The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • The corpse

    Some may say it has a new life. Others call it alive but with a false breath of life. Others will conclude that Biafra is not alive, but dead. Others still observe that the so-called southeast maelstrom is merely imbuing Biafra with a life that is not there.

    If it is dead, why are we discussing it? Why is a freebooter with a spectacle and a bigoted register at the head of its boil? if it is boiling, does it make it alive? If it is alive though, what kind of life can we attribute to an agitation that the Igbo elite are too ashamed or timid to define or associate with in clear language? Why is the acting president convening dialogues, why are senators sniping, a former central bank boss (Soludo) a sympathiser, an Igbo intellectual like Nwabueze lying from both sides of his octogenarian mouth to appease the cause?

    But for this writer, Biafra is dead. It is only pretending to be alive, propped up by phony leaders, polemicised by unfledged intellectuals, triggered by a lure of enterprise and profit, backed by incendiary propaganda machine, fired on by an imperial state of mind, enriched by a tribe of gullible followers and riven by a lack of ideological or cultural clarity.

    For all those who know this and still war on, they say in their minds, “Biafra is dead. Long live Biafra!” The irony and hypocrisy fascinate. They know that the pursuit of an independent state of Biafra is like Samuel Becket’s waiting for Godot. It is like a song, an intoxicant, an aphrodisiac, a rallying cry. It is melodious, beautiful, demoniac, soulful, lurks in the heart, burns the adrenaline, and no more.

    Biafra had life once, and breathed into being in the tactile air of tyranny. It was a great and worthy cause then. It rose on the ashes of tribesmen and women slashed and daggered to death in pogroms. Its leader, Odumegwu Ojukwu with his immaculate diction and soaring rhetoric, jolted the nation and, some may say, the world in its early months. Until it fell foul of its own logic by owning other Nigerians in what is now the Niger Delta. Biafra lost it moral impetus for everyone except the southeast. Since then it has flailed to its death. It had neither the support nor sympathy of the southern minorities. Biafra literally shot itself in the foot.

    After the hostilities ceased, Biafra has only lived in fantasy. Ojukwu knew that when he returned from exile. He did not pitch his tent with his southeast political brotherhood, but dined with the same seance against which he asked his fellow tribes men to fight and die. The NPN, that is. So, he did not really hate those for whom he asked his people to die. The poet Yeats captured this in these lines: “Those I fight I do not hate/ those I guard I do not love.” By that very association of surrender with the NPN, Ojukwu resounded the gong and euthanasia of Biafra. He embalmed the idea. All his protestations for Biafra after that misadventure were like trying to save a beheaded John the Baptist.

    Since then the mention of Biafra has been a romance with the dead. It has been a corpse that has refused to decompose, but a corpse all the same. It reminds one of the Spanish film, the Corpse of Anna Fritz, where the body of a model captures the erotic embers of some young men who make love to it in the mortuary.  Senegalese Poet Leopold Senghor describes it as the “dead who have refused to die.” It is gone but not in the fantasies of the obsessed.

    The golden age of Biafra was, unfortunately, an age of misadventure and failure. The Chinese leaders of the 20th century have characterised the 19th century as their age of humiliation, where nations like Japan and Russia made mincemeat of the people that once towered over the east. Biafra’s age of humiliation was the 1960’s. It duelled and expired in the dust of heroic miscalculations and strategic naiveté.

    The ethnic entrepreneur, Nnamdi Kanu, has been owned by his followers in high and low places in the east as a pretext to fight for restructuring, a voice not heard in the buccaneering days of Jonathan. Now they are saying that we are all Biafrans. By that they mean anyone who is up against the inequity of this federal contraption is riding on the genius of Kanu.

    Kanu is an opportunist just like Judas Iscariot. His votaries are conjuring his name to push for a fairer arrangement. He has entered the fray to corrupt it. Judas Iscariot came to the life of Jesus to corrupt the cause. The crucifixion happened and Christians claim redemption from the betrayal of Judas. But the same Judas has been dismissed as a son of perdition. No one thanks Judas for betraying the lord.

    For those who say we all are Biafrans, they are not only wrong but wrong-headed. Kanu, for instance, claims that Biafra will extend to the animated states of the Niger Delta, including Rivers, Delta, Akwa Ibom, etc. The fellow recently claims he inspired a great crowd in Port Harcourt. As I noted last week, he rallied Igbos, not the indigenes. The phrase “we are all Biafrans” is an imperial insult on the South-south. That mindset has not learned from the remonstrations of the minorities against the injustices Biafra inflicted them with during the war. They are trying to levitate Kanu, a fringe felon, to a mainstream hero. They are trying to legitimise a cynical buccaneer.

    Meanwhile, they are carrying the corpse along, and hoping that someday it will come back, breathing and jerking like a new-born, the failure of a fantastic necrophilia. It’s like the family in William Faulkner’s novel, As I Lay Dying, where the children take their mother’s corpse on a journey to a place they want it buried. She is laid to mother earth when the stench makes everyone unhappy. If Biafra is so beloved, its fanatics should let it down before it suffocates others. They should make Biafra, in the words of Charles Dicken, “a lovely corpse.” Not a stinking one.

  • Makarfi, Sherriff, PDP, et al

    The verdict that gave the Makarfi faction of the PDP victory over Sheriff was expected. But that is beside the point now. What is more significant is that it brings our politics to an autumnal moment. Autumns, also called fall, is the weather that forces all leaders to reveal their true colours and the weak ones fall off the tree ahead of a wintry turbulence.

    So, with the verdict, all those who belong to APC in PDP will start to show themselves, and vice versa. The quiet storm in APC will also join a narrative of the 2019 elections that is on everyone’s lips but no one is ready to roar.

    We cannot escape it. Who will line up behind Buhari’s APC? Will it still remain APC or a ghost of its old vigour? Will it reenergise or fall in smithereens? Are the old PDP guys coming back to their old fold, and how will all these gladiators live together in a fierce battle ahead?

    What will Buhari do, if he will do something? Will he be good enough to run a hectic campaign? It is the season of the political patriarchs and duel in the mud. Garcia Marquez’s novel, The Autumn of the Patriarchs, comes to mind, except that he x-rays the bestialities of dictators. We are bracing for a new season where our politicians will show their true colours. We expect night meetings, money peddling, crafting of new platforms and coalitions. Backstabbing, strange bed fellows, rhetoric of abuse and embrace. The histrionics will excite, but will they ennoble? Will they help us or the self-styled leaders? Stay tuned.

  • Maitama Sule and I

    Maitama Sule and I

    I met Maitama Sule three times. Twice at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs in the early 1990s.They were debate sessions. We sparred over the state of the country, journalism, international politics. In his colourful babanriga, feisty spirit and ringing voice, he spoke with me as though we were contemporaries. We were at polar points but we exchanged ideas with cheer. He came across as a profound follower of news and events around the world. Our last tango was about American anchor Walter Cronkite. He wished we could replicate his stature. Cronkite made President Lyndon Johnson not to run for re-election.

    The last time I saw him, he could not see me. I was compere at a book launch. He grabbed my hands and poured out a visceral prayer. It was a divine meeting. As he goes home, I also pray for him from the bottom of my heart. He was a great man.

  • Age of innocence

    Age of innocence

    It seems odd to speak of the beginning of an old or modern country in the same sentence with the concept of innocence. A child knows little because he is too little to know. But countries and societies like Nigeria were clear-eyed at birth.

    United States first beat its chest with rhetoric before rumbling into war. Greece muscled itself into being. The Sokoto Caliphate invoked Allah in a jihad of blood and sword. Bismark coalesced troops to build an army with a state. Yet, there is a sense in which a new state is innocent. Not in the sense of a new-born child who screams every other eye awake at 3:17 am, but in the sense of a new-born people, cobbled together to pursue a future that enchants and mystifies simultaneously.

    In justifying why he wrote Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe urged us to return to when the rain started to beat us. Perhaps a good way to look at the convulsion around the country over restructuring. In the melee of voices, few have examined why the centre has become so juicy.

    At independence, the centre was little. The regions boomed. Chief Obafemi Awolowo turned the western region into a model of governance. The east emulated. The north rollicked in its agrarian riches. The regions relished their relative autonomy. Things fell apart later. As columnist Kunle Abimbola noted, the national question took centre stage when IBB suffocated June 12.

    But it was because the Southwest saw it as the inflexion mark signifying that the Yorubas were seen as second fiddle. We have to go a little back in time to understand this. The Richards and Macpherson Constitutions helped with setting the stage for a federal state, so the regions cared for themselves. The centre held because it attracted only a few. More importantly, the centre was perceived as belonging to all.

    Hence after he was done with his work in the Western Region, Awo headed for the centre to run for prime minister. Also by mid-1960’s, the Igbos dominated the civil service. While the Middle Belt had a huge number in the army, the officer corps boasted an array of Igbo soldiers. No surprise that when the coup erupted in January 1966, Igbos headlined the actors.

    Irony that the Southwest is not impressed with the centre these days. So, it hails a return to regionalism. The Igbos who once puffed in the centre have rejuvenated Biafra drum beats. Why?

    It can be traced to a resource that belonged neither to the east or west: oil. When oil was discovered, the centre was not supposed to get more than 30 per cent of its proceeds. Fifty per cent belonged to the land owners, according to the law based on the Raisman report on derivation revenue.

    What followed was a caliphate coup of oil. With the military takeover, the proceeds came down to 1.5 percent to the oil-bearing areas until Abacha made it 13 per cent. We must blame the regions, East and West, for kowtowing to the greed of oil and abandoning their economic war chests: cocoa in the West, and palm produce in the East and Midwest, and rubber in the Mid-west. So greasy was the North with oil that it slipped out of the groundnut pyramid. If all decided in their indulgence to follow oil, the Northwest decided it was going to dole it out. It had the power of the army to fulfil this destiny. Lewis Obi called it the Caliphate army in the June 12 era.

    In all of this, the minorities counted for almost nothing. It was a great tragedy that canvassers for justice – East and West – also saw the minorities in the Niger Delta as feeding bottles.

    We must understand that the most egregious sin happened when former President OlusegunObasanjo, in his roguish elegance, schemed a minority to the top. Goodluck Jonathan squashed the opportunity. The same minorities and the Southeast missed the opportunity to set the template for a fairer country. Rather, their elites waxed into carpet baggers and continued where the majorities left off. When Jonathan fell, the South-south and Southeast now began to complain about neglect. We must situate in this hypocrisy the rise of an opportunist bumpkin like Nnamdi Kanu.

    So, the centre is oil, and the Northwest elite became the North’s worst. They took the centre by force. The frustration of the East, West and minorities in the centre revved up the decibel of clamour.

    We can see that the Northwest elite is the only region that resists restructuring. The voices of IBB and Lamido Sanusi, who support a structural rethink, are outliers. If we want restructuring, we must compel the Northwest to submit. In his new book: Nigeria: The Restructuring Controversy, former IGP Mike Okiro gathers the main voices on the subject. The Northwest distinguishes itself with an eloquent silence. Unless we hold the Northwest to account, the centre will not hold for all.

    If oil spelt poor governance, ditto the national question. Pre-oil was our age of innocence on both. We are now looking back with anger. Philosopher Albert Camus characterised it thus: “every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.”

    But it is a nostalgia with prejudice. Biafra does not trust Oduduwa does not trust Saifawa, etc. Paul Unongo laments that Awo gave no ear to his plea to create the Middle Belt region during the constitutional conference for independence because he had secured the West. Awo is not around to respond. We are still a babel and until a united front compels the Northwest elite, the clamour may become impotent.

    If we cannot get back our innocence, at least we can work on our prejudices. As the French philosopher Denis Diderot noted, “one makes up for the loss of one’s innocence with the loss of one’s prejudices.” We can’t all lose our prejudices, but we should chasten them to help us work together for a fairer union.

  • Kanu the coward

    Kanu the coward

    An an interview with Kadaria Ahmed, who anchors Channels Television’s The Core, Nnamdi Kanu said two curious things. He said he was for confederation and he no longer wants to fight with arms. First, is he serious? This man peddled incendiary rhetoric asking for guns. Is he not a coward? Confederation means the Southeast is still part of Nigeria. Maybe he has recanted or he does not know political science 101. Kanu showed himself an ethnic entrepreneur, rallying gullible kinsmen to stock his Biafra purse with hard-earned money. He also boasted that he could win a referendum in Rivers State because he rallied a big crowd in Port Harcourt. He should not mistake the Igbos in PH with Ikwerres, Ogonis, Ijaws, Andonis, etc in Rivers. He could rally a big crowd in Ladipo in Lagos as well. This is one delusional conman.

  • Soul of the City

    Soul of the City

    Two things happened in Lagos recently that teach us the value of place. Alpha Governor Akinwunmi Ambode reiterated the need for the federal government to return its properties to the iconic city. In another development, a little controversy was put to death over uprooted monuments to Moshood Abiola and Gani Fawehinmi at the famous Ojota Park.

    What Governor Ambode sought was not merely the monetary value of the properties but the soul of the city. What makes the soul of a city is as much the people, the heroes, the workers in the routine glories of their days, when they work and play. So, when he fought to get the National Stadium the other day, it was not the stadium but the memory. Lagos was taking back its own, when Yakubu Mambo scored the first goal, when Haruna Ilerika made fancy work of the mid field, Segun Odegbami turned mathematical, when we won gold medal as a nation.

    If Lagos gets those properties back, the money only makes sense in the context of its culture. The city is nothing but its past and dreams. New York is the economic capital of the world, but it is nothing without how it grew from a lowly port settlement with its geniuses and workers. Like Lagos, London is nothing without Queen Elizabeth’s exploits, and the tower, Buckingham Palace, the German bombardment, Churchill and its heroics.

    So, Lagos swaggers with such names as Tinubu Square with its independence roots. Now the governor has restored its fountain pride. This brings memory to my childhood days. So also is the memory of Chief MKO Abiola, who roiled for democracy. Abiola risked money for public good to immortalise him. Gani Fawehinmi duelled with the law. He dared the gun, groaned in Gashua prison, defended the weak and poor. Eventually, he died. Writer George Crabbe said even monuments need memorials. Hence Governor Ambode wants to memorialise the monuments by making them bigger and grander. A few already are materialising in public like the headless ardour of Abami Eda, Fela Kuti.

    “Monuments, like men, submit to fate,” wrote poet Alexander Pope. Governor Ambode giving new fate to the monuments. In the same way, he is building new ones, like the flyovers in Abule Egba and Lekki. Monuments are messengers of the might within the land, to quote Joseph Conrad. So, if it is a high rise, a residential quarter, a bald piece of land, they are as important as a bust in Idumota. That is Ambode’s point.

  • Grandmaster

    Grandmaster

    For the records, not all those who have condemned him want the kidnap maestro to go to hell. For the records also, it might be said that some Nigerians envy the monster, Evans, whose real name is too long to swallow in one swig. They have lusted like him and with him, as Jesus said of the adulterer fantasist. They have gone to hell like the rich man rather than to Abraham’s bosom after a lifetime of crumbs.

    Yet, Chukwudumeme Onwuamadike brought a movie to Nigerian homes. They imagined the dollars and what and who it could buy. The palace and the shimmering amenities, the luxury cars. They also. He was a sort of Pablo Escobar, who walked out of a gunshot scene in South Africa, his scar not a sign of humiliation but hubris. He murdered by proxy, he manoeuvred, he robbed. He hired Nigerian soldiers and commanded his own. He graduated from drug baron to a baron of robbers, not merely to steal gold or money. He stole the source, the humans. Just like the Trans-Atlantic Trade when the west stole men and women. Humans are the most valuable targets.

    Not a few Nigerians became voyeurs of the monster. They dined with him, slept with him, rode with him. It was a sort of public hypocrisy. Many condemned him in public, but wondered why they were so poor. But it is not strange. We have always had Evans with us. We have always had them in our villages when Christmas erupted in festivities, or during wedding feasts, festivals, funerals, birthdays, house warming, etc.

    It was Evans, who splashed that stack of dollars. He stood in the middle of the dance floor, a bag of dollars in one hand. The other hand dipped inside and scooped out cash in rhythm to the music and the flattery of the musicians. He splashed the bride, bridegroom, birthday boy or girl, or the priest, or the … He was the one who organised the customised car to rival the other Evans to show the villagers the kingpin of prosperity. Evans got even with all those who had written him off for ever as nothing when he was a 15-year-old laggard.

    He owned that big house, installed the communal electricity, lifted the dirt road into a tarred wonder, he gave scholarship to the son of your neighbour now flying with first class at Princeton. We all know Evans. He was foolish then. Now he is the mine of wisdom. Like Pierre in Tolstoy’s classic, War and Peace. Everyone derided him as a village bumpkin until they worshipped his every word. His plum of an inheritance had transformed him.

    So, Evans was only a criminal because he was caught. He was foolish enough to slide into a trap. If you examine him properly, he could pass for a big politician today. He operated in the tradition of what many know as the political machine. He knew the enemy. He had his own intelligence squad. Just as a politician skulks the opposition, he compiles dossiers of the comings and goings of the foe. He knows when and how to strike. When he is winning, he hits the jugular. To the politician, he has won the election.

    He celebrates in grand style, whether he wins in the state house of assembly or senate or governor, or even local government. The party is raunchy with wine and women and salty with triumphal rhetoric. Mouths froth, waists wiggle, the air ripples with lyrics of the damned. They have won. The public dam, that is the treasury, bursts open.

    Look at Evans’ architecture. He has two parallel groups, oblivious of each other. Like a forked road that converge somewhere in the horizon. It is like the grandmaster of the famous comic, who pitted one group against another. He formed them. They answered to him. They fulfilled his goal. One could go east, the other west, but they meet in Evans. He also controls technology. The midgets, another source of mass envy. No one knew his numbers.

    The only pain to such people is that they are lonely. Just like some of our politicians, their families stay abroad. The wives and children. As for education, they school only in England, Canada and the United States. Evans knew that. His family first darted to Ghana, and then to Canada. Distance is their sanctuary. Any blood splash will not cross but dissolve in the Atlantic. If anyone dies, it rather should be them. They are the family hero. After all, the Bible says he who cannot provide for the family is worse than the infidel. Better infidel in public and holy at home.

    When he loses, he goes to court. Now Evans’s lawyer has said that most of the story about his client are false. So there. Senatorial or governor candidate goes to the tribunal. Evans feels he has been rigged, so he is headed to the chamber of wigged men.

    He got money with his gun. Politicians fritter away theirs through the pen. The politicians deny any bad doing. Evans denies any bank doings. But we must thank providence that Evans got caught. He had all the equipment and amenity of the politician. He probably was in an apprenticeship to run for an office. Probably stalking and skulking. He is an almost governor, senator, member of the house of representatives.

    If he became a governor or senator, etc, he might quote Prophet Isaiah: “although you have been forsaken and hated, so that no man went through you, I will make you an eternal excellency, a joy of many generations.” Like Jesus, he would stand on a rostrum and say, today the scriptures have fulfilled before your eyes.

    This Evans did not make it that higher. But how many have escaped and now preside over our laws and lives.

  • Bad marriage

    Bad marriage

    I have been waiting for a while to witness a colloquium on Biafra by Biafrans for Biafrans. From such a fest of loyalists, I expected to hear each of them define the word for themselves and the world. But such a thing would never happen because it would ignite a dynamic no Biafran or Nigerian, for that matter, desires.

    They will hit a deadlock. One man’s Biafra may be the next woman’s nightmare. For a few people, Biafra may mean Biaxit, or exit from noisome Nigeria. To others, it means simply an Igbo identity, which connotes tribal pride, music and dance, cuisine and couture, romance and rites. It is anaemic until stirred, like old wine lost in a decanter.

    To yet another set of people, Biafra simply signifies rebellion, a Pavlovian reflex to defend an identity wherever the matter arises. It could even mean flicking out a knife or toting a gun. It bears no special political register or temperament, but an instinctive assertion of a cultural forte.

    Yet for another set, it is rebellion all right but one shorn of a separatist impulse. These are the forces for restructuring, who loathe secession but whose emotions align with the Nnamdi Kanu’s.

    Part of the problem is that Biafra is not an Igbo word. Unlike similar agitations, like The Kanaks of New Caledonia or Party Quebecois of Canada, Biafra draws its name from a bight that abuts on the Atlantic Ocean. From merely a bight, Biafra evokes a blight of identity. If it were an Igbo word, its meaning might be specific. Yet, there is nothing more specific than the fact that, in its earliest incarnation, it meant secession. Ojukwu evoked his people’s pride, a pride that led to a theatre where they fought and died. But the idea now exhales an ambiguous life.

    If it failed then, it has undergone metamorphosis. Some will say metastasis. But whatever form it takes depends on the individual Igbo man’s perception of Nigeria today. So, when Nnamdi Kanu and his other cohorts blare out imprecations about Nigeria, the implications are sometimes lost on us. Is he speaking to the secessionist or the “restructurer”? After any deconstruction, we shall arrive at these two main divides in Igboland. The secessionist, who wants to go. The restructurer, who would stay but in an ambience that affirms his rights.

    This kaleidoscope of personas does not come up on the burner of national discourse, or Igbo dialogue. Biafra has been slammed into one bracket: exit from Nigeria. We have to understand this if any progress will furnish our engagement with the southeast.

    So, when Acting President Yemi Osinbajo gathered elders in Aso Rock, which Biafra did the invitees stand for. The assumption was that they stood against Biafra, and that the elders held a clue to the quelling of the distemper. The point, though, is that the Igbo elite needs to winnow the disquiet and identify the various groups and see how a meeting of minds can help create a semblance of consensus. Or if a consensus is not possible, we need to know what proportion of the Igbo reject any dialogue.

    What we see now is a sort of schizophrenia. Now for Biaxit, now for Nigeria. But no true dialogue is going on. During the American revolution, Benjamin Franklin said, “the revolution is in the hearts and minds of the American people.” Yet, only a third of Americans wanted to leave. But it was strong enough to edge out England. During the country’s civil war about a century later, the south fought to secede because of slavery. Some of them were also fighting for a cultural identity, the southern idiosyncrasy, the way they speak, eat, love, die and play. The majority did not want war.

    This is a serious matter. Those Igbo leaders are clearly afraid of the maelstrom in the east. They are afraid to speak truth to the kanus while the false demagogue rails at his fellow Igbo who worship in a Yoruba man’s church. He speaks about war. He peddles hate and hate words. He asserts Igbo identity only at the expense of others. He “others” the others. Like Jean Paul Sartre, he believes “hell is other people.”

    Yet the governors and political elite pivot towards decency of language and a serenity of vision. These people cannot speak to the turbulent hordes within their region. This tension creates a paralysis for all of us. It is even a bad omen because it allows the reptile in the sewer to morph into a monster. Then it might be too late.

    Few remember that the Middle East of today, with such countries as Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, etc were part of the Ottoman Empire. They roiled quietly, sometimes violently, against the state. The empire swaggered, especially under Kemal Attaturk. But it staggered and fell at the end of the First World War. The Allies broke it under the League of Nations, and the countries secured their independence.

    We cannot pretend to keep the peace when there is genuine tension. Those calling for secession know that the federation is a fraud, and it needs urgent work. We cannot solve it with the fragile plasters of the rhetoric of reconciliation.

    So what is clear is that Biafra suffers from an identity crisis. Until that is resolved, we shall go giddy in a circle. Some of this problem lies in the hypocrisy of the Igbo elite. They know this identity tension, they merely keep quiet. A professor like Ben Nwabueze receives Kanu and tries peevishly to recast him as a restructurer rather than a treasonous bumbling.

    They see Kanu go along like the Shakespearean music as the food of love. But they are in thrall while the country “sicken and so die.” What we have is a bad marriage in the east. The sort in which the Biaxiteers and the restructurers are cohabiting as though divorce is remote.  In Twelfth Night, the clown Feste quips, “Many a good hanging prevents a bad marriage.”

    Unless the bad spirit is hanged, the bad marriage will lead to a divorce action whose consequence no one can predict. In the play, there were a number of comedy of errors as people fall in love with the wrong people until the fairest of all finds out she is in love with a woman disguised as a man.

    To hang the bad spirit, a dialogue, open and urgent, is imperative. Or else, they will encourage the other treason peddlers among Arewa youth to issue their own versions of instability. The last time such tension happened, a pogrom burned in the north with many Igbo and southern minorities wiped out. Biafra followed.

    This is the time to cut through the disguises. We should know who stands for what. The Presidency must serve as catalyst in this. We cannot continue as liars to ourselves.

  • Wike’s weak position

    Wike’s weak position

    His language is vulgar. His mien is coarse and brutish. His ambience invokes violence. His name is Nyesom Wike, and, believe it or not, he is a governor. When he is not lying about Rivers State money in the posh apartment in Victoria Island and even swearing before the Almighty in church, he is denying his voice in a filthy conversation with an electoral officer. The best way to approach him is to see him as a burst of humour in an increasingly humourless country.

    Recently, he sided with a law that supports a military throwback. The law even supports well-heeled company against his own people. It’s the NLNG  law that grants the gas firm a holiday from paying three percent of its N500 billion yearly profit to help with development in the region.

    The army, with its pecuniary interest, forbade NLNG from paying that relatively small sum. Wike stands against his country and his people. He railed at those who want NLNG to pay. Some say he would have thought otherwise if Jonathan were in office today.

    The man gave no reason of any intellectual quality. In his boorish way, he roared against reason, even though the House of representatives has already weighed in on the side of the people and wants NLNG to pay.

    NLNG says it is not oil-producing. A cop-out indeed. You want to eat where you did not sow. So it wants to enjoy a tax-free life while others who did the yeoman’s job are paying. It’s like saying I cooked the soup, but I should not be held responsible for how the onions entered the kitchen. That’s too complicated for a Wike. And I understand why.

  • Biaxit

    Biaxit

    If we were to follow history, it will be easy to dismiss Nnamdi Kanu, Ben Nwabueze, Nwazuruike, as well as the other cohorts of MASSOB and IPOB. The reason is that they often fail. The secessionist ends in a riotous divorce. Free, proud, but broken.

    Southern Sudan reels in blood and bile. Eritrea stews in want and lies prostrate, often envious of its former cousins. In Europe, the remnants of old Yugoslavia are quiet, but sniff no greatness ahead. The Basque separatists in Spain are a shadow of their historic bluster. Scotland saw their dreams scuttled. It is now more difficult since the last elections. Once proud, it now limps.

    Those calling for Biaxit, or Igboxit, or eastxit, or eaxit, should better think again. They should be grateful that Nigeria has never come part. It is not only in the southeast but in every region that thanks should trump tanks of war.

    If Biafra were born today, the battle for the soul of the new country will eclipse in the face of new insular agitations. The Owerri area show resentment for Enugu’s proprietary hubris. Today, all of Igboland cannot agree on a new state.  Wawa will assume new and truculent meaning in Igbo lexicon.

    The frenzy to go over the border for business may steam up passions. The nostalgia for trading in Kano, lap up Lagos profits, sprout up high rises in Abuja will compound the absence of protein in a land-locked country. No access to the water through Port Harcourt, or meat through other south-south states will loom with the spectral skeletons of old Biafra. Immigration men and women in stolid visages will stand guard. If, that is, a Trumpian wall is not in the offing.

    Nor will it be easier in the southwest. The Yoruba, who would be heard rather than be herds, may even be more heady. In Ibadan alone, a battle for a new state of Ibadan state atrophies any prospect of brotherly meal of abula. Ditto in Ogun, and Osun and other parts of Yorubaland, including Lagos where the Awori babel jars aplenty.

    Since the Yoruba wars of the 19th century, the heart of Kaaro Ojire has shrunken from consensus. There is often no ‘us’ or a shadow of consent. What is sometime interpreted as principle or an assertion of independence is an excuse to launch selfish ambition or seek revenge. It has helped well in the context of Nigeria. The southwest has become the conscience of a frazzled hodgepodge called Nigeria. When it fails, all else fail.

    As for the south-south, the contention will be a world tragedy like that of the former Yugoslavia. The Urhobo may marry the Itsekiri but the politics may turn blood from drip to deep like the ocean. Ijaw will look askance at the others. Ogoni will want to rail against the Ikwere, and the many so-called minority will suddenly wake up with egos as large as the Atlantic Ocean.

    Of course, in the middle belt, Kogi is showing the slippery way. But were that region turned into a country, remember Kwara State, riven in parts that look at each other as parasites. Remember Benue between Tiv and Idoma. Plateau was a land of picturesque tranquillity. Now, suspicion has wracked it into a place of spontaneous barbarity.

    Up north, the Christians in Taraba invoke the Holy Spirit against the “unbelievers.” Ditto Adamawa. In Sothern Kaduna, where a call for a separate state has gone the way of all flesh, herdsmen and sporadic hordes raid in murderous glee and rape for spoils.

    We see the triumphalism of the 1804 Jihad of Uthman Dan Fodio will contend with the subordination of the Hausa. The Jihad made the Fulani the lords, a minority though they are over the Hausa. But all of that is not a factor in a Nigeria where there are many others to duel. The enemy of my friend is my enemy.

    In many microcosms, we see these tensions. In a small state like Edo, all the tendencies thrive, north versus south, big group against the smaller, Christian versus Muslim. Nigeria is a state of multifarious midgets with big egos. They have been kept in line under a big, sprawling umbrella of a federation.

    The issue of Biafra is still gaining traction in some parts of the east because it is now only an emotional matter. If it goes into an intellectual mode and debates light up, it may look like the story of Quebec in Canada. The yes voters began gradually to understand that being a north American island was going to give them a pride and a fall. If Biafrans start to understand that business will stunt their riches, their land will suffer human overload, and know that the Yoruba they love to hate so much is the reason to love to go back to Nigeria, and the Hausa they loathe loads them with a lot of patriotic raison detre, they will start to keep the Kanus and the gang in the lurch. Reason will mix with emotion. Biafra suddenly will become a castrated bull.

    If the United States calls itself a melting pot and Canada a mosaic, Nigeria is a web. All the strands exist like chaos but they are bound. Every family has an inter-ethnic link. An Itsekiri cannot forget the Yoruba tie, nor the Onitsha the Kogi link, nor the Hausa the Ogbomosho provenance, etc. So, those who tend to call for division should not forget many who do so want to pursue selfish agenda. They are opportunist careerists. It recalls what the novelist Walter Scott wrote, “what tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive.” The more they try to divide us, the larger the connectedness.

    The battle for federalism means all should be fair. We all know we run a skewed and ethnically rigged federalism, which makes it no federalism. We need to have a federalism where the small is no smaller than the biggest part of it. That means a south-south community that suffers from oil spill should not get 13 percent of its own gift without its permission. Federalism without democracy is hegemony. It is such matters we should bring on the front burner.

    The call for restructuring is a great call, but it is not our greatest drawback. It is a sense of suspicion and failure of high values like fairness and honesty. If we give every ethnic group its state, and very region its due, we shall still rail at each other because, at bottom, we still suspect each other. We need to cut through official hypocrisy, and say truth to ourselves and not try to use power of tribe over us. It is then that we shall be a true web and ignore poet Blake who wrote, “The bird a nest, the spider a web, men friendship.” We need a web of friendship, not of tribe.

    Or else, it will look like the story of the Osage Indians, as related in an important new book titled, The Killings of the Flower Moon by David Grann. They were a small group driven from place to place in the United States until they found a dry, craggy land for them to suffer and die in the 1920s. It turned out it was sitting on oil. They became per capita the richest people in the world. The U.S. government took the back seat while the Osage were systematically killed and eliminated in order to take the oil wealth from them, including through cynical marriages. The investigations of these tragedies led to the birth of the FBI. That is a travesty of federalism. It had no democratic content because the Osage people had no say in their own country. Federalism is about sharing, not parasitic.

    We need Nigeria, but we need it for all and not a few. But we cannot do it by following the path of the Kanus who point an anarchic alternative. We are better under a Nigeria. But we have to make it work as insiders, not as outsiders. That way, we can turn the web into wealth for all.