The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • 200 million plates

    200 million plates

    Some frown because he sports a wild and luxuriant beard, as though it were a crime to be devout and be a governor at the same time. The same people have applauded the bombshell of hair around Fidel Castro’s chin when he dared the world’s powers, enthroned a system and rallied a lowly people against capitalist interlopers. Castro’s beard was no believer of Christ or Allah. It is atheist and proclaims no god except the man who bore it.

    Some did not like his vocal ways. But being vocal was not the issue. They just did not want such a man to be bold.

    But Osun State Governor Rauf Aregbesola’s foes clutched to excuses as launching pads to assail. Men in the political class, ecclesiastical order and even some in the media, shut their eyes to virtue. They saw only errors and when they erred they lacked the humility to acknowledge him. Rather they have cloaked repentance with silence. I must admit that some of the contrition is also a factor of ignorance.

    Some of the ignorance arises from a puny media unwilling to balance familiar harangue with unfamiliar accolade. Some of the bad press began with salary deficit. The point has been made with as much authenticity as with malice that his government had what might be called an excess of zeal. It started with ambition and swallowed up project after project.

    Whether it was a mammoth education project of N30 billion or the construction of roads and bridges and drainages to end the vehicular burden of the Lagos- Ibadan Expressway, or whether it was the tablet, or opon imo, to simplify learning through technology, no one questioned him then. They actually saw the vision, which they praised in silence. There are others, including the social welfare programmes, the massive investment in small entrepreneurs. They came as O’Beef, for cattle. O’pig for piggeries, or O’honey for honey.

    All of these were intended to raise the profile of a so-called backwoods state with knowledge and prosperity. But he did not anticipate, like many others, the dip in revenue after the fall of the naira. It hit the pocket books and the projects. But several months of salary arears became a rallying point.

    Aregbesola became the poster man of financial imprudence. A few months after, it became clear that it was not Osun alone. Even at the time his story was trending, Imo State crawled under the same deficit. More states, including the oil-rich ones, began to unveil their books as workers groaned from months without pay.

    But Aregbesola was not to be forgiven. Those governors who could not pay their salaries piled on with media frenzy and political gamesmanship to pillory him. The game was still unknown to many then. With the fall of Ekiti State, they wanted Osun out of his hands.

    He prevailed with a clear victory in his return election. The people were more in touch with him than his assailants. That rattled his foes with deeper malice. But they have been unable to shake him out of his seat. Meanwhile, while other states have yet to get to the bottom of their salary issues, Ogbeni has hunkered down to business.

    Today, he has reached a deal with the workers, and some of this news is known only under the bushel. How many of his detractors know that the majority of Osun workers have been paid their full salaries to date. Workers from grade level 01 to 07, have received their full salaries up till May. The deal was to pay those from levels 08 to 10 the package of 75 percent of their salaries. They have received that till date. Those above that level have had 50 percent.

    In spite of this, they do not include the fact that cost overrun of government still goes on. This year, Osun has received only N2 billion in federal allocation, and its pay load in a month will gulp nearly all of it. Few have asked the question: how has he been able to do it?

    This is the other side of the story. He has combined other forms of budget support, including internally generated revenue. If he has been accused of recklessness in the past for not anticipating revenue shortfall, no one has had time to wonder how he has done it now, even if they are too proud to praise. If he was footloose in the past, he is rooted now.

    In spite of this, one of the great welfare work of this generation is flourishing nonstop on his watch. No other state comes close. His school feeding programme, that is. It is a project that defied low funds availability. As of last December, over 200 million plates of food had been served to the school children. This is a gift for a generation. I recall, as a kid in Methodist Primary School, Oke-Ado, Ibadan, how we looked forward to our meals and how they nourished our learning.

    At a young age, especially in an impoverished country such as ours, school feeding may be their main source of daily nourishment. It plants the seed for future prosperity by breeding wards with healthy brains.

    In infrastructure, few know that the financial crisis did not stop work. Over 800 kilometres of roads with drainages have been completed. He is still working on the Orile Owu-Ijebu Igbo road, Omoluabi Motorway that spans Gbogan and Akoda, Os ogbo Old Garage to Ilaodo as well as Oba Adesoji Highway.

    There is more, but it is better for people to go and see. Sometimes leaders wait for history to vindicate them. But in such cases, it indicts the age for closing their eyes for historians to see. In the United States history, one of the great victims of such blindness was Harry Truman, who some historians have elevated from inept to near great. Because of the colour and swagger of John Kennedy, he is often overrated. They tend to judge him by what he might have achieved than what he actually accomplished. History, after all, is no impartial arbiter.

    Ogbeni’s story is still evolving as governor for the next 500 days.

  • A phony intellectual

    A phony intellectual

    When a man has lived a long life, and has attained the age of 80, you don’t expect to agree with all he has said or done. His human foibles should not be allowed to overshadow his moments of light. But some indiscretions can stand out, though, and may haunt his hoary journey to the end. Professor Ben Nwabueze has often affected to be an intellectual, and at times, he has shown himself one. He is a constitutional lawyer by some standards. He is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, although not many agree with the judgement of those who dole out the SANs these days.

    Recently though, Nwabueze associated with Nnamdi Kanu of IPOB, and called him a great Igbo man. Hear him: “Today is one of the greatest days of my life, meeting you.”

    But he lacked the courage to say the man is calling for Biafra. This is a fork-tongued intellectual licking two soups at the same time. He says, the Biafran advocate is not fighting for “secession but for regional autonomy.” May I ask the learned prof what Biafra means?

    Did we not fight a war over that? Has Kanu not in many ways and on many platforms called unequivocally for Biafra. Is the professor lost in some sort of octogenarian fancy, the delusion of age? Is associating with Kanu not a cowardly way of accepting Biafra without the liver to say it in plain language?

    In Jonathan’s time, he was cosy with the inept Azikiwe, visiting him at Aso Rock and offering him advice. How many times did he complain when Jonathan accommodated his kinsmen. He did not caution his kinsmen from a pig’s embrace of a man who conned the Igbos by giving them elite positions but did nothing concrete in terms of infrastructure and other deliverables of government. This is the way of hypocrisy, not of an intellectual. If his intellectualism is about embracing a secessionist, he has made himself a friend of an enemy of our sovereignty. He has led a group called Patriots. He is the least qualified for that position, except if he agrees he is not a Nigerian patriot. To embrace Kanu would make him an impostor.

  • How not to make a hero

    How not to make a hero

    In demeanour, he does not stoke a crowd. His rhetoric, even when on fire, does not burn down a leaf. He walks even with dignity, like one accustomed to the deference of crowds. He calls himself a Jew, in the pious not in the symbolic terms that accommodates modern Christians. Bespectacled, and sometimes with a walking stick and a fan, he conveys the carriage of an elder even though he is in his middle years.

    When he addresses a crowd, Nnamdi Kanu comes away more as a balm than an argument. Maybe that is why he is dangerous. Men do not have to carry the fierce visage and towering diction of an Odumegwu Ojukwu to send shudder to a ruling elite. After all, Awo had no gift of the garb in the 1960’s when he soared in the courts and in rallies. The soft-spoken swagger of the Ikenne denizen piqued the men of power enough to consign him to the confines of solitude. The power of suggestion sometimes comes in the conviction of kings than in the laws of the monarchy. De Gaulle was no orator. Neither was Washington. Pol Pot had a silky voice.

    Whether we like it or not, we have made Nnamdi Kanu into a substance, from being a mere agitator in the shadows. He no longer is a poison-free serpent lurking in the hedges of Nigerian unity. His neck sprouts out, his tongue forked, venom drips. He has become more than a shadow of a titan, if a budding one.

    It was not his doing. During the Goodluck Jonathan years, we could have called him a thing without a sting. If you thought so, you no longer think so after what happened in the southeast about a week ago. IPOB called the indigenous people of Biafra to stay home. Not since June 12, when a certain Ubani skulked the government of the day, had a people shrunken out of daylight. Some say it was out of the fear of punishment. Others counter that it was an act of conscientious solidarity. Whatever it was, Igbos abandoned profits for cause. The last time they started it, 30 months of gunshots, and bombs, and fratricidal dislocations turned Nigeria into a hump of a nation. About a week ago, the verve of Onitsha market, the cacophony of Owerri streets, the hum of Umuahia offices paid homage with their silences to the subversion of a former nonstarter.

    He might have been nothing, if the Igbo elite were not compelled, including the erudite Pat Utomi, to ask the federal government to release the man. He was a subvert, an anarchist even, a lawless, demoniac spirit in the federation. But the nation had no right to subvert his rights in the pursuit of the purity of right in the country. We made him a hero by undermining a straightforward adherence to our own law. If we wanted to prosecute him, it meant we had the law on our side. But if we overturned that law, we had no superior moral fibre or constitutional claim. We made Kanu our equal in impunity.

    So, while he was in detention, we lionised him. We made him a rebel with a cause, and he became caustic by the hour. His people cried for him, wielded sticks and machetes for him, died for him. If that is not how a cause grows into myth, how else?

    Even a certain story gained momentum when his handshake reportedly healed somebody of stomach ache. Is that not how legends are made? In historical tales, we read of men who die as gods. In our age of celebrity, we are like the stories of the Greek myths where stalwarts live as gods. If Ogun, Oya, Sango, all died into deity, we are not so patient. In our lifetime, some Nigerians saw Awo in the moon. Black Scorpion, who stung Biafra many a time vanished in the battlefield. In the slavery era, a black man equated Abraham Lincoln with Jesus, saying “he walk the earth like de Lord.” French philosopher Montaigne mused in one of his seminal essays why the greatest general of all time had a reputation of giving off a scent while he sprinkled no oil on his body. He was, by nature, a scented genius. So lofty was Alexander the Great that he did not need a “cologne” to please the nostrils.

    Little anoints Kanu as a force more than the court’s decision to grant him bail. Why is Sambo Dasuki still sulking behind bars? Why is the Shiite leader Ibrahim El Zakzaky not out on Zaria alleys? They were three whom the federal government have locked up against their rights. Forget the farce of conditions that the judge gave Kanu. It was an act to save the faces of a besieged judiciary. It was also to bow to the pressure of the streets and turbulence of media onslaughts. Kanu has become a hot piece of yam we must either eat or leave on the plate.

    He might not have been a gentleman. He might not have been one of the men to stand up to the creme-de-la-creme of the Nigerian society. But we have, by our own fear of him, made him an icon of sorts. When Buhari won the election and became president, he looked at the man with contempt. It was naïve, and he must take responsibility for alienating a people he should have clasped into his bosom, the same way the DSS has given his Katsina home the divine right to gulp the lion’s share of recruits into the intelligence agency. Nothing but limp logic has tried to explain away that lopsided extravaganza.

    Rebels are not always for good causes even when they ride populist support. U.S. confederate general Robert Lee was described as “legend incarnate” and a gentleman. He led forces to support what he and his cohorts called state’s rights. But it was a right to uphold slavery in a society that described blacks as a fraction of the human soul. Some top southern politicians still echo that toxic euphemism. Even Reagan roared his support for state’s rights. Trump is the modern-day champion.

    The rebirth of Biafran anger must be traced to our habitual contempt to solve our crisis. We keep hopping from crisis to another, hoping they will just go away. Yakubu Gowon said there were no winners or losers. The Igbo believe they have been treated as losers, a cry that was almost non-existent when Jonathan, who called himself Ebele, garlanded them with choice positions. The Igbo caulked voices of dissent. They felt part of the governing elite. A Kanu would have been anathema then. He is an item today because Buhari made him.

    How Buhari handled Kanu and the Biafran uproar is an example of how not to make a hero, especially in the aftermath of the relative quieting of Niger Delta militancy.

  • City on a hill

    City on a hill

    A tussle is in the air in Ibadan, although much of the nation is not paying attention. Oyo State Governor Abiola Ajimobi has set up a committee to look into how the Olu of Ibadan is elected. Two members of the Olu’s council have risen in protest. They are joined by Rashidi Adewolu Ladoja, the hoary upstart and serial loser.

    Ajimobi wants the committee to review the formula where only old men emerge as Olu, and look for modern ways to make younger people. A system where men in their 80’s or older want to be kings rids a society of the contribution of their vital years.

    Ajimobi is calling for merit to upend age. “When I was old,” said the Chinese proverb, “I did not have the strength.” The governor wants a throne where kings brim with energy and wisdom, whose orders do not sound like whimper, who do not walk as though they limp.

    The irony is that Ibadan is a product of talent, not entitlement. It was a repository of the best, fleeing other towns and kingdoms. The city, built on a hill, became the forte of military ardour and strategic elan. It became a progressive bastion, a tradition that we cantrace in Yorubaland from Ogunmola to Awolowo.

    That is what Ajimobi wants to recreate. A better and more vital past. Not the past of 1957 where gerontocrats reign. It is the same town where, as the governor noted, the big names could not raise enough money to build a befitting palace. It seems some of the town’s bigwigs hark back to a wrong Ibadan past. A past of dilapidated palace tenanting an old and expiring king. Ajimobi is attempting another paradox: a revolution in a palace, if not of a palace.  He wants Ibadan to return as the city on a hill.

  • Wart is in a name

    Last week at the Gold Lecture in honour of fiery nationalist Herbert Macaulay, an irony pervaded the hall at the Lagos Country Club. Both his names were English, but no one stood for the indigene better than the foreign-named nationalist. The guest lecturer, Ambassador Dapo Fafowora, who gave us a riveting snapshot biography of the icon, asked that the Glover Memorial Hall be renamed after Macaulay.

    As the emcee, I said it was time to decolonise our streets. Glover, as Fafowora related, bombarded his way into Lagos. I said to rename the hall after Macaulay was a counter-warfare to earn us a victory and last laugh. But the same applies to Port Harcourt named after the colonial lord Harcourt. That city should be renamed, just as we should rename Lagos. Lagos can easily be called Eko. That is the real indigene fight.

    H.L. Mencken, the American writer, noted that American towns were named for “more humour than poetry.” Ours were not named for either. The foreign-named ones came as tyranny.

    In the days of Fashola, it was “Eko o ni baje o.” Now, under Ambode, it is “Itesiwaju Eko lo jewa logun.” I don’t see Lagos mentioned. In the hearts of the people, it is all Eko. The use of Eko obviates the Edo consciousness. Same should apply to Badagry. We have streets like Queens Drive, Bourdillon, etc. They pay homage to a time of colonial thraldom. I understand Carter Bridge because it came from friendship, not imposition.

    Lekki came from Lequi, a white man, who saw that place as a prison to lock up our people. The re-spelling of the name is an act of rebellion because we have corrupted it to own. Awo was locked up there.

    As we mark 50 years of Biafra, we forget that Biafra is not an Igbo word. It is a cartographic statement in a foreign tongue. It comes from the Bight of Biafra that represents not only exits, but also entrances. A bight is a curved coastline. The Bight of Biafra abuts on the Gulf of Guinea. The agitators have not claimed rhetoric independence from Biafra. Perhaps that is why the Biafran cause is still a difficult idea to articulate and accomplish.

    Nigeria’s name is rooted in River Niger, which is named for us by foreigners who said they discovered it before the farmers, fishermen, ferrymen and traders who thrived for centuries before Mongo Park was born.

    We need to rediscover ourselves as a people. One way is to call ourselves by our names.

  • Omo Eko

    Omo Eko

    They march, wield sticks, guns and machetes. Their bonfires spark with as much heat as their tongues. They defy law and order in order to define their homegrown law and order. They yell Ojukwu, swear by Biafra, assert independence and, with a streak of martyrdom, roar “death” to Nigeria.

    Some see them as rough-hewn, raw, ragtag, even among disaffected Igbo. Others regard them as the seed of a great revolutionary shoot. Many fear them as a throwback to a time of turmoil and butchery. The Nigerian elite, especially from the North, regard them as outlaws with treason in their souls.

    Few have seen the diamond in the rough. They are not like Ojukwu, an establishment soldier who rebelled, with well-honed accent and Oxford cadences. So, they think they are mere ragamuffins. But these men mark 50 years of Biafra, not because they want to leave or eye any prospect in that journey. They just want someone up there with empathy and power to call them to a table over Isi ewu or amala or tuwo masara. They want to coexist rather than exit, to be heard rather be herds at home. They don’t want parasites but partners, to toil as equals.

    We must look at the life of the ultimate Biafran to tell the story of the new-minted rebels. Emeka Ojukwu grew up an Omo Eko. By many accounts, his Yoruba was, if not as fluent, smoother than his native Igbo. He hugged and smooched the place, schooled in King’s College before he proceeded to Oxford. His father was no less a Lagosian. In commerce and culture, the father immersed himself in the city. He was a sort of Dangote of his day, owning, according to legend, half of Apapa.

    Emeka is also known, more in hushed circles, as the offspring of a Hausa-Fulani mother, a fact featured in my novel, My Name Is Okoro. His spoken Hausa was just as autochthonous as his Yoruba. Emeka loved Lagos. He was, in spirit, at one with the temper of the contraption called Nigeria. In a variegated pool of haters, he clasped the ethnic other in a fraternal warmth. He contained the Nigerian contradiction and multitudes in blood and soul.

    Yet, when crisis erupted in the 1960’s, history mocked not only us. It mocked the man it threw up. Ojukwu disdained Gowon. He was no superior officer. Yet, the northern establishment lofted Gowon above him as the supreme commander of the army. Ojukwu loathed Gowon before he fell out with Nigeria. His personal ambition meshed with the injustice with which Nigeria oppressed his Igbo folks.

    He rose to the occasion in rhetoric, with an exterior of rage and a charisma unmatched in all of the Eastern Region, or even Nigeria. Frederick Forsythe, no neutral in matters Ojukwu, compared him in stature and even temperament with some of the great soldier-statesmen in history, including Washington and Charles de Gaulle.

    When the war started, however, the Omo Eko could not conceal his ferment. First, we may say, he was not a good general. He had Nigeria in a corner when his army roared out of the East. But he did not head straight to Lagos. He probably was like Mark Anthony of Ancient Rome.

    Anthony, like Ojukwu, was buff, athletic, of royal bearing, confident, a paragon of the lady’s fantasy. But Ojukwu, like his Roman counterpart, was a failure as a general. He wore his army thin, roaming and riding roughshod in the Midwest, while his Nigerian counterpart still regarded him as a police action. If his army rumbled forth to Lagos, it might have been a walkover. But he dithered until the federal troops coalesced and formed a redoubtable force to repulse him at Ore. Mark Anthony did not want to attack Egypt because he loved a woman, Cleopatra, a femme fatale, who charmed him into suicide. Ojukwu’s Cleopatra during the war was Lagos, or Nigeria. If his project was Biafra, he already had it. He only needed to defend it. Rather he wanted to decapitate Gowon, and win Lagos. He would then become the head of state? That would make his Biafra a soap bubble.

    So, while many Igbo soldiers were fighting ravenously for Biafra, Ojukwu was a leader, but not a true believer or convert. A tender Nigeria coiled covert in his loins. This was not a fact he could admit to himself, even if he asked himself. Perhaps he was a great general, but not against his femme fatale, Nigeria. Anthony craved Egypt with its mammoth resources. He knew he loved Cleopatra. In Shakespeare’s rendering, Anthony and Cleopatra, Anthony is besotted by the fatal charms of his captor. So, he says, “Kingdoms are clay, our dungy earth alike feeds beast as man.” Biafra became his clay. But before Anthony says that, he declares, as Ojukwu might have said of Nigeria without hearing himself: “Here is my space.”

    It is for that space that IPOB and MASSOB clamour as they nudge the polity. They see themselves as Ojukwu reborn. In the Napoleonic era, young men were enthralled by the exploits of the “little general.” They wanted to be little Napoleons. They wanted to be ordinary people who rose to significance, what German philosopher Nietzsche calls the superman. In his nihilistic classic, Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s character Raskolnikov confesses that he wants to be a Napoleon. He represented the youth of the day.

    So are the youth of IPOB and MASSOB. They want Nigeria. They love Nigeria. They just want Nigeria to return that passion. Violence is not the way to do it. That, tragically, seems what they know.

    Ojukwu came back to Nigeria not to join a rebel party or even an anti-establishment one. He became an NPN partisan, calling for “a new direction” in the East. He spent most of the rest of his life in Lagos. If Lagos marks 50, this year also marks 50 years since Ojukwu was separated from his love: Lagos.

     

  • Contents and malcontents

    Contents and malcontents

    Okonkwo and his fellow villagers in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart confront a dilemma. Either they uphold their sovereign dignity or allow the white man flush them out. Pride pitted itself against surrender, and Okonkwo embodied a self-esteem that some critics call hubris. With the impulse of a lion, he belches out: “If a man comes into my hut and defecates on the floor, what do I do? Do I shut my eyes?”

    That sentiment has haunted Nigeria since the British set foot on Nigerian soil centuries ago. It led to the rise and fall of kingdoms, internecine intrigues, the collapse of rites and rituals, the fall of warriors and rise of quislings. It gave birth to inferiority complex, the rise of nationalism, the fissures of lore and customs. Ernest Ikoli, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Awo, et al made their marks by rejecting to be marked down by foreign overlords.

    Over half a century after, the issue of national self-assertion against the foreign interloper gnaws us with the rabid rapacity of a kitchen rat. One of such insistent presences is the work of the multinationals, especially those in the oil field. The decision to clean up the Ogoni area is a reaction to the depredations of the leeches. They fatten and leave us poor, our waters and farms and livelihoods ruined with grime and disease. When they leave, we clean up the mess. They are making more mess. Partly because we have failed as a nation to own our oil as we cannot own our country.

    An instance is the story that happened a few weeks ago when PENGASSAN and NUPENG picketed the well-known behemoth called GE. They had secured a court ruling to suffocate a local company known as ARCO, in spite of agreements that the Labour Minister Chris Ngige and other mainstays of the oil company, including NNPC, were witnesses.

    The agreement was simple. If GE and its co-traveller, AGIP, worked to ease ARCO out of a deal, at least they should pay the Nigerian workers their due for the years they worked. GE has balked on the agreement. That explained why the two unions picketed in Lagos and Port Harcourt.

    There are many injustices in this tale. The Nigerian workers’ due amounts to a paltry $1.2 million as against close to the $90 million deal they ferreted out of our soil to edge out ARCO, even though ARCO did bid for the same deal with $37 million offer.

    In this age where we seek local content for our businesses in the oil sector, even our courts and local business elite work together to create malcontents. The point, though, is that the malcontents are the winners. They cavil at the rules and turn the institutions in their favour. To be a malcontent in Nigeria, you soil the content first, and get the law to anoint your action.

    In that way how can we have great industrialists who are home-grown. In Nigeria today, the only true industrialist is Aliko Dangote. In cement, food, and now refinery and petrochemicals, Dangote is domesticating prosperity. Other players are Lilliputians. The big ones come from outside. If it is capitalism we want, we must understand that it has a big appetite, and to generate it you call in local talent. That accounted for the Local Content Act of 2010. But it has been feat in the breach.

    The United States big names like Ford, Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, et al, galvanised an economy into the engine room of world commerce. They worked with rules and with earnest energy and innovation.

    The suffocation of ARCO leaves a sour note on a patriot’s mouth. Especially if we realise that ARCO saved the business for GE when the company’s staff fled the Niger Delta when militants kidnapped foreign workers.

    But the tragedy began in the beginning when Arco was hired as partner with a foreign firm Nuovo Pignone to maintain the OBOB/ Ebocha/ Kwale Agip plants in the Niger Delta. GE bought Nuovo and degraded ARCO from a partner in the deal to a sub-contractor. ARCO tagged along, helplessly. After GE staff fled the project from militants, ARCO played hero and maintained the plants.

    For gratitude, GE not only degraded Arco as sub-contractor, poached 19 of their key staff and plotted the local firm’s removal as part of the deal. When the contract expired, GE worked with a firm top-heavy with foreigners bid for among over 30 firms for contract renewal. Agip and GE took Plantgeria that scored 6.05 as against 8.1 by ARCO in the official assessment.

    The Nigerian courts ruled against ARCO in its challenge of the selection process. In spite of winning, GE fails to the 150 workers. These same 150 refused to work for GE’s Plantgeria. They don’t want to be wage slaves. So, GE ferried staff from Europe.

    With such institutional surrender, we cannot grow. We import oil. We even now import services we have here at home. It makes ARCO a metaphor for local firms who suffer quietly. But ARCO’s fight for its 150 workers recalls the Greek myth of Prometheus who saves mortals by gifting them with fire. Zeus is angry because it gives mortals power and independence. Just as ARCO stands for the nurture of local enterprise. This story is dramatised in Aeschylus’ play, Prometheus Bound. Though bound by foreign firms and conniving locals, ARCO and its workers are, as the playwright puts it, “standing upright, unsleeping, never bowed in rest.”

    Foreign firms have the right to do business here. But not the right to undo us.

     

    Ride on, Dino

    Senate upstart Dino Melaye titles his book, Antidotes for Corruption. What is for doing in that title? For means “in support of.” So, the senator was giving us a Freudian slip. He is saying, by that title, that the book was written in irony in support of corruption. Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki, take note as you go to court.

    The title then is, “Antidote in support of Corruption”. Nobel laureate Samuel Becket invented the phrase Risus Purus, meaning “a laugh laughing at itself.” Was Melaye not laughing at himself? Ride on, Dino.

     

  • A Lagos original

    A Lagos original

    At the weekend when I rode the Abule-Egba bridge, I said to myself, “here originality of thinking meets fortitude.” To think, first you must be bold. If you had travelled that intersection a few years ago, you would deny it is the same place. Anarchy has given way to ease. Technology theorists call it disruption. The economist Schumpeter wrote about “creative destruction.” You bring it down, rebuild it, so others may ask, am I displaced or something is replaced, or am I dreaming? Shakespeare’s Imogen wakes from sleep and says, famously, “I hope I dream.” It is the spirit of Lagos that alpha Governor Akinwunmi Ambode clinched there and in Ajah.

    In that same spirit, I think of another Lagos original, Herbert Macaulay. The fiery nationalist whose fervour for justice and sovereignty was also born in Lagos. His name signposted the irony of the struggle against colonialism. As I noted in my poem, Scented Offal, “He was twined into a twinsoul/ He spoke their language but forswore their tongue/ he wore their suits to shed their skin/Sometimes he loved their skein to uphold his skin.”

    He was the precursor of Zik, Awo, and others who have turned the city into Nigeria’s pre-eminent place. In his honour, a lecture will hold on Thursday, May 25, at the Lagos Country Club, Ikeja. Another Lagos original and Honorary Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters, Ambassador Dapo Fafawora, will talk on “Herbert Macaulay and his relevance to the excellence of Lagos.”

    As Lagos turns 50, it deserves its originals – and excellence.

     

  • The letter storm

    The letter storm

    These days letters are going out of date. The post office has moved from the mainstay of communication to a dinosaur. So, we send emails, text messages, or bow to Donald Trump’s ultimate sharp shooter: the tweet.

    The past, as they say, never dies. So, last week, the letter roared back from the dead. It happened in two places. One in Nigeria, the other in the United States. In Nigeria, President Muhammadu Buhari scripted one to the National Assembly. Donald Trump fired his to James Comey, the director of the FBI and the man probing his possible collusion with Putin’s Russia.

    The one letter was a hiring, the other a firing. Each let off a storm. They were written in what many will call simple sentences. Everyone should understand them. But, as it turned out, the phrases spun into a cloud of ambiguity.

    Trump’s letter fired Comey apparently for his handling of the Hilary Clinton email scandal. But the author denied and said it was all about the Russia probe. In the letter, he said he fired Comey on the advice of the attorney general. But when responding to questions, he said the counsels counted for little. His press corps agreed that the bottom line was that he fired the FBI chief.

    Here at home, Buhari’s letter referred to the relevant portion of the constitution that makes Yemi Osinbajo acting president. But fire gutted out of the phrase that the “Vice-President will coordinate the activities of the government.”

    The word coordinate, according to critics, belonged to a lower tier of authority. An acting president leads or heads, not coordinates, they would say. The storm roared into silence after Bukola “Eleyinmi” Saraki intervened. But that did not end the chatter around the country.

    Why did it generate so much brouhaha? Does a leader not coordinate? Of course, a leader does. But coordinate is not usually the term deployed for a leader. A leader leads, heads, is a visionary, orders, etc. Those are muscular words, indicating a man in the arena.

    But the storm came because language is never simple or difficult. It depends on context and sometimes the audience, or the utterer.

    The Buhari letter sparked predators on both sides of a divide. The divide predated the letter. Critics were miffed when he degraded from office to home to sign files. He was absent-in-chief at FEC meetings and became holy-in-chief at Friday prayers. Even that became epileptic.

    Suspicions pervaded certain quarters that his “kitchen cabinet” had corralled him. They wanted him around to do little so long as they wielded power. His absence meant their impotence. So, when the letter was unveiled, critics saw the hands of the cabal. They saw an attempt to cripple Osinbajo, to hem him in as vice-president.

    Were they right? They might and they might not be. If the president did not write it, at least he read it. The letter may have been written with all the best of intention. Maybe the president has seen himself as a sort of coordinator, working with others as peers in which he was first among equals. That is washed away by his martial bearing and feudal background, though. But could it be because he sees the word the way his critics don’t. After all, sections 148 and 149 refer to the word coordinate as the president’s function. That makes him home free. Some would say, well, it was not in the context of a handover from president to acting president.

    As the Senate president has indicated, though, the constitutional requirement sufficiently clears any fog of the intent. As easy as the sentence was, the epistolary flap will haunt Buhari. It will also irritate his supporters who think it is much ado about nothing.

    In the letter, we had the north and south divide, the PDP-APC divide, the cabal and the others divide. A stark wall disrupts understanding. A stark wall of words. Nor is it the first time such a thing would happen. Whether in politics, religion, or even literature, words have always sparked turbulence. It might be simple, it might even be clear in its rhetorical stumble, like Rosa Parks’ “My feet is tired.” Or when Mark Twain wrote that stories of his death were greatly exaggerated.

    The bombing of Hiroshima was attributed to misinterpretation of the Japanese leader’s response to the American threat. The Japanese leader had said he was considering Truman’s terms but it came away in translation as though they were ready for the Americans. When Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal…” it referred to only white men. Now, it’s everyone and gender. Even at that, Orwell’s Animal Farm still haunts, as some are “more equal than others.” Trump will agree. Ditto Marie Le Pen.

    Hence French writer Roland Barthes announces the “death of the author.”  According to him, “to give a text an author is to impose him on that text.” So, the writer is not writing but he or she is unknowingly a messenger of a group, a church, a tribe, a time, or consciousness. So, when a Jukun man writes, the Yoruba does not see it as the man’s views but his Jukun background.

    It eliminates the individual, everyone is in a sort of chain. While Barthes sets off debates, he has been engaged by such writers as Paul De Man, Barbara Johnson, Michel Foucault. Jacques Derrida lashed back with his “the Death of Roland Barthes.” When Soyinka flayed Achebe as guilty of “unrelieved competence,” he might have subliminally fallen into the Barthian spell.

    Sometimes it is a matter of the humble comma. When Jesus was at the stake, he told the repentant thief and fellow victim, “I say unto you today thou shall be with me in paradise.” Those who believe the thief went to heaven, place the comma before today and those who believe he did not put the comma after today. Or in analysing Becket’s play, Waiting For Godot, a critic described it as “nothing happens, twice.” If the comma is removed, it means something else. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, megalomaniac Malvolio misreads the author of a letter and makes himself a public fool for love.

    So, when Buhari wrote that letter, the meaning left his hands. As the author, did he die, or was it the mischief of others who were imposing their own backgrounds on the words? A new book, Do I Make Myself Clear, by Harold Evans has intervened in the capacity of language to mock us. Evans is regarded as the best editor ever, having shown his mettle as editor of the Times of London. He cavils at obfuscations, long introductory sentences, clichés, abused words, etc.

    What we know here is that words are not only not simple, they are never innocent. That is because we are a complicated people with lots of mischief.

  • At the IBB wedding

    At the IBB wedding

    It was not the array of private jets that bothers me as much as the fact that they gathered for the gap-toothed one. The one who dissolved June 12, suspended civil liberties, hounded critics, scuttled the economy, invented the fleeing Andrews, exploded talents, obliterated the word corruption from official use, and boasted after all that he was the evil genius.

    When the political and business elite gathered to pay homage to him at the wedding of his child, was it an endorsement of those woes and that blighted a chapter of our past? I find it difficult to believe that. Some of the guests were also his victims. It has to be that he was forgiven. IBB must be the luckiest man to have committed that much atrocity and enjoyed forgiveness without asking for it.

    The question is, is he grateful or appreciative of this? Or is it a wasted act of grace?

    The weekend in Minna also reinforces what I have noticed about society weddings. The parents show off. In such weddings, it is about the parents. In poor weddings, it is about the couple.