The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • These men died

    These men died

    Three deaths happened in the past week. Two of them were personal, and the third was deeply professional. The first and personal one is that of Pa Jacob Mosanya, a labour activist and perennial fan of In Touch and The Nation. He struck a friendship with me about five years ago, and was like a father figure. He visited my office a number of times and showed his great love of poetry, history and politics that engaged our conversations. He wrote a book a few years ago on Awoism and the Western Region. He worked for many years with the Railways and was a committed Nigerian. I will miss his intellectual brio, his mental dynamism and paternal advice. He died two days after his 88th birthday. He had wished to outlive his father, who also died at 88.

    The other death was a little personal. The poet Derek Walcott died at 87. He visited Nigeria a few years ago, and I met with him for a long interview about his works. He told me my interview with him was different because I was familiar with his works. Many interviewers around the world were not. I interrogated him. His great work, Omeros, was a modern epic that domesticated Homer’s Odyssey in the Caribbean. He won the Nobel Prize principally on its strength. My favourite line from his work has haunted me: “You will love again the stranger that is yourself.” Another line? “I met history but it didn’t recognise me”

    The more distant death was of Jimmy Breslin, 88, the cigar-chomping journalist, who dared establishment, baited scoundrels and supported the common man. He wrote in a sunny, acerbic style, and maintained a column for over 40 years. He was a major icon of pen, and won the Pulitzer prize. He has been imitated in vain by many columnists and served as example in journalism classes. I never forget his view of column writing, maybe because I share it: “Rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

  • Avenging angel

    Avenging angel

    What intrigues a thinking man over the furore over Ibrahim Magu is that the Senate and the DSS want him to be an angel. The paradox is that, by finding nothing but fuss, they seem to have made him one.

    The President has stumbled twice over a stone by nominating him twice before the Senate and meeting rejection twice. But the upper chamber thinks it has won twice. Saraki, the Eleyinmi, must have indulged a gloating laugh. The DSS boss must have done same. Both must have found some time to say congratulations.

    Magu, the imperious soldier of morality, may have sulked in silence. But what would Muhammadu Buhari of the imperfect health be doing. What did he say when the word reached him that his pick was scuttled again.  Did he call the DSS boss? Did he ask his men to call Saraki, the chief comedian of law makers?

    The EFCC storm is about purity. We want to cleanse the system, of moral worms and thieving scoundrels. We need one with a pesticide, or shall we say, moralsticide. One who can clean the sink. So, it follows that everyone who wants to decide who gets the job must have moral high ground, must not be a sleaze merchant. So, by rejecting Magu, the DSS has presented itself as the angel. Saraki and his men have shown themselves angels. Buhari who nominated him has done so because he is angelic, and Magu must also be an angel.

    We all know that it cannot be so, and therefore, we are all kidding. The constitution was not made by angels or for angels. Nigerian citizens are no angels. When the United States constitution was being crafted, the authors knew this. Hence the main writer, James Madison, wrote: “If men were angels, no government will be necessary.”

    So, when they formed what is still the best constitution on earth, the U.S. founding fathers like Washington, Hamilton and Jefferson knew they were glorifying an imperfect document, but one with ambition, a revolutionary fervour and credo for human progress and equality. They confessed that it was a project that would be improved along the way. That explains the several amendments on the documents over the centuries.

    Ordinarily, one would expect that a man who wants to guard our coffers against thieves would be an imperfect person with a reasonable level of probity. But the Senate wanted a perfect man, so did the DSS. The irony is that they had a “perfect” man, as we could find. They found no fault with him. They wanted to find an appearance of a fault.

    They said he had paid for his residence improperly. It was not only an official residence, but he never touched the finances in the transaction nor contacted the persons involved in the deal. Like most persons in such positions, they move into their residences as he did. There were other allegations, which included boarding a plane with potential target of his investigation.

    The attorney-general cleared him of the charges, after issuing him a query. So, from all these, it means the only man who said the truth was Magu. That makes the Senate and the DSS purveyors of untruth. The seeming angel here is Magu.

    So, what does that make of the President? Buhari comes off as a weak angel. He should be the angel of angels. But it seems the arch angel is incapable of defending a lesser angel.

    So, what is the matter with DSS? I say, nothing. The DSS is a security agency rooted in the security history of this country. When we became a democratic people, did we retailor the DSS into a democratic machine? If we did, we have failed. The men who took over the reins of office from the soldiers still had military mindsets. They included men like Obasanjo and Danjuma. Of late, we learned from IBB that generals formed a military wing of our democracy, and they have exercised great influence on the polity since 1999. Let’s not forget that the OBJ years boiled over with impunity, and how could the security agents not flow with the strong-arm sentiment of the times? It means that our soldiers have freed themselves from the stronghold of the trigger. They have not plucked themselves from the jackboot style of the military era when security reports were not about facts but about intent. So, reports were tendentious, inspired by bias rather than investigations.

    So, we ask a simple question? Did the DSS not know these charges when Magu was first appointed in acting capacity? Secondly, did the President not contact them before nominating and re-nominating the man to the shark waters of the Senate?

    If the President didn’t, then we run a naïve executive branch. If the President did, then we have a cravenly presidency. Both are fatal to the concept of the presidential system. Why then do we have Senate whose wheel horses are under investigation presiding over the moral competence of their investigators? If correction lies in the hand that committed wrong, to whom shall we complain? But what Saraki and company are doing is to try to become angelic by intimidating the angelic. Or what Shakespeare noted in his sonnet, “double penance, to correct correction.”

    Neither am I saying that Magu is without his fault. The major fault, ironically, does not come off as devilish to them. That is, Magu’s dalliance with impunity and contempt for the rule of law. The Senate and the DSS see nothing there.

    Now, let’s see what the President does about his power. The greater target of all this is what may pass as Buhari’s enduring legacy: the war against corruption. The presidency and DSS tango reminds one of the Reagan years when Secretary of State Al Haig defied his boss, and said: “I’m in charge here.” Reagan would not let another snatch his glory.

    Magu is still EFCC boss, and he would be so as long as the President wants. The law is clear on that. I support him there as the avenging angel. Let him continue to haunt Saraki and his men, who think they can edge him out and force the President to pick someone else. My fear Buhari lacks enough dan iska in his soul to bait the Senate. If he does, there will be no peace in the Saraki enclave and the corruption czar can act with substantive result.

  • Of Shettima and gratitude

    Of Shettima and gratitude

    In his hefty tome of historical writing, The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon identified a foul trait of human character. It was what he called the fear of gratitude. It is the sort in which a person is afraid to acknowledge that he actually was helped by another person. Such fear of gratitude is expressed by violence and subversion to the benefactor. He said some of the major figures in the fall of Rome could be attributed to this fear. I saw this recently as far away as North Korea, where the infantile despot killed his uncle and now his cousin.

    Here in Nigeria, the calm governor of Borno State, Kashim Shettima, scored twice last week. He showed that with the decline and ultimate fall of Boko Haram, he has started the work to rebuild the lives of his people. He launched an estate with 432 houses, 13 primary and junior secondary schools as well as a full furnished estate with 26 apartments, some of which are for medical doctors.

    He has shown that when the Jonathan administration was fluffing the war against terror, it was stopping him from the work for his people he is eagerly doing right now. He is doing other things, in health care, roads as well as education. The story is unfolding.

    He named the estate after Asiwaju Bola Tinubu as an act of gratitude at a time when his predecessor Ali Modu Sheriff wanted to derail him and his party men. This did not get much publicity and neither Tinubu nor Shettima boasted of their cooperation and triumph. They drove the Sheriff out of town. But Shettima could have brushed high moment aside and moved on. But he was not eaten by the fear of gratitude. He unfurled it, in his usual rhetorical elegance, in public. That was not just humility; it was from a man of self-assurance. Roman writer Tacitus once noted that “men are more likely to repay an injury than a benefit, because gratitude is a burden.” Not so for Shettima, whose work shows that he is comfortable in his own skin. Was it not Awo himself who noted wisely that to acknowledge greatness in others is, in itself, an act of greatness?

  • On the bus

    On the bus

    We called them bolekaja. It was a metaphor of violence, of youth in disarray and a city out of joint. They had no respect for the full-clothed species of humans. With singlet threadbare, seamed faces and arms bustling with muscles ready for the punch, they dared each other over a kobo or a passenger or sometimes over the winking eye of a wench.

    They are called the agbero when they are not bus conductors. This brand of young men determined where you went in town and how. They still do today. It tells you how long they have been around in Lagos, Nigeria’s iconic city.

    Everybody craved the buses who did not own a car, when they were not standing and sitting in the larger contraption called molue. The other word for it was danfo. They are called yellow buses today. We cannot move in Lagos without them. They crackle, roar and snort on the road. While they puff about with smoke, the buff boys in charge carry the air of the powerful. They know they are indispensable.

    The guy who wants quickly to reach the place of work. The happening girl clad in the best of today’s fashion. The market women. The boys and girls who have to meet an interview appointment. They all want to get there on time. They all know they want the yellow buses. They all know they have to choke into the casket-like interior.

    They have to bear the sweat dripping on their fine suits. The fart, the fire hazard, the fiery tempers of others. They have to bear the foul, alcohol-ridden breath of the lowlife beside them. They may breathe laboriously and live dangerously while pondering their fates on the bus, on seats huddled together, going where? Remember Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities? “They were all going to heaven; they were all going the other way… it was the winter of despair.”

    With the yellow buses, some of the passengers have, over the decades, gone mercifully to heaven. The others, well, have gone the other way.

    Fela did not live long enough to bring his muse to the service of the yellow bus, or the bus to the service of his muse. He captured the years of the molue, the 99 standing, the suffocation, the growl of the massive casket. Suffering and smiling.

    Now, the plan is to make it only smiling. The alpha Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, has proclaimed the time of mercy. No more carnage. No more sacrifice. Jesus said, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.” That would mean a certain sort of sacrifice though. The yellow buses must now go. In phases, that is.

    We have about 30,000 of the buses in Lagos. They carry a few at a time. Why not bring bigger, more comfy ones, and have drivers separated from the age of caverns? So, the alpha governor has announced that the Lagos State government is bringing new buses. They carry a sort of divine halo of mercy for those tied to years of yellow bus hell. They have air-conditioners. They charge their phones. They have spaces. Leg room is often a great asset to a traveller. For air traffic, the difference between first class and coach is leg room, more than any other merit. It is luxury for the masses.

    The governor is doing that with some doze of financial wizardry. While scandal has sullied not a few governors with the Paris Club windfall, Ambode is putting the money on the road. He would not join those who want to use it as private nest of vanity and profligacy. The money will eventually amount to N29 billion, and the government will add a billion to make it N30 billion as part of a N100 billion bond.

    This makes the initiative a public-private affair. The yellow bus owners are not going out of business. They will buy into the new arrangement, and that makes them stakeholders. No one thought that molue would be out of sight in Lagos.

    But for a big city like Lagos, the yellow buses are a blight. Big cities need mass transit, not a slow, plodding, convoy of raggedy, environmentally malignant, smoking, puffing contrivances. A city of over 20 million, and the fastest growing in the world, needs people to move in droves, not in trickles. This makes for freer highways. The yellow bus is no more urban. The new ones are urbane.

    The Stadium and kalo kalo

    First, we heard the good news, and then the bad. The National Stadium played host to the alpha governor and the sports minister, and there was a consensus of mind as to the need to revive that monument. Then the news came that some shadowy forces wanted to stop Lagos from doing a good thing. They wanted to turn it into what the Yoruba call kalo kalo, a sort of casino where they would lobby the lawmakers in Abuja to stymie it for a pot of rotten Naira.

    Is it part of the plot against Lagos, to make Nigeria’s indispensable state the pariah? For over a decade, In Touch has been relentless in the fight to give Lagos its due, and against those spineless men who would not let it be. Kaduna lapped up the stadium from the Federal Government without a stir. So did Nnamdi Azikiwe Stadium and U.J. Esuene. Why is Lagos a problem? The governor has already laid out plans to make the stadium play for profit. We don’t want it broken.

    I recall as a boy the first match, and how Yakubu Mambo struck the first goal on that green pitch from a pass delivered from the greatest player of all time, Haruna Ilerika. That is history. The governor wants to turn a monument back into joy and profit for all, and some people are looking only at profit. They probably want to kill the place and turn it into apartments that do nothing for the larger society, and make profit. They want to mangle it the way they have done some of our treasures.

    It is in that spirit the governor wants to turn National Theatre, another treasure, in a move to revive the arts and culture.

  • Tortoise at 80

    Tortoise at 80

    For those close to Okikiola, the pose fits him like a lion in repose. You saw him the other day on television, planted on a mat against the backdrop of tree roots. Beside him was his wife. School children, in striped uniforms, formed a semi-circle on the edge of the mat in front of the Owu chief.

    His head hidden in a two-lipped cap over his buba, Olusegun Obasanjo was reading from his new book, A World of Tortoise, to the wards. The pose on the floor was no showy humility. It was him in his earthy ease.

    Civilisation and officialdom compel the Owu chief to mount the luxury highs of upholstery, like the cushioned exotica of a presidential chair. He prefers the earth-bound comfort of a grassy floor, the smell of sand and moist air of herbs. He would rather read from a mat than on red carpet.

    Obasanjo has earned his plaudits as one of Nigeria’s men of instinct. A dignified rustic, a village ambassador. When last did you see him in an English suit, or even a tee shirt?

    But that is the life of the tortoise. A “bush” man is no country Bumpkin. At least not this one. He cons his environment with his apparent lack of finesse. Yet, no one is more sophisticated than Olusegun Obasanjo. He is the tortoise he was unveiling to the boys and girls. A tortoise telling the tale of a tortoise through the voice of a man. His English is flawless, if wordy. His elocution coarse, but no matter. His grasp of governance is second to none. He wraps his hands around politics like a wrap around pounded yam. A man of wise daring, cunning while seeming a con, a manipulator, a master of deception, a humourist when he is in no mood for banter.

    The late debonair journalist Stanley Macebuh, who had worked for him as adviser in his first incarnation as Nigerian leader, described him: “He is crafty, very crafty.” He even brought this sleight of hand in his engagement with children.

    All his life, it was either you saw him or you didn’t. When you didn’t, he seemed to have dodged a bullet. When you saw him, he was collecting the trophy, even if he did not compete. Apostle Paul said, “he that runs a race runs all, but one picks the prize?” Like one defying gravity, the Owu chief could do away with running a race and yet pick the trophy, and no one shouted foul.

    Watch his life reel. He was Nzeogwu’s best friend but was out of town when the coup happened. He was quiet for most part during the civil war, but joined the Third Marine Commando, when the war was all but done. A browbeaten Biafra bowed to him in surrender. Black Scorpion toiled but Obj had the spoils.

    When Gowon was ousted in Murtala’s coup, he was lucky to be picked as number two. But the bigger one came later. Murtala died in a coup carnage, but Obj was secure and took over. He became the first Nigerian soldier to hand over power to civilians.

    We read of Joseph’s prison-to-palace story. He was held by Abacha, but he left, had a world tour, and returned to lead the country. Whoever wins a race when his people vote against him, especially in a country torn apart by ethnic bigotry? OBJ. It turned out he was the one Nigerian who could bring a fragile nation to its peace.

    But if he is a man of luck, it is arguable that his career has favoured Obasanjo more than it has favoured Nigeria. He was head of state twice, but he was never known to have engrained what we might call a vision. Some say, he has brought some beauties, one of which was the war on corruption. History will hold him to account why he seemed to have gone after his enemies in the guise of fighting corruption. Yet, he has created a momentum with the EFCC and ICPC that no successor can erase. Again, he left office with Nigerians poorer than he entered.

    With his Yoruba group, he is being charged with Awo envy. He never loved or courted friendship with the Yoruba icon. He was said to have once boasted that what Awo sought with all his might, Obj soared into. The story might have been apocryphal, but it reflects the tension between both men. He was believed to be happy to hand over power to Shagari who bested Awo in the controversial twelve two-third 1979 elections.

    Again, he once showed up General Oluleye when the latter complained to him that the military elite marginalised the Yoruba. Obj brought in General Shehu Yar’adua and asked Oluleye to repeat his charge against the Fulani elite. Was it an act of betrayal? Was Oluleye naïve? Did Obj believe that if he did not report him, somehow the Fulani elite would hear and think Obj was in cahoots with Oluleye to undermine the military hierarchy, which was potentially career-ending or even life-ending? Those who charge Obj with betrayal may have to rethink.

    When a military leader, he relinquished power willingly. When a democratic leader, he would not let go. He wanted a third term.

    Like a tortoise, he has been in every tale since the 1960’s and survived all. As soldier, a writer of controversy, a military leader, a civilian leader, a thespian, a disputed romantic, a party builder who ruined it, a peace maker and bulldozer. A plotter and plodder. The man who wants to be called a democrat introduced a foul phrase: do or die.

    Yet, is he a statesman? He is, even if he has not always behaved as one. That epaulette is a reluctant one from this page. He duelled to unite us and intervened twice to lead when we almost fell on our faces.

    Soldiers and democrats look to history for models. George Washington saw Roman general Cato as an exemplar of a soldier who turned into a republican maestro. Obj looked to the bush and found one that had wit and wins. Writer Lewis Carroll said of the beast, “we call him tortoise because he taught us.” He has taught Okikiola.

     

    Wedding party: Kaboom of laughs

    It has attracted rave reviews and not a few roars of laughter. And it should. I refer to the movie, The Wedding Party. It is cheering that Nigerians have one of their own to trigger a swagger, instead of the usual Hollywood staple.

    The movie boasts its strength, no least the cast like Richard Mofe Damijo, Alibaba, Sola Sobowale, Ireti Doyle, Banky W, et al. The actors did not flail. Damijo eased into the role of upper-crust Igbo restraint and Doyle wore her cocky part well. Sobowale and Alibaba puffed powerfully in the Yoruba ostentatious vanity. Both pairs headline the theme of two antipodal cultures in a comedy of collision, inspiring other actors and setting off kabooms of laughs.

    If the acting was great, so also were the scenes and writing. The cinematography glowed with brutal editing and focus of scenes rarely seen on Nigerian celluloid.

    Yet, it suffered two great flaws. It yielded a formulaic plot line. Its predictability was, however, smothered in the sheer perfection of the acting and lines. Two, the stereotyping of the ethnic groups taught us to see each group through one window. The Yoruba is vain, loves party, lies about finances, is a lickspittle. The Igbo loves money and nothing else. No greys of culture. It fought shy of nuances. There was no crossover of vanity, for instance, which we see in both cultures. It ended in bathos, hilarious but not deep.

    The movie is, however, the sort that many should see. For all its imperfections, kudos should go to director Kemi Adetiba, who cowrote the script with Tosin Otudeko.

  • Aliyah’s face

    Aliyah’s face

    Even if you didn’t see Aliyah Masaku’s face, the story as narrated by The Punch newspaper’s reporter was horror enough. Three fierce, fang-filled dogs unleashed on a five-year-old? The imagination turns coy, frozen, unable to call up the scenario.

    A five-year-old, weak arms, cherubic face, eyes aghast and even ghostly, feet limp, heart racing and pounding in her fragile chamber of a chest. The dogs, Alsatian, mature, slobbering and barking, and snarling, the floor and walls shaking with their rage. No help around. No neighbour, no mother, no father, nobody. She was helpless in the wild, which was her home. The wild against the bewildered in her Ikorodu residence in Lagos State.

    And as the report had it, she was asleep when the wild dog named Rover broke loose from its kennel, and reached out for the innocent girl. This was no blood feud. This was no feud. It was a brute set against a brittle. It reminds me of the classic memoirs of the Australian William H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago, in which he recalled his vulnerable childhood and referred to two stanzas of a favourite poem from Robert Louis Stevenson: “Children you are very little/ And your bones are very brittle.”

    [quote font_size=”17″ font_style=”italic” color=”#ffffff” bgcolor=”#000000″ bcolor=”#e0b364″ arrow=”yes”]Her bones were brittle, easy to break, and dogs love to conquer the feeble. They did it to Aliyah. It happened when no one was at home. And Aliyah may not have been at home. According to her father, Wasiu, she might have been in school at the moment of Rover’s insanity. But there was a problem with her school, and he asked her to remain home until she found another one for her. That was not to be.[/quote]

    The mother was not home. She did not live there. Apparently separated from Aliyah’s father, she lives in Cotonou. So, it was a story of a father who wanted his daughter, and the mother yielded. Now, father’s love wove a fatal lore. The mother’s presence may or may not have saved the girl. The dogs were probably hungry. The father, who kept the animals for the absentee landlord, had walked away to obtain feed. The dog Rover could not wait.

    Omatseye Writes on Buhari’s death Rumour

    The name makes me shudder. Rover evokes the image of Satan in the Bible. Peter describes him as a roaring lion moving about seeking whom to devour. Rover was notorious, according to Wasiu and leashed the beast. He left two others, presumably docile, to roam free. Alas, Rover dragged Aliyah from the house to the backyard and the so-called docile canines pounced on the girl.

    But this is a story also of irony. Aliyah was no stranger to Rover and company. According to the father, they were chummy, and she even shepherded fearful visitors through the lair of the beasts.

    This shows that the father was not necessarily evil for leaving the girl alone at home with the dogs. Or he had ever judged the canine’s temperaments. But he could have locked the girl inside. A five-year-old at home with 15 animals of potential ferocity was, on hindsight, more than a little naïve. Minders of animals have gone wrong in the past. We have seen tigers kill their masters at circuses. Snake charmers have fallen at the bites of their slithering pets.

    But Aliyah’s intimacy with the canine’s goes to the heart of the relationship between dogs and humans. She must have been stunned to see the dogs come at her. She might have dredged up her usual strategies of friendship, a word, a smile, the promise of a piece of meat, etc., but they did not work. If men have their moments of madness, why not the beast?

    But we know that dogs have been intimate. They call them man’s best friends. Aliyah died, and it came from a good friend or friends. It was a moment of betrayal between man and its best friends. Harry Truman saw a lot of back stabbing as president of the United States. When asked if he could have any friend in Washington, he said, “if you want a friend, buy a dog.” In his classic novel, A Call of the Wild by American author Jack London, he shows how a dog can be at once intimate and ferocious, staid and steroidal, loyal and Brutus-like.

    Omatseye’s piece on Donald Trump

    Over a decade ago, Tacobell popularised a Chihuahua dog with an advertisement. The dog became a bestseller in the US as evidence of a dog talking. Rin Tin Tin was a German Shepherd rescued during the First World War by American soldier Lee Duncan and it starred in 27 Hollywood movies and became a friend many children in many other incarnations presented as the same Rin Tin Tin. Children loved the series. Aliyah would have.

    But I see the larger picture of the Nigerian canvas in the brutal episode. A landlord amasses 15 dogs and abandons them for a place in London. It is like some of our CEOs and political bigwigs who leave a vicious Nigeria they have created and lived away in luxury, either out of town or some cosy retreat in a five-star hotel. The dogs serve as their hounds, their foot soldiers always at the ready to unfasten terror. The dogs, just like their minions, seem harmless. Some of our foot soldiers live among us, and they do nothing until there is a breakdown. Take, for instance, the rise of militancy in the Niger Delta, and the surge of Boko Haram in the Northeast. The militants began as foot soldiers of the political elite. They, like the dogs of Ikorodu, outgrew their hinges and wreaked mayhem and deaths.

    The dog owner was reported to have said that he was not at fault. Which is typical of our elite who never say they had a hand in the tragedy. Ali Modu Sheriff never takes responsibility for the rise of Boko Haram. Neither do the political elite of the Niger Delta for the rise of militants.

    Wasiu is the false elite, who is used by the master to maintain the state. The bureaucrats, the so-called professional hands, who work for the masters. They are grateful for their pay but they keep a dangerous brood. When things turn awry they shed tears because they are inevitably victims too. Aliyah lost her life because her father was probably making money from taking care of the dogs. He has lost his daughter and no amount of money can restore Aliyah, which in Arabic means Praise or Noble, to his bosom.

    Neighbours could not help. The average mass cannot save their fellow citizens from impunity. We only yell when an innocent goes to jail and his masters eat caviar in Honolulu. The neighbours said they had to call the father. They could not get in the yard because they could not withstand 15 dogs. Impunity, like Rover and company, reigns over common sense and collective will.

    The result is the face of Aliyah, with the marks the dogs’ claws and teeth inflicted. Because she could not survive, her tragedy is ours.

    PMB, please call NTA

    Since President Muhammadu Buhari has been in London to take care of his health, he has not spoken to the Nigerian people. He has spoken with Donald Trump, the volatile leader of an uncertain world. Last week, he spoke with Kano State Governor Umar Ganduje. I presume he has been in touch with Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, who is holding the fort competently.

    A few days ago, his spokesman Femi Adesina posted online that the president called him. No problem with those calls. I wish the president could speak with the Nigerian people. The people need to hear from him. We don’t want filters. He was voted in without filters. If he could speak with national and world leaders, including his mouthpiece, let us hear a piece of his lips. He could do that by calling NTA and utter a few reassuring words, including his usual sense of humour.

    Some people may doubt, as they are wont to, the authenticity of his intervention. But he should not bother. He should do right by us and that should be enough for his conscience.  PMB was quoted as praising Adesina for defending him against mischief makers. That is not a presidential line, and Adesina should have protected the boss by not saying it. He probably did not mean it for general consumption. He should know that not all those who ask questions about the lack of transparency have mischief on their minds, while I admit that there are some out there. The President’s image should rise above the low tide of recriminations.  Last week, I sparred with Adesina on Channels Television Sunrise show, and I hope I am not one of those “mischief makers” in question. I want the president to be well, but my priority is the over 150 million Nigerians who have a right to know about their president’s health.

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  • Rumour

    Rumour

    At one time in the past week, some Nigerians were led to believe that President Muhammadu Buhari was almost set to return home. At around the same time, the same Nigerians were not so sure.

    The signs contradicted themselves. One reflected the end of a drama. The other skewed the plot. Nothing demonstrated this semiotic dissonance more than two news items. The one was a headline that told us that the presidential staff was on alert for his return. The other served us pictures of Senate president and House speaker ensconced in a sitting room with the president in London.

    The background to this was the profusion of all sorts of pictures and stories on the state of the president’s health. Some said he was sick unto death. Some said he was actually happy, about to hop on the plane. Technology and imagination fed the plate. True pictures collided with concocted images. So much was the distortion that distortions seemed real and the real seemed distorted.

    A picture PMB took in London was read as the one he took in Aso Villa. Some of the pictures were believed to derive from three years ago, or six months ago, or even two months before he touched down in the Queen’s enclave. Online fizzes with pictorial potpourri. PMB on wheelchair. PMB jugging. PMB in fistic fury like Bash Alli. PMB wired like a patient at death’s door.

    What we are seeing is the imagination at war with reality. Is the president sick, very sick, convalescing? The situation has reached a stage where truth may never really win. This is because from the beginning, Nigerians were rigged out of the bare facts.

    No one was told what the real illness is, what the doctors said, what tests were conducted, and what the diagnosis and prognosis are. Some said that should have been done early and as the facts emerged. That way we can shut out the lugubrious mischief of what Soyinka called the “millipedes” of the Internet.

    The other view said, no, this is Africa. We are not the United States or Britain, where transparency also entails telling everyone even if you are dying of gonorrhoea. Just like Governor Mark Dayton of Minnesota who recently confessed openly that he had prostate cancer. That sort of openness, they say, is not for this part.

    This is responsible for the dissonance. We are embracing democracy of the 21st century but clutching at Kosoko or Uthman Dan Fodio. For us, democracy is the pie crust on a 19th century salad. That is why some are already seeing the Buhari story as a sort of Yar’Adua reborn. This is patently mischievous. There are no facts to bear that. Yet the absence of solid information has done little to stanch the imagination.

    We are not at the point where people will have to show public outpouring of sympathy for their president, other than the ones shown by APC bigwigs and other big names of society. It has made London a sort of medical tourism. You cannot really know how to sympathise when you don’t know how serious the matter is. Unlike the case of Ronald Reagan whose full situation after the assassination attempt was disclosed. He even spiced it with humour when he told his wife, Nancy that “Honey, I forgot to duck.” Or the case of Viktor Yushchenko of the Orange Revolution of Ukraine who was poisoned and filled the streets with sympathisers day after day. Or the story of Tancredo Neves of Brazil that led fellow citizens to keep vigil, in prayers and songs and enchantments. Or when Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito was not ashamed to be quoted when he dramatically told his doctor to cut off his sick leg. His people grieved.

    These people were not forced to rely on the imagination. We are. That is why many are still asking questions. Those who pushed out information that presidency staff were on alert show great ignorance about modern medicine. The doctors will not tell any patient vague timelines about his health. If he will be in London for six hours or six months or six centuries, the doctor will let his patient know. So, as we speak, the test results have already apprised the doctors about how long he will be in London and when he will have to return. So, we should not be fed with fiction about the president coming back suddenly. Modern medicine does not work that way, and no one should hoodwink us.

    Imagination has now overtaken facts. Even if at this stage, the presidency tells us facts, many Nigerians will react with the incredulity of Thomas Didymus. If they say he is fit as a sky eagle, they will doubt. Even if they present the physician’s report saying, in great detail, his diagnosis, cure and his new impeccable physique, we cannot rule out apocryphal versions online.

    As the human spirt goes, the false report will go viral and the true one dismissed as not virile. If a true video is taken of him, some will deny every facet of his face and vowel of his voice. If he is jumping in the picture, some will say it was all another man’s features. This is an era of alternative facts, where truth is no longer beauty. The same Poet John Keats who said “truth is beauty, beauty truth,” had a prophet’s eye for this age when he wrote that “what imagination seizes as beauty is truth.”

    It is modernity catching up with our neo-feudal temperament. Some of us are asking the president to disclose every inch of his health. If they are in the same state, they may resist any disclosure with every fibre of their traditional being. Yet, we know that IBB in a pre-internet, military era disclosed his foot illness. Radiculopathy became a sort of chant when he was military president. And it took nothing from him. In a military era, health was unveiled without doubts. In our age, the democrat bows to feudal redoubts.

    Political philosopher Hannah Arendt lamented in her book, The Human Condition, how the modern state cannot realise the ideal of the Greek city state, where everything and everyone was held up to the light. The WikiLeaks hysteria is a global example. The sooner we clasp the modern ideal and not shy away from saying whether we have a headache or cologne cancer, the truer our claim to modern times. And it must start from the very top.

     

    More on the Brash boys

    In reaction to my column last week on the class of September 1973 of Government College, Ughelli, some readers wanted me to give them a sense of the accomplishments of my classmates and name some of them. That would give validity to some of my claims, they argued. Well, I said we had doctors and quite a few of them. At our reunion, I met Baldwin Maduagwu, who is medical director in Port Harcourt, at his own Kez Clinics. Also in Abuja, is Joe Agidee, a surgeon. We have a professor of medicine in Gabriel Egberue Ofovwe at the University of Benin. Ese Bright Atiyota, alias Ti-le, is a medical doctor in North America. Also in North America, Matthew Uponi is a senior contracts manager with Shell Energy, Canada. We also have a Senior Advocate of Nigeria in Omoruyi Omonuwa. He is also an OFR. We used to call each other “hello Baas,” mimicking a character in Peter Abraham’s novel “Tell Freedom.” Austine Emielu is a professor of music at Kwara State University.

    We also have entrepreneurs but I will just mention Ehi Braimah who is one of the top public relations and marketing men of this era. Clement Agege, an engineer, is the director of environmental services at DESOPADEC. I can go on and on. We also have the blessing of the holy spirit with a high-profile cleric, Bishop Chris Kwakpowve, who authors the international best seller, Our Daily Manna. He started when we were in school, making tracts with his little pocket money. Of course, Sam Omatseye belongs in that class. He has won multiple awards on three continents as a journalist and columnist, and is an honorary fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters. Need we say more about that distinguished school and class!

  • Brash days forever

    Brash days forever

    Recently my classmates – the class of September 1973 of Government College, Ughelli – had our inaugural reunion in Lagos. Classmates, some of whom had not seen each other since we left school in 1978, gathered from across the world in a hilarious weekend full of laughter and recollections. This column pays tribute to that class as a metaphor to school time and power of memory.

    “I am a fag, (a bush man) a dirty, stinking fag. I am to be seen and not to be heard. As from this moment, I promise to discard all my rustic and outlandish ideas to become a true member of Oleh House, Government College, Ughelli.”

    I still recall that evening of odd foreboding in the common room of Oleh House. Usually the common room was prim with tables and benches and designed more for lucubration than celebration. But that eerie evening for me in Class One etched in memory my first consciousness of life as ritual.

    It was one of those rituals I recall with fondness today, a ritual of belonging to a school where I formed some of my enduring manners and habits, and of course some of my endearing friends.

    After that solemn declaration, every senior boy in the common room watched with contemptuous glee. The room was now clear of all tables, leaving mainly benches lined along the four walls. The seniors sat as spectators, cheering and jeering. A class five senior presided, a bowl of salt water in his hand.

    After the declaration of the class one student, he would answer some questions. Then the presiding senior would shout, “Brine or no brine?” That is, salt water or no salt water? And depending on how the class one student performed in questions propounded to him, they shouted “Brine!” or “No brine!” or a babel of loud “brine,” loud “no brine,” low “brine,” or low “no brine.”

    Because of a certain childish bloodthirstiness of the night, the seniors were more inclined to shout “brine.” That meant the class one initiate, his face smothered in powder and a wrapper dangling like a tail from his buttocks, would be plied with a concentration of saltwater, which he was obliged to drink, the cup sometimes “garnished” with powder flaking down from his face.

    The class one student was a bush man, like an animal, hence he tied a cloth that dangled down like a tail from his buttocks. A senior, stick in hand, would swing down with fury as though cutting off the tail. With mischief, the “civilising” stick landed often on the lower back and missed the tail.

    Yet after that night, we danced and sang and eventually took part in the tasty delicacies of the night. That was the beginning, in a rite that brought us in five years from class to class, to play hockey, sometimes hookie, tackle bullying seniors, play cricket and yowl “Howzat sir,” admiring those who marched as Man O War Trojans, playing soccer, preparing for general inspection, evening debates, doing “awoko” or lucubration for exams, salivating for “cuum” (beans and dodo) “A.G.G.S”, (Rice and dodo) double decker,” (beans and rice) and “obroshun,” (bread, egg, tea, butter and fish stew) and the inter-house sports, including soccer, and also looking the other way when you became a beneficiary of a mashed ration; that is, a prefect slamming a latecomer’s meal into another student’s plate.

    We all were doing all these because we wanted to become high school graduates and pass an exam to qualify us as undergraduates. Few of us thought beyond that.

    But we knew we wanted to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, pilots, journalists, teachers, etc., but we lived one day at a time.

    When we sat for the school certificate exam, we knew that our epic sojourn was at an end. We all parted ways. Some of us were never to see again. I have always wondered in my quiet moments at the whereabouts of some of my friends. Some remained in the Delta part of the then Midwest. Others moved away to the Edo part. Some, like me, hardly returned as I became a Lagos habitue. But my heart always throbbed with Ughelli, the plays, the fights, the pranks, the episodes of bravado and diffidence, the hungry moments when I and Victor Agbro and Bright Atiyota and Anslem Uduehi and Ebifegha Akangbou and Matthew Uponi hunted endlessly for fruits. I recall our staple of bread and groundnut, when it was three point two, meaning the bread was three kobo and groundnut two kobo; or six point four. Inflation damaged the equation and it was around nine point one when we graduated.

    Today we all have gone our different ways. Some have become bold who were shy at school, some have become great at science who looked locked in the arts. Some have become wealthy who did not seem to know how to make a kobo. Some became soldiers, others professors, others writers, others not so successful.

    Some have become household names, others have taken humble paths. Some have decided to win souls for the Almighty, while some have gone to the Almighty.

    Yet, we know who we are. If any of us is a mighty man today, a great CEO or a military general, or a great doctor or a tycoon with boat loads of cash, when we see each other, we see not the new man with great beard or wrinkled brow, or the fancy car or fat bank account, or the skewed accent, or the big government bureaucrat or the famous writer or the music maestro or topflight diplomat, it is the small boy running with smudged uniform we still remember. The boy who, in class one, answered “yes please,” to the bully who called him, “Class one…rotten dodo… ewa gutter…”

    You remember the struggles and triumphs in class, the rush to avoid the hooting of Principal Demas Akpore’s advancing SUV, the late-night reading to pass the next day’s test, the collective devouring of a bowl of eba and Geisha and the cheering on of the school in a match against Edo College.

    So, when we meet, it is not a reunion of superior with an inferior, but a reigniting of boyhood, of old times, of the brash innocence of a time when ambition was all about going through the routine glory of a day in school, of eating the eba and okro soup, avoiding detention from a sully senior, or going to bed as a way of counting the days when the term ended and we returned to our parents.

    We reunite as fellows and as brothers. The rich is not rich, the famous not famous, the heady not heady, but all of us in hugs and recollections of our times of innocence. That’s the value of this. It is a celebration of memory, of a time of sweet vigour and inestimable playfulness, and the beginning of a mighty dream.

     

    Lagos marathon

    They started as equals, their muscles at rest. An hour later, some hearts were racing, others flagging, others lagging far behind.

    The boys and girls knew who the masters of the race were at the 2017 Access Bank Lagos City Marathon. In the end, two sets of heroes emerged. The first were the athletes, like the first-place runner, Abraham Kiptum of the lean, bony vitality who breasted the tape, and collapsed to the floor, about a hundred kilometres away from Nigeria’s alpha Governor Akinwunmi Ambode, who would hand him a cheque of $50,000.

    The other, more authentic hero is Lagos. For the first time, Lagos is showing it is not only Nigeria’s city on the hill, but the country’s indispensable place. What a way to market it but an event of international charm like the marathon. Last weekend made it the second, and a much better performance in terms of organisation and buzz than its first. Lagos with its talent, imagination, business opportunities, cultural diversity and vitality, is the potential London, Dubai and New York. All those cities had the sort of humble beginnings with Lagos.

    The Marathon prompted CNN to ask: “is Lagos the next marathon haven?” With the marathon, Governor Ambode has sown the seed. His vision for tourism and hospitality can only make that dream blossom. Kiptum breasted the tape, but he ran roaring waves of the city. It is the first sure breath of Lagos in its marathon to join cities like Dubai and London as world’s elite cities.

  • A light touch

    A light touch

    Driving the other day in the Abule-Egba axis of Lagos State, I ran into a sort of traffic snag. I was forbidden to take my usual route to Otta, and I had to negotiate a diversion. It was a laborious engagement. With the diligence of ants, vehicle trailed vehicle in an eternal slog through serpentine roads.

    Suddenly the sight ahead absorbed the driver. A flyover. The structure is a high curve towering over all, and with workers furiously at work. Ahead was a chaos of industry, of working to meet a deadline dangling like the bridge. The chaos of men, machines, engines revving, men hollering orders to others who obey with their bodies buried in white dust.

    Suddenly the vehicular ache was no longer a scandal. The architectural marvel ahead reminded one of what used to be at that same point. That is, another anarchy of horns, or cars ramming into cars and sometimes into men. It precipitated a paralysis of movement.

    The contrast of optimistic chaos against paralytic anarchy brought to mind a line I read in William Wordsworth’s immortal poem, Intimations of Immortality. “The things I have seen I now can see no more,” wrote the bard. It reads like a religious, out-of-body experience. It is, however, a sort of ecstasy of miracle from human hands.

    The flyover, now a seeming bridge between earth and sky, promises to connect people to people and place to place with a lightness of touch. It is not just the work of money. It is the triumph of thinking. How much difference one contraption can do to the lives of millions who live in that part of town!

    That is a big snapshot of the style of Nigeria’s alpha governor, Akinwunmi Ambode. His is an administration powered less by money than the force of mind. As Einstein once said, “imagination is more important than knowledge.”

    If the Abule-Egba is money, less money is about to turn gridlock into ease in Lekki merely by doing away with the onerous roundabouts. Or is it the near-miracle drive through the Third Mainland Bridge by constructing a layby on a tract of land which seemed invisible until his eyes look. Many of such are sprouting in major centres of the state.

    He will have to do that, he knows, against the ambition to turn many pot-hole ridden inner roads into mercies for cars and commuters. Last year he redeemed 114 roads. He plots 181 for 2017, and it is not to save roads for saving sake, but to link them to major arteries. That betokens more traffic and better traffic management. He is looking at many major areas, such as Agric-Isawo-Arepo Road in Ikorodu, Ajelogo-Akanimodo Road in Epe, Oshodi to Murtala Airport Road and Ketu-Alapere Inner Road Phase II.

    It is often said that administrators should restrict themselves to one passion, and if they do it well they endear themselves to now as well as after. Legacy is assured. George Bush Sr. said he wanted to be known as the education president and unleashed the phrase, “a thousand points of light.”

    The risk, often, is that things may not work for that one dream. Finance and the concourse of events may overwhelm the leader’s plans. As Richard Nixon once asserted in his autobiography, “history affects us more than we affect history.” That pushes leaders to move from one interest to others. Obama just ended his reign doing things other than health care and pulling troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. For instance, he became the enabler of the greatest environmental agreement in history, a feat Theodore Roosevelt would envy in his grave.

    So, the alpha governor is looking at other areas. One of the most cheering for me has been the launch into the arts. He is now at work on theatres across the state. This is counterintuitive. We are, by all accounts, at our philistine nadir. The arts, including drama, are places where governments pay next to no attention.

    But Governor Ambode has worked up his bona fides for such an undertaking. With his security measures, Lagos is bubbling back to night life, and theatres are an important part of it. But this is no arts as snob. Each part of Lagos will express its sensibilities. So, he is not offering the eyebrow variety, keyed to the Victoria Island brood.

    While digitalising modern-day libraries for schools, he is also rejigging the environment with a new cleaning programme that will disrupt the swagger of the accustomed and contracted firms and make the exercise more accountable.

    The Christmas period was marked by the rise of rice, or what many called LAKE rice. If that was more than a little surprising in itself, it was even more so because of what it means if we take our jobs seriously. This was just one season. The deal between Lagos and Kebbi only came to light a year earlier and we already reaped the fruits. This makes nonsense of many years of dilating over locally grown food that continues to cost us billions of dollars a month in foreign exchange.

    As he keeps working, Governor Ambode is making governance look easy because he is a creative dynamo. He knows, just as the artist Pablo Picasso said, that “everything you can imagine is real.” His imagination is becoming every Lagosian’s reality.

     

    Okowa, Okubo and $10 million mistress

    Last week, the news media online buzzed with speculations about Delta State Governor Ifeanyi Okowa over this newspaper story about a governor that laundered $10million to a mistress who escaped with the loot. Even the APC in the state railed at Okowa, asking him to own up. The Delta State governor’s media team harped that their boss is innocent of the charge.

    This newspaper did not mention Okowa. It merely stated that the suspect is a governor in an oil-rich state in the Niger Delta.

    But I was quiet until I read a Facebook comment from one Festus Okubor, who accused me of being behind the news story, and that I was working with social media woman Olunloyo and a third person that courage fails Okubor to mention.

    Okubor was information commissioner under James Ibori and chief of staff to Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan. I wondered why a person who has held such responsible positions could act so irresponsibly. One, I am not the owner of The Nation as he claims. He said: “Sam Omatseye’s paper published…” Two, on which source did he conclude that I was behind the story?

    Three, the newspaper did not mention Okowa’s name. It only said the suspect was in an oil-bearing state in the region. Is Okowa the only governor in that region?

    Four, I can authoritatively say it is not Okowa, and all the facts based on our sources point to someone else. So, how come an Okubor could accuse me of such fiction? He was an information officer of the state and he is the exact mockery of information management. He traded in fantasy in the name of sycophancy. He had served Ibori and Uduaghan, now he is grovelling to Okowa and he is even praising him for a non-existent infrastructural stride.

    He even vouched for Okowa, saying “he has no girlfriend, whether Ika or Itsekiri, anywhere in the world.” Who asked him if Okowa has a Fulani or Yoruba or Ibibio or Turkish mistress somewhere in the world? He is a serial doormat and lickspittle, and Governor Okowa should be aware of such crawlers around him.

  • Bomb boy

    Bomb boy

    The rage of recriminations of ethno-religious bashing that has razed southern Kaduna in recent times has beclouded many from one of the seminal speeches of late.

    Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima looked at the North in the eye, and he did not spare the truth. More evoking than anything is his ability to deliver the speech without any craving of limelight or the profligacy of political capital.

    As the chairman of the Northern Governors Forum, he stands as a principal voice of the northern elite, and what we expect any personage in that high estate is to present of speech of self-congratulating grandeur, however false. In other cases, it takes a tone coy self-disregard, criticising itself to excuse itself and to blame the other guy.

    But as Governor Shettima gave his speech, you had the impression that other regional leaders would do well to learn from its unvarnished self-scrutiny. One of his illuminations came from reference to the words of the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Muhammadu Sanusi.

    Hear him: “He was quoted as saying he was tired of philanthropists regularly expressing readiness to build mosques whereas the majority of girls were growing and married out without education. The result of course being high rise of maternal mortality in northern Nigeria. This bold thinking captures how we have misunderstood our beliefs. The Emir said he has enough mosques but has few educated women. This is true of most states in the North. We have many mosques and many churches with unfortunately, hungry and uneducated worshippers. We have worshippers who don’t have basic knowledge of the religion they practice, yet we keep building worship centres as against educating the worshippers…”

    He was not addressing some quiescent students at a back-desert school or some academic lords bored into theory. He was speaking to the world beside emirs and his fellow governors. He was speaking not truth to power. It was power speaking truth to itself. It was an example of power in an extravagant moment of humility.

    He also gave one important piece of narrative, hardly highlighted or known by the media. Lamenting the corrosion of poverty, he unveiled an anecdote about spying and dying. Hear him again: “However, at the level of followers and other actors, poverty has made significant influence. For instance, in June 2013, we recorded a good number of extremely poor persons, who were recruited for as little as N5, 000 to either spy on soldiers and report their vulnerability to insurgents, attack and set ablaze by late night, or in some cases, poor old women were paid similar amounts by insurgents to either keep arms in their huts or smuggle arms from one point to another. One case I particularly remember is one Musa Grema, a 13-year-old boy who revealed that he accepted N5, 000 to set three of our primary schools ablaze and also spy on soldiers because his parents relied on him for their feeding.”

    I have pondered the story of that little boy since that speech. He was a child of war, but he merely thought he was doing good by his family. What does a little boy of 13 know about the fatal extremes of faith, about the bloodshed that eviscerates other families? He wanted his mother fed, and could not bear to see them hunger and die. Yet, to achieve that, others have to die. A father or mother with a 13-year-old like him will die because he snitched. Or another 13-year-old will go because he wanted his mother not to go.

    He is the story of Boko Haram, the story of a failed North, of bad governance that has endured generations while what the elite has focused on was hegemony. What sense does that make when the boy on the street and the girl hawking one piece of Kolanut cannot spell their names?

    Novelist Charles Dickens wrote Oliver Twist, a tale of a boy with poor background and teased dangerously into crime and gang. The novel forced the Prime Minister to ask Dickens if such a person lived in England. Oliver twist was a product of capitalist cruelty, but Grema is feudal, deeply rooted though in capitalist corruption.

    Shettima hit the bulls’ eye of education. It is the answer to a North that failed to look itself with self-love that is not self-doting. He noted that the backwardness of the North is a failure of effort and not of opportunity. But poverty, he noted, was the result of this, and the North had to tackle poverty. He said if the “North doesn’t kill poverty, poverty will kill the North. Allah Ya Kiyaye!”

    As the helmsman of northern governors, I like to think that others are beginning to think like him, and he also talked about appreciation of multiculturalism and difference, which he characterised as a “major challenge and indeed a litmus test of leadership, good governance and progress not just in northern Nigeria but in the entire globe.”

    The question of how to address the issue of herdsmen and the clash between them and the other citizens in southern Kaduna naturally flows. Where people are well-educated, and not fixated on religious fidelity, they are able to cast away bloodshed and hate.

    The supporters of Donald J. Trump are not necessarily uneducated, but they take advantage of the majority who have read little and therefore cannot know much. Musa Grema who spied to let his family live may think differently if he goes to school and grows into a 50-year-old. He may know they have taken advantage of him.

    But it was a society that gave birth to Musa that had to do what he did. It shows, as they now say of America, that elections have consequences. Many military leaders and democratically-elected governors presided over a North that played ostrich abroad but scavengers at home, exploiting the little one. Ali Modu Sherriff, who was Borno governor and Shettima’s predecessor, once boasted that his fellow citizens could not read what the media reported about his bad governance.

    It is that sort of scenario that Shettima lamented. Whether Southwest, Southsouth or Southeast, the lessons are not learned enough. If poverty has generated so much bad blood in the North, the currents in other regions are worsening as kidnapping, robberies and impunity are ominous indicators.

    There are many Musa Gremas down South. They are ticking bombs, of bombs as boys. It is no longer time for vigilance because we can hear them tick. It’s time to take action.