The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

Don of a new era

The crowd, as some have said, seemed to call back the tumult of 1968. Then the young across the United States as well as in France bubbled to the streets in uproar against the system. Saturday’s march did not show that much rage, but the discontent was different.

While the 1960’s was against a system, Saturday’s targeted one man: Donald J Trump. The toupee President, who fought in a presidential campaign as though he didn’t. He allowed his foes to take him for granted, and they did.

He bullied to cow his opponents while he wowed his crowd. When he sullied them, his opponents growled in complaints, while he roared in the polls. They all thought he would pull out or lose out, but his opponents were squished. In the fallout, they fell. He preened to see them bleed. One after the other, they licked their wounds.

It was like a movie, and last week, on Friday January 20, Trump stepped on the stage and became the president of the United States. His opponent, the staid, maligned Hillary sat as spectator beside her husband Bill. She was quieted and avoided a squint because of censorious media cameras.

But the Saturday after, we saw a surge of discontent. City after big city, in the United States and around the world, crowds were unbound. I wondered where were they when we needed them? The guy did not show himself a good guy. He said he did not like people who did not sound like him, who did not colour like him, who did not dress like him, who did not worship like him. Although on the worship theme, he did not worship anyone but Donald J. Trump and the money that Donald J. Trump made.

He fed off his crowds and they all loved walls, curses, bigotry. Yet we all looked and thought that somehow, the world was too good to embrace such demagogues. The United States constitution, so superb in its revolutionary impulses for the common good, would checkmate the rise of such a character.

Indeed, the constitution fell first and the people afterwards when Trump won. The idea of the electoral college was to stifle people like him. Rather he rolled the document in his palms and his vulgar psalms made more sense to the people than its homilies.

The founding fathers like George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, etc. may turn in their grave. They never had checks against the rise of a Trump. That is why they did not want democracy, they wanted a republic. Democracy is about the rabble. A republic is about institutions. The founding fathers saw the past democracies, especially Greece, and they saw how it threw up tyrants. They might have recalled a phony like Pisistratus who draped himself in fake blood and lied to the Greek commoner that he was hostage of the elite, and the people backed him until he became tyrant over all. They also read Shakespeare, especially Coriolanus, and how a patriot is misunderstood and the people line behind their tyrants.

So, the United States leaders suspected the popular vote and wanted institutions to mortgage the mob. But as we saw last November, the elite collapsed under the weight of an angry underclass of white men and women who thought it was better to support their own than to own their history of tolerance. It was the rise of the raw blood. They chose race over embrace.They conflated diatribe with tribe.

He has now promised to build a wall. But his whole promise was a big wall. A wall between America and China, a wall between rich and poor, a wall between decency and barbarism, a wall between free trade and fair trade. He has pitched himself on the wrong side of every divide.

Yet, if you listened to some of his rhetoric, many who are tribal bigots here at home would have lined up behind him if they were white. The southern Kaduna crisis is evidence that we are no moral superior. But the difference is that America has always claimed to be the city on the hill, the exceptional beacon of goodwill and integrity, the defender of the better angels of our soul.

Trump is saying, the world has taken that for granted and it is time to hit the other cheek. He says he is going to be friends with Putin. But Putin wants to be the initiator and controller of that dynamics. He quickly despatched Aleppo and staged a conference and invited the U.S. Well, Trump is not sending any envoy there.

He will find out in time that the man who hacked the computers to tilt the polls in his favour wants to be congratulated and deferred to. Putin has no intention to befriend a Trump. A megalomaniac with an adolescent sense of his own power cannot operate equally with another adolescent with equal hubris. The stage is set for a world confrontation. Many just don’t know it yet. Before that, Russia will be forced to let the world and Trump know that it played a role in his victory, and also may blackmail him with video. That will determine whether Trump remains as president or will be impeached.

Such a possible turn of events may be the blood slander that Trump needs to turn on Putin with the potential of a nuclear war. We hope and pray it does not get to that.

On China, we witnessed at Davos how Chinese leader Xi Jinping became a cheer leader of free trade as a counter-dynamic against Trump’s hectoring rhetoric that he wanted to confront China. The truth, though, is that Trump is right. China is speaking about free trade when it thinks it is working for it. Trump wants to renegotiate, and that calls for both powers who need each other to handle this matter.

The Chinese are now more self-reliant because domestic consumption has risen, and their nationals are gradually doing away with their dependency on American products. But that is because they have stolen American brands and domesticated them. They have their own I-phone, Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

But does Trump have the right temperament to turn negotiation into advantage or war? Just as the issues of the South China sea is a conduit of confrontation.

But more importantly though, we want to know if Trump will not destroy the world economy by insisting on protectionism when America needs its products to do well around the world. It could implode America’s economy with inflation.

Then his so-called white working class in Pennsylvania and Ohio will know that we are no longer in the 20th century and technology has roared past them. That was what many knew about Trump but thought he could lose if they did not vote.

The women filled the streets Saturday but it was too late. He is going after blacks, Muslims, Hispanics, etc. They could have shown this zeal on polling day. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” is a quote credited to Edmund Burke without evidence. But it shames the protesters. We hope Trump stumbles, although he has the potential of success. He wants to rupture the system and rebuild. But whether he can rebuild after the rupture is the stuff of history.

Is he a Machiavellian liar with good intention or just for his ego? The lie he told once in his primary campaigns about Muslims portends his reign. He said a storied American general known as Pershing in the First World War slaughtered 49 Muslims with bullets dipped in pig’s blood. He asked the 50th person to go home and tell his fellow Muslims what he saw.

This sort of soul does not preside over decent people. He is the don of a new era, and the error of a new dawn.

January 23, 2017
Every inch

Many a time a person feels a certain obligation to write about his life. It is because he has been a governor, a chief executive, a supposedly professional high-flyer, or a socialite of great frivolity.

Many of them are projects in egotism. They are public desperadoes banging their feet to gain attention. Some have good stories to tell but fluff them in flawed narratives. Others write grandiloquent tales that literary pundits call ‘burlesque’ with a lot of theatre but little treat.

Last year, I reviewed the book on Felix Mathew Osifo, titled From Machine Boy to Managing Director, about a Nigerian who rose from the dust to become a pearl of corporate Nigeria. The book authored by Professor Hope Eghagha, a poet and head of English Department at the University of Lagos, documented an essential story not only of a time in Nigeria when it paid to work hard but how Nigeria has evolved into a redoubt of opportunists. Osifo’s flight from houseboy to managing director of GB Ollivant and Vono, unveils the twists and turns of a man’s brilliance and audacity, and a picture of a society sometimes at odds with itself.

We need books like this to demonstrate the intersection of persons and their times. In fact, the best way to tell history is to examine the actors at various stages of their stagecraft. Hence Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted that “there is properly no history, but the biographies of great men.” Tolstoy, though, thinks otherwise.

The public caterwauling of former president and Owu chief, Olusegun Obasanjo, about a book written over half a decade ago by the Awujale of Ijebuland drew attention to one of the most impressive personages of this era.

The oba, a tall, robust, charismatic figure, told a story of some of his interactions with the Owu chief. Having written it, he made no bones about howling after the fact. He had written it, and he moved on. Seven years later, the Owu chief is whining and wailing.

Oba Sikiru K. Adetona Ogbagba 11 is one of the underappreciated talents and virtues of this age. Perhaps because he heads what we all know as an anachronistic institution, we tend to undervalue what political scientists call “soft power,” a term coined and popularised by Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye. He does not need to hold political office, or stand behind an army tank, or be a governor, to wield influence. He had to exercise the force of courage, honesty and the principle of fierce independence.

It is interesting that, in spite of the ballyhoo of the Owu chief, the Awujale routinely ignored him. News reports say the Owu chief has apologised. It had better be true. The man is not only older than the former president, the Awujale has earned his octogenarian credentials, not by years but the exercise of his dignity.

The book, titled Awujale: the autobiography of Alaiyeluwa Oba S.K.Adetona Ogbagba 11, unfurls his forthrightness. If he has lashed out at OBJ in the book, it is a little lazy, especially of our media critics and journalists, not to have plunged deeper. Many have restricted themselves to where he narrated Obasanjo’s witch-hunt of GLO chief executive Mike Adenuga. But the monarch has been quite fair to Obasanjo. We all know, Adenuga was targeted in an exercise of hypocrisy when he wanted the same man to help build his Bells University.

The Awujale worked with Obasanjo to push the presidential candidacy of Professor Adebayo Adedeji during IBB’s quicksand transition programmes. While opposing his actions in government, he praised him for constructing roads that gave access to Ijebu land, and stood against those who wanted to dislodge him from office. He had called Obasanjo Judas and made it known he called him so in a meeting in the buildup to the elections that selected him to run against Falae. Yet, in spite of OBJ’s failing, the Awujale thought for the sake of the country and stability, Obasanjo’s rift with Atiku ought to end in order to save democracy. Newspapers ought to pay attention to books as news, not as vapid material for inside pages but virile aspects of our conversations. It is a reflection of the philistinism of today’s news organisations that many of such gems pass us by.

I was also struck by his sense of balance in the Ogun State governorship sweepstakes. Ever a stickler to be nonpartisan, he said when Gbenga Daniel indicated he wanted to be governor, he advised Daniel to wait out Aremo Segun Osoba’s stewardship. But he didn’t. The Awujale stayed neutral. But when Daniel stormed his palace for a visit, he insisted that he would not attend to Daniel unless he stopped his supporters from throwing invectives at Osoba outside his palace. Daniel reportedly obliged.

His Awo story also should have made news in 2010 when the book was published. He implied Awo’s AG and UPN resisted dissent or intellectual independence. He said he had doubted Awo’s socialist credentials and wondered if he was a socialist, why was he so wealthy he would not part with his properties as Mahatma Ghandi did. Awo had replied that he would if the society agreed to have full-blown socialism. That was not the same thing with Ghandi. Ghandi led by example. Awo wanted the mass example to lead him.

During the western crisis, he had tried to play peace maker, but neither Awo nor Akintola obliged. He wondered why Awo wanted everyone in Ijebu-land to line behind him uncritically while he wanted others from other ethnic groups he competed against to abandon their ethnic leaders for him. His tale with Awo dovetailed into his crisis with Chief Bisi Onabanjo, who had dinner with others downstairs in his house with Awo, while he asked him to wait up to an hour upstairs. It began a friction that, once Onabanjo became governor, he deposed him as Awujale. This is the same person he had predicted would betray him after showering hospitality on Onabanjo in London with free accommodation, meals and transport back home when he was sick.

He even offered to resign as oba when Diya succeeded Onabanjo after the military coup. Diya would not reinstate him even when the courts ruled against Onabanjo. After his military bluster, Diya had to acquiesce because the man said he wanted a plebiscite and if 90 percent or less voted against him, he would resign, support his successor and buy him a car. In spite of this, he eulogised Onabanjo’s exploits as governor.

He also stood with the NADECO chieftains. He was openly called Oba NADECO and he even hosted the meetings. He had warned Shonekan that he would be dislodged as interim leader and history would call him a traitor.

He knew very early to enjoy his reign, he had to be financially independent. Chief Odutola had wanted to teleguide his reign as he had done the predecessor. But Adetona resisted him. He launched into commerce and pried himself loose from the antics of government wheel horses.

This is a good book, not a great book. I had craved his fresh observations of men like Awo, IBB, Abacha, Shonekan, Tafawa Balewa, Oba Sijuade, Adenuga, FRA Williams, etc. He had more than cursory interactions with them and must have greater insights than he revealed. Abroad, he met with Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, etc in the Middle East. He mentioned them in passing. It is not his fault but his editors’. They could have debriefed and opened him to bigger revelations.

The book is uneven, showering details in some areas and stingy in others. But it is a book that gives a window on a man of character, aware of his position and did not take anything he was not ready to do away with on principle.

Remember he was the only Southwest monarch who did not mince words to Jonathan when dollar softened his peers.

In Shakespeare King Lear, a character heard the voice of the king, and said, “he is every inch a king.” That is the impression the Awujale leaves you after communing with the story of his life.

January 16, 2017
When did God become man?

Not many expected the sort of headline that arrested the front pages of the newspapers on Sunday. Pastor Enoch Adeboye retires. He seemed, for many, eternal on that holy couch. Every household has become accustomed to the even keel of his voice, his equable temperament, his resonance as a raconteur, his unruffled visage, his “let somebody shout hallelujah”…

For lay and faithful, Christian and Muslim, atheist and agnostics, it is first the surprise and later the why. The why because he did not step down of his own freewill. This is not the sort of retirement that swished the former Pope out of our holy ken. Or the sort that made Apostle Paul to declare to his mentee Timothy that he had finished his work and awaited the “crown of righteousness.” It is also not the example of Prophet Samuel who poked any of his flock to say it if he erred in any way during his stewardship or whether he gave or obtained bribe.

This was the case of a state coercing a bishop to step down. The state versus the church. Adeboye stepped down, but only in the Nigerian church. We are still left with a cloud of ambiguity. He becomes spiritual leader. Does it make him also the spiritual leader of his successor in Nigeria? The church will unfold that dynamic in due course, or it will unfold itself in the relations between the two persons.

The matter is just beginning to brew. How come a law comes into place to determine how spiritual authorities determine their leaders and how long they are permitted to lead the flock? The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) is the source of all this. It categorises churches with all non-profits and requires the leaders to stay in office for a specific period and step aside.

It is a case of man playing god with its institutions. It calls to mind the question asked by famous theologian and philosopher in the Medieval Age: “When did God become man?” Peter Abelard, the castrated upstart of that age, was not referring to the friction of church and state directly, but the echoes are not mistakable. The FRC may say an Adeboye, Oyedepo, Kumuyi, et al, have come to the end of the tether as leaders of the organisation they founded. But a feeling creeps in that the state is playing god over God.

The theory of the Two Luminaries in the Middle Ages bears example. The Catholic Church was the sun and the Holy Roman Empire was the moon, although it was cited then that the “holy Roman Empire was neither Roman nor Holy.” In our case, the church is the sun, the brighter light, and the Church the moon, the lower illumination.

But the Romish Church then abided in an era of ecclesiastical dominance. Today, the secular outweighs everything, including the spiritual. The church leaders have also quite often quoted Paul’s epistle to the Romans that everyone should be subjected to the “higher powers.” Even Jesus in addressing the question of loyalty to state asked his followers to see Caesar’s coin. But he said, rather enigmatically, “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s.” what is Caesar’s and what God’s?

I have also been rather uncomfortable when our pastors cite Paul almost uncritically. The same Paul asserted that we would rather obey God than man. So, if one of these mainstays says that they would not step down and God had not spoken to them, what shall we say? Some may want to wring their arms with their assertions about subjection to state.

But Christ was clear: “Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s.” Now, a conundrum brews. How that will play out is still in the womb.

But this FRC law seems peculiar to Nigeria. No one forces the Pope to step down. Nor any of the big church leaders in Europe or the United States. John Hagee has led his church for over 20 years. So did Graham, etc. The archbishop of Canterbury steps down at 70 years.

Some have argued that the problem with our churches is that they are run like monarchies. The overseer is the accountant, chief security officer, chief educationist, contractor, et al. His is part businessman, part prelate. When he sets up a board, it is no more than a sea of rubberstamp heads, eager to bow to the visions or orders of the leader.

This is different from the story of the counterparts in Europe or U.S. Even if they founded, they are subjected to a rule of law. And if they overplay their hands, they will face great revolt, even when they sin a sin unto death. The society also rises in righteous anger and the church leader cedes authority.

Those checks are not here in Nigeria. But is that the business of state? If the blind leads the blind, Jesus says, both shall fall into the ditch.

But when we look the Bible, not many of the men of God lived so long as stewards. Moses did, but he started late, and died with his vitals still intact. God took Enoch, ferreted Elijah away, allowed Paul, Peter and others to be killed in their prime.

These people were also working against the law of the land. Jesus was crucified because he was a revolutionary, calling his followers to place family lower than God’s people and naming himself the saviour with all its implication for revolution. Yet he declared that his kingdom is not of this world. If it were, his servants would have prevented him from the axe of the crucifixion.

So, the tension abounds. Where does the church fight and where obey?

That matter stands in the middle of the FRC rule. Many will miss these church leaders. The dapper Oyakhilome and his epistle of the sovereignty of grace. Part political, part evangelical Okotie. The prudish sobriety of Kumuyi. The apostolic brio of Oyedepo. The pugilist in Bakare. The genteel flow of Adeyemi’s sermons.

This will imply the birth of a new generation. Will they rise up to their founders? That is to be seen. On a secular plane, historians have said that the layer below the American founding fathers was peopled by far lesser men. They had nothing of sublimity and heroism of Adams, Washington, Jefferson, Henry, Madison, etc.

The classes of Adeboye havemade their followers acclaim them, at times, like some followers said of Paul: “The gods have come down in the likeness of men.”

We look forward to whether and how the leaders comply with the FRC. Will they accept the church as the better luminary or the lower? Whatever the answer, they will be haunted by Abelard’s question: When did God become man to determine when a pastor should quit the pulpit. Or when did man become God to do same!

January 9, 2017
The herdsman of the year

To pick a person of the year is not necessarily an accolade. Sometimes it is. Some other times, you hold your nose as though retrieving something from a toilet bowl. The write-up skewers the choice. Sometimes, it is eminently neutral. The selection this year, for instance, of Donald Trump as Time magazine’s man of the year, could be seen as double-edged. The citation called him the “President of the Divided States of America.”

When The Nation’s editors picked EFCC chief Ibrahim Magu as the person of the year, it was out of no desire to bathe him in a perfume cloud, or to toss him in a sewer. The Nation saw the double-sidedness of his doing. While he became a sort of gadfly and nemesis to thieving elite, we also saw him as a messiah with specks in his eyes.

Time started this tradition over 60 years ago and described its pick as the person who has impacted the year the most “either for good or ill.” So, it is a verdict of impact, not about devilry or righteousness. The choice is not necessarily a hero or heroine, a Marquis de Sade or Mother Theresa or Idi Amin Dada.

My pick this year is a sort of humble fellow, whose narrative is arguably nothing about that. He is the herdsman. The year began with him and ended with that fellow, not literate, nor foppish, nor colourful, not individually a headline grabber. He does not read his story in the newspaper, nor sees television clips, nor surfs the web. He belongs to the lowest caste of the society, but he commands the loyalty of the elite, and sometimes the trepidation of the masters, the hem tugging at the helm.

At the beginning of the year, the northern elite cavilled at the adjective to the herdsman. They should not be called Fulani herdsman. They are not Fulani, merely a band of shepherds with blood in their eyes, masquerading as Nigerians.

Nothing characterises the ominous ambiguity of this nomenclature than the firebombs in southern Kaduna. The diminutive impresario and Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai waded in by saying the killings were engendered by a band of criminals, not Fulani herdsmen. Then he contradicted himself by saying they were actually Fulani herdsmen from out of the country.

He then morphed from governor to foreign minister, deploying envoys to Fulani communities out of the country to broker peace, even sending bribes to soothe their boiling spirits. He said the fellow was angry over killings of his folks during the 2011 polls.

Suddenly we are right to say Fulani herdsmen, but how does a reporter now characterise them in a news report? Non-Nigerian Fulani herdsmen? We have not been given one evidence that the marauders are indeed outsiders. General Martin Luther Agwai led a panel of enquiry that blamed the Fulani outsider but failed to parade a culprit.

El-Rufai or Agwai committee may be right. But they have to prove it first. That is why the herdsman story is so intriguing. Earlier in the year, they did not only call themselves innocent, they said they wanted state governments to give mammoth acres of land for grazing. Southern locals said it was brazen.

Yet the story arose of what is called cattle rustling, where individuals steal their cattle. This led to backlashes of rage. A man steals a cow, the herdsman amasses his fellows and they turn into a band of vengeance. They target not the thief or his family but morph into a barbarous horde in the whole community, slashing throats, raping women, burning down several houses.

On my television show on TVC on Saturday morning, a caller asked us to accommodate the Fulani because he does not forgive. I asked whether it was right to kill a hundred people and declare war on a community because of one bad egg. This is a nation of laws and not of men. If a person steals, it is not his brother or mother or neighbour who stole. Get the law to punish the person.

It becomes impunity when one sin waxes into a people’s original sin that must be punished on end as we see now in southern Kaduna. Several people die even when a curfew is imposed and soldiers are deployed. When I wrote a piece last year, the Fulani herdsmen’s leader called me and told me that the Nigerian Fulani herdsmen were responsible for the killings in some communities in Benue State over cattle rustling. He said further that he knew it was not right, but the Fulani never forgave. He explained that if you kill a Fulani man, the Fulani will kill a thousand in revenge. The law has no place for such malice. It punishes what is wrong. The murdering herdsman is not above the law.

At the time of writing, the President has not visited or made a comment on the southern Kaduna tragedy. His spokesman’s assertion that he cannot comment on everything makes light of the tragedy of scores of families dying and living in perpetual terror. The southern Kaduna affair is not a routine robbery in Oshodi. If President Buhari can soar into the clouds in his private jet to sit below the swaggering Gambian despot in his futile trip or go to Zamfara State in solidarity over stolen cows, why not at least issue a statement to condemn the killings? Why not call for arrests and hold his intelligence chiefs to ransom? The President should avoid the suspicion that he is silent because he tacitly condones them.

We saw the Ekiti State governor also hit headline by holding the herdsman to account. It is the only time the humble fellow was humble in character. The only time he looked as humble as his cow. Law upended hubris. Many, including a popular cleric, saw Fayose as defending his people.

Throughout the year, the herdsman was humble only in caste. But it was a humility of hubris. They kept the President in silence, turned a governor into a foreign minister, converted a community into a blaze of fire and stench of funeral pyre, confounded the definition of their identity, killed several people in the Southeast and no justice found for the killers. The victims though have found their graves and have been forgotten. Even a cleric, Enoch Adeboye, gave praise to Fayose on their account.

The humble herdsman was sought in spite of these. We sought the protein in the last Yuletide as well as during the Salah festivities and throughout the year as our eba and pounded yam had ‘accidents’ ploughing through livers, thighs, ponmo, etc.

The herdsman knows the country. He sees a wide spectrum of vistas, he walks through bushes, slaps his animals’ hides through highways, through sleepy alleys, arboreal retreats, and even the blinding lights of city centres. He touches the leaves and people, he hears the accents and inflexions, he eats, dances, plays, sleeps across the land. But somehow, he reminds me of the classic novel about the “beat generation” in the United States, On The Road, by Jack Kerouac. The main character travels throughout the country. He makes love, drinks, works, makes friend, parties but he does not take with him the soul of anywhere he travels. His is spiritually alienated. He has been in those towns and cities but those towns and cities have not been in him.

The same applies to the herdsman. He is everywhere in the country, but nowhere is in him, except where he comes from. He is peripatetic without empathy. Like Jack Kerouac’s American, the herdsman is always on the road, like a rolling stone that gathers no soul.

If we cannot describe him as Nigerian and have no evidence that he is not, and we cannot arrest him, how can we start a conversation of making the herdsman part of our community? How can we give him a grazing land?

It is this crisis of identity that has erupted into a crisis of deaths, destruction and disunity that makes him my person of the year.

January 2, 2017
An overkill

James Ibori has been, for over a decade, the story of Nigeria’s guilt and shame. His biography has also served a menu of crime and punishment. But Ibori, former Delta State governor, has seen all these in this generation more than, perhaps, any Nigerian politician, living or dead.

Before our eyes, Ibori lived in glory. Now, all that has faded. He who once flashed with rhetoric of the throne, uttered the language of guilt. He whose face shone with hauteur had to look about in shame. He once beamed with the Urhobo beads and hats and tops to the rhythm of his royal strides. But he was forced to slouch, head down, in prison clothes, before a judge. He heralded himself in many motored convoys to parties, to official ceremonies, to airports. He had to flee, siren-free, for his dear life.

He was a colourful and popular personality in his Delta State, sweeping to victory twice and building a dynasty perhaps rivalling any state in the country. His dynasty is more potent because he sways even while coiled within the smouldering walls of a prison. When his term expired, he still clucked with swagger in the Yar’Adua administration, influencing appointments and policies.

As fortune flipped, so did Ibori’s form. From being the man of power and splendour, he was on his heels. The Jonathan administration, working with the EFCC and other political wheel horses, would not let him go. They would not forgive him for his days of thunder. But found revenge in the guise of a legitimate excuse. He had to answer charges of corruption. So, within a year, he witnessed the sunshine and shadow of power.

His first trial in Nigeria reflected the flaws and maggoty underside of the Nigerian judiciary. He was set free, and he indeed celebrated. But he had a man too many, including the former president who would not let him flee in peace. He eventually was arrested and put on trial on a foreign soil, and it was then that we saw, first hand, the contours of corruption in Nigeria.

The trial was seen as that of Ibori. Indeed, it was. But it was a trial of the Nigerian politician and politics. It was a theatre of revelations, of humility and humiliation, and tirades and familial conspiracy. Ibori’s life stood in the mirror, all scums and offal undisguised. It turned out it was not Ibori alone that was literally on trial. We saw he had a mistress in the story, a sister, a wife, and other friends and relations. It was also a trial of the past.

We saw that he had lived a humbler life once. The judge in London would not escape a narrative of the pre-Mercedes Benz, pre-Mansion, pre-billionaire Ibori, even daring to unearth his brush with the law with his wife for stealing when he earned a paltry $24,000 a year.

After his trial about six years ago, he was sentenced to prison and his story, even when not obtrusive, still haunted the Nigerian body politic. His story whispers in every show of corruption trial in Nigeria. The Ibori trial was handled swiftly and with professional dexterity. Yet, since Ibori was convicted in London, have we had any high-profile conviction of his stature? We have not.

That brings one to the story of the judges and corruption in Nigeria. The DSS stalked and stormed the homes of some judges a few months back, and some lawyers said it was not right. Maybe the visit was not beautiful in the night, but no one has proved the DSS did wrong. What we want is justice. But the revelations of corruption in the courts and judges reflect why a man like Ibori is now completing his term of punishment and others are still involved in judicial dances of adjournments and trials without a conviction or acquittal in the horizon.

Yet when the court in London spoke of a Mercedes Benz Maybach, another top politician here at home was also guilty. When he was accused of a lordly mansion in South Africa, another governor was also guilty in another state. Ditto to the funnelling of millions of dollars. But Ibori got his punishment. He did not only get that, he got his shame because his guilt was put on parade. The ones at home are rolling in stolen plenty, their children are getting married in opulence at home and in the world’s exotic best. Their fathers are private jet-lagged or happy. They are living in misery, if they don’t know it. Greek playwright Plautus once wrote that “nothing is more wretched than the mind of a man conscious of his guilt.” Though these men are guilty, they own the law and the process and force the lawyers and judges and the bureaucrats to eddy about in a futile whirligig at the expense of justice. They don’t act as though conscious of their guilt. Apostle Paul described them in the Bible as men whose consciences are “pierced with hot iron.”

With Ibori about to come out of jail, reports have it that some forces are calling for more trials for him. This is no more than vendetta. He has seen trial, exposed and disgraced not only in Nigeria but on the world’s public square. The open offal of his life has abused our sense of dignity and moral purity. He has been ensconced in jail for over half a decade.

I am not party to those who want to throw a party for him as he leaves jail, but he needs to be left alone. There may be other charges unanswered. If he were charged in Nigeria, as his peers are today, they would have been combined, and he would have suffered the same fate. If it is not technically a double jeopardy, it is morally. I would like to see judges do the same thing to hundreds of cases of politicians undergoing rigmaroles in court. Let justice to its course.

The current war on corruption has its great shortcomings. We are shaming some people and taking money from them in public. In private, however, some are treated like sacred cows. We take money from them, and the public do not know them. They are not allowed to undergo public disavowals or ignominy like the Dasukis, Fani-Kayodes, Obanikoros et al.

In his novel, The Great Expectation, Charles Dickens says “we need never be ashamed of our tears.” The question is, Nigerians have not shed tears enough to know the right thing. We have not lamented enough at home the abuses of the integrity of office. Let the abusers of our patrimony pay like Ibori and we will know that justice is around the corner. Ibori has had his. Let’s learn the lesson and not bring him to further suffering. It’s now the turn of others for justice. To try Ibori again is an overkill.

December 19, 2016
The year of identity

Throughout the year, we have been riveted on the bias that draped the United States presidential election. We bewailed Trump and his incendiary rhetoric. We bemoaned the sartorial evil of France of liberte, egalite and fraternite that would not let women free to wear hijab on the beaches just as we moaned when young zealots razed down lives in pubs and stadium.

We looked with horror the tents in Calais that tenanted the tears of a rootless people, what Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul designated as a people without a place, in his novel, In a Free state.

Brexit led an island nation in rebellion against one of its own Poet John Dunne, and denied it is “a piece of the continent.” Italy that traffics fancy shoes and dainty suits to other nations booted out its international leader, Renzi, and voted like Britain. Russia with its Putin is not wary of an uprooted world order and stretches world equilibrium by staking bullet after bullet, air raid after sorties to dare a quiescent Obama. Austria narrowly escaped the harmer of disharmony, but just narrowly. It looms in next-door Germany where Hitler is getting a revival in the great mall of its great city Berlin.

In all these, we as Nigerians show horror at the prejudice in a world that should canonise harmony. Yet throughout the year, we committed the same sins. We did not, could not, look in the mirror. But just like Macbeth who saw the vision and prophecy of his own bloodletting but willed himself to more malevolence, we did it week after week, month after month.

It was a year when the militants were angry, whether driven by ethnic rage or religious bile. They fought in the Niger Delta, but like invisible forces. They told President Buhari that they belonged to the place that once produced the president. They did not want peace except on their own terms. So, until that peace comes, bombs would go off. And they did go off, and they went straight to the jugular of lazy largesse: oil. They blew pipeline after pipeline. So, even when the price of oil rose modestly, we had no reason to laugh. Starvation stoked by scarcity makes the states pine for a little draught of financial air.

Yet, the president, who was weaned on the profession of guns and bullets, thought it weakness to bow. So, the militants blew, but he did not bow. What bowed? Our prosperity, if we ever had it. Shall they sit on the floor or at table? Would the president not even do humility the courtesy of visiting the Niger Delta to appear to understand? We never had it. Same applies to MASSOB and how they made streets boil in the East. No Nigerian project is good enough. No one has approached them with the language of conciliation.

Everyone, the militant, the MASSOB and the president, sat in their little covens. It was the same President that belongs to everybody and nobody. That is the very definition of soullessness. I am everywhere but I am nowhere. Translation: now you see me, now you don’t. Perhaps that’s why he has flown more to other countries than he has to states under his watch.

So, we suffer, while each party sinks in self-righteous despair. Up North we see the same thing. The religious bigots under El- Zakzaky understand themselves and no other. The Sunni majority understands Allah the way the Shiites don’t. But all inhabit the same pious space, worship the same God and invoke that same God against the other. This is against the logic of Boko Haram that sees a theocratic vengeance in every bomb, in the willowy menace of the girl bomber and the muscular stealth of the boy bomber. All of them talk to a people not happy to live together.

We also see in southern Kaduna where a people are subject to the routine savagery of a band of bandits. They burn houses and slaughter in droves. At the last count, 102 persons have been consigned either to heaven or hell, or purgatory, or whatever. Houses and hectares of land gone. They see no government presence to help, and the governor claims a group that has never been publicly paraded or evidentially convicted as culprit. He invokes similar rapine in Zamfara State. By claiming the victims there are Muslims, he exonerates the herdsmen. No evidence, so no excuse. But the larger blame lands where the Army is. They probably have not enough men. So, we ask, why not provide self-defence in the absence of official defence. Just as we have vigilante where police is absent.

The herdsmen were a story of our lack of mutual understanding. Herdsmen say they have the right of way, and it has translated into the right to maul, kill, rape and steal. They want life and more abundantly at the expense of the land owners. The federal government even flirted with the idea of giving them the land that belongs to others. In the Middle Belt, the herdsmen would revenge those who rustled their cattle. That I move illegally should not make you a thief of my cow. Right. So, no understanding except bloodshed.

Even in our electoral politics, the story is the same. In the Edo as in the Ondo and the Rivers State near-war electoral contests, it is a people who bear the same nation, sometimes the same name, fighting to the death against the other. Each group is either pelting the other with the charge of lack of good faith or good taste. But what is not good is our fate because of the flawed process and we have accepted it as an emblem of our flawed existence or coexistence.

We are not better than Trump, or the Brexiteer or even the Manila villain Duterte. Or the French who disavow hijab. We just saw them as excuse to levitate ourselves as moral superiors. But what does this tell us, that this is a year of identity. Everyone wants to assert who they are without pretence. It is the boldness of the bigot, the murderer, xenophobic. But they also claim they are not. They claim to be fair. They may genuinely feel so, and that is the conundrum. Some who voted for Trump say they loath his divisive rhetoric but love his trade bill or just loath Clinton’s hypocrisy. It is therefore the year of Shakespeare’s best play by critics, or at least the most contemporary: King Lear. When many saw Trump as a devil, his followers said, like one of the best lines in the play, “the prince of darkness is a gentleman.”

No one who voted for Trump or voted for Brexit, or calls for immigrants to go, would call themselves racists. Nor will a herdsman call himself a murderer. They are just doing right. Hence the 21st century person defies definition, just like when Lear, in a clarity of madness, asks: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” The clarity eludes Harvard theorist Samuel Huntington who calls it “the clash of civilisation.” Yet the irony, they speak the language of the bigot. Trump calls Hispanics rapists. The British foreign minister used the word piccaninny when Obama visited the United Kingdom to lobby against Brexit. They “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” Another shot from King Lear.

So, we like our little cubicles. We talk to ourselves, smell the same, sound the same, and would not accept the other just the same way it happens in King Lear. Hear this: “Come, let’s away to prison. We two alone will sing like birds in a cage.”

Irony, large numbers don’t think like this. But the frightening thing is that they have the important numbers and they are the most mobilised. They have dredged up the wrong identities. As we go into the new year, need not push away the other tribe or faith or face, but we need John Dunne’s cry to prevail: “I am involved in mankind.”

December 12, 2016
The pen versus the gun

The crisis in southern Kaduna has raked up in my mind an incident in Bayelsa State when Goodluck Jonathan was still governor. Militancy was in bloody blossom, and their growls and goons and hoods overtook the power of state. Probably without his vintage cap and top, Governor Jonathan fled from Government House, and anarchy had more power than order.

The hoodlums had undermined the throne. It also took my mind to many years ago when I was in Canada. When I was at the University of Toronto, I had a fierce debate with a few PhD students on the issue of whether African states were strong or weak. I was of the view that it depended on where you came from. According to established theorists, a weak state is that state that has failed to accomplish the classic objectives of a government, including the provision of peace and order, health care, education, etc. In that argument, African states were weak. I thought that point of view was a little self-congratulatory of the human spirit.

I noted that my country was under military rule, and the leaders did not share those lofty objectives. They wanted to suppress freedom, steal public coffers and perpetuate poverty. In that regard, they had succeeded and they were strong states. My fellow students did not agree with me while finding my perspective intriguing.

We are facing similar situations around the country. The Niger Delta militants keep bombing oil pipelines, the kidnappers still run rampant in Ogun State borders of Lagos, and in southern Kaduna, 25 villages have suffered consistent attacks from herdsmen, with 102 persons killed, 50,000 houses burnt and several wounded, about 10,000 persons displaced, and hectares of lands in ruin.

In spite of the presence of the army, police and secret service, the situation has been out of control. Many parts of the country do not feel the arm and shadow of government. It is the case in southern Kaduna.

The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) has cried out and the government has seemed unable to stanch or even anticipate the attacks, again and again. It shows that we have so many ungoverned places although the government is supposed to cover every nook and cranny of the country.

The Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, has said that it was not the rapine of Fulani herdsmen and that it was mere criminality. His argument is that the hoodlums were Fulani herdsmen from outside the country, and that they have been silenced with filthy lucre. Therefore, the new wave of violence must be from hoodlums. He argued that the same bandits were responsible for the crime in Zamfara State where the Fulani were the predominant victims. So, if it were genocide, the Zamfara violence would not have happened because the victims were Fulanis.

El-Rufai’s point will make sense if we can have on parade the criminals who did harm to southern Kaduna and Zamfara, and an undisputed link is made. A panel led by General Agwai was reported to have proved that link, according to the governor. Where are the culprits? Has any gone to jail or even been identified publicly? We need answers to these questions. It is not even whether the outcry of CAN over genocide is right or wrong, the question is, why is the government failing the people over and again?

It brings to mind a book published earlier this year titled, Nigeria’s Ungoverned Spaces: Studies in Security, Terrorism and Governance. It is a scholarly work of essays edited by Professors Richard A. Olaniyan and Rufus T. Akinyele. The book identifies so many ungoverned spaces. The eight-chapter book looks with rigour at various areas from northern border security to pipeline vandalisation to the pastoral Fulani herdsmen, and shows the state has found it difficult to live up to its billing to govern many spaces.

It must be a frustrating time for the Kaduna State Governor but it is also one of the larger problems of security in the country. State governors are chief security officers but wield that power only as ciphers. They command neither troops nor artillery, but have only the impotence of rhetoric as armour.

But the issue of ungoverned spaces does not fall within the ambience of law and order alone. The province of the mind is an important ungoverned space in Nigeria. Especially in Nigeria where education does not flow enough to the rural reaches, government can indeed be said to be failing in that sector most of all. The preponderance of gangster violence can be traced essentially to the poverty of the mind.

Some states have tried to address this issue. One of those states is the Sokoto State under Governor Aminu Tambuwal. With the provision of ICT across the length and breadth of schools at all levels, whether tertiary, secondary or primary school, the government is able to pass on not only pedagogic material to a good number of the institutions, but it is also able to institutionalise it. He came into office showing palpable concern for the girl child syndrome, a point the Sultan of Sokoto, Sa’ad Abubakar 111, had harped on since he mounted the throne a decade ago.

Governor Tambuwal and his government received recognition as the top state in the country in e-governance with an award from the National Information Technology Agency (NITDA). Sokoto State represented Nigeria at the Smart Cities Programme in Washington, D.C. in March this year. It was jointly organised by NITDA and the United States government.

As the Sokoto State government has demonstrated, the issue of ungoverned spaces is best tackled in the mind. According to Cicero, “the diseases of the mind are far more numerous and more dangerous than the diseases of the body.” Corruption, ignorance, murder, ethnic and religious bigotry and mayhem spring from the corrupt mind. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so he is,” said King David in the Bible.

If we do not take the issue of reorienting our people, we shall continue to deal with the explosion of perverted minds.

I must say that not all ungoverned spaces are evil. Many places where meetings were held to undermine the military era in the aftermath of June 12 turned out to be of public benefits. The so-called NADECO route was an ungoverned space. Revolutionaries also inhabit ungoverned spaces. Lenin, Napoleon, Castro, Cromwell, Mandela thrived in ungoverned spaces. Shakespeare asserted that truth sunk into the earth shall come out again. That is the nature of ungoverned spaces.

Nothing demonstrated the ungoverned space like the underground Railway during the abolitionist era in the United States. This is dramatised in the new novel The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, a hallucinatory account of how blacks and whites built, through sweat and dedication, networks of rail-road tunnels where blacks fled to safety from their blood-thirsty hunters.

The issue of the violence in southern Kaduna should go beyond rhetoric. Recriminations abound when government has failed, and blame games do nothing but stoke the fire. I asked a question in a recent tweet, posing whether the people of southern Kaduna have a right to defend themselves if government has failed them. Some people, out of ignorance or tendentious misinterpretation, saw it as a call to arms. If government fails, we create ungoverned spaces. That is not the job of government. We do not want a repeat of the situation where the Itsekiri had to end their battles with the Ijaw by arming themselves. It was a balance of terror that ended that bloody chapter. The same thing happened between the Muslims and Serbs. Bill Clinton government armed the Muslims and led the Serbs to go to the negotiating table. Even communities have organised vigilantes in their estates because government cannot fill the vacuum.

To obey is better than sacrifice. Government should stop the violence, and let all of us live together in peace. If we resort to education, fewer people will think of the gun instead of the pen.

December 5, 2016
Our little Castros

For today’s young, the name Fidel Castro sounds like an antique. But for my generation and the one before it, Castro cut a picture larger than life. He was the one that humbled 11 American presidents, almost ignited a nuclear war, overwhelmed several assassination attempts including from a limber beauty, overthrew capitalism, became one-man contagion of revolution around the world, was a lion in the Bay of Pigs invasion, a despot who was both loved and reviled, an exporter of change but whose legacy may be that he refused change when it knocked on his door.

With his phallic cigar, green fatigue, John the Baptist beard, domed forehead and luminous eyes, Castro was the most important Marxist alive in the 1980’s when I was a student at Ife. Fellow students loved to be called Marxists. Some donned Castro’s beard. A few had fatigues. We had a group called the Alliance of Progressive Students (ALPS), and it throbbed with Marxists. They ate and drank Lenin and Marx. They were fascinated with the Soviet Union, but Russia was a bastion. Yet its personages were bulls. They had force but lacked style. They had charisma but not colour. They had men like Brezhnev, Andropov. Earlier was Nikita Khrushchev, the boor who could not stand up to Kennedy. If the Soviet Union was a shadow of bears, Cuba was a mirror alight with a lone star.

Castro was the one alive, and he inhabited every romantic philosophy about change. The ALPS students were brilliant, audacious and even contemptuous of those who did not belong. They celebrated lack, canonised collective suffering without knowing it, showed contempt for material acquisition to the point of devaluing the virtue of productivity, acclaimed tyranny in the name of promoting the common touch. They were the mainstay of student unionism. Since Ife propelled student activism of those years, it is arguable that the course of students’ imbroglio roiled from the ideological heart of ALPS. They were fantasists in the league of Don Quixote, a novel by Cervantes and acclaimed the greatest novel ever written. Castro compared himself to Quixote. In his essay on Napoleon, Ralph Waldo Emerson said the French general bred many young clones who were known as little Napoleons. Well, my ALPS friends and some professors were little Castros.

I had quite a few friends who were ALPS members, and I thought they were the secular equivalent of the religious bigots on campus. They bullied from half-baked knowledge, spewed out cants, quoted history tendentiously, dreamed of communes like some lecturers and other groups who tried but failed capitally. Some of them were still active after their Ife days. I recalled prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, I had a discussion with my editor Lewis Obi at the African Concord about the fall of socialism, and he encouraged me to write it. It was titled “The Last days of Socialism”. I met a few of the old ALPS men at the residence of the late lawyer and human rights avatar, Gani Fawehinmi, for one of those occasions that undermined the IBB regime. Some of them scoffed at my piece and said when the revolution came, I would be in the forefront.

Castro died last Friday at the ripe age of 90, after about four decades on the throne, the longest person on an executive throne in living memory. Ghaddafi was despatched in disgrace; the Thai leader was ceremonial and so is the queen of England.

Many wonder why we should celebrate a man who lived for an idea no one wants to use these days. He died without repentance. But that was the world he knew. He fomented his revolution when democracy was still an ideology of doubtful fairness. It was an age of countervailing propaganda, and the success of ideologies was often a matter of whether you wanted equality more or wealth less. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the chain effect in Eastern Europe settled the matter in favour of the Americans and western liberalism. Professor Fukuyama in a famous essay declared the end of history marked by the triumph of liberal ideas.

Castro understood power and he held on to it aggressively. He banished a Havana of erotic excess, American decadence with all its image of a big, bright Babylon, of bordellos, drugs and deep inequality powered by a corrupt political class.

Castro was a man of myth and symbolism. At a big hall, the revolution was ushered in with the release of many doves. As he spoke on the podium, one bird flew down and perched on his shoulder. He was not a man of faith but the bird made his image soar into myth. God must be behind him.

After he left the stage, his country still has an antique architecture, the 1960’s type vehicles and widespread poverty by western standards. But he gave the world two great gifts. Advances in medicine and world-class education. Historian Tacitus quoted Aristotle as saying the mind and body are the two great benefits of governance. The people can do well after that. But you need a riubric to turn them into wealth. Like my ALPS friends and the Soviet Union, a good mind and body needs to be free. That led to the birth of Gorbachev’s Glastnost and Perestroika. The 2008 collapse also told us freedom has its limits. The Bernie Sanders campaign also tells us that we need capitalism but we need to save it from itself by addressing inequality within its rubric, but not the ideas of Marx and Castro.

Castro’s system could not generate its own prosperity. It relied on money from the Soviets until communism fell. Hugo Chavez also helped. His Venezuela has also fallen.

The problem with Castro was that he grew up as a rebel but ended up as the establishment man. That is the irony of history. When the world changed and embraced a new sort of economic system, he did not budge. He merely introduced cosmetic reforms until Chavez money and he reversed them. He was an unflinching revolutionary who did not understand that every revolution needs the dynamic thinking of a revolutionary.

Part of it was his biography. He thought he was the light of the world, he was the Jacob, in the words of The Proverbs. “The Lord sent word to Jacob and it lighted upon Israel.” He saw himself in such egotist terms. He failed as the conduit.

The lesson was that every leader should know when the ovation is loudest for any idea. He had become a dinosaur but he did not know it. He drew much love but his wine bottle was at its bottom. He insisted on still sipping furiously.

November 28, 2016
The Lagos imperative

In my television show on TVC on Saturday morning, the point was made that everyone everywhere in Nigeria knows someone somewhere in Lagos. It shows that Lagos is Nigeria. Every Nigerian citizen is there either in body or in spirit.

The Kano rich install palaces, the poor Abakalikian knows a relative, the Warri entrepreneur tracks his wares, the Ogbomosho socialite dances to its maestro.

That makes Lagos Nigeria’s psycho-social city. Lagos is where we dance, we feed, we move, we fight and we make love as a people. It is our melting pot. It is “our town,” to borrow from the title of one of America’s quintessential plays by Thornton Wilder. The play looks at the town both as an intimate and a stage, just like Lagos. And Lagos is where we fake and play, where we are home and away simultaneously.

When Nigeria falls, it betrays the first crack. When it rises, it cracks the first smile. It is the John the Baptist of the Nigerian pulse. If it is Nigeria’s special city, so why is Abuja unwilling to make it official?

When the matter popped up at the Senate, it was dropped. Yet, all of those men in the Senate who railed against it are beneficiaries of Lagos. It is an act of ingratitude, an act of gratuitous politics.

Let’s look at some facts. One, it provides 60 per cent of our gross domestic product. Two, it is the biggest economy in West Africa. Three, it houses some of the iconic brands and blue-chip companies. Four, it has the biggest port. Five, it has the most vehicles, consumes the most fuel, and the most food. While making a case for its status, the alpha Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, revealed that Lagos consumes N3 billion worth of food everyday, and that makes it over a trillion Naira worth of food a year.

Six, it has the most complex infrastructure in the country. Seven, it is to this city we have the largest influx in Africa and third in the world. The people move there not to visit or for transitory business but to live.

No city has this, and yet Abuja recoils from its duty to its most iconic place. When the matter came up for consideration, former Sokoto Governor Wammako said this was not the right time for Lagos to get a special status. For a man who was a governor, it is a shame. He should have explained better because no other time is Lagos more suited for the special place. I had made an argument in this column as though I anticipated the debate on Lagos, in my article, “Burden and glory”.

This is a time of recession and, during dire economic times; the best place to focus is the big city. Lagos provides that example not only because it is a big city, but because it is a working city. It is the city with a working jobs programme with its N20 billion platform with Ifueko Omoigui. It has embarked on disruptive infrastructure programmes, with works going on at furious pace from the feeder road in Yaba to the mammoth flyover in Abule-Egba. It is Lagos, where other states are still chafing under militancy and kidnapping, that developed a smart programme with vehicles, gadgets and men to tranquilise its highways and the bloodstreams of its felons.

Lagos has the population, and it has the companies and infrastructures. That is where governments can test their policies. In the last great recession, the United States took advantage of its big cities from Los Angeles to New York. According to the Brookings analysis of Moody’s Analytics data, the big U.S. cities gave America 1.3 million more jobs than before the recession kicked in 2008. History bears that out. The Marshall Plan designed to revive Europe after the devastation of the Second World War worked in cities from Athens to Berlin to London to Paris. It is partly the reason New York is seen as the world economic capital, Paris the city of light, Sydney the city of fireworks, Amsterdam of rivers and tunnels, Athens of history, etc.

In cities, various people dare. They try things, they are not afraid to fail. It is where everyone wishes to rise above their places. As the Italian writer, Italo Calvino, noted “with cities, it is as with dreams…” The concept of Manifest Destiny coined in the age of Andrew Jackson, for all its ingrained bigotry, was largely a move of genius. It helped remake America into a place of many cities and varied prosperity across North America. According to historian Frederick Merk, it was inspired by “a sense of mission to redeem the Old World by high example…”

Lagos has always that allure. It is the city where you have the accents aplenty, whether north, or south or east, or west, and they mingle in a chemistry of human harmony. Even in fashion, you see the aso oke as well as the Hollandaise, or the kaftan, and all blend into a sartorial statement quintessentially Lagos. Even for those who worship, Lagos is it. The churches do not always start here in Lagos, but once they see the light, they come like Paul of Damascus to the city. It is not for nothing that the anointing leads them to Lagos.

There we domicile the theatres, the intellectual fests, the festivals, the radicals and the conservatives. Lagos has always been there because Lagos, of all Nigerian cities, is the city that never fails. As I joked with a few friends, while other states are in soup, Lagos is licking soup.

Governor Ambode has shown not only transnational initiatives, but also international. His government has shown compassion, contributing to alleviate national crisis as in the case of victims of Boko Haram. It also worked a big agricultural alliance with Kebbi State. Governor Ambode has shown the knack to set Lagos on a high map to battle recession, and the Federal Government just needs to join. Other states are in trouble and their citizens are pouring into Lagos, yet lawmakers like Ekweremadu, who oppose it, do little for their people and hide in the cosy shadows of Abuja power.

Before the elections in 2015, PMB promised to pay special attention to Lagos. We are going to two years of his stewardship, he has yet to step an official foot on its soil. He still has the opportunity to do so. He should know that helping Governor Ambode in his abode bodes well for all of us. He should help Lagos help everyone. It is not a plea. It is an imperative.

PMB and Onnoghen

It is strange that Justice Walter Onnoghen is not yet being considered for the substantive job as chief justice. We are not in a crisis. There are no issues as to whether he is being investigated. If he is under probe, he should not even be in an acting capacity. Speculations are high that PMB wants him to play out his time as acting chief justice and the next man will walk in.

We are hearing nothing on this matter from the presidency. Normally he should send his name to the Senate. It is not as if this is the case of any other job where he has to consider the best on a list. If he is thinking of going outside the Supreme Court, he should let us know in line with democratic practices. If he chooses somebody else, we should know why Onnoghen does not fit. They may have a good reason, but we need to know.

PMB does not communicate well with us and, because of that, he allows speculations to bloom. It is out of sync with the democratic spirit. If he has something up his sleeves, we shall know in due course. We cannot kill time without injuring eternity, according to Henry David Thoreau.

Let us know now, the job of CJN is too important a matter for trifles or the intrigues of politics. When PMB wants to do something, he does it in spite of public opinion. We shall know whether what he plans for Onnoghen is fair or out of sync with the spirit of the constitution.

November 21, 2016
Trumpquake

Barely two months ago, I had a dinner in New York City with an American journalist, and I cannot forget his view about the presidential election.

“I don’t care what the polls say, that guy can’t be the president of this country,” he declared, a furrow defining his disgust. His tongue could not lift the name of “that guy.”

A week later, at lunch in the remodelled Union Station in scenic Colorado, another journalist showed less cheer. She, however, voiced dismay to me at the pro-Trump ascendancy. Both are journalists of over 40 years standing.

They saw an America that was morphing from an old virtue. An old virtue of civility, of mutual respect.

That virtue drowned in a resounding splash last week. Donald J. Trump of the swagger held sway, a one-man insurgency spiced by a raw vitality. He put a whiplash on the American pulse and those who doubted him woke up around the world on Wednesday morning to the triumph of a barbaric impulse.

The White House will indeed be tenanted by a new person in January, and it will not be the first United States woman president, but the man with the toupee, a puffed face and sometimes cartoonish face, a sardonic turn of phrases, with a baseball cap, with a crowd that hoots and jeers gleefully, with a juvenile energy, a billionaire who never respects women nor pays taxes, stiffs investors and employees, mocks a globalising economy but fattens on it, etc.

So, a day after, many wonder how the strongest and wealthiest nation in human history ended up with such a man as leader. But it is part complacency, and part ignorance. We have idealised America. It is a land that flows with milk and honey, where the good always triumphs over evil, where John Wayne always beats the bad guy, where Tom Hanks shines in a dark plot. They gave us Internet, aeroplane, television, Facebook, google, fast food. They coalesced forces to roast Hitler and other emblems of human backwardness. Coca-cola. Starbucks. Star Wars. How could they now vote a man that condones pugilist Putin, the nuclear-thumping dwarf of North Korea, plots to install a wall, calls Hispanics rapists, shows open contempt for blacks, would initiate mass deportation, etc.

But as the tallies finally flowed in, we discovered that this was an election in which white America decided to hug their own. But was this not the same country that voted in a black man just eight years ago? Yes, and that’s very American. It is a country that is at peace with rolling back its earlier chants. Remember Walt Whitman, its poet of democracy? He wrote: “Do I contradict myself? Yes I contradict myself…I am large, I contain multitudes.”

But a remorse set in quickly after the Obama boon. Mitch McConnell led the Congress Republicans to boast that Obama would never get anything through Congress. They would paralyse. Not long after, a few whites banded together in Washington to inaugurate the Tea Party, a movement that became a launch pad that derailed the Obama years, inspired nativist resurgence and threw up such bigoted heroes as Ted Cruz. They lay the foundation for Trump.

The Americans who gave Trump victory had clutched the electoral college. Those who lost gave less emphatic gesture: the majority vote. So, the contradiction is in, and we have to live with it. If we go through U.S. history, it is all too familiar. He said he wanted to make America great again, a code phrase for a return to a white America. I see parallel with America of another president, less known to many Americans and even to Nigerians. He is Andrew Jackson. The similarities are striking. Jackson rose on the common-folk white instead of property rights in earlier years. He focused on whites of the Anglo-Saxon stock, just like Trump. In his electoral slugfest against Dukakis of Greek origin, George H. Bush said he belonged to “mainstream America.” Reagan landed in Alabama and proclaimed that he believed in “state rights.” Jackson promoted what historians call “manifest destiny,” that called for setting apart certain areas in the west for the whites to explore and work. He was to the Indians what Trump is to American Hispanics and all immigrants. He railroaded a law that allowed him to sweep all Indians from their residences with whites into reserves, and they packed their all in long walks and travels that left many of them and their children dead. The road has been called a “trail of tears.” He had a trail. Trump promised a wall.

That part of America rose again in different times in the U.S. history. In the 1960’s, Governor George Wallace of Alabama ran for president and called for segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.” And another candidate George McGovern’s slogan “Come Home, America” is a precursor of Trump’s disdain for Pax America and the jettisoning of alliances around the world.

In a text message from the ebullient governor of Borno State, Kashim Shetima, a perceptive point is made. He writes, “by his pronouncements, Trump’s doctrine will rest on isolationism, non-interventionism and protectionism. In essence, other’s problems should be America’s…” He was also right when he wrote that “it was white America striking back…the thumping down of the American spirit and unwinding all the gains of 50 years.”

But there are other points. While we expect great from America, we should at home muse over our own troubles. The whites fight back but in our local elections, we are no better. Not long ago, we lit with delight as we corralled Ghanaians out of our shores. We vote according to what tribe or religion the candidate professes. We should not be too hard on the Americans. We are no better. In the last Lagos State elections, the Southsouth and Southeast folks gave the impressions they could outvote the indigenous Yoruba and impose their choice. The indigenes coalesced and had their day.

We are trying to indigenise rice production, the same way Trump wants the jobs back from China. It’s a nativist impulse that arises in any people when they feel threatened. This is the dark side of human impulse, and Trump tapped into it. Demagogues always do.

A critic has said Trump did not mean his rhetoric. Others took it literally rather seriously. But his followers took it seriously but not literally. I hope so, because that’s how I saw Soyinka’s red card promise. W.S. is a dramatist, and I saw the theatre once he uttered it.

Trump is a businessman, and many critics have said, he will run a transactional government. He hypes it, calls for the skies, but settles for something acceptable. We hope, in the end and for the love of all, we get something less apocalyptic than we heard on his hustings.

November 14, 2016