The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Like going to war

    Like going to war

    Sometimes we think when a war is over that it is over. It is the deception of the senses. The war comes again in new incarnations. There is still hunger. We still hear of murder. We still shrink at loud noises for fear a bomb has gone off, shrapnel is flying and bodies are falling. A crash, a thud, a boom.

    With the war against Boko Haram now smouldering, we focus less on the hordes hurling bombs and rolling into town after town with their messianic flags. Yet the news still nestles. Recently, women protested lack of food in the IDP camps. Pictures show images that recall the pangs of Somali tragedy. A little child with shrunken jaws, eyes popping out and legs spindly from kwashiorkor. Their homes are now empty land, if not still smelling of the bonfires of militant vanities.

    Most have no homes again. If they return, it is not to what was there. It’s all gone even if the house and the football field or the markets are intact. It is all different now because they have had different lives in the past few years. The meek is now a cynic, the fearful is now fearfully brave, the generous now poor and stingy, the fat is now lean, the athlete now limps. The farmer wants to be a farmer again but in vain. The yam seller has no farm, the teacher wants students, the student has to catch up or has become a mother now, and has to be a new student of something else: motherhood.

    So it is for the authority. It is a new society. Post-war societies are new societies. But making those new societies is like going to war. That is what Governor Kashim Shettima is doing these days. We witnessed it in eastern Nigeria and parts of the Niger Delta after the civil war. The society is new again, battered, broken, prostrate, in ruin. It has to rise again. It has to be born again. As Salman Rushdie wrote in the opening paragraph of his controversial novel, Satanic Verses, “to be born again, first you have to die.”

    The United States confronted same at the end of the civil war, and reconstructed large swaths of a mammoth continent. We saw it after the Second World War where the big hulk of Germany rose out of its Nazi ruins, or the Balkans after the nightmare of its dictators. Some Iraqi and Syrian towns rescued from ISIS are grappling with that.

    The job is a collective one, as Governor Shettima is doing. He is the fulcrum of the rebirth. He knows he cannot do it alone. Gone are the days when Boko Haram was only about 20 kilometres away from the state house. He never squished. Thanks to Buhari and the reinvigorated army, the government house and he will not know oblivion.

    The same collaboration is needed to rebuild the town. Maiduguri will have to be reborn in many ways, like Gworza, like Bama, etc., not only in physical infrastructure, but also mental and psychological. As Christ noted, “except a corn of wheat falls to the ground and die, it abides alone. But when it dies, it brings forth much fruit.” Now, the state cannot abide alone.

    The task has started. International envoys are coming around. BBC and CNN cameras click at scenes of hope and despair. Bono visited Borno, so did other top world celebrities, including our own Aliko Dangote. The Irish rock star has made quite a few donations, in cash and kind. Dangote is releasing tranches of the N2 billion he pledged. Recently, Governor Shettima and he visited a new estate under construction for the refugees.

    The IDP camps, though, are the centres of gravity. We see the remnants of war. We see easy morality, stealing goes on even in the midst of scarcity, especially because of scarcity. A baby boom is upon the north as though the IDPs want to replace the lost souls in a frenzy of casual promiscuity. It is a burden on boys whose virility preys on idleness and women whose fertility beckons procreation. Shettima and the government deal with about 50 births a week. The rich get richer, wrote Scott F. Fitzgerald, the poor get children. The government cares for them and also has to contend with another sort of fertility. Get the men and women to work again. Schools are being rebuilt; citizens are getting animals for farm and other supplies.

    The task is heavy. The federal government must have to play a major role. Part of the story behind the food protests was that the federal government is slow to play its part of an agreement with the Borno State government. According to the terms, the Borno State Government is supposed to supply the protein and the Federal Government has to supply the carbohydrates. Both are important, and complement. It reminds me of a story the late Chief Hope Harriman told of his time as a student in Government College, Ibadan. The students had gathered for their lunch. The eba was ready, and they waited for the soup with the protein inside. The British teacher saw them and wondered why they were standing idle. They replied that they were waiting for the other part of the meal. The teacher replied out of frustration, “why don’t you eat this while you await the other.” The students laughed and educated him that eba was nothing without the soup.

    Sources say Treasury Single Account issues have trammelled National Emergency Management Agency efforts to release funds for the food. This has to be sped up. TSA is good but people should not die. It will fulfil Apostle Paul’s words that the letter of the law kills. Let us invoke the spirit.

    Heraclitus said the law of life is struggle. One triumph challenges another spirit to triumph. So, post-war is like new war. In his play, Mother Courage, Bertolt Brecht tells a story of a woman who loses her children while she profiteers in the Thirty Years War. When the war ends, it is as though it has not.  She learns that “in decent countries, folk don’t have to have virtues.” Virtues are taken for granted. In a place like an IDP camp, virtues collapse under the need to survive. That brings thieves, brigands, rapists, the hungry, the sick, the lonely. After surviving the war, they have to survive the peace like Cyprian Ekwensi’s novel of that title about the civil war. That is the new war, and it is our war. If we let it fester, it will come to us in our halcyon corner.  Governor Shettima needs as many helpers around the world as he can get. Happily, they are coming, if not enough.

     

    Kudos to a dramatist

    Wole Oguntokun is one of our unsung heroes. In a philistine world, he is fighting for the revival of a crucial part of our lives: the theatre. While governments do little and the corporate world funds flimsy entertainment, Oguntokun has set up Theatre Republic in Lekki, Lagos where Nigerians can watch plays, both Nigerian and foreign, from his plays to Soyinka’s to Greek plays.

    “Everything is self-funded,” he told me in a phone conversation. The greatest accolade we ever had in literature came from plays, yet we are not taking advantage of Soyinka’s gift of the Nobel Prize. Oguntokun is a theatre warrior, and he needs to get big-time support. No society thrives without high culture. Hence in Britain and the United States, billions are poured into the high arts by both government and corporate organisations.

  • Burden and glory

    Burden and glory

    I remember a moment in church as a teenager in the God’s Kingdom Society here in Lagos, and Pa Adedokun was presiding and visiting the city from Warri, where he then domiciled. A feisty and hoary preacher with biting anecdotes and Yoruba proverbs, he was once the station minister of GKS Lagos decades earlier.

    This moment was in the 1980’s, and he mused on the transformation of the city. In the 1960’s, he said, you walked the streets of Lagos alone and when someone appeared on the horizon, you adjusted until he or she came within touching distance. But everything had changed in the 1980’s, the streets bustled and people milled and bumped into and jostled past each other. Melee had replaced a tranquil street.

    That was a Lagos where Aboru or Iyana Ipaja or Abule-Egba sounded like Madagascar, far in the Milky Way, and outside the ken of familiar chatter. Lekki was alien and roosted as neighbour to an asylum. The late Chief Hope Harriman, the real estate mogul, once reflected on how he compelled his friends to obtain properties in Ikeja, now a highbrow part of the city.

    Yet, when Cyprian Ekwensi wrote his debut novel, People of the City, many thought he painted the quintessential Lagos. Yet he wrote of the 1950’s, the one that Pa Adedokun knew and never romanticised. Yet, harlots, thieves, brigands, hustlers, bigots, opportunists, money changers inhabited Ekwensi’s Lagos. It was the big, bright Babylon.

    By today’s standards though, Pa Adedokun’s and Ekwensi’s Lagos are coy. They are a shrunken tree compared to today’s overfed wrestler. But Lagos was not the only city on the rise. Port Harcourt was daubed the “garden city,” because its roads and bridges nestled by a dazzle of plants and flowers and arboreal appeal. Kano was growing out of its feudal rut into a commercial hulk. Calabar, though in decline on account of Lagos’ ascendancy, still streamed with culture. Ibadan was where Awo tenanted his genius. Enugu was, like Constantinople of the 19th century, the star of the East. Even Kaduna clucked with political hauteur.

    Each of these cities held a special appeal to the Nigerian soul. I recall an essay by role model Roger Rosenblatt. In the essay he wrote for Time, he pondered the world’s iconic cities. He urged young ones to travel because each city is an instance of the human range. So, he mused on “the logic of Greece, the fortitude of London, the grace of Paris, a city for every facet of the mind.”

    But over the years, Nigeria is looking like a country running out of cities. The failure of the Naira, the plunder by our political elite, the years of locusts of bad governance are taking a toll on the cities. If Ekwensi wrote about a time when we had rural-to-urban migration, the migration of today is both urban to urban as well as rural to urban. The people are not flowing to all the cities, not Kano, or Calabar, or Port Harcourt, but principally Lagos.

    Statistics show that Lagos, which is turning 50, is third in the ranking of world cities receiving throngs of people daily. The reason is simple. It is the only vibrant state in the federation. But that glory is potentially a burden. If other states are not working, Nigeria’s alpha governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, is unknowingly becoming the Nigerian rescuer.

    Lagos is the state generating much money, embarking on disruptive infrastructure work, illumining the night streets across the state, embarking on a large-scale employment programme, reinvigorating the rural reaches while facing a homeless horde and increasing army of restless youths. The roads bear the weight of tankers and endless streams of automobile. From Oshodi to Abule-Egba to Lekki, the city is humming with work.

    With a little over a year in office, Governor Ambode has had to face the reality of a country in doldrums, and he presides over an island of relative prosperity. Like metal to magnet, people will move to Lagos and seek not only shelter but also treasure.

    In an age where most states wait, bowl in hand, for federal allocation, Lagos is generating its own money, is swirling with ideas, partnering with industry and international agencies, spurring its staff to industry and imagination, challenging the federal government to rise to the brilliance of one of its parts. Just as New York or California is a major world economic power in its own right, Lagos is a power in Africa.

    In a less dramatic way, Lagos is Nigeria’s Europe where people are fleeing their misery to take shelter. In the case of Lagos, no one is drowning in oceans from capsized rafts, nor are they facing visa requirements or xenophobic hysteria or referendums over whether to accept or reject them. Nigeria’s alpha governor’s success has even helped to mitigate the crisis in the nation. If a naïve and incompetent man mounted the saddle, the challenge would have escalated today’s economic crisis. What if Ambode failed to tackle early surge of crime with calculated deployment of men, resources and strategy, what if he has not tackled the traffic mayhem with imaginative tinkering with nodal points and bottlenecks in the city, what if streets crawl in darkness and criminals bloomed with bloodshed and robbery! Thanks to him, Lagos is the Cinderella of today’s governance.

    But the story of Lagos and its evolving staying power show that cities are about imagination. Big cities make great countries. New York came from a coastal settlement like Lagos and lifted the United States. Like Ekwensi’s Lagos, London was a grubby city once and full of slime, crime and grime. Charles Dickens created Oliver Twist in his novel of the 1830’s. The then Prime minister, Lord Melbourne, hated Dickens’ London of underworld crime and he complained to the queen. It is a different London today. Paris rose from a rural fiefdom, the rumble of revolution, Napoleonic swagger, a series of republics, and the shaping of the hands and dreams of architects. It tempered Hitler who could not destroy such a beauty. When Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway lived there, he wrote an all-time classic on the city, and called the book, The Movable Feast. Hear him: “If you are lucky enough to visit Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.”

    Lagos beckons and it is always a work in progress, and it has been the steadiest in all of the federation since 1999. It must remain so, but the federal government must understand that it needs Lagos to succeed. It should work to support it by giving it a special status not only in budget but other aspects of national planning. When George Bush Sr. was president, he gave a special status to China. He saw the future, and it is today’s burgeoning super power. If Lagos fails, Nigeria wobbles.

    Hence we must give kudos to the work so far done by Ambode. The work ahead is still enormous. Caesar Augustus once said, “I found Rome brick. I left it marble.” The road to a marble Lagos appears long, but with the sort of work and assiduity today, a marathon can be managed. One governor or one president, does not El Dorado make. But when they do well, their impact cannot be forgotten.

  • Father and son

    Father and son

    What intrigues writers and philosophers about King Oedipus was not just that he killed his father and married his mother. It was that he didn’t mean to marry his mother and kill his father. He meant well for his people and himself. Dramatists say he had a ‘tragic flaw.” As the play winds down, you feel sorry for the man as his impetuous flamboyance leaves him. He is onstage, tottering, wailing, blind, flailing, dying, and arriving at the knowledge of his epic folly.

    When our own Ola Rotimi adapted that play to Yorubaland, he called his work, The Gods are not to Blame, and up till today, critics still wonder what happened to the king. I, too, wonder today as I look at the political incarnation of father and son in conflict in Yorubaland today.

    More intriguing is that Jimi Agbaje will be the last to call Bode George father. Yet, not long ago, the evidence compelled otherwise. George sees himself in a regal way in PDP politics in Lagos. Therefore, anyone who wants to ride on the party ticket must first bow at his portal. So, when Agbaje pooh-poohed progressives to duel Akinwunmi Ambode for Lagos governor, he enjoyed George’s nod.

    Even while the gubernatorial battle wore on, tensions bled between father and son. Agbaje and his men had sniffed a victory. They began to share the spoils before the game fell. In their premature celebration, they plotted to sideline the former military officer and party wheel horse. George, on his part, baited him. Not knowing they would be pole-axed by the diligent former Lagos technocrat, both waited for the polls. They salivated in vain for victory. Ambode bested Agbaje. Father and son sulked in silence. George had promised to flee the land after a loss but his feet and wings froze in Lagos.

    Until a new game beckoned. The PDP looked for a party chairman. A storm started brewing between both men. Both are eying the meaty prize. No one is ready to relent. They are spilling blood in public. It is official: son has divorced father, and father is irate at the vaulting ambition of the son. It had not been a great relationship between father and son. They never witnessed Shakespeare’s wish: “when a father gives to his son, both laugh; when a son gives to his father, both cry.”

    Son did not acknowledge father gave him a platform to run for office. But we are witnesses to how George invoked his regal might to checkmate another renegade known as Obanikoro or Koro. Koro knew he was rigged out of the helmsman’s position in the primaries. He invoked all the deities of party and society. He fought with money and law and influence. He lost.

    George saw a gladiator in Agbaje to fulfil his selfish dream to own Lagos. He knew he could not do it himself. He wanted his son to do it. He probably had read writer Frank A. Clark that “a father is a man who expects his son to be as good a man as he meant to be.” Agbaje sold his progressive convictions for a mess of ambition and sought to fell his foes that serially defeated him in the past. Father wanted to ride son and son wanted to ride father. No one had the opportunity to mount the saddle. Both had a common enemy in the APC in Lagos. But they were not friends enough to fight the enemy.  So, both fell and never laughed nor cried together in public. Rather, they are eating their own flesh. An Agbaje sees George as ‘agbaya’, while George sees Agbaje as wayward and prodigal, or “omo ti o leko” (a spoilt child). Youth scowls up at age; age drips with contempt. He may be lamenting like Shakespeare in his play, The Tempest, that “good wombs have borne bad sons.” That is assuming that he has a good political womb.

    The Agbaje-George slugfest reflects the existential duel within the bigger PDP. It is a battle between interlopers and the mainstays, between renegades and faithful, between old guard and new feathers, between the worms and the bones, between the moles and the moulding. It is a battle between two morally fetid enemies. The end is not good. With one convention after another clipped by the court, by a technically happy judge and another imperious judge, the PDP is fighting over a carcass. Ali Modu Sheriff, who was a renegade in the APC before the PDP governors called him to be a legitimate renegade, planted himself into a mainstay. He rebuilt the party when the governors like Fayose, Wike and Mimiko, could not. Now, they seem to have found their rhythm, and they want him out. They used him and wanted to spit him out. They are coming back to their own vomit.

    It is not different from the case of George and Agbaje. They made Agbaje a factor in Lagos PDP, and they want to flush out the worm. George is paying for his opportunism just as the bigger party is paying for bringing a flawed character like Sheriff, with all his Boko Haram baggage, to head the “greatest party in Africa.” They gave two carpet baggers, Sheriff and Agbaje, the main floor to dance, and they want to pull the rug underneath. There will be consequences. The party is paying for its self-indulgence and opportunism.

    It all shows that George does not know how to be a father and Agbaje does not know how to be a son. History and literature abound with clashes like this. James Baldwin in his opus, Go Tell it on the Mountain, where father Gabriel never confesses he is Royal’s father before he died. Okonkwo was never wanted to talk or be like his father Unoka in Things fall Apart. Elesin Oba and his son belong to two worlds in Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman, expertly performed with binary flavour at the Freedom Square by Crown Troupe recently. Or Turgenev’s Basarov who dies disavowing his father’s world in his novel Fathers and Sons. Literary artists, like journalists, are fascinated with such dramas when father fails son and vice versa. But the United States had founding fathers whose sons we see prosper from generation to generation up to Obama. It can work.

    But the bigger PDP is fighting a more potent father: its ghost. It is at war with what PDP used to be, a swaggering, corrupt, bullying behemoth awash with money. They are holding on to a carcass. Just like a scene in the novel, Revenant, where the protagonist in cold weather hollows out the inside of a dead horse and slips inside and turns the carcass into a sleeping bag.

    If Sheriff will hang around, the PDP will hang. He will not give up, and the courts are there to give him mercy. Eventually, they will understand that PDP is an expiring brand and each of them could form different parties. My wonder, though: If PDP wins in either Edo or Ondo, who will be the authentic governor? Shall we have an interregnum while the courts nod to one candidate today and another tomorrow?

    Perhaps the answer is with King Oedipus or filicide. If father kills son or son father, perhaps there will be peace. That may not be solution, though. We shall have peace of the graveyard.

  • Light with equity

    Light with equity

    What does power have in common with superstition? Well, the following story illustrates it. Somewhere around Ikot Ekpene, a power line met a higher power. The shrine. Some staff who wanted to route the modern marvel through the community ran away. Why? The priests pursued them. They swore that if they came near with their wires and woods and technicians and their funny regalia, the shrine would invoke death and disease.

    Power pass power, as Nigerians would say. You would have expected the opposite. It makes us reflect on our history. Where were the African gods when the white man came with guns? One community after community, one god after another yielded in disgrace as the white man thrashed through and imposed a colonial rule.

    But here, in today’s Nigeria, modern still bows to ancient. The carriers of natural shock yielded to the awful prospect of spiritual electrocution. But modernity is defiant, must have its way. Not always, not with these men in Akwa Ibom whose tongues spewed out curses of the end of days. They asked for compensation first. They had it. The gods yielded not to firepower but to filthy lucre. The gods have become human.

    All the staff returned. Where ritual reigned, lines now swagger. Physical light replaces what Joseph Conrad calls, with impish disdain of African society, “the night of first ages.”

    In the same way, power supply in Nigeria has taken quite the same trajectory. We try to supply power. We stop it. When it is not corruption, it is red tape. When it is not red tape, it is gas supply. When it is not ignorance about gas supply, it is lack of accountability. When it is not lack of accountability, it is inefficiency. When it is not inefficiency, it is culture, or it is greed. A sort of chaos theory takes aim at our country that has grappled for over 50 years with how to turn on the light and keep it turned on.

    With this mesh on our hands, we are raging towards the dying of the light. So, it is true that we are groping with about 2000 megawatts of supply today when the average consumer is being asked to pay rates at the projection of 4000 megawatts. So, why the outcry? I say, why not? The Gencos and the Discos are not reconciling accounts.

    But we must start from the beginning. Gas. Without sabotage of the militants, we still don’t have enough gas. A revolution is required which will have to involve tweaking how our gas deals were configured in the past. Today, only 16 per cent of the gas goes to local consumption. The NLNG sells 38 per cent to foreign markets. About 36 per cent is a toss-up from what is called associated gas from oil wells and direct clear, but this is often frustrated because the western companies who work our wells are not interested in gas. They want only oil. That revolution of gas will stop the 10 per cent that flares interminably into our skies.

    The real issues are with the Gencos and Discos. For now, an illusion reigns about transmission. It has 5000 megawatts capacity. It is believed that it is not enough. For what we supply, it is. We have never surpassed 5,000. For Gencos, I have a lot of pity. I paid a visit to the Egbin Power Plant and saw that a lot has been invested. Before its takeover, it operated at 30 per cent. It now operates at about 87 with 1,100 megawatts. But it all depends on gas availability.

    But to get power to a high level, it has to come with small wins. Here and there, we have headaches. One, money has to be spent on bringing many of the turbines in all the power plants to high level. Many of them need money. Egbin, for instance, has invested about $400 million. Two, there are areas where legal cases have stood in the way of installations of power. Three, the various Gencos have many turbines lying fallow. Why? They need a lot of money to install them. Many of the companies that took over did not have a sense of what they were going into until they possessed, except a few like Egbin. Even at that, they did not anticipate the Naira fall.  Three, IPP also are under construction. Four, Aba Power Plant of about 141 megawatts just settled out of court, so is now under construction. Ditto to Zungeru power plant now under construction after legal row over commission claims.

    But the immediate problem is now accountability. The Discos are now being accused of not making the money received from consumers available to transmitters and Gencos. Part of it is fraud. Consumers have been charged the same rate when power was about 4000 which is the projection. Now, it is about 2000, they are charged the same. This is not fair.

    I understand the bellwether minister, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, has set up a committee for them to reconcile accounts to reflect what has been supplied. They are short-changing the consumer. It may be standing in the ability of the DISCOS to get enough power to supply to consumers. Many Nigerians are complaining that when they had an average of two hours power supply a day, they are paying about the same rate when they had six hours.

    This is a call for transparency, and the NERC should be the agency to step in and ensure that light comes with equity. This should complement the efforts of the bellwether minister to solve the supply chinks in different parts of the country.

    Another issue is the huge debts from big federal government institutions, including agencies and the military. But the Discos have been saying that the consumers are not ready for power supply. They say that it costs a lot to give power and we want to have it for cheap. They have a point. We had the same story with oil marketers. They had to withdraw and forced Nigerians to pay for fuel before we settled for it.

    Nigerians use power carelessly. Sometimes a light bulb will beam from morning to morning. Until we are ready to pay for power and turn on the light or the fan or the air-conditioner only when we need it, we shall never enjoy power. In advanced countries, they use power rationally.

    Only with consumption discipline shall we say we have conquered power.

  • End of reason

    End of reason

    Everything about our lives today is a cliché. That people stole our money is a cliché. It’s nothing new that a Speaker padded his budget, or a fellow legislator blew the whistle. It’s nothing new that we flushed with dollars once and we did not prepare for lean times. We know that from the ‘lean time, fat time’ story of Joseph and his brothers.

    It’s nothing new that it is a time of financial fraud. One governor carted away a billion, a minister two billion, an ex-party leader rotten billion hides beneath blossoms on his farm, or the head of state sets up a machine to track down the thieves.

    Yet, when they happen we raise perfidious or righteous eyebrows and yell, “Jesus” or “Allah.” We say it as though we have just erupted on this earth. The cycle of financial horror and empty treasury continues to surprise us. That is what makes us human. We lament the depredations of Aleppo today, but we also mourned over Boko Haram yesterday, and Nazi’s holocaust before that and slavery before that.

    Even though we know Jonathan and his cohorts splurged on our money, we act as though our funds are bottomless. We glowed to the refrain: Let the good times roll. But we also know about the plummeting oil prices, the market glut, Saudi Arabia’s intransigence on supply.  We show our own intransigence. We shout foul in the states when we hear that about 27 states cannot pay salaries.

    Labour would hear none of it. Labour rolls up its sleeves, brandishes its signs, stamps its cacophonous feet on the streets, chants truculently, curses ecclesiastically, hollers and threatens Armageddon.  But that is the way of humans. We have to act emotionally. We have to vent. We have to scream at an errant establishment. It is the end of reason.

    Two examples of the show of emotion call for consideration. In the Southwest, we have followed the trajectory of Governor Abiola Ajimobi and his joust with Labour. Up North, we have seen Governor Tanko Al Makura tango with Labour in Nasarawa State.

    In Nasarawa State, the governor bares the account to the people and says the citizens cannot live the way they used to. He says at a time when oil gurgled in waves of hard dollars, the country had to raise wages. It did not happen in Al Makura’s state alone. It was a nationwide bonanza of sorts. Salaries rose as high as 200 per cent. It was an act of justice. If we have money, we share. Salaries go up, lifestyles change, appetites widen. Crude oil turned crude men and women among us into urbane. Money answers all things. As the Bible also says, “in times of prosperity, rejoice…”

    Look at some figures in Nasarawa State, for example. A grade level 8 civil servant earned N17,731.36 in 2006. But in 2011, the same fellow pocketed N55, 515 when salaries had to go up in tandem with oil price rise. The grade level 16 civil servant jumped from a salary of N41, 750 in 2007 to N183, 140 in 2011. While the grade level 8 worker had a 213 per cent leap, the Grade level 16 had a 339 per cent soar. The price of oil was over 100 dollars per barrel. To paraphrase the poet Wordsworth with a whiff of exaggeration, it was “bliss that dawn to be alive.”

    Well, things changed, oil stumbled in a giddy fall from the stratosphere of 100 dollars per barrel to as low as 35 dollars. The great heft of state allocations also was crestfallen. So, there was not enough to pay salaries of the good times. Al Makura had to embark on a pay cut. In spite of that, from January to May this year, Nasarawa needed N11.3 billion to meet its salary obligations. Yet, it made N9.7 billion in that period in allocation.

    In the midst of this financial turmoil, Labour erupted. The governor’s plea was fruitless. How is the worker who could buy a shoe and pay a rent on the basis of the pay raise now deal with a pay cut? Reason does not work in such circumstances. Only emotions, it appears. But emotions cannot reverse the price of oil, or bring back all the money stolen by the Jonathan era. That is why I say, it is the end of reason.

    But only reason can come to the aid of emotion run amuck. The same story happened under Governor Ajimobi. Eventually after Labour stamped their feet and uttered imprecations, they settled down to the reason of the governor. Once, Ajimobi turned Ibadan into a modern city when money flowed. He paid salaries and gave education high-octane energy. When things turned, he explained. Was it not the same teachers who did not go to work everyday in parts of the state that are looking to be paid for work not done?

    “In times of adversity, consider…” said the Bible. So, Ajimobi has said that some civil servants have skill and want to work, some have skill and don’t want to work and others have no skill and do not want to work. How sapient. Yet he has said he will not fire anyone. That is politically wise, and that also calls for understanding when pay is not as high and regular. Hard times are here.

    It is not a time for emotion, but for imagination. It’s time for the protesters to hold their tongues and freeze their rebellious feet, and open their minds. Thomas Jefferson once said, “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” This was the soft-spoken volcano of the American Revolution. He knew that protest had its limits.

    What we need now is to work for a revived economy, and that is why I have always recommended that the Buhari administration resort to what economists call quantitative easing. They have to pour money into the system, in infrastructure, power, health and transportation and education. Larry Summers who was the treasury secretary under Bill Clinton has been vindicated over his call for pumping more money. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman railed at Obama for not pumping more money as part of strategy to revive the economy. Perhaps that explains what some see as an anaemic recovery.

    Fears of inflation will disappear if the money is turned into productive use. Imagine Lagos-Ibadan Expressway now under construction in massive transformation, or the railways roaring across the country and building sprouting and equipment buzzing in all the hospitals.

    It calls for courage. And it can be done. That should be prelude to freeing the states to tackle the problem of taxation and representation. I believe if everything is taxed in every state, each state will not only have enough but the governments will be forced to account for every penny.

    In her Nobel prize-winning novel, The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck makes a contrast between famine and flood. Famine gives little for the imagination, so people flee Rural China. But flood comes, and the people have too much water, yet they were able to identify some hard ground and use water. One extreme trumps the other. So is the case for quantitative easing.

    The problem is not with the governors like Ajimobi and Al Makura. It is because we need to free the states and use our common strength. Oil has failed. It’s time for imagination to win.

     

  • How we lost our way

    How we lost our way

    Fifty years ago, Nigeria was on edge. Like the sky before a cloudburst, civil war hovered. But now it reads like a thriller.

    Then, however, danger skulked. Soldiers hid under an inky night, bullets flew out of stealthy corners, officers intrigued as their men had their hands on the trigger, and politicians feared and retreated.

    In Ibadan, where Awo tenanted his genius for democracy and as a model for governance, things were falling apart. There were two soldiers, one a host, the other his boss. They had a night together before they said their final goodnight. They were not, in the language of Poet Dylan Thomas, going “gentle into that goodnight.”

    Aguiyi-Ironsi was the boss and head of state. He always dangled a live crocodile, mythicised as a counterfoil against the evil eye and enemy’s reptilian plot. Some said the little croc guaranteed his disappearance when intrigue darkened around him. His host, Adekunle Fajuyi, the governor of the Western Region, was playing host, ensuring that Ironsi had a good time with his cavalcade.

    But a man known as Theophilus Danjuma had other plans. He crashed the party, and eventually, Nigeria’s. Not that things were squeaky clean in the country. Pogrom had sullied the northern landscape with the Igbo and southern minorities dying like flies from machetes, pickaxes, bonfires and guns of zealots. That night set us one major foot onto the bloody puddle of a 30-month civil war that claimed millions of lives.

    That night, both host and boss were arrested by visitor Danjuma and his men. They had come to kill Ironsi and spare Fajuyi. But Fajuyi, a man of honour that he was, would not go gentle. He, too, had to die. If he were alive, the narrative would implicate him in Ironsi’s death as traitor and conspirator. Ironsi was executed and Fajuyi also killed. They could not, in Thomas’ words again, “rage, rage against the dying of the night.”

    In spite of that foul night, Ironsi, also known as Ironside, has no memorial to his name. He has not been called hero even in most historical literature. You are not a hero because other soldiers killed you. You are a hero because of the values that oozed out of your pores as you expired. Some have therefore called him a villain.

    I am not about to follow that path. Ironsi came on the scene because of the failure of the Nzeogwu-led coup of January, 1966. It was tagged an Igbo attempt to foist ethnic hegemony on the rest of the country. From being a popular effort, it turned out a tinderbox. Why did they kill non–Igbos like Balewa, Sardauna, Akintola, Omimi ejo and leave two Igbo premiers in the Midwest and Eastern regions untouched. Why did they leave out Ironsi unscathed? He was asked to try the coup plotters. He did not. If he did not, why did he promulgate Decree 34 that called for Unitarianism in a country of strict regional fidelity?

    Some have said he was naïve, and he meant well. His kinsmen dominated the civil service. Of the major universities in the country, Ibadan, Lagos and Nsukka had Igbo vice chancellors. Balewa trusted key ministries with the Igbo. They had the railways, the employment power. If that was the case, why would Nzeogwu obstruct a free-flowing system for his kinsmen?

    Some of the answers we may never have, especially since they had claimed they wanted to bring Awo out of jail to steer the nation’s affairs as the head of state. Moments like this make the call for the study of history to be restored in our educational system rather than the tentative way we have it today.

    The brilliant writer and journalist, Chuks Iloegbunam, is an authority on Ironsi. His book, Ironside, tackles some of these issues. On my regular television show on TVC on Saturday morning called The Platform, he addressed why Ironsi did not try the coup plotters. He noted that the Supreme Military Council had it in its minutes. That document has not been made public, although Hassan Katsina, Northern Region governor and an instigator of northern hate, had reportedly said so. If such a document is made public, it will do well to exculpate Ironsi from some of the charges. We will yet want to know why he temporised and made no effort, in spite of the clamour of those days, to say it himself and in clear terms.

    One irony of the day, though. Ironsi was slaughtered by Danjuma and his men for Decree 34. Yet, in the long shadow of military that lasted many years, Nigeria ran a military rule in the spirit of Decree 34 with Danjuma as a mainstay. So, were Danjuma and his fellow mutineers not hypocrites and vermin of the hegemony they accused Ironsi of? I say, yes indeed. They did not kill Ironsi because they wanted a federal system. They had an opportunity to install it. But they mounted a grey wall of hegemony. While it was wrong for Ironsi to upset the federal applecart began with the Richards Constitution, Danjuma and his cohorts only marched us to the bloodiest era of history with their night of infamy. If Ironsi was no hero, Danjuma was worse. Ambiguity clouds Ironsi’s story. T.Y. Danjuma’s stale was clear-eyed regionalist. He did not spin a patriotic yarn.

    Yet, I should say that explains the swagger of the Kaduna Mafia for most of our history. Before its decline, they were deft handlers of power. Reviled and despised by the South, they showed a subtle hand. In their appointments, policies and symbolisms, we saw northern control with ‘respect’ for the rest of the country. Not like today, where Buhari has shown little subtlety. If the Igbo triggered the pogrom because of the mistake of a few of them, they compromised the flowering of the Igbo in the country in a time of peace. That was a lesson, I think, the Kaduna Mafia learned when they held unquestioned sway until IBB bungled June 12.

    The greatest villains, though, were the January coup plotters who would not allow democracy stumble and learn. If they did not breach the system, we probably would have found a way out of the impasse. No doubt, it all began with the imbroglio of the Western Region. The NPC/NCNC alliance at the centre had choked the AG and a sense of unease had enveloped the country.

    Before the coup, the political society was looking for ways out. If the most wronged region, the West, was not thinking of secession, perhaps the East was having a good time. Yet, Nzeogwu and co. popped our innocence and, in Achebe’s words in A Man of The People, “lit the tinder of unrest in the land.”

    We cannot forget Fajuyi. Some have tried to dilute his heroics by saying he never wanted to die. I stick to his yarn of sacrifice. Professor Bolaji Akinyemi’s essay in this newspaper testifies to the man’s effacing sense of honour.

    Given unanswered questions, Ironsi may not have a national monument, nor should as yet until the clouds clear. Fajuyi’s case was that of personal honour, not national unless he represented the Yoruba at that moment. Like Awo in personal honour and infectious vision and policies as premier, Fajuyi might have externalised the Yoruba as an exemplar of cooperative elan. We may never know. Such individual acts are engrafted on souls of others. Yet, the circumstances problematise his heroism.

    At the bottom, we see how our soldiers ruined us, and how we lost our way and never returned.

  • Tenants in chief

    Tenants in chief

    The one stands as though about to fall. The other seemed to have overcome the storm of its early days. But now, both are in the eye of a cyclone.

    It began with the Oloye Bukola Saraki who played the comedian of the television series, Eleyinmi. To be fair to him, he did not think Eleyinmi when he hid his haughty hands in his voluminous agbada. His comic majesty thought it natural. A big man with royal hubris should not show his hands to mortals. To be fair again, this column cautioned him out of that hubris. He obeyed and freed the hands out of the suffocating clutches of his showy damask. He then felt free to wear a western suit. I had feared he would sew himself a suit with overlong sleeves. That would have been a fashion tour de force, a sartorial first for a lawmaker. Well, there is no telling what a royal impresario can do.

    To everyone’s relief, we know his hands are mortal just like the ones writing these lines. So, cut the Oloye some slack. He has some capacity for humility. He shows us his hands now. Pride, however, remains a granite part of his political being. For all the charges against him and his colleagues in the upper chamber, he acts the peacock part. Hence a moral weight hangs over the Senate today.

    He carried a train of drooling senators with him to court, when he was not playing court to them at home as the oloye of Nigeria’s legislature.

    Yakuba Dogara seemed to have transcended the low script. Once his triumph as speaker was complete, he draped himself with a sort of parliamentary dignity. He spoke the right things, had the right airs, sported the right suit. He sounded not only patriotic, but also pious. He revved up his homage to Oyedepo’s church. He gave the impression of a big tent leader. He also shielded his chamber from the turbulence of the Senate. He did not have a spectacular first year, but a quiescent one. No brilliance, but silence. Compared to the puerile tempest of Oloye’s ambience, Dogara was a good tenant of the lower chamber.

    Until last week, it seems. First he fired Abdulmumin Jibrin, the Kano legislator who headed the Appropriation Committee. The charge? He padded his budget proposal with a princely N4 billion. The man had some pride. He pre-empted his firing by resigning. He was replaced, for fairness, with another Kano man. As Nigerians say, nothing spoil. But not for long. Jibrin boiled over later. He charged back. If he was ‘fired’ over N4 billion, we should go back to our math lessons in school. Four times 10? Yeah, that is his reply. Dogara and his team had padded their constituency projects 10 times over his puny proposal, if it was true.

    Here we go. Where was the Dogara of the pious air? The Dogara of baby face. The Dogara of the calm waters, of impregnable dignity. The Dogara who took on the anti-corruption frock when he shocked us with the news of a man who domiciled over a billion Naira in the belly of a farm.

    He has to face charges. He said he was innocent. He charged back that Jibrin had no moral fibre to attack him over attempts to introduce an immunity clause for lawmakers.

    Suddenly, the Winners Chapel man looked sanctimonious. His press release was more insistent on defending the immunity clause than the impunity of N40 billion. We see here that the two-chamber legislature has become a burden on this democracy today.

    The lawmakers who should be seeking ways out of the ennui of the day are fighting for their moral well-being. One has to show it is not involved in forgery. The Oloye has been mocked in public for stating in his assets declaration that he owned a mansion that did not exist. He knew he would own the house before he declared, a prophet of his own prosperity. By implication, he wrote a prophecy in his assets declaration.

    The lawmakers turned into a stinking muck. The first story was the presidency’s stumbles. Buhari’s budget was flayed for inconsistencies of figures, for fabulous padding, for illiteracy. Like Shakespeare asked, when correction lies in the hands that committed wrong, to whom shall we complain?

    What moral right will they latch on to when a minister of education has turned standards in our unity schools into a thoroughfare of mediocrity? Or why people now steal food just to survive, or why so much division is tearing apart our fragile being as a people, or whether we should tackle head-on the frailties of our constitution?

    As many have called the Oloye to step down as his case plays out in court, Dogara has no moral right to retain his seat as speaker until a thorough investigation into Jibrin’s allegation is done. Jibrin also ought to step aside as a lawmaker until his matter is resolved. That is the proper thing to do. But Nigeria is not proper, and both men will continue to tug at each other’s sleeves in the course of their tour of duty that ends in three years.

    Ironically, Jibrin and Dogara were in the same camp in the battle for speaker. They were apparently strange bedfellows. The N100 billion constituency project is not the job of lawmakers. They are not project executors. They are advocates of good work in their constituencies. But to execute belongs to ministers and directors-general. This drama exposes the corruption of the Tenants of the House, apologies to Wale Okediran whose searing novel unveiled the fetid lies and greed of our democracy from the lawmaker’s standpoint.

    They are not good tenants. They have abused the landlord like the one mocked in Graham Greene’s A Heart of The Matter. The reason neither Oloye nor Dogara will step down reminds one of the novel of Nobel laureate Pearl S. Buck on pre-Mao feudal China where a man rises from a humble estate to be a great lord. The novel, The Good Earth, ends on a tearful note. In his hoary years, the lord hears his sons plot to sell the land. He faints. He knows only the land all his life. The difference with our lawmakers is that they have no investment in this house. The house belongs to the people.

    We are the landlords and they are like “ghosts unlawfully tenanting a defunct carcass,” in the words of Melville.

    But the landlords – we, the people – are impotent. We own the house. But we have no keys. If not, we would have yelled like the Poet Byron, “O man! Thou feeble tenant of an hour… corrupt by power. Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust.” They won’t quit. By our impotence, we have made them tenants in chief.

  • A school as morgue

    A school as morgue

    The crisis stirring the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife reminds me of one evening at the Oduduwa Hall in the 1980’s when I was a student. I cannot recall the reason for the gathering, but Professor Wole Soyinka, not a Nobel laureate then, rose to speak.

    It was the first time I had heard of the “university idea.” He observed that OAU, then the University of Ife, was losing its way. His concern was not about egotists jousting for leadership or a febrile issue of student discontent. He was disappointed that where lawns should green and trees blossom, buildings were sprouting widely. For a student who was studying his homage to nature in his play, Madmen and Specialists, the evening was all too poignant.

    He was also disappointed that some campus high rollers did not even understand the simplicity of the “university idea.” He mocked them by alluding to those who accused him of “obscurity and impenetrable densities.” Yet, the Ife top brass ought to hang their heads in shame for breaching nature in the pursuit of the soap bubble they see as architectural bliss.

    Today, the soap bubble is the rule of law. The result is thousands of students idle at home. Ambition has shut the horizon. Egos are clashing. Greed is in high places. The university idea is hibernating. I cannot escape the irony. This is OAU, the place of culture and learning. It is the same school that has twitted an inane establishment, revolutionised student unionism in the country, installed an academy of conscience, held to account the brutal ecstasies of past military regimes and tamed the flamboyant corruption of democracies. Chinua Achebe once called it the seed bed of African renaissance.

    Jesus would have yelled at them over the recent crisis: physician, heal thyself. How come the struggle for who becomes a vice chancellor has transmuted into a template for paralysis? In the past, we have seen fragile egos go sore, juju placed on roads, death threats skulk rivals, orations of meaningless acidity, money exchanging hands, et al. But often, a certain code of civility undergirded the apparent barbarities. Students still attended classes, the registrar still paid salaries, lecturers still laughed and guffawed over beer at the clubs, campus nights maintained the contradictory rhythms of lucubration and romance, aluta cohabited with the evangelicals.

    At OAU, it is now graveyard. Why? The soap bubble of the rule of law. The story seems a bit straightforward. To pick a vice chancellor, the university top council advertises. This they did. They were supposed to draw up a shortlist. This they also did. In fact, it was done by the body called Joint Council of and Senate Selection Board, (JCSSB), which comprises persons from both the Senate and Governing Council of the university.

    In the course of making a shortlist, members of Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU) and Non-Academic Staff Union of Universities (NASU) suspected foul play. They would not allow the process to continue because they thought it was not going to be a contest but a coronation. They took the matter to court, but the JCSSB, went along with the process by also securing a court order. What it means is that the matter was still brewing in court while the process continued.

    Both SSANU/NASU and the JCSSB were in their rights. The process therefore continued. The law was followed. A shortlist was made, and a final decision favoured Professor Ayobami Salami. But the opposition was not happy for the following reasons. Two of the top three candidates at the final interview were not from Ife. Three others from OAU were shortlisted but decided not to show up at the final interview. They automatically disqualified themselves.  Only Salami came from Ife. The others were from outside. Did the law forbid that? Is the university idea not about merit? Maybe the others believed the board had decided on Salami. The other point was that one of the shortlisted candidates was not healthy because he had a stroke. That is a valid point. I still wonder how the council would defend that. He was not even physically present at the interview, so he performed it over the phone. In any case, he never was made the vice chancellor. Again, if they wanted somebody from Ife, they have it in Salami. Some on the short list were about four OAU professors.

    To make it more absurd, the minister of education had accepted Salami as new VC. The same VC now dissolved the governing council because the process was said to have been flawed. This same education minister has stumbled several times on his throne. The same man who cannot distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate and dissolved university boards unilaterally. His is the minister of board dissolution. He forgets that Salami had gone through all the processes: academic, health, SSS, etc. he was found sound enough.

    If those who oppose him felt things did not work according to due process, why did they not follow their own lead and wait for the court to take its course?

    How does the dissolution of the board de-legitimise Salami’s pick? The board was legal when it decided. It cannot be illegal in retrospect and that makes the education minister’s decision untenable. The governing board members as well as the senate who picked Salami may have choreographed the process to pick their anointed. It may be so. It may be fair.

    It is obvious that if it is a matter of the rule of law, the SSANU/NASU coalition would have yielded. They wanted something less noble than the rule of law. The snag about the rule of law is that it can be manipulated. But to paraphrase Apostle Paul, we can do nothing against the law but for the law.

    That means everything should be done according to law. Meanwhile, we need the minister to step up and invoke the necessary steps to get the students back to the classroom. It is clear that it is not the principle of law that is at play, but group interests. One group beat the other in the fight for campus supremacy, and the losing side is calling for the rule of law. As I have often said, the rule of law makes sense in the context of justice.

    The injustice here is against the students whose future is truncated by juvenile academics and other staff. All those who carried symbolic coffins around the campus and created a mournful air should realise that Ife is a school, not a morgue. Presently it is a school as morgue where ideas and learning are waiting for the breath of life.

  • The Biafran ghost

    The Biafran ghost

    Like Banquo’s ghost, the past haunts us today, again. Forty nine years after the civil war, we are still fighting the war. Some think the war is over. They are wrong. The war is with us because we are a nation of self-deceit. We lie to and at ourselves. We say peace whereas tribulation lurks and detonates everywhere.

    That is why Boko Haram harangues us in the North. It explains the resurgence of the IPOB and MASSOB and the rumblings of the Niger Delta Avengers and the barbarous entitlement of herdsmen. Even before the past few years, when bombs were literally quiet, tongues exploded between tribes. Rhetoric rattled rhetoric. Tribes and tongues differed by saying tribes and tongues differed. The June 12 excitement was a rebirth of the divisions of the 1960’s.

    We did not solve the problem when it confronted us. When Gowon exploited his name as an acronym of unity, GO ON WITH ONE NIGERIA turned out to be an empty epithet, a feel-good delusion from a victor. Nothing concrete was resolved other than fell the enemy in battle.

    Did we resolve the issue of abandoned properties? Leading up to the war, pogrom lit up the North in incandescent murders. Not only Igbo were killed as many tendentious literature say. Even Adichie’s Half Of The Yellow Sun, for all its strengths, portrayed the single story that the author has campaigned against. The slaughter up North targeted anyone who was not Yoruba, and that included the sweep of minorities in the today’s Niger Delta. Urhobo, Itsekiri, Edo, Efik, Ogoni, etc were mincemeat in the cauldron of death.

    Now, did we have any enquiries into that sanguinary chapter? The northern elite, including political, feudal and military leaders, reportedly encouraged the barbarities. Has anyone been punished or even been officially reprimanded? We have not even officially investigated. We know too that Nzeogwu’s coup was seen as tendentious, and it inspired some Igbo to provoke northerners with their proprietary swagger, boasting that they had taken over the country. Have we looked at that, too? If the swagger was bad, the killings were never justified. But even at that, have we addressed them as a people? Ironsi enacted Decree 34, and some analysts said it was naïve because he did not intend to introduce a unitary system to impose Igbo hegemony. If that act was naïve, what of the second act? He did not want to try the coup plotters. That, according to critics, gave him away as an Igbo jingoist.

    Have we revisited the Aburi meeting, and its aftermath, and how that confab either ossified or laid bare the fissures of our inter-ethnic relations? Were there blames? Where there acts of overreach on both sides? Was the war avoidable? Did the pogrom make war inevitable? How come a region that knew it was tactically and materially inferior to its opponent take the plunge into war?

    So, we also had the war atrocities. We saw what Ojukwu’s army did in the Midwest when Biafra invaded, and the resentment overshadows conversation up till today. We know of the killings of the Igbo in Asaba and how Murtala’s Second Division teased out trusting locals to welcome them and killed them like animals. Gowon, who could not rein in his generals, only had an apology over 40 years after. The apology, however heartfelt, never brought closure.

    So, when hostilities ended, Gowon declared that there was no victor and no vanquished. We know that was as vacuous as GOWON. We just wanted to move on, like a child who walks into a party from a bathroom without cleaning up. The smell and mess linger.

    The ghost has followed us ever since. In education, over whether we should have catchment areas or not. In the Orkar coup. In Saro Wiwa’s murder. In the Matatsine imbroglio. In the meltdown of Fulani and indigenes relations in the plateau. In the June 12 logjam. In the choice of Jonathan as president. In the choice of Buhari as counter president. The list is endless.

    So, when many, including the self-serving Atiku, called for restructuring, it was because the civil war and ghosts of the many dead are still with us, walking the Nigeria earth, apologies to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Developed nations understand the merits of closure. Last week, Britain unveiled the Chilcot report and picked to pieces all the facts of that ignoble chapter of the Iraq War. Tony Blair was exposed, as well as some of the intelligence community and the parliament. The nation looked itself in the mirror, and mea culpa replaced a sense of righteousness.

    On the Iraq war, the New York Times issued a lengthy apology for allowing the emotion of the day sway its professional duties. Next time, both England and United States will think deeper before throwing innocents at the teeth of battle. The crisis of the Balkans is still lapping up its culprits today. Enquiries have dredged up the bad guys and they are subjected to the rule of law. The Hutus and Tutsis have also had theirs and those who inflamed the land to butchery have been exposed and punished. Apartheid in South Africa had its Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

    The Second World War could not be concluded without a clear resolution through the Nuremberg trials. The First World War was concluded without such an enquiry. The victors simply punished Germany and isolated it. The result: a resurgent Germany with the Hitler of hate.

    A people must always learn not to take its injustice for granted. During the Peloponnesian War, Athens fell because it merely slaughtered its best generals who did not pick up its dead at sea as was the custom. The parliament did not reason. The absence of its best brood of soldiers allowed Sparta to crush it.

    So, when Buhari stands accused as nepotist and regionalist in his appointments, it is because he has not transcended the hubris of the civil war. He invokes GOWON but he denies it when his pen signs an appointment. When does a chief of staff to a president become a board member of Nigeria’s choicest corporation? How do we call a truce with the Avengers when the NNPC board is lopsided and has only one name from the oil producing areas?

    The civil war haunts because the hostilities have never really ended. Unnerved on his throne, Macbeth could not exorcise Banquo’s ghost. He said, “Avaunt and quit my sight. Let the earth hide thee, thy bone is marrowless and thy blood is cold.”

    The Biafran ghost still spills cold blood. We may deny it and say our nation is not negotiable, but the past keeps growling and badgering. The more we claim we are together, the more apart we get.

  • Farewell cruelty

    Quite a few Nigerians have tried to redeem Jonathan out of the dust of infamy. With dewy eyes and longing, they see him as the new pope of Nigerian politics. They might even loft him up as a sort of Christ. The one who descended to the grave, and now he is alive for ever. He holds the key to kitchen and plenty.

    That is the view of quite of few Nigerians who are laden with nostalgia. This do-over of the Otuoke potentate growls beneath formal speeches. They say, in Jonathan’s day, dollar flourished in their pockets. Their food pots flowed over. Their mouths choked with delicacies. They shone with sartorial choices. They could pay their rents. They could travel. They indulged in the familiar Nigerian vanities. And, to top it all, they had their salaries, however abject. Now they seek small mercies called salaries. Instead, they face damnation.

    Today, it is quotidian misery. Their ribs now chill for lack of laughter and the party music now tamed, they act as though in self-imposed peril. So, they ask, why don’t we go back to the Jonathan era and let the good times roll again? Some of them voted for him, and we could see that as self-justification. But others who voted against him now have volte-face.

    That is one example of an about-face. The other pirouette concerns the confab of the Jonathan years. The ebullient Babachir David Lawal, the scribe of the government, tossed aside the call to bring back the reports of the 2014 National Conference. He called it “jobs for the boys.” Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, one of the confab mainstays, ribbed Lawal. How dare he condemn a work that took hours and intellectual rigour with the constellation of role models? Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka also took a swipe at Buhari for pooh-poohing the document, asserting that it surpassed the work of PRONACO years ago.

    Suddenly, Jonathan has a makeover. The shoeless man is bouncing out of a dust-ridden image. For Buhari, a “messiah” wants to go to work but meets a rising tide of the people who think he is no messiah.

    The portrait of a leader can change anytime, and it often depends less on what he did right or wrong, but what people feel at the time, especially about who leads them now. That is why Jonathan, who brought the economy to its knees, who divided the nation on ethnic and religious grounds, who crippled the Northeast with a corruption-ridden war chest, who never completed a landmark project in six years, is now the candidate for sainthood.

    But if we look at the facts, they are seductive. Salaries are hardly forthcoming. The dollar is cascading furiously, many more are homeless and roaming the streets, people are stealing their neighbours’ amala and impiously stalking Ramadan meals. Joining gangs entices boys and harlotry gulps up girls. Queues to flee the country are elongating.

    Suddenly the hero for some is the ineffectual man who created the mess. His image has changed. “There is something fatal about a portrait,” wrote Oscar Wilde in his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a novel about how a picture changes from winsome to murderous. The same way some people are giving new pictures to Jonathan.

    Was it not Jonathan of the billions of naira scandal, of Dasukigate, of cousins in theft, and friends in spendthrift stealth? Is it not the same Jonathan who wrecked the dollar, who excused a dame who flew with impunity and extravagance, and another dame of BMW saga?

    How come the people now salivating for him cannot make the connection? A witch cried last night, a child dies this morning, says the African proverb. Who does not know the connection?

    The same applies to the confab report. We can say that the report may not be all saintly, but what report is? Hence we can see the sagacity in Soyinka and Akinyemi and others who call for redeeming the project. I know, from sources at the time, that the meeting was called as jobs for the boys, as Lawal said. And we cannot forget the princely allowances. Jonathan’s minders also saw it as a diversion. In spite of that, they had a report and they included a few gems. Shall we forget the gems because of the germs in the hands of the makers? Judas betrayed but redemption resulted.

    But as I have noted before, we need to rake up all our reports since independence. The piles have become files of paralysis. We can even build a museum and stack them and see what catastrophe of ideas has been our trajectory as a nation. Is it about the Niger Delta? Or about education, the army, the civil service, the housing crisis, urban squalor, foreign policy? The files abound. Or it is about our ethnicity or faith clashes? Go to the informal museum. Maybe we should inaugurate the museum as a way of laughing at ourselves as monuments to paralysis.

    The crisis reflects our failure to latch on to a golden era as a nation. Well, we don’t have a golden era. Perhaps in a regional sense, we have, but only in the Southwest and because of Awolowo. The Southwest can look back to the rim-glass hero. But not so in the South-south region, which is an array of people with diverse roots. Nor in the Southeast, except the only soap bubble of Biafra. The North is grappling with its feudal fantasy in a republican age. Leaders like Shettima, Tambuwal and El-Rufai are working hard at it.

    If the past haunts the present, it is the job of the present to exorcise it. That’s the task before the charioteer of change, Buhari. Or else we will look like the post-Napoleonic France that made the historian, Albert Carrie, to write, “Those who looked back to the Napoleonic era, they belonged to the lunatic French.”

    Buhari has to attack the challenges of perception and galvanise a nation. No one but he himself can do that. Or else, the more people will start look back rather than looking forward. They will say, like Shakespeare in Twelfth Night, “Farewell, fair cruelty.”

    One hundred years after

    He was called Mala, as short for his longer Itsekiri name. But as his stature grew and myth gained vigour, everyone called him Nanna, who was fondly and sometimes derisively called Gofune or Gofine, a corruption of the word governor, a position he held in the Niger Delta where he flourished in politics and commerce.

    This week, Nanna’s death will be marked in Itsekiriland and the Niger Delta as one of the great icons of his era and pre-colonial Nigeria. Nanna’s martial spirit and patriotic rage will be marked as candle lights wink, monuments unveiled, speeches soar, his ad hoc soldiery celebrated

    Nana towers today as one of the men of visions and courage we ever had. He ranks with avatars like Sodeke, or Balogun Latosa or Ovonramwen, except that no one put up so stout a resistance to the colonising devilry of the British like Nanna. Where the British saw a servile black, he proved the mettle of sovereignty. He also turned an interregnum into republican swagger.

    He was no democrat. He was no king. He was no general. Yet, he reigned with the glamour of royalty, the groundswell of popular following and strategy that impressed an Alexander or Patton.

    The British needed him in oil trade and made him governor. But they thought they had their slaves. Nanna knew the age of slavery was over. Maybe the English still basked in that era. They broke his staff of office and wanted to trick him out of town into jail. He was on to them. They brought their Army. He mounted a blockade. The English called themselves “mistress of the sea” but got stuck and had to seek reinforcement and the help of local rivals like Numa to break the blockade. He had help moving from place to place and took shelter with his Yoruba friend Seidu Olowu in Lagos before he turned himself in.

    His story reminds us why we should study history in our schools as highlighted by patriarch and author and president of Itsekiri Leaders of Thought, J.O.S. Ayomike, the inspirer of this remembrance.