke up one morning.

    I also had a gruelling time with the army who beat me for beating their security cordon to see the plane crash site at Ejigbo. I wrote quite a few columns, and I could not tell the story of my life as columnist without kudos to Mike Awoyinfa, who gave me the first opportunity to own a column with the Weekend Concord.

    I cannot forget the angst with my pieces on Awo, Ojukwu, Jonathan, Achebe, Buhari, etc. all these bonfires smoked out of my column In Touch, which still smoulders. I cannot apologise for who I am, because as the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson writes in his Ulysses, “I am a part of all that I have met.” I also hope that those who have been needled by my words understand the wellspring of conviction from which they emanate and accept my right to annoy righteously. As Abraham Lincoln orated when he became US president, I write “with malice towards none.”

    My gratitude goes to all I have worked with in The Nation from the managing director Victor Ifijeh to the gatemen, especially those on the editorial where we engage in friendly affray and sometimes cantankerous bonhomie each Wednesday in order to produce editorials that are the best in the land.

    My sojourn in the United States was also worth the while, especially as a reporter with the Rocky Mountain news and Journalism teacher at Denver. As I taught, so I practised, also privileged to win a few awards. I cannot forget John Enssling and Rebecca Cantwell for all they did to make life and journalism worth the while in the United States.

    I cannot end this piece without thanks to my years in the God’s Kingdom Society, a church where I learned the rigour of the Bible and life. The Bible, of course, the best gift I ever had, as a book not beaten by any for its great divine message and great sayings and stories. It haunts when I write and it is on a plane above Rosenblatt and my favorite novelist Joseph Conrad.

    I also will say that Felix M. Osifo was a mentor just by being within my sights as a model member of the GKS. He rose from humble beginnings to the top of the UACN. His story was a great inspiration for me to do something with my life.

    I shall of course not forget Moses Oghanero Omatseye, my late father, who toiled for me as though his life was a sort of Abrahamic sacrifice for his son. I would be nowhere without him, and of course my mother, Salome, who was always a quiet tower of strength.

    In all, I give glory to Almighty God whose grace and mercy on my life I cannot weigh.  So, I say to my teachers and my God, thank you and accept this ode for the odyssey you gave humble me. The story continues…