The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • A time to learn

    A time to learn

    It was a day for accolade. It turned out, ironically, as a night for introspection. Ben Murray Bruce tried to play the common sense card. As senator, he has craved the spotlight. In diction, in boast, in effort to play down his patrician status and, many will say, in vanity.

    He was talking up our history at the Silverbird Man of the Year night. He said, as he noted in last year’s event, that we have perished our memory. The young do not know the past. The old cannot remember our landmark events. We are plunging blind into the future. We need to play up our past. We need to do that now.

    He gave an inspired speech. I associated with him. I have campaigned quite a few times for this. We are a rudderless people without history. When we understand our past, the resources will abound to tackle our heres and nows.

    But Senator Bruce was about to be bruised that night, softly. The man of the year, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, injected him with a little dose of commonsense.

    He said he agreed with Bruce, but he was acting impotent when he had the power to act. If he was still campaigning for the position of senator, he would have made a mammoth sense. But he was not campaigner Bruce, but Senator Bruce.

    “Sponsor a bill,” encouraged Tinubu, and he stretched his hands to the right and called out the name of Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola. He would support the bill. He then referred to his wife and senator, Oluremi Tinubu, who would prop up the bill with her voice and brio. He assured Bruce that he would rally the forces of intellectual progress in the upper legislative chamber for the cause.

    “I am anxiously waiting for the bill. Over to you, Senator Bruce. We want it to be introduced so we can have the young study it in primary and secondary schools as a compulsory subject. In universities, we want all history departments to be restored as independent units rather than combinations with international studies, which is meaningless.

    We don’t have to go the past to grasp the value of the past. Look at some of the contemporary concerns. Look at the corruption war. We have been in this matter for long, since the First Republic. Nzeogwu and company despatched our first political elite in a putsch by lashing out at the fetid pool of corruption.” But he lamented the tragedy, and he noted that they were 10 “percenters.” What did that mean? The politicians and contractors stole 10 per cent of contract money, but allowed 90 per cent for proper work. In today’s terms, they were saints. Today, at least in the era that ended with Jonathan, they stole over 100 per cent in many instances. The evidence was ghoulish. Contracts were awarded but not implemented. The same people asked for review after a year and got more money and did nothing. The historian will have to tell us how we grew from petty thieves to shameless robbers. We can learn from that how to cauterise the malignant growth.

    The Boko Haram matter is seen as recent by many. But those who know our past will say that the seeds had been germinating before independence in the imperfections of its feudal nights and manifested in the First Republic, especially when the pogrom hit the Igbo and southern minorities. It grew gradually. Who has tracked this trajectory and shown us how to reverse the perverse train? Historians, of course. History feeds all disciplines. Those who acclaim science and technology also are inspired by the history of inventions and discoveries from Faraday to Steve Jobs.

    I spoke to a student who made a first-class in history and international studies recently, and she had only a vague knowledge of the civil war. If a first-class student had a fragmentary knowledge of our most sanguinary chapter, our bloodlust of brothers, imagine the young men of IPOB and MASSOB who know little about that time of crushed bones and seared consciences. The first-class student confessed she was more interested in the international aspect of the studies.

    Today, we are assailed by the herdsmen. Before we saw them as a metaphor for bloodshed, the herdsmen were mere curiosity to southerners. They and their cattle were mysteries. We saw them roll past on roads, in the aisles of forests, on lush grasslands. It was a mystery that overwhelmed poet J.P. Clark in his famous poem, Fulani Cattle. He wondered: “The whip no more/on your balding mind and crest/arouses shocks of ecstasy.”

    But it is not the whip that arouses shock today, but guns and the omen of death rather the “secret hope or Knowledge…” that imbues the cows with the courage that leads them “not demurring or kicking…to the house of slaughter.” Clark wrote this about an idyllic vista. Today, the slaughterhouse has changed. The abattoir has been redefined in homes and farmlands and bush paths and human alleys and streets. I received a response in the form of a full-length article to my column last week from the National Secretary General of the Gan Allah Fulani Development Association (GAFDAN), the umbrella body of the Fulani herdsmen. His name is Sale Bayari.

    This newspaper published it last week in full. His arguments were self-serving. He said the Nigerian cows are of the breed not suited to a sedentary condition. They have to roam to survive. That is an anachronistic view of biology. All biological beings survive. Even humans remain in prisons for life and do not die. Nature is about adaptability and not surrender. Americans who now build ranches once roamed as I traced last week. History has shown that this is possible. In his article, he should have followed the path of the Northern Governors Forum who argued that the guys doing the slaughter are not Fulani but infiltrators. Governor Kashim Shettima made this point. This brings a new dimension to the story.

    What it means is that we have a bigger trouble on our hands. We hear that many of them do not speak Hausa and they come from outside the country. So why did GAFDAN scribe not make this point? Secondly, who are these infiltrators? Are they new incarnations of Boko Haram? If true, what is our security branch doing about this? Why did they not know this? More, if it is true, why have the members of GAFDAN not alerted the world and openly separated themselves from the hordes of slaughter?

    If it is true that other incidents were perpetrated by feral interlopers, the Agatu slaughter was undoubtedly the work of Fulani herdsmen. GAFDAN confessed it butchered the Agatu men and women and children as vengeance. This calls for a serious investigation.

    It is time for ranching, not grazing reserves if the reserves will divide us. The lands belong to locals and locals should not be coerced to give up their lands. It will trigger the conscience of sovereignty. Ranches with parking plants are possible. We need imaginative leadership to effect this. Civilisation is about bending nature to human will. Just as the cattle should adapt, so should our agricultural lands. If we have better organised farms, herdsmen will not have excuses for predation. Herdsmen versus farmers is a collision of wild anachronisms, the sort of metaphor that Jack London graphically paints in his immortal novel, A Call of The Wild, about human savagery by the agency of dogs.

    The story is getting to the heart of the Nigerian fibre, and it is time for all to allow commonsense prevail over a fighting sectarianism or ethno-religious bias. It is good that efforts are now being done by north and south governors to close ranks. But nothing will happen until the bad eggs are fished out and punished according to the law.

    We are making history, whether good or bad. Someday, a generation will have to learn from these times.

  • Cowboys and herdsmen

    Cowboys and herdsmen

    As a boy, I was a fan of the western, or what we know here as the cowboy drama or movie. I did not only watch their heroics, I played them. I was Michael Landon who played Little Joe in the Family Cartwright show called Bonanza. Dan Blocker was too fat and impetuous for me. Lorne Greene was too old and hoary. When I didn’t play Little Joe, I eased into the equine razzle-dazzle of Buffalo Bill, Jr, starring Dick Jones.

    I also gathered their picture cards attached to every chewing gum item I bought. I did not only admire the dynamics on screen, I also loved their names, including those I never saw on screen, like Bob Big Boy Williams. They spun tales of the west, of the good guys versus the bad, of horse ride fights, bull fights, gunfights on plains and craggy highlands, of bar brawls and chivalry. They had guns, rode horses and, lasso in hand, controlled a herd of cattle. Their fashion fascinated me. Their hats with the wide, floppy rims; their bandana, the boots, their tops that came across as a cross between a soldier and civilian attire. The good guys were often winsome like Little Joe.

    I loved their confidence. The cowboy was debonair before he felled his foe. So, you saw him as a noble figure.  The Indians were for the most part the bad guys, hooting, tactless, ungainly, their faces tarred, dark and ugly and inevitably doomed.

    The image lingered in me for years even after I stopped watching the westerns. It was at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife when I studied American history under Professor Richard Olaniyan that I came to understand that I was fed a myth by Hollywood. The story of the cowboy as hero and vanguard of high values was part of the American tendency to romanticise the past. I began to repaint the Indian in my consciousness and asked their forgiveness. I learned of President Andrew Jackson, who drew a trail of tears with the slaughter of Indians. His face is being replaced by Harriet Tubman, a black abolitionist, as part of the American quest to restore truth to history.  From my studies, I knew that the cowboy was only a little different from the Fulani herdsman.

    The herdsman wields a long stick and hides his head in a low-crowned wide-rimmed hat. His dressing is sparse. The American counterpart mounts a horse with stirrups and bridle and lariat. Both graze and move in sprawling expanse of plains and grasslands and travel miles under a benevolent sky and surly cloudbursts or dry heat.

    But the challenges coincide. You don’t have the cowboy today in nearly the profile and dynamic of the 19th century, except as symbol or romantic culture.  They had problems of cow thieves, as the Fulani have. They fought to preserve and protect their animals. They had to fight locals along the way.

    They provided meat for people and communities faraway. In the late 19th century in the aftermath of the Civil War, they travelled north where beef was scarce and expensive. It was big business. In Nigeria, the herdsmen travel south.

    But the contrast begins here. Because the American cowboy confronted locals, they did not persist in fights of proprietary claims to grazing routes. They understood that the lands did not belong to them. So as communities sprouted, they adapted by charting new routes. Eventually, modernity caught up with them, and the open-range culture of grazing over wide swaths of territories became an anachronism. First they took their cows to railheads. Later they had grazing reserves with stockyards and parking plants.

    Two intertwined things happened in the American case. One, a respect for the rule of law. Two, there was no resort to impunity by insisting that a century-old path ought to be sustained in spite of modernity.

    The American cowboy bowed to the rule of law. Another man’s farmland is not my territory. They also understood that the law would catch up with them if they insisted. Those who stole cattle also had to face the consequences of the law. No one, not the cowboy, or the land owner, had a right to take the law into their hands.

    Today, Americans consume more meat than Nigerians, and if you travel through the country you won’t see men on horsebacks herding cows over long distances. In 1997, an American family, John and Denise Enssling, took me to the state of Wyoming to see The Cheyenne Frontiers Day, a show to dramatise the western, the sort I saw on television as a little boy. It was a great experience and I saw where myth met reality. I bought myself a cowboy hat.

    Our herdsmen ought to come to the 21st century. They still walk about in the expired glory of a lost era. They are enchanted with the big sky and other people’s farmlands. To live in the past and kill to retain that past is no more than barbarism. That is what the herdsman represents today. Modernity has come. It is time for the state to stanch the blood flow and lust for the flesh of innocent women. Like Boko Haram, they now have access to sophisticated weapons. Here is the irony. They clack modern guns but act like old goons, plundering, maiming, raping, killing.

    We cannot excuse the stealing of their cattle. They provide meat for everyone. But if one steals your cow, it is not an excuse to rape his wife or wipe out whole communities. The story of Agatu is important. The herdsmen say the Agatu people killed their herdsmen and the police did not do anything about it. Why did they not go to the court?  The Gan Allah Fulani, which is the herdsmen umbrella body, justified the Agatu killings because it still does not understand that this is a country of laws. That society ought to be held to account by the Buhari administration. The promise to build reserves for them was only philosophical, only a sop for us. Buhari ought to come out and condemn the herdsmen in clear and unambiguous terms. It is moral cowardice not to do so. People are dying, daughters are being defiled, families displaced. If Buhari could condemn El-Zakzaky and his Shi’ite men on television, we expect no less from him, especially since he is widely recognised as their patron. A policy statement can be anaemic if it lacks a moral tone.

    It is a moral challenge to his administration. The promise of a grazing reserve is fine, but it cannot work if we don’t provide for meat packing plants. It was perhaps that example that spurred Obafemi Awolowo to propose transporting meat across long distances. The herdsmen are illiterate. They need to be saved from themselves and we need to be saved from them. The IPOB incident in killing seven herdsmen in Igboland cannot also be justified. You don’t kill criminals to make a point. It makes you a criminal too.

    The absence of Buhari’s intervention and personal voice is interpreted as a tacit encouragement. If a patron keeps silence, the tyranny goes on. He needs to urgently counter this impression. I know he can. The world is waiting.

  • The Iceland example

    The Iceland example

    Senator Bukola Saraki began by hiding his hands in his voluminous agbada in the fashion of the Village Headmaster virtuoso known as Eleyinmi. Those were his first days as Senate President, and this column chastened him out of that ostentation. He learned and placed his hands where they belonged afterwards – outside.

    Now, it is clear he was not only acting, he was hiding something. He had hidden them out of an instinctive impulse for surreptitious dealing. We are witnessing two acts that bear Saraki’s sneaky signature, one in the Senate, and the other offshore.

    One came from the #PanamaPapers. He has tried to finagle himself out of the charge of wrongdoing. He has tried to make it a matter of his wife, who is also under the gun. This is the same man whose, shave with the Code of Conduct Tribunal has taken a turn for the controversial. It is not about Saraki now. It is about the immensity of the Senate as a sort of priestly chamber of our democracy.

    The man who is arguably our number three citizen cannot be seen to be sullied not only by corrupt dealing or the suggestion of it. Especially with the PanamaPapers scandal. If the Panama scandal were scooped in Nigeria, he might have argued that it was all part of a vast conspiracy of detractors. Just as Vladimir Putin has said in a briefing to his fellow citizens. The beefy despot of Russia said it was the United States that was responsible for the leak and it was all apocryphal. He did nothing wrong.

    Saraki and his men are doing same in the Code of Conduct matter. They are pointing fingers at a cloud of conspirators. They forget that the best way to clobber his charges is to clear self rather than embark on a judicial rigmarole. He thinks he can con Nigerians to accept his innocence by flooding the courts with his tribe of swooning senators. Reports say the last time he appeared in court, only a handful of senators obeyed their feet to the court. Are they beating a cowardly retreat? Well, other appearances will clarify the matter.

    Yet, on the Panama matter, the Icelandic Prime Minister has bowed out of office. Not out of breach of the law but out of honour. Spanish industry minister has also resigned. The idea of offshoring money does not minister grace to the ears. It is a way of doing financial transactions in the dark, away from the prying eyes of the law or society. As Jesus said, men love darkness rather than light because their deeds are evil.

    British Prime Minister David Cameron, tar-brushed as “dodgy Dave,” by an elderly lawmaker, has been under pressure from the parliament and the public to come clean on his account. No one has been clear, including T.Y. Danjuma and David Mark, as to what their fingers were doing with the Panama papers. Only Ibori, now in Jail, can be excused for now. Our nation loves to smell like filth.  Somebody said the other day that, in a former generation, the Panama papers would have turned our universities into a cauldron of protests. Our students are now quiescent like a kennel without dogs. For irony though, the generation that erupted against our maggoty governments were in the cradle with Bukola Saraki.

    A young professor, Gabriel Zucman, last year published a book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations, in which he estimated that offshoring deprives nations of $7.6 trillion. The 28-year-old professor of the University of Berkeley noted in the book that 10 per cent of the world’s financial wealth breathed quietly in those offshore accounts. The World Bank has noted that offshore accounts engender inequality among nations because about 30 per cent of the clandestine money hails from Africa and Latin America. No wonder economist Thomas Pickety, known for his groundbreaking work, Capital In The Twenty First Century, wrote a foreword to Zucman’s book and described it as “the first serious economic research in this area.”

    Saraki was still in the throes of this shadow of iniquity when the Senate initiated another round of folly. This time the Senate is trying to rush through a bill on the Code of Conduct Bureau and the Code of Conduct Tribunal. Ordinarily, will it not show how bold our lawmakers are? At the time Saraki is under trial, the lawmakers who marched beside him in solidarity to the court are the same people plotting to change the law to set him free.

    They want to take the CCB from under the office of the secretary to the federal government. Reason? They believe they cannot coerce Babachir David Lawal to cower to their machinations. Two, they want to use this change of law as a preface to changing the criminal code act that was a great legacy of the Jonathan era, in spite of its serial bumbling.

    They have argued, through a few of their decorated thugs in the Senate, that it was not inspired by their boss. Are they kidding us? Do they take us for fools? Why was Saraki absent at the deliberations? And his poodle and deputy said it was a noble endeavour and the Senate would go along with it.

    The act is desperate. They want to find a sort of way out for Saraki. The former Eleyinmi has not spoken, at the time of writing, on the subject. Without a doubt, this is a law to consecrate corruption. It is a law to corrupt the law. It may be the worst wanton act of lawmaking since the third-term bill. Even the third-term bill was an effort at effrontery for a temporary act. This is intending for the long haul. The point is to allow us return to the era of everlasting litigation, whereby a corruption case can remain in court forever through the devious art of adjournment. So, in Saraki’s case, the matter would be in court through not only his tenure as Senate president and a second term in the same position but forever. Their action recalls Mark Twain’s assertion that “No one’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.”

    The case would go to President Muhammadu Buhari’s desk. He had better not sign but consign it to the dust bin, or else he would have condemned his own anti-corruption war to the garbage bin.

    Given this shadow hanging over Saraki, it is only an act of honour for him to step down as Senate president. Trent Lott resigned as U.S. Senate leader when he associated himself with Strom Thurmond,  the Dixiecrat and white supremacist. He had grown too small for his office. It was not illegal to remain Senate leader. But he had fouled the sacred air of the office.

    The rule of law is nothing without the thumb of honour. The law makes sense if we imbibe it more than recite it. The letter kills. Hence in the Old Testament the law killed 3,000 people. The spirit gives life. Hence also 3,000 people were saved in the Day of Pentecost thousands of years later.

    The law was made for us and not the other way round. Hence The Iceland PM resigned. That is why Saraki should follow the Iceland example.

  • Trojan horse versus work horse

    Trojan horse versus work horse

    Sometimes in this republic, some well-meaning folks have questioned the essence of a legislature. They see the National Assembly as merely a chamber of opportunists, of jobbers, of men and women of claptrap vanity. They offer little but milk the nation to the bone.

    They are like the Polish parliament after the middle ages that was part cantankerous but wholly fruitless. A historian described it as a “divinely ordained confusion.”

    But the National Assembly is theoretically a necessity, a robust counterweight to the despotic impulses of power at the centre. In Nigeria, though, our legislature hardly adheres to the principles that inspired Montesquieu to dream up this delicacy of balancing for modern democracy. We need them as we need two gangs instead of one in a neighbourhood. So, if one menaces, the other can save us. It is a cynical necessity.

    The sense of the worthless lawmaker came up last week when the National Assembly decided to strike out some cardinal gems of the 2016 budget. They turned a baleful eye to major railway projects in spite of counterpart funding and brought their knife down on major road projects.

    It is a tale of contradictory impulses: greed versus progress. They sinned against major road projects and gave their nods to road projects where no studies have begun. The executive was thinking about the constituencies. The lawmakers were fantasising about their constituency projects.

    For irony, just last week, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo (SAN), rolled out for the first time a comprehensive vision of the PMB administration’s economic plan. It was the First National Forum on the Economy organised by The Nation. Presented with rigour and coherence, it answered lingering questions in the light of a cascading Naira, fuel woes, infrastructure decay, power paralysis and a rising army of the jobless.

    The two-day conference featured not only the vice president but also governors and members. Other than the vice president, the first day featured the Lagos State Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode and the Imo State Governor, Rochas Okorocha. The main fixture of the second day was Borno State Governor, Kashim Shettima.

    The governors of Oyo and Ogun states sent representatives. But the point was made clear that as far as Nigeria’s progress is concerned, a coherent plan is required.

    The vice president’s speech is what we should have heard since. It explained the interconnect between power and development, infrastructure and job, the power of social initiatives as palliatives in a harsh environment.

    Yet the lawmakers have thrown into it a Trojan Horse. They are saying they want to return to business as usual. They want to stem progress.

    If to generate power we need gas, we must start now. If there are no pipelines to transmit gas from East to West where the plants are domiciled, we cannot afford to wait. In the same sense, we need to get the trains from Lagos all the way to Calabar, and it entails connecting all the states in the Niger Delta and East in one line. In the Jonathan era, China was ready, Jonathan was busy wasting dollars on politics and vanity.

    Now that PMB is ready, the law makers are saying no. This is what can be called the Trojan horse of Nigerian governance. The law makers must guard against that image. With one of its leaders under the gun of moral impropriety, this is not the time for the law makers to obstruct things.

    The executive must learn not to be held hostage by the lawmakers. With Osinbajo’s coherence, the government should have moved forward with its programme. It does not need to wait for the budget approval in order to attack the heres and nows of development.

    Governor Ambode, who has started what may be the boldest initiative of these times, called for “political will.” He said it in the context of his agricultural MOU with Kebbi State, with a potential to open up the greatest agrarian push in our history. The PMB administration can roll out work on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, power projects, and work on the rail lines without the Trojan horse of lawmakers.

    The term Trojan Horse dates back to the Trojan War, when the Greeks sought to take Troy. The Greeks built a wooden Horse and left it near Troy and sailed away. The Trojans saw it as a gift, but inside Greeks soldiers hid. Once the Trojans took in the horse, the soldiers crept out and defeated Troy. Both Homer and Virgil wrote fascinating accounts about this epic battle. Virgil wrote, in his account in the Aeneid, “whatever it is, I fear Greeks, even those bearing gifts.” Hence the phrase Greek gift has come to represent an undesirable present from an enemy. Trojan horse has been appropriated in computer language as a sneaky and dangerous virus.

    If the lawmakers are now the Trojan horse bearing Greek gifts, we must wage our war for progress creatively. With the PMB almost a year in office, it ought to have mined its creative gifts to source funds in lieu of the budget. It can be done. It could be in the form of loans or grants. The Nigerian government is too big and the country too needy for huge work of development to remain in the abeyance for so long.

    Governor Okorocha made a salient point. He noted that we have big agriculture budget at the centre but no land. Spicing his speech with humour and anecdotes, he talked up the economy by emphasising practical approaches.

    Backing his presentation with slides about his state, Borno State was ravaged by Boko Haram, lost its sense of being and was even about to become a de facto theocracy in defiance of the centre. He was there come fire and bomb and suicides and Chibok, working up the civilian JTF. He spoke about his school feeding initiatives, his emphasis on agriculture, several housing projects for the dispossessed and the need for the nation to rally round the state to bring the people back from the brink. Shettima became a metaphor for hope among ruins.

    From the story of the conference, it is clear that Governor Ambode hit the bull’s eye with his call for political will. It is what will make the difference between paralysis and progress. It will make the difference between Trojan horse and work horse.

  • In the arena

    In the arena

    The greatest asset in public life is courage. The worst is what Bola Ige, no laggard, called siddon look. Ige had to rise from the ennui of the onlooker to get his feet dirty, his brain tested and his life taken.

    All the men in our history who matter have not recoiled from the ring of action. They may fail. They may be caviled at. They may stumble and even end in disgrace. But they never want to become spectators, eyes alive and lusty but flesh weary and inert.

    The man who would never belong to that tribe of low blood pressure is another Bola, who turned 64 last week to great eclat. He had what some philosophers will call the promethean spirit, a restless energy to rebel, to challenge, to endure, to imbue humanity with the brio to conquer his environment.

    When Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu was celebrated last week, it was that vitality that seized the minds of his compatriots. But more specifically, it was to acknowledge what he started, the history he dared to foist not only on a nation, but a political class noted for its complacent surrender to quick profit.

    But those who saw him begin the idea of an APC hardly expected the turnout. Some took up the idea as just a compulsive activity. The man wanted to dare Jonathan. What else did you expect of him? He was not going to go far. The new project would lumber, meet an obstacle, lose oxygen, asphyxiate, die.  The prospect seemed daunting. Jonathan’s rating had hit the heavens and his swagger menaced the potential opponent.

    Tinubu had Southwest. Buhari was still sulking from a shellacking. Politicians were flocking to the PDP. The price of oil was over $100 per barrel. Pock was barreling into the pots of any political harlot. It was not a case of David daring Goliath. In the imaginations of many, David was not even born.

    Others shrank into their ethno-regional comforts. CPC in the North. ANPP in the Northeast. APGA in the East. AC in the Southwest. PDP everywhere. It was no suicide to remain so. But Tinubu started. He worked the phones, called meetings, contrived committees, flew from one wheel horse to another.

    But it was clear he was knocking on the door of many who preferred their sleep to hunting at night. Many of them saw the Jonathan triumph, and had developed the anti-heroic tranquility of Lord Jim in Joseph Conrad’s immortal novel of the sea, Lord Jim. They wanted action. They wanted to be heroes. They did not see their opportunities. When they saw it they were reluctant to take advantage. Like Jim, they jumped into the sea rather save others in a shipwreck. Nigeria was a shipwreck in the making. The news had begun to show Jonathan’s footloose attitude to the nation’s purse. Billions had been devoted to projects that never took off. A certain somnolent surrender had overtaken the men of politics. Let us wait for the election cycle and we will see what can be made of it. That was their thought mode.

    Asiwaju was ready to wake them up. He was like the United States President Theodore Roosevelt, who would rather fight than faint. Hear Roosevelt on the man in the arena:

    “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

    Roosevelt, often called TR to distinguish him from his relative FDR, remade himself from the profile of a high class to a frontiers man, rugged, warrior, intellectual, a nature romantic, a sort of Renaissance man.

    Asiwaju was told of the menaces ahead. The big egos. The territorialism of those party bigwigs who thought him an interloper. The Jonathan men would plant spies that would undo the party. We saw that with OBJ in Labour Party. Ethnic bigots would derail them. Others said the issue of party leader would destroy the coalition. If not that, the presidential candidate.

    He knew all that, and he said he had formulas for every obstacle. He who dreamed the project had seen the scenarios. Each time it happened, he sailed it. It was a fight with wrinkles. The victories came all the same. But always with wrinkles. Giants don’t fight without bruises. Bruises are often badges of honour. Sometimes he confronted roadblocks and dream enders. He took the attitude of the Ballad of St. Andrews: “I am struck and wounded; I lay me down and rest awhile and I will rise and fight again.”

    He did not take this project without attention to detail. At one stage, the issue of the symbol of the party, or the name of the party, created its own challenges. Egos clashed. But he had a way of giving everyone their sop. He sacrificed much of the AC to get APC. He thought it was worth it.

    Yet while it is easy to say the APC is his best political achievement yet, we may sometimes forget his best trait. In a series of tributes to him on his birthday, perhaps the best words came from party apparatchik, Ismaila Ahmed, who noted that Asiwaju had made more leaders than any leader. We know some of them: Yemi Osinbajo (SAN), Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN), Abiola Ajimobi, Kayode Fayemi, Rauf Aregbesola, Akinwunmi Ambode, Adams Oshiomhole, et al. It is a tribute to self-confidence and selflessness. The first task of a leader is to make leaders.

    But not least of all is that he knows how to make leaders win. You have to win, or else you will never be realised. In spite of the opposition of bigwigs, he stuck with Buhari, and worked the game like a chess player. The other contenders saw Buhari overcome the negatives as they, with money and other virtues, fell. Buhari, sometimes aplomb to a fault, might have been dazed to see Asiwaju the prophet turn right at every turn.

    When the story of this generation is written, he will be on the front ranks of those who stopped this republic from falling, and from being charmed into decay or one-party tyranny by prostitutes and carpet baggers. In fact, if he were not here, it seems no one else was ready for the task with what Buhari called his “creativity” or even the courage and sense of timing. The other imponderable he came with is called charisma.

    But the task to right the wrong has just started, with fuel queues, cascading naira, and jobs lost, he knows he has to play a role to make this era whole.

  • When things fell apart

    When things fell apart

    The Rivers State imbroglio just revealed one of the ailments of the Nigerian mind: a compulsive amnesia. We sometimes act as though the past is either too heavy with sorrow or casts us in bad light, so we forget. Or it is so light we lose sense of how to make it into a weight of glory. The media, just like our political elite, are culprits of the mnemonic sin. The media reports and comments suffered from a scant well of historical backgrounding. Our politicians ape the trend. In the end, we act as a people without a past.  Socrates knew this and so devised a system of recall that is now called the Socratic Method in philosophical studies. Socrates says our senses deceive us and that we know more than we think we know.

    The bloodshed and intimidation a week ago rekindle the need to study history. The media have simply reported it as an Amaechi-Wike standoff, as though the story began either last year or in the run-up to the last elections into the local and national legislatures.

    A brief history may help rejig our anaemic memory. After the Obasanjo years, the militants soaked the diaries of the region in blood and near anarchy. The new governors of the region as well as the late President Umaru Yar’adua set out to tackle the enveloping nightmare. Governor Timipre Sylva initiated the amnesty programme that led to the dropping of arms, especially in Bayelsa and Delta states. The Rivers State dimension was different.

    Before Amaechi became governor, Rivers State, especially the capital Port Harcourt, crawled with fear and blood. Amaechi disdained amnesty and would not reconcile with them. He confronted them. He basked in the support of the centre.

    Just as Yar’adua backed the amnesty deal, he put the nation’s military resources behind Amaechi. Port Harcourt hummed with hoodlums. Sudden bursts of gunfire, melee on the main arteries, yelps for help, bodies lying on roadsides became part of the narrative of the once-lauded Garden City.

    Innocents walked the streets and commuted with doubtful hope of a peaceful journey. I visited the city a few times then in 2007 and was amazed to see citizens trek with grave brows and upraised hands. I asked why, and I was told it was to show they had no arms. Two bare hands, raised up, protested innocence.

    One of the ghoulish familiars of the times was a place ominously called “the evil forest.” It was the lair of the militants. There they built and stored armoury, hatched plots of unrest, also lived in unspeakable opulence. They farted violence and fattened on it. Foreigners fled the city from the commonplaces of harassment and abduction and the rapine of their businesses.

    Commerce stagnated, jobs depleted, governance was stultified and gangsters reigned. Eventually, the lords of the murderous rings were flushed out of reckoning. The evil forest became a historical relic. It was a triumph of federal-state cooperation. For about six years, Rivers State grew steadily back to its halcyon past. Rotimi Amaechi was a PDP chieftain and even became the head of the Governors Forum without controversy.

    Things fell apart between Amaechi and Goodluck Jonathan. The reasons were in the public space. Mama Peace, in her lack of grace, foregrounded a drama about a hovel of crime and bandits that Amaechi levelled. It was in Okrika. I propounded a question in Jonathan’s meeting with editors in Lagos. He responded cavalierly. In his usual dodgy style, he spoke as though he knew and didn’t know of the incident.

    But since then, the President and the Rivers State Governor did not enjoy any cordiality. Amaechi claimed later that it was because of pecuniary pressures from Mama Peace, the first primitive first lady in our history. We saw the fight in other incarnations. Over oil wells with Bayelsa State, the neglect of Rivers State projects from the centre, etc. Some have accused Amaechi of lack of tact. He had a confrontational style.

    But the problem lay in the conventional wisdom that because Amaechi hails from the President’s region, he should bow to his will, willy-nilly. He also had a face-off with the judiciary. NJC, in a nepotistic way, bent its rules to favour the party and government of the centre.

    Amaechi would not remain in the party with the President. He joined the APC after the New PDP morphed and grew out of the PDP. That, historians will note, as the beginning of Jonathan’s fall. Some of Amaechi’s kinsmen would not forgive him for humiliating their son. He might have sinned. He might have been inept. He might have been sly and vicious. He was their son. You have to serve your sentiment even if it is inscrutably stupid. That was how the violence of Rivers State moved from rhetoric and emotional fracture to blood and death. His victory over the Governors Forum machinations by Jonathan and his PDP kingpins scarred the landscape further.

    The first sign that the matter was bound to violence was with the appointment of Mbu Mbu as police commissioner. In a recent interview, the former CP said he had not met Jonathan or first lady and Amaechi prejudged him and that led to strains in relations. He must think he was speaking to fools. If he did not know them, did that account for his wanton acts of irresponsibility, his contempt for the rule of law? We were all witnesses to these. If Amaechi prejudged him, was that excuse to prove Amaechi right? President Obama, in response to not bombing Syria after a threat, has said, “bombing because you promised to bomb is not a good reason to bomb.” Decency reveals character.

    Not long after, the hoodlums paraded the streets of Port Harcourt in an extravagant display of brawn, arms and intimidation. They were backed by the federal might. The army and police with which Amaechi flushed them out had new masters. Amaechi was now bait. Since then violence gradually took over the city and state. It festooned in the 2015 elections where brawn took over law. The Supreme Court gave judicial armoury to bloodletting by privileging technicality over realism in law in Wike verdict. Go thou now; kill and maim and destroy, implied the verdict. It was fulfilled in the recent polls.

    The Buhari administration did not learn from this history. The Bayelsa poll was a signal. Violence determined who won. The President also said he was not going to be involved. No one wants the President to be partisan. But if violence succeeded in crippling and determining the outcome of the proceedings, the blame lies with the commander-in-chief. We know that some soldiers and police see elections in cynical terms to compromise peace in lieu of filthy bribes. The same discipline that has made the Boko Haram fight succeed should apply to elections. Bad security eggs, bad elections.

    It is damnable enough that Amaechi and Wike have to see it as their fights for supremacy. It is more damnable that the security infrastructure made this possible. If the centre was able to paralyse any privatisation of security infrastructure, Amaechi and Wike would have looked on as the citizens cast their votes without fear. The signs leading to the polls were clear. Soldiers killed, APC chairman beheaded. Violence begets violence. The umpire – part INEC, part Federal Government – failed and gave in to anarchy. If Amaechi brought peace because of federal-state cooperation, peace failed this time because of lack of it.

    This shows that we do not understand the value of history. We have become a historical society. Our students no longer study history at every level. Our media and political leaders don’t either. A novel, A History of Violence by Paul Wagner, also adapted into film, tells how ignorance of the past wrecked a family. What is even worse is the absence of what philosophers like Hegel and Nietzsche have called “historical consciousness.”  Apart from history as discipline, some United States universities now study historical consciousness as a course. It interrogates how societies interpret major events and incidents to shape attitudes to similar contemporary affairs. In Nigeria, for instance, our interpretation of Biafran uproar today will be probed by such a study.

    We are not there yet. Hence the Rivers imbroglio seems intractable.

  • Picking the pieces

    Picking the pieces

    We must be thankful that the Northeast is not what it used to be. Today’s state is a prelude to become what it used to be before it lost its innocence. Things have more than a little subdued now, in spite of the occasional irritations. That is, the hijab girl as ticking bomb and the menace of driver-by motorcycles.

    Some of the leaders, especially the governors, now exhale with relief and triumph. Before now, they inhaled the smoke of a terrorist’s threat. In Borno State, the news was frenetic. City after city fell. Villagers eviscerated. Emirs and leaders either captured, slaughtered or on the run. Flags soared impudently in the name of Boko Haram. No schools, no hospitals, no local governments, no mosques, or churches.

    To many, the Nigeria Army was effete and defeated. It became of target both of rout and international shame. Borno Governor Kashim Shetima cried but it only elicited silence, and sometimes cowardly scorn, from the presidency of Goodluck Jonathan. He warned that Boko Haram was better armed, better trained. They made mincemeat of the army of the biggest black nation on earth. He was governor, but he did not control the army. When Maiduguri remained the only major city yet to fall, he did not get succour from the centre.

    The state capital was besieged such that only one road in and out of Maiduguri was relatively safe. That was the Maiduguri- Damaturu- Kano road. Others cringed to the goons. The Maiduguri-Bui road, the Maiduguri- Bama road, the Maiduguri–Gworza road and the international road that snaked away to Cameroun and Chad. Fear whistled with the dust in the city air. The seat of government was only five kilometres away from the machine of the greatest terror threat in our history.

    It was a matter of time, and we might have witnessed for the first time a popularly elected government fall to a gang of renegades in the cloak of God. Yet, a cynical game was going on in the army and the political elite. They were not arming the soldiers. They were profiteering on the blood of their men. They even had the temerity to charge them with mutiny and desertion. Officers as rich man. The boys as Lazarus. Those who had courage were made to look like mice.

    The average citizen was displaced. They ran anywhere but home. They went to Chad, to Niger, to Kano, and even down south. They had a country, but they had no home. It was worse than what Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul delineated in his book, In a Free State. The novel was about a people without a place. We are witnessing it now in Europe. Hordes of people, women, children, men, in long treks, on rafts in turbulent waters, behind stockades of barbed wires from hostile host nations, some dying of hunger, some drowned, etc.

    History is no stranger to these. Biafra witnessed a horrific horde of the displaced. The World Wars, the Middle East, Asia, all saw the turmoil of moving people. They are all seeking to return home. The existentialist philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, noted that every human activity is directed towards going home. No matter where you are and whatever luxury you enjoy, if it does not feel like home, you are full of misery. Hence first generation of settlers are never rooted. That pleasure belongs to their children who never knew where their parents were weaned from.

    Even when they return, can Gworza or Bama citizens still recognise what was there before the coming of the goons? Not the houses now razed, or the other landmarks now vanished, but the spirit of the place, the indefinable something called home? The memories of terror, lost ones, butchery and rape may discolour the landscape in their souls.

    That is the task for Borno and the other Northeast states that lay prostrate for years under the militants. Governor Shettima is now faced with a big task. For him, it is like beginning over again. His priorities: education, healthcare, gender empowerment and agriculture.

    All of the pathology in the state began with water, or lack of it. In its proud era, Lake Chad was the lifebuoy of the people. It powered commerce, agriculture and culture. It was their River Nile. Desert encroachment lapped up the water from its big sweep of 25,000 square kilometres to 2,000 square kilometres. Since the Obasanjo era, feasibility studies had been commissioned, and five million dollars released for it. No word has been heard since. The Buhari government has asked to be updated on the matter. Hopefully, the project, under the canopy of the Lake Chad Basin Commission, could work the lake back by opening a source in the Congo River. As Fela said, water, e no get enemy.

    Shettima had ticked up school enrolment 35 per cent when he introduced free busing. It rose 45 per cent with free meals. He laments that he has to start over. The number of schools in Ibadan alone supersedes all the schools in Borno and Yobe put together.

    This cannot be done without a sense of emergency from the centre. Fund raisers have pledged about N58 billion, but they have not been redeemed. The President ought to help that part of the country. The main source of the crisis was underdevelopment. It was in the same Borno State that Shettima’s predecessor ripped journalists by saying that his citizens could not read so their reports had no effect. The same man was associated with Boko Haram and is the chairman of the PDP.

    The infrastructure of government is returning gradually as Boko Haram has been deprived of its capacity to maintain a standing army. Intelligence will play a big role in turning the group from a sporadic menace into a limp and disappearing force.

    Governor Shettima must be the most relieved chief executive in the country. He must also be the most challenged. It’s time to work. But it is not his task alone. Boko Haram was a collective disruption. We must pick the pieces together.

  • Who’s Afraid of W.S.? (2)

    The Eko Foundation bought a full page advertorial in The Punch last week. They raged and flailed at the issue I raised about Soyinka as chairman of the Lagos @ 50 Committee set up by Governor Akinwunmi Ambode. It was rage without rhythm. I advise the foundation to go for anger management counselling. After that, they can reply my column. They also tried to show their erudition with some white men’s quotes. I thought they were nativists, so why did they not quote only Lagos indigenes? They are waking up to the fact that this is a cosmopolitan world.

    They also turned themselves into advocates of Senior Advocates of Nigeria. So angry were they that they forgot to be their own advocates.

    After confessing innocence about impugning the stature of W.S., they could not reconcile that with disqualifying him from the committee. They had no logic to advance over “no Lagos house,” or my point that he reflected the “sights and sounds” of the city.

    They had ears or eyes, but they did not see and hear the performance of his play, The Beatification of The Area Boys. The high and low, including indigenes, saw the drama’s sights and sounds at the Freedom Park last year. Maybe the natives of Eko Foundation were out of town.

    My advice: since they have nothing to add to knowledge, they should keep mum.

  •           More on Ese Oruru

              More on Ese Oruru

    The Ese Oruru story took a new hue for me when the Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi 11, called to take objection to my column last week. He spoke in his usual feisty spirit, but with a royal dignity. He sounded offended without being irate, and noted that he did what he ought to have done. That is, he sent a letter to the police AIG and asked the police officer to repatriate the girl to her parents. I asked him if he did that,  why did the AIG not respond? Was it because there was a sort of deference to a system that accommodates a minor marrying an adult? After all, Ese’s mother met an angry village chief and the two parents’ journey up North could have resolved it if the system, including the police in cahoots, did not condone a man marrying an underaged girl.

    But the emir denied that he locked out Ese Oruru’s mother when he presided over a matter on Ese as well as when her father was not allowed to the palace. The parents had recounted their frustrations in reaching the emir, and they have not debunked it.

    The story has run a foul gamut as North versus South, Christian versus Muslim, liberal versus conservative. But it all shows how our sentiments overweigh simple human compassion. Neither faiths condone any form of oppression. And that is what happened to the little girl.

    The other side of the story is the sort of parenting Ese had. It has been said that Rose is not her biological mother, and her classmates have heard her say she wants to return to her real mother in Delta State. We need to probe the facts. Did Yunusa’s pedophile dreams exploit a girl who was an alien in her home?  From the Emir’s words, the girl was probably willing to marry the guy. So when parents fail, they foment national crisis. I would want Ese’s real mother to speak, and Ese’s relationship with others in the Oruru household.

  • Who’s afraid of W.S.

    Who’s afraid of W.S.

    When two supposedly senior lawyers translate their thoughts into lines of commentary, you should expect to tap into wisdom. No matter what you say about lawyers, their calling affords them access to the fount of any society. From handling a slew of cases, they dip their fingers into the pulse of society. They see people in their different states: in remorse and cunning, fear and trembling, defiance and humility, triumphal vanity and mea culpa. Whether high or low, they are witnesses to human folly and sublimity, when they stare into the abyss of the jail or prance at the accolade of society.

    Their training also imbues them with the history of societies, the sociology of groups, the psychology of individuals. So, you expect them to convey deep learning and worldly wisdom.

    Not so for two legal minds who allowed their nativist impulses to run away with them. They are Professor Imran Oluwole Smith and Kunle Uthman. They are principal officers of an otherwise obscure group known as Eko Foundation.

    They have been making high decibels of noise over the appointment of Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka as co-chairman of the Lagos @50 committee set up by the Lagos State governor, Akinwunmi Ambode. In a slew of nouns, they say that “true” indigenes of the state have reacted with “shocking waves, trepidation and disbelief.”  They follow these nouns with a raft of footloose adjectives, saying that the shock waves are “resonating, reverberating and deafening…”

    First, how does Soyinka’s appointment lead to trepidation? Does Soyinka scare them so much? For their information, Soyinka is a harmless figure. They did not use the word fear, but trepidation and that indicates perhaps one of the highest levels of fear, if you discountenance such words as horror or terror. Trepidation is an urbane way of expressing high-octane unease.

    As lawyers, they ought to understand such words, especially as Smith is a senior advocate of Nigeria, an epaulette that some thinking Nigerians now take with levity. Some SANs have been behaving badly in the past few years, especially in the past few days. Example: the flock of never-do-wells who lined up like bleating sheep behind Tarfa. No matter.

    The lawyers said Soyinka was not an indigene, so he should not be chair of the committee. Haba! Soyinka lacks connection with the soul of Lagos. Soyinka is an Egbaman. Soyinka has no house or compound in Lagos. Is this how they argue in court, and rose to Nigeria’s legal prime? They also said Soyinka is alien to the “sights and sounds” of Lagos.

    I think they were trying too hard to make an argument. They clutched at wet grass and it not only stung them, they bled. And what a sloshy pair of hands with its oddball mix of blood and mud and dew.

    They are in the 21st century, but they still have not recovered from the Lagos of the early 19th century. They still live in primal Lagos. They are cavorting in the coastal Lagos of the canoes, of the lightless nights, of the ovine and bovine innocence, of the long treks without the whir of cars, of the illiterate many, of the pre-Kosoko and Akintoye duel, of the humble huts and zestless fashion, of unruffled accents, of the Egba suzerainty and the upstart Ibadan, when the Yoruba wars resounded from afar with Dane guns and refugees spilling over…

    Well, this is news to them. This is Lagos of the variegated hues, of high rise and highways, of the technicolour nights, of a humongous port, of business mogul attracting the best of cultural mavens, of languages as diverse as the Nigeria, even West Africa, where it is not just a feudal king that reigns but a governor of a democratic vote. It is a city morphed from a few hundreds to several millions. It is a city where doctors treat from a place called hospitals, where herbalists are now Neanderthal, a melting pot, a megacity, an embrace of all colours, creeds, castes, of Yakubu Gowon, of Ojukwu. It bred Fela and I.K. Dairo and Ebenezer Obey. The Ibrus prospered here and others by them. It was home to Leventis and UAC and the big banks, etc. It is the same city where Soyinka celebrated first at the airport when he brought the nation and continent the world’s top literary prize.

    They say he does not reflect the sights and sounds of Lagos. Really? He did not when he twitted the army in the same city? He did not when he was jailed in the town for his beliefs? He did not when he staged one of his major plays, The Dance of the Forest, at our independence in 1960? The lawyers might have read too much legal briefs and not read much of Soyinka’s works, such as The Jero Plays, Opera Wonyosi, etc. They probably do not even know the song, I love my country I no go lie?

    They say his co-chair, the eminent Rasheed Gbadamosi, is indisposed. Are they his doctors to decide for him what job he can or cannot do? They admit that most of the 12 persons on the committee are indigenes. So what’s the problem with the Eko Foundation that their contentions lack foundation in Lagos thinking? They brim with nativist anarchy?

    If they are afraid of W.S., they have only to confess, and we treat that ailment appropriately.