The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Buhari’s vomit

    Buhari’s vomit

    The battle for peace in the northeast has taken a new dimension with men and arms coming in hordes from the Sahel countries around us.

    I think we should enlist the genius of military contractors, and let those mercenaries come back and tackle the beasts of death and plunder. The fellows were driven home by the Buhari administration, and their expertise has been missing in the region.

    Mercenaries know no mercy. They know stealth and strategy. They evince ruthlessness and result, and they have no respect for the enemy, especially because they are cultural agnostics.

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     They have no roots in the place, and so can root out the bad weeds. They want money, we want peace. A great trade-off. President Jonathan made progress with them, and we need their acumen to add to what we have on the ground.

  • The real coalition

    The real coalition

    At last, the cleric as governor, Umo Eno, made good his word. He echoed the spirit of late Tony Anenih at the SDP convention in the 1990’s.

    Politics still crawled under the shadow of IBB’s transition programme. Anenih described M.K.O. Abiola as talk na do. But in the ethereal rhetoric of a pastor, an Eno would evoke Christ, not Anenih, the swashbuckling ex-police chief. Eno would rather go to the New Testament, and say “let your yea be yea, and your nay nay.”

    So, he did. He was no longer promising. Not for him again the dithering or keeping the nation on tenterhooks.

    He was in earnest about his move. He described his party – his then party – the PDP as a picture of the apocalypse. He might say it is a shipwreck; a plane headed to a crash.

    It is a fuddy duddy dizzy on a cliff’s edge, a hoary end. It is careening out of control. It is falling from the twilight into the dark. Goodbye PDP. Welcome APC. A swansong is not always an ending.

     For Eno, a new window opens. A new testament.

    Some in the PDP see it as betrayal. He walked through the governor’s portal as a PDP stalwart, and he changed garment. As he himself might say, the scripture sees the garment as the emblem of the heart. The outer appearance has no value if the interior has value. It is the heart that matters, not the hype or harp. Paul says in scripture that circumcision or uncircumcision does not profit, unless you circumcise the foreskin of the heart.

    Those who see it as a traitor’s act may invoke what Winston Churchill said in the days of parliamentary turmoil in post-war Britain. “It is easy to rat,” said the boisterous statesman of letters, “But it takes a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat.”

    The great Chief Obafemi Awolowo was enamoured of that quote since the First Republic Western Region legislature boiled over with such a tempest of movements.

    Eno’s ingenuity lies in the way he did it. He promised and he delivered. As the poet Samuel Coleridge wrote, “anticipation is more potent than surprise.”

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    He was not like a stealth bomber that strikes without prophecy. He fulfilled his own. He was a B-2 bomber. He announced with a roar from afar; he struck and hit a homerun.

    His is different from that of the governor of Delta State, Sheriff Oborevwori, who struck like the F-35 bomber. No one saw it coming. Yet, it was not a one-man action. He consulted obviously.

    The lawmakers were in. The party hierarchs were in. Ditto the local government authorities and the grassroots. As the story is told, even the non-indigenes were also consulted, and that accounted for the groundswell of solidarity when the party dumped the umbrella for the broom. How Governor Sheriff enacted the manoeuvre without a leak should be a stuff for not just historians, but a study in political science, mass psychology and sociology. Elias Canneti, where art thou? Max Weber, wake up.

    If I described the move of the Sheriff as a transplant, then that of Eno is a transfusion.

    “Many people change their minds in politics. Some change their minds to avoid changing their party. Some people change their party to avoid changing their mind.” That was Winston Churchill. But both Sheriff and Eno changed their party after changing their minds. With the people in PDP, they are changing their minds to avoid changing their party. Hence, they were in sync with Abubakar Atiku, but then they changed their mind about moving to a coalition. That hurt the Adamawa chieftain, and he sulked into Osun State recently.

    He still sulked for breakfast in a now viral video when he opted to team with a pariah with a profane tongue whereas he could lock step in a dance with the premier of the state.

    It is the poverty of Atiku. The man does not know how to play politics. He plays with malice. He projects an often dour look that chimes in with his lack of cheer or animation.

     He had no humour for Wike when he conjured the PDP ticket for himself in the last minute in 2022 primary. Rather than humour the Rivers State citizen.  He would not call him, or placate him, or strive for a common ground. Rather he held his ground with bilious insistence and let the party divide under him. He stuck with Iyorchia Ayu, a man who never had a job where he was not fired, including the job Atiku wanted him to hold. He held it at their mutual peril.

    The blind led the blind. He is playing humour of dark harmony with those who have no humour like him. Like Nasir El Rufai, who is now tumbling from party to party having been shooed out of his homestead in Kaduna State. Like Rotimi Amaechi, who makes humour from being hungry. He does not even know that you cannot be hungry when you make a bash costing tens of million of naira. It is what playwright Samuel Becket calls risus purus, a laugh laughing at itself. The tragedy is that the former transport minister is not laughing. That is the laugh.

    We can only say coalition is a will to activity. A mere whirligig. They have to act so as to seem to act. It is a coalition of the losers as I had written a few weeks ago. It is the coalition of the aggrieved. It is the consequence of interior pain. They are not happy that they lost.

    They did not exercise the spirit of sportsmanship. It is the spirit of malice, which the scriptures described as self-corrupting. Atiku likes to act as such because he wants to be in the news. He is ready to do a coalition of people who have no real structure.

    Atiku ran on a structure that had been established, and it is that of PDP. Now he wants to form his own coalition from the air, from nothing. He is supping with people he likes but who, like him, have pockets of followers.

    For instance, how much levers can El-Rufai pull in Kaduna State. He packed up his suite case and looked back at the yard to wave goodbye. No one waved back. No after-wave, so he left in his own waves, soundless.

    Or is it Namadi Sambo, former vice president, who is, to all intents and purposes, almost retired. He is a nice guy. Nice does not win votes.

    Or is it my good friend Amaechi, who has never pulled more than 15 percent of votes in Rivers State except when he sought his second term as governor.

    So, what we have is a parade of chieftains who want to make anger a strategy, apologies to Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN).

    But theirs is a shadow coalition. Pat Utomi may draw some humour here. They are a shadow coalition in that they are not real. They cannot agree on a party. They cannot agree on the members. They cannot agree on a leader. They cannot agree on a platform. They cannot even agree on humour.at least, not yet.

    Atiku is dour. Sambo is quiet. El Rufai is a boor. The Osun guy’s dance is poor and Amaechi is hungry. It is the stage and state of their coalition. “Most men die of their own remedies, not of their own diseases,” wrote French playwright Moliere. So do organisations and even civilisations. Coalition is their remedy and graveyard.

    But their foe that gives them the quake is making his own coalition without noise. Not long ago he had Delta. Then Akwa Ibom. The PDP is begging its men not to go. Even Fubara, who is at war with Wike, is being urged by some of the allies to move to APC. In the south-south, the APC is the dominant party.

    The battle is just starting, or is it? They were the first to start the move to 2027, and they have not even moved a step. Some of them are accusing the APC of starting the move towards 2027 whereas they did not allow the dust of defeat to clear from their homestead before they inaugurated their trot. They are spoiling for a fight. The terrible thing is that they want  spoils first. Remember the Kaduna guy already has decided who will be minister from APC’s cabinet.

    They are like what the poet Okigbo describes as the coming and going that goes on forever.

  • Naysayers at two

    Naysayers at two

    The clamour will not end. The fierce malice burns. The rage of jealousies, too.

    But at two, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu does not need to convince the doubters. If his work does not, he does not need to avoid his sleep.

    Those who are angry for no just cause are entitled to their anger. Those who are deaf to their hard-of- hearing. Those blind to their unseeing eyes.

    It is like what essayist and philosopher Francis Bacon says to those who deny God. “God never wrought miracles to convince atheism,” crooned the thinker, “because his ordinary works convince it. It is true that a little philosophy inclineth men’s minds to atheism.”

    But Sunny Ade, in one of his immortal songs, sang A sese bere ni o/ eti won aya/ to ba ya/ won a fe ran/ ti won ba ran a wa di.

    Translation: “We have just begun/ their eardrums will tear/ once torn, they will sew it back, when they sew it back, it will be blocked.” The minstrel was lamenting compulsive ignorance, the tenacity of hubris masked as a cause.

    So, if they are saying the president brought hardship on the people, it is not the work of anyone to teach them that the president inherited an economy gasping for breath. They know. The figures were released. They cannot say they did not know that we were mired in ways and means, that is, printing money for survival.

     We were printing ourselves not into debt, but into oblivion. If they did not know, it is a pity they did not hear of the about N30 trillion  hole we had dug. They knew we owed IMF loans. We owed billions to the airlines. We owed subnational debts in the trillions.

    If they know and close their lips, we are no gods to restore a voice to them. If they do not know that all those burdens are history, I am not about to begin a history lesson. Journalism of the robust kind has said it over and over with facts and figures. Just like Poet Birago Diop wrote, “if we tell gently, gently, all that we shall one day have to tell…” The critics and uproarious commentators have heard it over the past two years.

    If they did not like the Lagos-Calabar Superhighway, what do they say today? They said it was a scam. It was a strategy for larceny. It was not going to happen. The president opened 30 kilometres. They cannot reverse it, but they still would not accept it. Nothing anyone can do about  that. It is fait accompli. At two, he opened about a dozen roads for Nigerians. So much for crybabies.

    What about  agriculture, and the work of Pate for medicine or the loans for over half a million students and credit for over 80k poor entrepreneurs? What of the investor confidence that has made the stock market swagger or the rise of the reserves from $3 billion to over $23 billion? The states are flush like never in the past decade, ask Jigawa that paid off 90 percent of its debt or Delta that paid off half of its debt of over N200 billion  under the great Sheriff Oborevwori. See Lithium in Kaduna and sprawls of farms in Niger, Kebbi and Kaduna states. If it is not hope, they can hug despair.

    They want to deny that progress is afoot on security. They forget Birnin Gwari in Kaduna where a market lay like a corpse for a decade; border onslaughts in Katsina, the persistence of fear and trembling Zamfara, parts of Kogi, Nasarawa, Niger. They forget that an insurgent group threatened from Sokoto called Lukarawa. When last did we hear of them? The commentators and gadflies often glad at faults have said nothing of the long list of bandit kingpins that have been eliminated. This page listed quite a number of them.

    It is not my duty to teach critics how to think. But at least I cannot give them eyes, if they cannot see. I cannot give them ears if they cannot hear.

    But I will have, like others, to remind them of what they know. To a philosopher like Socrates, he may be frustrated by that ilk of men. The Greek philosopher argues that we know a lot, and that we forget all we know, and we have to nudge the knowledge out with questions. It is called the Socratic Method. Hence the man said, “if I am the wisest man alive it is because I know nothing.” He says this in humility but he says our senses deceive us, and that we have to dig into our forgotten well to know that we know.

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    Maybe that is the problem with these critics. They are, however, too cocky. Unlike Socrates, they cannot admit that they know nothing. Maybe they know, or their prejudices and hatred for one man have genuinely blinded them to what is before them.

    I was with the president recently, and I discussed IMF with him. He said he had no discussions with IMF. I had said earlier on this page that his policies may have received IMF endorsement but it was a coincidence of policy, not obedience of thought. He confirmed that to me. It was then he said “ways and means, $7 billion debts and others gone.”

    The stinger is inflation. But the cost of food was soaring when there were ebi npawa cries. Then a bag of rice was over N100k and tomato, onions, garri, etc were hitting the roofs. The prices have not exactly touched the earth, but they are tracking down. Rice now sells for about half the price now. I met a fellow at Asaba a few days ago who said this was the first time in his lifetime that a price would drop down after a jump.

    We are seeing it in another core inflation index: fuel. Dangote has announced consistent drops in fuel price. The only time it jerked up again was when the naira-for-crude policy expired. But it was renewed to hope. That idea is genius. Do you think the men the critics brandish can think like that? Atiku? No. Obi? Nada.

    The Financial Times of London wrote a sunny editorial on Tinubu’s performance on the economy. But his naysayers are not seeing it. However, when, in the past, the western press slammed him, they advertised it. They became friends of IMF that they had bedeviled. IMF is an angel now, a devil now. Go figure.

    The naira is not where we want it but it has survived its topsy-turvy hour when men feared it would outride N2000 to a dollar. “I still think the naira is undervalued,” the president told me. I also spoke about the penchant of corporate Nigeria to raise prices when food was coming down, and he said in reference to bank charges, that “Cardoso will handle it.”

    What do the critics say about the loans to indigent students? They say nothing. Over half a million students are getting it. Is that not intervention? Over 83k Nigerians are taking advantage of credit schemes. It has barely started.

    But some are angry. At the bottom are partisan and ethnic caterwauling. They would not accept it even if President Tinubu paved all roads gold in the country. The bitterness of 2023, the fear of the man in Aso Rock, has blinded them to whatever good comes out of his Israel. Last year, when I delivered a lecture at the Trinity University, a number of the students asked if the government could extend the student loans scheme to the private universities. I did not have any answer for them, other than that private universities are for those who have the money to pay. But the public university is for the very poor. My answer may be logical, but it ran foul of their sentiment.

    “I think we are blind. Blind people who can see but do not see,” wrote Nobel Laureate Jose Saramago in his novel Blindness. In that book, a whole town turns blind, and they are lost in the paradise of ignorance of the world around them. He shows the true conscience is the eye.

    When you have a bad conscience, you see bad things. Civilisations have applauded bad things for ages. Democracies have voted out democracy. They saw slavery and thanked God for it. Killed twins and worshipped heaven for it. Forbade women to be circumcised. Women should not go to school. Children who ate eggs would be thieves. Colonialism was good for Africa. Hitler was good for Germans. Today, immigrants are not good for America. Beware of wise men when they are foolish. John Stuart Mill calls it the “foolish majority.”

    In his play Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s hero goes to war and comes home triumphant but the masses do not accept their liberation until he shows them his battle scar. Evidence is not always enough. A deranged elite can con a people to believe a lie, like they did to the poor hero Coriolanus. Hence Apostle Paul warned that God would send “strong delusion” to a stubborn people so that they can believe a lie as he did to Pharoah.

    Those who do not believe in what is before their eyes and sounding in their ears ought to read Diop’s line, “If we tell gently, gently all that we shall one day have to tell…”

  • In search of the good cardinal

    In search of the good cardinal

    Cardinal John Onaiyekan has taken it upon himself to serve as a critic, a reverend without reverence, and he did it again recently. The problem with some clerics of his ilk is that they wear the toga of piety and belch out folly. He is playing to the gallery for the gullible.

     If he says Nigerians are going through poverty, has he addressed the facts that prices are coming down and he should encourage that pattern rather than holler?

    Has he noted that his own candidate also agreed that we should remove fuel subsidies and marry exchange rate windows?

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    Does he, in his hoopla, explain that we were in a quagmire before those policies? Does he explain that the same president has paid off IMF loans, given scholarships to poor students and credit to small business folks? Has he diagnosed the agricultural policies?

    Does he know that the states are flush with money now that even Jigawa has paid off 90 percent of its loans?

    Is he a cleric without context in his thoughts? Men like the good cardinal should follow the contents of scripture about learning, especially the one that says, “for a soul to be without knowledge, it is not good.”

  • One day with President Tinubu

    One day with President Tinubu

    The suave Ambassador Adekunle Adeleke, the State Chief of Protocol, walked into the waiting room and said the president asked for me. The inner caucus of the presidential staff were in the scribe’s office, including the chief security officer, Adegboyega Fasasi and personal assistant Kamorudeen Yusuf. Swathed in a sunny smile was the country’s First Physician, Dr. Ade Tinubu, who has only one patient: the First Citizen.

    After exchange of pleasantries, including Yusuf’s affable jibe at my fila, I was ushered into the president’s office. Poring over a document, President Bola Tinubu did not know my shadow was before him. Principal Private Secretary Hakeem Muri-Okunola welcomed me in and the president heard, looked up, smiled and offered me a handshake and I sat. He continued reading. Muri-Okunola, popularly known as HMO, informed me the president was absorbed in his daily briefings. Private secretary Adedamilotun Aderemi was beside him.

    I asked him how often he received the briefing. HMO said Monday through Sunday, with a chuckle. Prepared every day, the briefing was sometimes oral, but often both oral and written. The office is smaller than most ministers’ offices with its understated elegance.

    Once he stopped reading, I posed a question to him about security in Plateau State.

    “The Plateau State governor was here last night,” he remarked, and he reeled out an idea he was mulling to Mutfwang to put the guns at bay and bring peace and plenty to the Plateau. The idea is at gestation, disruptive and out of the box.

    “I was not in the battleground, but I didn’t sleep,” he said glumly about the bloodbath in the region.

    We veered into agriculture, and his face lit up as he announced a Brazilian $2.5 billion investment in livestock. Feasibility studies had advanced for ranching.  He praised Livestock Minister Mukhtar Maiha, who is mooing well with his new job.

    “We are bringing in 2,000 tractors into the country,” he said. Just then National Security Adviser Nuhu Ribadu walked in, and quipped, “Hi Sam. Mr. President, how did he get into town and he went through my security net?” The president smiled, and Ribadu sat down, and the dialogue went into a plan to make cattle wear chips, to monitor, tame herdsmen violence and cattle rustling.

    The president remarked that the 33 items were too many before the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting scheduled to hold in a moment. The unwieldy number could chip away at rigorous exchange and debate. He was working a mechanism to beat down the number so any item that escaped his eye or FEC did not end up in fraud. The Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, also entered and we exchanged greetings.

    Just then, Vice President Kashim Shettima entered, and he, too, was surprised to see me. He had a warm exchange with the president and thanked the Jagaban for his help.

    The cabinet was seated, and the president rose, and I followed his retinue to the chamber meeting, next door.

    Before deliberations and after the national anthem, President Tinubu swore in a commissioner for INEC and members of the Code of Conduct Bureau. Three absentees: FCT Minister Nyesom Wike, Attorney General Lateef Fagbemi and Foreign Affairs Minister of State, Bianca Ojukwu.

    Secretary to the Government of the Federation, George Akume was the scribe, and the president was addressed as Mr. Chairman. The meeting started in earnest with a memo from the president himself about insurance for key officers. But Creative Economy Minister Hanatu Musawa’s memo was the next to be read by Akume, about $100 billion programme.

    The president highlighted the Wole Soyinka Theatre, which he described as “a diamond in the rough,” and great revenue potential given its environment. Since her memo did not draw from the public till, the president said it was approved.

    Aviation Minister Festus Keyamo had a few also that received approval but not before the president adverted to the antelope snafu at the Asaba Airport.

    Drama did not come until Works Minister Dave Umahi’s turn. Before that, he seconded virtually all proposals before his own memos. Of course, those of Education Minister Tunji Alausa, Health Minister Mohammed Ali Pate and Agriculture Minister Abubakar Kyari, among others had smooth sails.

    Pate’s memo resonated with the public private partnership to domesticate production of essential drugs to cut import cost and choke the market for fake and adulterated medicines.

    He drew applause for his honour as one of Time Magazine’s 100 influential persons. Kyari updated the president that of the 2,000 tractors anticipated, half had arrived.

    Umahi’s list was longer than anyone else, covering roads in all regions. He announced that 19 projects were ready for commissioning, and 25 others by December. Section one of the East-West Road, a section of the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Road awaited the blare of traffic.

    Some roads in the Southwest raised some concern. They included the Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa road, the Sagamu-Ore-Benin Road and the Ekiti-Akure-Benin road. The third generated a response from Solid  Mineral Development  Minister Dele Alake when he said, for 30 years, it had suffered neglect, and he “wholeheartedly support(ed) the memo.” The president asked, “are you sure” he has plied that road? And he said yes, eliciting laughter.

    Alausa observed that the Sagamu-Ore-Benin road was not only a deathtrap, it had many industries there, making it both a safety and economic urgency.  The Ibadan-Ife-Ilesa Road, said Umahi, was emphasized when First Lady Oluremi Tinubu passed it in her visit to Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU). This essayist also drove through it a week ago when I visited OAU for a reading of my new novel, Juju Eyes. It took me an hour to return to Ibadan but two hours from Ibadan to Ife.

    All three projects were approved.

    But Umahi drew swords with Wale Edun, Minister of Finance/Coordinating Minister of the Economy, when Edun said quite a few firms were prepared to bankroll the projects.

    Umahi threw the first salvo earlier, a comment that jolted the amiable air of the meeting.

     “Since Edun does not like to release money…” But Edun gave no riposte until Umahi had completed his presentation. Umahi said handing the projects over to bankrollers would mire the country in legal obligations because of the contract terms. It was a tense exchange between both men.

    “I won’t sign my pen on any such matter,” Umahi said.

    “You have a bad handwriting,” the president said sarcastically.

    Umahi said he would like to rest and he did not want such matters to keep him up at night.

    “You want to rest?” asked the president.

    “No sir. I mean after eight years. That’s what I mean, sir. I want to rest just like the president after eight years.”

    A laughter across the hall.

    Alausa said the roads were too urgent to bog us down by a committee to look into it. The president had the last word and said he would work with Lateef Fagbemi, the attorney general, to find a way out of the legal mire. The roads, he contended, were too important to be delayed by contracts.

    Whereupon the president asked Umahi about the Federal Roads Maintenance Agency of Nigeria (FERMA), what of all the engineers? Why can’t they maintain the roads? The agency is under Umahi, but it is underfunded. Umahi said FERMA has 7,300 engineers and for FERMA to do its job, it has to be by legislation. The president said urgent memo was needed to seek out how to make FERMA central to road infrastructure in the country. Umahi referred to Iddo Bridge and Carter Bridge in Lagos undergoing checks.

     Just as he was talking, Regional Development Minister Abubakar Momoh took Umahi on about FERMA negligence. He spoke with rage, and Umahi asked the president to take from Momoh’s budget to his ministry in order to fix roads in his domain. Momoh was livid as everyone else laughed.

    A little chuckle over a road that led to Ribadu town in Adamawa, and the president asked, “Ribadu?”

    Another laugh.

    Umahi said it was an important artery in the region. Another drama involved Ribadu when he explained the danger of dredging, some of them in the Lekki area.

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     The president teased him to leave dredging and go to the forests and flush out the bandits.

    Ribadu held his own and said dredgers posed security threats, including oil pipelines. It led to discussion on vandalizations of bridges and manholes, and the president agreed with Gbajabiamila that a special legislation with stiff penalty should be enacted to punish the thieves and the enabling companies.

    The meeting cheered to the payment of IMF loan. Edun said it  made the government creditworthy. The president told me later that it resulted from discipline, adding that ways and means and the $7 billion debts were now behind the country.

    After the meeting, I commented to Alake on the feisty atmosphere. He said it was a carryover from Lagos when Tinubu was governor. It had a collegial air. The president did not hold a patriarchal hold on the debates. It was a FEC of self-expression.

    During lunch with him, I observed to the president it seemed we had just started to govern, given the deliberations.

     He held meetings I observed comings and goings like a fly on the wall. One was from Aminu Maida, who wanted the president’s backing on recent hirings and he was under political pressure to replace merit with corruption. “I believe in merit. Do what is right,” said Tinubu. Another special adviser updated him on CNG.

    HMO returned as the day was winding down to update him on  what was coming up. One of about an anticipated list. His trip to inaugurate Pope Leo XIV topped his priority. “I should get my suit ready,” he said.

    He would take his rest and return, and meetings would last into the night. “When his appointees are sleeping,” remarked his P.A. Yusuf. “The president is working at 2 am.” I had witnessed that once with Dangote, Akinyelure, Segun Osoba, Oshiomhole, Fubara, et al. A busy day, a busy president.

  • Utomi’s shadow

    Utomi’s shadow

    Pat Utomi is a friend, and I have often regarded him as a friend. Not until recently, I never considered him, with his donnish airs, eyeglasses and abstract eyes, as a man who chases shadows. I should have, on second thought.

    Delusion? Yes, he has been a man of delusions, including when he ran for president, and also, not long ago, when he wanted to be governor of my state, Delta.

    He offered himself the ill-grace of being a candidate for his party, and he was going to lock horns with Great Ogboru. But he showed his signs of chasing shadows when on the day of the primary he asked for the delegates’ list.

    A late-hour exam expo, in Nigerian parlance. It was also like arriving town at 10 am and asking for the venue of the exam that was billed for 10 am. It was the naivety of a don.

    So, Utomi has been a man out of clock because he is out of sorts. Chasing shadows therefore fits him well. It fit him well when he called for the formation of a shadow government.

    We must understand where Utomi is coming from. He is not coming from the intellect. He is not coming from a revolutionary instinct. He is not coming from political theory. He is also not coming from the wellspring of patriotism.

    Nor is conscience the fuel. He is a victim of his own malice.

    He has a beef with the APC. Maybe he should. He said he was in the think tank that fashioned the manifesto and working idea of the party. But once the broth was ready, he was shooed out of the kitchen.

    For a man with an appetite, that must be jarring. I wonder why no one remembered to give him even a shadow of a chicken when Buhari took over the kitchen.

    Someone who did that must take the blame for Utomi’s shadowy condition.

    The Minister of Information, Mohammed Idris, would not have corrected him to the effect that presidential systems do not hug shadows.

    He was not educating the professor of political science. He already knows. He knows that it is the Westminster system that installs shadow governments as opposition pedestals.

    The prescient professor must have seen the words of former United States President Theodore Roosevelt’s lines about such sneaky elements in a presidential system, when he wrote, “to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of today.”

    We borrowed our system from that country. The good prof knows that, too.

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    Utomi is too smart not to know that shadow governments do not rise out of whims.

     In the United Kingdom, Canada and even Australia where shadow governments subsist, the cabinets often are elected persons. They win elections at the local levels. The members of such governments are therefore voices of the people.

    They are not accidental business men or professors of fortune who want to be in government.

    The reason they are elected, though, is because they have to be loyal to the constitution and the legitimacy of the government at the centre.

    Hence, some of those systems name them loyal opposition.

    In shadow governments, the opposition lawmakers have titles without offices. They are dud. They have their say, not their way.

    The ruling governments have offices and titles. They are substantial.

     The Westminster system creates a real government and shadow one because all the actors play in a single chamber in a collegial atmosphere.

     Even when they battle, the smoke expires within the house.

     They all have constituencies to report to because whoever elected them whether as shadow cabinet or real one, are not shadows at the polls.

    But Utomi is not thinking that way. If he were, he would have contemplated the word government rather than the ‘adjective’ shadow.

     The qualifier is nothing without the noun.

    He may be lost in a shadow reality. A government is not so-called out of an impulse. It needs a constitutional legitimacy. We have had it before in this country, in the First Republic. Obafemi Awolowo was the leader of the opposition, and he flourished within the structures of a codified law and convention.

    Our professor also must know, unless his immersion in business has rid him of his theories, that the most valuable tool to a political scientist is history. Maybe he should read more history than theory, since theories can sometimes deprive you of the roots of political philosophy. If you listen to Utomi often, you realise that he touts theories with little appetite for objective facts from the past.

    He will do well to read the masters from Aristotle to Rousseau, even more contemporary ones like Charles Taylor.

    We know that many writers, including columnists these days, are undergoing a divorce from history. That is evident from the recent infatuation with Ibrahim Traore, the upstart from Burkina Faso, and how he has switched one form of slavery for another. And Russian’s foxy-eyed Putin has made him a pawn on a global chessboard.

    When the DSS took him to court, it is not because they wanted to gag. It is because democracy ought to gag. The law ought to gag. What he is doing is subversion.

    You do not form a government outside the law. He is trying to foment political guerillas in the guise of a neat idea.

     It is rebellion by stealth. But it is illegitimacy with a bold face.

     Utomi celebrated the news that some people wanted to gather a cloud of 500 lawyers to support him. I want to ask those lawyers where they were going to find a shadow government in the constitution.

    Jesus lashed out at lawyers who have lost the key of knowledge.

    Our smart professor is just following the script of the 2023 election grievance. He still has not recovered from  a loss, where his party came a distant, if hefty third. Some of his followers failed through the courts after trying to intimidate the justices.

    Some of them then started calling the army to take over.

    I never heard the good prof say anything about those subversives.

    Nor did he say a word about clerics whose prophecies bowed to reality.

    Utomi knows too that no system is locked up. It can be tweaked. But he also knows that it goes through a process. If he thinks a presidential system should have a shadow government, he is welcome to advance a theory.

    He will then have to deploy history, and show to us that it can work. He will also have to push elected officers to propound it and shepherd it until it becomes a legislation.

    If he does not want to? Then, he is working for a subversion. That fits into how people have looked at shadow as a metaphor for ominous, an insubstantial idea to heist the state.

     Or it will be a wraith of an impulse that Shakespeare, in his play Macbeth, describes as “a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more.

    It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.” Or it may signify the illusion of the subvert Macbeth, who was afraid of a shadow after he murdered sleep.

  • IMF loan and my Cambridge vindication 

    IMF loan and my Cambridge vindication 

    The news that Nigeria under this administration has paid off all its IMF loan reminds me of questions thrown at me last year at The Cambridge University in the United Kingdom when I was interrogated on my book on the 2023 elections, Beating All Odds: How Bola Tinubu became President.

    Some had tackled me when I asserted the following words:

    “Some critics in the country who are on the left have said President Tinubu is beholden to the West and IMF policies. This is an interesting point.

     His policy of stanching the bleeding like floating the currency or letting fuel sell at the market rate seem to suggest this. But he has no choice. He is, to me, not implementing the policy under their behest. I see it as a coincidence of policy. This so-called Washington consensus has been touted as the solution to the problems of many developing countries with mixed results. Yet, if your currency is bleeding, do you borrow to save it without a productive base? No. If the price of fuel is killing your ability to build roads or hospitals or fund education, do you continue? I think not.

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    “So, if it is IMF policy, it is not Tinubu obedience but a coincidence of necessity. When one of the candidates, Peter Obi was asked if he had an alternative to Tinubu’s policies, he said he would go and look for money to save the situation. In order words, he would hark back to the same era of extravagance and indulgence.”

     A PHD student was particular about the IMF taking over the economy. Even then, the government did not take any new loan from IMF.

    Today, it is clear that my point was vindicated. Professor Anthony Kila, who moderated the Cambridge event, as an intellectual understood the rigour of my argument, but he, too will be glad that he let me play the economic exponent. Some of those who argued that Tinubu was servile to IMF were economists without facts.

    Hence the late Henry Kissinger said during the 1982 recession in the U.S., “that the economy was too important to be left in the hands of economists.” President Tinubu demonstrated you do not need to be a slave to be right.

  • New Pope talks to Nigerian churches

    New Pope talks to Nigerian churches

    Pope Leo XIV, whose name is Robert Prevost, Stepped onto the perch of the Catholic Church last week in a breathtaking moment. Stepped onto the perch

     His choice as the first American tells me he was a counterfoil to Trump, and American cleric as “provost” of peace and unity, to help save the world from an American perdition.

     It overstates it to think the Pope can do it alone, but it shows how the church can do good by its appeal to the righteous regions of our souls.

    This new Pope visited Nigeria as part of his evangelical work as an Augustinian.

     The Augustinian hails from the theological philosophy of Saint Augustine, that loved to dissect the word and pay homage to the poor and help the sinner.

     The new Pope follows Leo XIII because he united the people and helped the poor. Which is what is lacking in the Nigerian church today when pastors, especially of the Pentecostal type, who elevate material splendor over the life of the spirit.

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    It reminds me of a cleric who said it is better to die a rich man than a poor man. Another, one pastor Ibiyeomie, said Jesus hates the poor, and he hated them so much in his earthly ministry that he did not visit the poor at home. Well, the real poor don’t have homes.

     He himself said, the birds have a home, but the son of man had no place to rest his head. If he hated the poor why did he live in poverty when he was on earth, so much so he cursed a tree for lacking a fruit.

    He did not visit the poor in the house? Do you have to visit the poor in their home to empathise? Did he not dine with the publicans, who were regarded as poor?

     When the Bible says he was poor so we might be rich, he was speaking of being rich in spirit according to James 2:5. To be rich is good. But to be poor is no sin.

     Some of these pastors encourage terrorism, kidnapping and fraud in this society by talking down the poor in church. it turns meek worshippers into conniving villains.

     Jesus himself was with poor people when he changed a few loaves of bread and fishes to feed a multitude. Were they rich? Jesus warned how hard it is for rich men to enter his kingdom. E.T Okere muses on this in his book, Church, Money and Power.

    By materialising scripture, they have defrocked the word of its power and glory, and made it a secular gambit.

     After all God said in the book of Samuel that He made the rich and poor, and in proverbs that the rich and poor should meet together because God made them all. (Proverbs 22:2).

     Is the parable of the Rich man not to condemn insentivity to the poor. It is not enough to live with the poor, but to care.

    That was the kernel of Pope XIV’s message, and our overabundant clerics will do well to learn.

  • Phony Traore

    Phony Traore

    They are part of a new trend of anti-western sentiment, seeking to indigenise heroism.

    This new leader projects youth and vigour in his red beret, pullover and camo trousers.

     Above all, he exudes an African nationalism, as though he were a rebirth of the negritude movement with quite a few French thinkers, from Senghor to Diop, in its wake.

    Looking at once like an athlete and a soldier, he wants to claim a hero from a past. Thomas Sankara, that is.

    An untested Burkinabe leader, Sankara has grabbed myth out of martyrdom.

    Even then, he was a martyr of hope. That is, people dress him up as a martyr because of what many expected of him. He did not live long enough to be a hero or villain, or neither.

    In Sankara’s days, the boys of Karl Marx incarnated his profile. The idealist’s song grew dark when his fellow traveler and traitor swept him aside in a stab-in-the-back coup that squelched not only him but also his dream.

    Even his executioner, known as Blaise Compaore, also has eventually vanished in a blaze of populist revenge.

    Enter Traore. The man was nearly removed in a coup, and that set him into a fever. He has made himself a hero by default.

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     When he and his French colleagues in Mali, Niger and Guinea fomented coups to power, they stirred up two contradictory emotions.

    They fed an anti-French imperialism. But a worldwide democratic impulse was up in arms against a military return to power.

    These two are resolving themselves in his favour for two reasons. One, the coup that failed to oust him but lionised him as a hero. Two, a charm offensive from Russia.

    Traore is taking advantage of a fear of the West. The French have looked down on their black West African for generations.

     They were their colonial subjects. During that era, they imposed a system known as assimilation.

    It was a racist ideology that meant the French did not govern but assimilated them into French culture and way of life. It was a delusion of equality, a throwback from the failed French Revolution.

     They assumed the French had a superior civilization and they planted it after using their colonial force known as the Senegalese Sharp shooters to mow down resistance from valiant kingdoms in the region.

    Their assimilation system guaranteed them free access to the wealth of the region. But it implied that the people were not capable of deciding anything for themselves.

    They treated them like children. Paris dictated every part of their life.

    Algeria resisted this in the days of De Gaulle. Guinean leader Sekou Toure, in the Loi cadre episode, also asserted Guinean independence.

    The average French has resented this post-colonial slavery but had done nothing about it. A set of soldiers, with no idea how to govern but how to hold on to power, saw their chance.

     They plotted a coup, and have used French tyranny as an alibi. It is a cynical view of power. It is them versus us.

    But they are heroes without spine. Rather than stand as African nationalist, they are switching one master for another.

    The Russians have seen their opportunity. They have swathed the social media with pictures, videos and narratives that brandish Traore as a hero. For them, the man lives in a humble home, whereas it is fiction. He turned down IMF loans, whereas it is false.

    That he turned down American offer of visit, another lie. Traore is making his myth on the go.

    They have turned the opportunist into who he is not. The Russians, on the other hand, have been doing deals and posting their outfit known as Wagner Group to provide army, materiel, and propaganda. The Russians are building schools, hospitals, etc as tokens of empathy. More like tokens of contempt. Immediately, after the failed coup, Traore signed a sweetheart deal for gold mining.

    This is the making of an exploiter, in the mould of cynics we saw during the Cold War when the Soviet Union and the United States carved spheres of influence in Africa. History has also told us that leaders tend to look to the past as a refuge.

     They hide in the shadows of men of quality. In Nigeria we have had small men who wanted to be like the big men. For instance we have had little Awolowos, little Ojukwus.

     In the United States, Ronald Reagan birthed Lilliputians known as Reagan Republicans. Reagan Democrats, the most unlikely, emerged as well.

    Napoleon lit up young passions all over Europe that Ralph Waldo Emerson described as Little Napoleons. Napoleon III arose and saw himself as Napoleon reborn. The novelist Victor Hugo wrote a pamphlet that put him in trouble.

    He mocked the fellow in the piece Napoleon, The Little.

    It was a writing that turned into a mathematical formula in showing how a people can be sold any lie. Hugo asserted that in trying to distort the truth about the stature of Napoleon The Little, two plus two equals five.

     It was an idea that other writers took up to poohpooh how leaders turn realities upside down, including Dostoyevsky, Samuel Johnson, and of course George Orwell in his famous Nineteen Eighty Four. In his short novel of ideas, Notes From The Underground by Dostoyevsky, “Two plus two is no longer life but the beginning of death.”

    It is indeed a battle to the death from a man like Traore, who must secure his position by subterfuge, by living in the disguise of a hero. What they are exploiting is, as Ebenezer Obadare demonstrates in a recent piece for The Council of Foreign Relations, a cult of personality.

    They are exploiting the hunger for a hero who would transform their lives. That yearning for a hero makes them easy preys to adventurers in power.

    They are not only exploiting Russia. They are turning their fellow African leaders who run democracies as foes of their good fortune.

    Yet, for us, the danger signal is that the radicals among us who bow to his phony profile are not different from those who had a vigil at the Defence Headquarters over a year ago asking for military rule.

     They are not different from the underage kids in the North who never witnessed an army rule but asked soldiers to return. It is the bastardisation of the heroic concept.

    Hence in his play Galileo, Bertolt Brecht said: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.” Need is the operative one. It implies mass surrender to fate. Such surrenders yield phonies with combat pullovers, red berets and sweetheart deals with Putin.

  • Juju Eyes for the downfall of many

    Juju Eyes for the downfall of many

    Title: Juju Eyes

    Author: Sam Omatseye

    Reviewer: Edozie Udeze

    This tale, Juju Eyes, is in all facets and facts the typical story of a runs girl, a high-class professional whore. But it is also the story of Nigeria, more so a young lady, beautiful to the hilts who set out to wallow and prowl in the euphoric impulse of a society. It is a society peopled by fraudsters and Oluseyi Ekanem now code-named Shay cleverly keyed into it to spill and strut a life of lies and tricks and all sorts of dubious mannerisms and nuances. The author actually uses the tale about Shay to explore and describe and indeed mirror into the society that is riddled with all manner of characters, who come ready to swindle, squabble and hoodwink the world. Shay is only a vessel through which this tale is told and embellished. And it is told in a way that there is hardly any aspect of this frosty and fake society that is not included in the story.

    Shay is an embodiment of the perilous times where the beautiful live as a prey and a predator, where lies have taken over the place of decency. What else can one say when Sam Omatseye, this ubiquitous author of this encyclopedic tale impugns the person of Shay as, “She did not come from this land, which, for lack of proper translation, meant Shay did not belong to this earth as we knew it. On some afternoons she looked so fair skinned, she became spectral, an “albino”. Sometimes, she was set to devour-a sleek, charming canine. At other times she looks so meek, all the children wanted to be like her, just like Jesus wanted little children to come unto me. At such moments her beauty contrasted with what Mista Naija would later call Juju Eyes. At times she was thin, spindly.

    On some nights like a gala event on a month ago, the same legs shone like the flame of an ethereal polish…at other times too she was a clipped goddess…” (pg. 48). The truth of this fantastic tale by one of Nigeria’s greatest and most prolific story tellers is that Shay is expertly used to explore the larger Nigerian society. A goddess of beauty in the real sense of the word, Shay comes fully prepared to expose and exploit the many inanities of the kingdom of evil and the not so evil, in Nigeria. The author does not spare the big and the small-dubious leaders, people in high places who are indeed the primary attention of this tale.

    Using Shay who is born Oluseyi Ekanem to an Efik father and Yoruba mother the author delves into more complicated and profound ways the society is run and run dubiously by criminals in human clothing. It is run by those whose intentions have not been too luxuriant or hopeful for the common goals of the people. So, chancing in on this, Shay surreptitiously decides to be a whore, a whore that is bigger than all whores. She preys on them, both rich and old. She is like a hawk who knows how to catch her preys. She operates with no draw backs or regrets. Her conscience is often deadpanned and she reaches out to those ready to do her biddings. She also often has her libido handy for the highest bidder. Often enough her libido is determined and controlled by her immediate need for it.

    Here is a lady who was first deflowered by her uncle, Uncle ID. From then onwards the monstrous urge and the penchant to have men, to deploy her beauty and charm and infectious aura with the juju eyes in tow, she enwraps and destroys men and their destinies. Here again Shay symbolizes all the runs girls and their wayward life and all their activities in highbrow areas like Lagos, Port Harcourt, Abuja and so on. At Lekki in Lagos, her type abounds. They live exclusively on their bodies and the bodies and pockets of men they reach out to.

    Shay is not your everyday type of lover girl. She pretends to love but it is short lived. Y0u can’t make her your pet either. Her aim is to seek, find and devour men along with their wealth and powers and connections. In making the story carry on with the weight of a tale that is all engrossing, Omatseye subtitles the chapters. The purpose is to be deliberate in which it provides enough rooms to involve all the numerous escapades of a ravenous young woman given to an insatiable gusto of all sorts. From the moment when she was born, Shay even as young as four years old had chosen to be an absurdity. She was meant to be a priestess of a goddess. But her powers overwhelmed that of the goddess and this made her a bigger disaster. That disastrous outing immediately helped to set her on a part of societal perdition.

    Shay is therefore both a witchcraft and a priestess who destroys all the powers of witches. She is indeed on a mission to implore her juju eyes at random. Her juju eyes are wired by the goddess and other evil forces of her kingdom essentially to achieve her aims on earth. And so, she lived a stupendous life, lugubriously so that the well to do in the society are attracted to her easily. In this case it is both wealthy men and sometimes the well to do women in the society. Her pride remains in her propensity to be rapacious, self-centered and tricky in all her dealings with both genders. She only goes where her bread is buttered and her road is paved.

    With her crown as the most beautiful girl at the University of Calabar and later at the NYSC orientation camp, Shay chooses on time to parasite on politicians and their allies and co-travelers. Her story progresses with measured acumen and accuracy, Omatseye is painstaking. He is deliberate. He creates a bigger room for other interesting characters, some good, some innocuous to join her in her obnoxious world of fantasy and deceit. The story rigmaroles, often summersaulting, touching on the fabrics of the society. It meanders. It goes on and on rippling through the lives of Governors, Senators, political hoodlums, political bandits and thugs. It touches on fake men of God, fake miracles, fake and dubious society women and their lifestyles, fake friends and so many others. Shay is comfortable when she tries all these, but yet comes out of it all. When she is depressed or have some regrets or under the spell of the goddess she seeks for deliverance. Meanwhile this is short-lived as she goes back immediately to her vomit. She belongs to life of cosmetic friendship.

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    Her life revolves around the whims and caprices of a typical ogbanje. So, from one man to the next she pitches her tent, mesmerizing at her own pace and dictate. She catches a man, leads him on until the man loses his guard, then in a flash Shay disentangles and begins once more to look back to her first love, Ese, on campus. Ese her first love is her idol but she lost the opportunity.

    It indeed shows that those evil forces which she refuses to honour will never let her be. One moment she goes for deliverance, the other time she is back to continue where she stopped. Yet they all turn into a façade. Shay is one of the reasons why some men fail to bolster their star. Politicians squander money, public money in hard currency to satiate her. This story has to be read by those who love faction – a story of facts turned into fiction, the story of the real runs girls of this generation. They have no qualms about their immoral exploits. They owe no one the decency or otherwise of their groins. For them life is meant to be lived anyhow it comes. Money is the master and it counts in all situations. They are not accountable to anybody, not even to their folks or men of God they run to when too much confusion beclouds their sense of rationalization.

    Then after the several rollicking scenes, Shay suddenly runs into Negel, a white man who turns himself to Mista Naija. It is there like it is said in smattering English, wayo jam wayo. And so, the tale goes on and on and on as Shay makes Mista Naija the center of her life. And in return Negel, the rich and regal Mista Naija hits the nail on the head. He tells Shay “You have juju eyes”. And Shay truly uses those bewitching eyes for destructive tendencies and to achieve her aim and get what she wants.

    In all, it is an overview of the story of a rotten society in all facets where everything goes and no one cares. Decorum and decency have taken a flight in this clime and Omatseye has not hesitated to lay them bare.

    As an audacious novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, journalist and public commentator, Omatseye is critical in matters of literary offerings. He is daring, sincere and profound. His works elucidate. They explore and teach and are sometimes exclusively different and penetrating. So JuJu Eyes shows Shay as a gifted sorcerer who is able to hold the entire society in the jogular ,almost choking all to death with her incessant evil deeds and demands. What a story. What a society. What a narrative.