The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Belle of oil

    Belle of oil

    Her arrest, at least, lay to rest the ghost of cancer. The civility and decency of the British criminal justice system would not whisk a dying woman from the omen of a hospital bed.

    The good news is that Diezani Alison-Madueke was not in the lethal stage of cancer. She was not numb under the knife, nor writhing with despair. Since she did not, at the time of arrest, crouch under the spell of carcinogen, then two things might have happened.

    One, she elbowed her way out of the hold of cancer in a miracle. Or two, the story of the affliction was all a lie to impugn the flawless physiognomy of the former belle of oil.

    Or shall we add a third: she and her people had concocted a fiction to whip up sympathy. Whatever her iniquity, it made no sense to wish such calamity, that voracious flesh eater called cancer, on a fellow human.

    Or a fourth? That her affliction had reduced to a benign status and she could bear her legal travail while her pain hummed in the background.

    Whatever the story, that modern blight of a flesh-eater is no stumbliong block to her trial. She can clear her name even if the hammer of cancer looms above her head. If she is not an oil thief, cancer will not stand between her and her plea of innocence.

    Since the Buhari administration initiated its anti-corruption war, eyes have rolled Madueke’s way. In the early days, she fed us with pictures of the lowly Diezani. We witnessed the fashion of humility and mien of capitulation. In her hijab, she bowed before General Abdulsalami Abubakar, who was relishing his new role as a power broker in the Buhari vortex. She also soared with Buhari, sharing a row with him on British Airways.

    They sat within each other’s breaths and eyeballs, her eyeballs obviously bigger and humbler. This coincidence of ambience generated the first scandal in Buhari’s inner circle. The story was that she stage-managed it with the aid of a Buhari aide, and the man was fired.

    They were pictures of humility in a drama of humiliations. She was the same personage who pooh-poohed major newspaper interview requests. But in the heat of her travails, she scrambled to respond to a report by the Osun Defender – no knock on the lowly newspaper. She was the one who waltzed into public functions and mounted every dais with a bored and superior mien.

    Yet, Madueke did worse. She had ranted that NNPC accounted to no one as a peacock institution. She huffed and puffed that no one told her what to do. We had a democracy, but she ran oil. She screeched with those words in Jonathan’s high noon, and commentators let her slippery venom flow under the earth like crude oil. Yours truly, however, remonstrated in vain. She snubbed the National Assembly when summoned to answer queries about billions of Naira she spent on private jet travels. Her boss and friend Jonathan defended her in his characteristic drawl and obtuse syntax.

    When CBN chief Sanusi cried over missing billions, she strutted about with the hauteur of a princess. She was the great woman of reserve. She neither erred nor stumbled. Was it not the same Diezani that United States Secretary of State John Kerry referred to when he and President Obama met Buhari and his team? He said she was involved in as much as six billion dollars in money in western vaults.

    When Jonathan was putting together his cabinet list, Madueke had not only told the former president he craved oil, he warned that she loathed to be assisted by an ancillary called minister of state. When the ministerial list was unveiled, voila! She was the lone Iroko of oil.

    But she did not always spread her wings like an eagle. Her first public spotlight was on the road. Her large eyes cringed in tears on Lagos-Ore Expressway. She lamented the portents of potholes and gullies. The road was journey as death. Its jaws snapped cars and trailers and human flesh. It dipped its pen in blood and retold the profiles and families in tragedies and graveyards.

    Madueke’s heart dropped, her visage fell and her tear duct dissolved. With her big, bold eyes, imperious carriage and poetic gait, she was a beauty with a human touch. The Nigerian heart tolled with the ministerial belle. She was a beauty after our heart.

    Then she evolved into an ice queen, good to behold, but beholden to no one. She became the character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The character is the belle in a place called Macondo. She freezes every eye with her physical charms. Her name is Remedios the Beauty. Every male pines for her flesh. They dig holes in her bathroom so they can ogle while water swishes over her naked body. She, however, never responds to the clamour of lust from the disoriented men. No one attracts her. She even walks about naked at home and on the streets.

    A certain peeping tom crashes from the bathroom roof after his eyes lose coordination with his limbs. Others have cracked their heads in such giddy falls. She often is indifferent. But this peeping tom survives and all Remedios the beauty does is ask him to scrub her back.

    Marquez was reflecting on the vanity of beauty, among other themes like fatuous divinity of Holy Mary.

    When the cancer story broke, I was scandalised by the lack of sympathy by many Nigerians. They believed the story with dry eyes. They did not see beauty. They saw corruption. If you see Miss Nigeria, and her toe suddenly turns maggoty, your eyes will rest only on the sore.

    Madueke grew to love power and glamour, and started to see the rest of us as commoners. She was like Livia, wife of Roman emperor Augustus, who saw Roman citizens as “rabble and slaves.” Historian Tacitus saw her as a manipulator of the emperor, and novelist Robert Graves portrays her as Machiavellian in his novel, I Claudius.

    If her cancer story was a miracle, she must wish for another one. She must be an apostle of Russian writer Dostoyevsky in his Brothers Karamazov, when he says: “In a realist, faith is not borne out of miracles, but miracles out of faith.” With EFCC and the British zeroeing in on her, she must believe that a cancer survivor will triumph over any charge, even if her sins led to the misery of millions of fellow humans.

  • Oloye Eleyinmi

    Oloye Eleyinmi

    In his earlier incarnation, Eleyinmi hid his hands under a voluminous agbada. It was a display of a sort of royal extravagance. His face skewed with disdain, his carriage lofty like a peacock, he spoke from a high pedestal. His voice, with its peculiar polish, played out of a palatial voice box. He walked not on earth but above it, above all who thought they were on the same soil. He is, after all, called Oloye, and an Oloye does not belong to the pedestrian promenade.

    He abided the sort of illusion that former American President Abraham Lincoln inspired in blacks when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed blacks. One famous quote of that era came from a legend. A black man was reported as saying in his poetic pidgin “Massa Linkum, he be ebery whai; he know ebery ting; he walk the earf like de lord.” Translation: “Master Lincoln, he is everywhere; he knows everything; he walks the earth like the Lord.” The sentiment was exaggerated, but the awe was genuine. The blacks breathed liberty after over a century of chains and shame.

    Oloye Eleyinmi might have lived that delusion of grandeur, and thought words like that came from his fawning followers. He probably heard them.

    But the present Eleyinmi saw what he had not seen, felt what had not touched him, and ran away from what had always run away from him. So, Eleyinmi was used to hiding his hands as a flourish of royal joy. But last week, when he was asked to appear before the Code of Conduct Tribunal, he ducked before he was docked. This time, he was not just hiding the hand, he was hiding the whole massive fabric of royalty. They sought him in court, and he was not found. Oloye was royalty. Royalty is court. How dare anyone redefine royalty by subjecting it to the logic of obedience? That was probably the refrain of his thought.

    Suddenly though, we saw that Eleyinmi could not hide anything, not agbada, not hand, and he appeared in the court. Even at that, his self-image was not vitiated. He still affected the superior gaze of the palace. His band of adoring followers, in regalia and dance and court flattery, trailed him like a boisterous wave.

    He at one moment wanted to play Awolowo on the dock. He looked back at another royalty, a genuine one not built on bloodline but on industry and time-tested wisdom. He thought he was an Awolowo and in his peroration after his treasonable felony trial. But Oloye Bukola Saraki was not Awolowo, and he had taken advantage of judge’s magnanimity in allowing him to say a word, and he turned it into a political platform for tirades.

    He and his folks say it is political persecution, and so the matter should be allowed to lie. That was a lie. The Oloye was at work. He does not know that this is no royalty but democracy. And in democracy, it is the rule of law, and not the sentiment of the big man. He was part of the change mantra and he is about to be a victim of a tiger he let out of the zoo.

    By the way, his is no royalty in a traditional sense, but in a contrivance of our big man politics. He inherited it from his father, and he has been adept at it in a small pond in Kwara State. In the ocean, however, the tilapia discovers he is not master but in contention with larger jaws and deft swimmers. Tilapia is about to end up in a jaw he pooh-poohed.

    In democracy, law enforces liberty. The individual is subsumed in what French philosopher Jean Jacque Rousseau termed “the collective will.” When he appeared in court, he must have realised that his royalty was a ruse. That accounts for his charge that he was a victim of persecution. That charge is neither here nor there. There are specific charges. He should account for himself and not hide under victimhood the way he hides his hands under his massive agbada.

    His supporters are also appealing to pity by referring to an earlier case, and saying that his example of persecution was akin to that of Asiwaju Tinubu during the era of Goodluck Jonathan. Are they kidding? His was about an account he operated before he became governor, and certain other facts were clear. It was dud because even the bank wrote him to show the account was closed. Again Tinubu did not hide like Oloye. He did not say he was above the law. He had even earlier won a case against Ribadu’s EFCC with a N10 million damage awarded to him. He said in a release after he was acquitted: “I was ready to defend my name and most importantly blunt the dangling sword of Damocles over my head. Then I challenged them to go to court and maintained that those who allege must prove. I am glad that the Code of Conduct Tribunal, consistent with the laws of the land and after painstaking trial, have dispensed of my case.”

    Oloye should not have ducked. He suffered the humiliation of appearing in the box of the accused. What we are seeing is the architecture of political disgrace. In 2002, the U.S. Senate Leader and equivalent of Senate President in Nigeria, Trent Lott, fell into scandal. He had uttered a statement that affirmed he was a racist. He said he voted for Strum Thurmond, a self-confessed segregationist, who hated freedom for blacks. Lott asserted in the man’s 100th birthday that he supported him still. The statement triggered a windstorm that swept him out of office as the top legislator in the land.

    The world has seen quite of few scandals. In Nigeria, scandal often is associated with murder and financial fraud. In other lands, it adds a steamy context: sex. John Edwards loft his prestige and ended his quest to be U.S. president when he was caught in an affair, especially when his wife was dying of cancer. We know of the Keating Five about lobbying corruption, and it involved five U.S. senators. In Italy, we know of Silvio Berlusconi, playboy, pedophile, gangster, fraud and swindler and his famous party for nubile girls called bunga bunga. Lott resigned when the American public frowned. But here we want a way out. Well, Eleyinmi would have to confront the bear ahead. Already his friends are shopping for his replacement. He is literally and metaphorically in a box. Who will help Eleyinmi?

  • On Professor vincent

    On Professor vincent

    I received an outpouring of emotions from some Nigerians over last week’s column. A few have offered to help. Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN), former governor of Lagos, called with example. He has committed N1million. A few others have pledged some sort of support. I am still working on how to get the family of Vincent involved in a transparent arrangement for help.

  • Buhari, help this man

    Buhari, help this man

    Not many Nigerians know Professor Theo Vincent. If I did not thrill to the bounty of the written word, I probably would not know him or care. When I first met him, I actually did not care. I admired him, but for a different reason.

    I did not meet him in flesh and blood. As I write, I have not. I met him in the form of a book on poetry when I was a teenager in high school and preparing for my school certificate exam.

    Poetry was beautiful tyranny in my eyes. Words came together in an opaque assault. I was expected to hollow out every poem, but I was hollow at the end of every exercise. Vincent’s book, A Selection of African Poetry, defogged the material. He compiled African poems with K.E. Senanu. At Government College, Ughelli, we called the book Senanu and Vincent.

    I forgot about the man, as many do their teachers when they have moved ahead in life. But a year after, I was glued to the NTA on a Sunday afternoon, and I saw a man clutching a book, and he spoke with an accent of rare sonority. I knew he was Nigerian, if his accent betrayed his foreign exposure and education. His voice had a low, rhythmic tenor. His lips moved with a slight tremor as though praying for the listener to lend an ear. But it was not a beggary tone. It buried a vitality of intelligence and confidence in the humility of its rendition. Now celebratory, now melancholic, it tore the book apart. I lent an ear, then my mind, then my heart. It became a regular for me every Sunday afternoon after church.

    When my father, Moses, observed my surrender to our pint-sized television set with this fellow, he asked everyone at home to grant me my 10 or 15 minutes with Theo Vincent. I remembered his chin hid inside a voluminous goatee. His eyes were sober behind a pair of glasses, and he held whatever book he reviewed with a sort of subdued flourish.

    Even though I passed my school certificate and GCE in literature at an elite grade – I had an A1 in GCE – Professor Vincent’s Sunday classes tore than my vanity. I knew from him that literature was an open-ended survey of words, and it was not about words but society. It was no mystery but a power of enquiry. It provided a platform to interrogate society’s failings and potential and to celebrate our humanity. It was the nexus of words and myth, the playground villains and heroes.

    He gave me the first true introduction to literature. I gained admission to Ife a year after and had great teachers in my literature classes I took as electives. The teachers helped my flame to a ruddy colour, but Vincent lit the spark.

    He has been a subliminal figure in my consciousness. When my friend, Professor Hope Eghagha of the English Department at the University of Lagos, spoke fondly of him, my heart quietly zipped back to his feast on television.

    I followed his career with aloof gratitude and was happy he became vice chancellor of the University of Port Harcourt.

    Somehow news about him fizzed away, and in my subconscious I thought he was in retirement until I saw a report in The Punch about him. The writer Chux Ohai titled it with an alliterative flair: Battered, Blind and Broke.

    I have read the piece a few times, but I could not understand why such a man, who has given so much to the society, should be allowed to pass his hoary years not only in penury but in neglect. According to the report, he is blind, and lives in one of the dingy neighbourhoods in Lagos where area boys, pimps, loafers and other never-do-wells thrive in dirt and darkness.

    There are speculations why the man cannot afford to live in a comfortable environment, or even get proper care with his eyes now locked in perpetual night. The Universities of Lagos and Port Harcourt issued statements that they have done well by him according to the law. They have paid all his entitlements. What that means is that he is left to his sightless devices.

    The universities are saying it is not about compassion. It is about the law. It reminds me of Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, who asked with aghast illumination when he was cornered, “Is that the law?” In his case, he wanted to use the law to take a pound  of flesh. He lost many pounds of honour to the bargain. The universities are losing pounds of goodwill to this bargain. Whatever led to the man’s state, even if it is due to personal indiscretions, he should not be left in that state of increasing immiseration.  We should not allow him regret his many years like Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of the Salesman who died with neither substance nor love after sacrificing his vital years to the service of his employer.

    He was a stellar professor, and also a vice chancellor. The fact that he is so poor shows that he did not take advantage of his lofty position for unlawful self-enrichment. He was an activist of the word, and played a great role in installing Nigeria’s top literary accolade, The NLNG Prize for Literature. As some people say, a man like him ordinarily should be bedecked with the Nigerian Merit Award.

    Men like Vincent indict our society. They have given service. They have served with their minds and might. We look back coldly.

    He did not leave the university environment in a scandal. He is not like the character in Philip Roth’s novel, The Human Stain, where a professor quits a United States university over a racial slur or disregard for other ethnicities. Or J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, where a professor quits for taking advantage of a female student in his bedroom.

    The least this man deserves is a decent home and a regular living allowance. I appeal to the President to step into his case, or any Nigerian with the means to do so, especially men in high positions in government. I recall that Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and former Governor Babatunde Fashola came to the rescue of Nigeria’s best soccer hero Haruna Ilerika. Tinubu also built a home for Fatai Rolling Dollar.

    Icons stand for the best in us. We should do well to serve them when they are no longer in a position to serve us.

  • No Greek gift from J.P. Morgan

    Recently, the international mogul JP Morgan decided to delist Nigeria from its government bonds. The reason is that the new Central Bank regime on foreign exchange transactions does not favour its own light of good capitalism. It has created a set of chain reactions and the stock market has turned a little giddy.

    But I am happy the CBN is not yielding to the shark of a bank.

    J.P. Morgan and its types come from a culture of due process and transparency. But it is a bank that knows how to trick governments and naïve citizens. Was it not the same bank that was fined close to $20 billion for a series of unethical and unprofessional conduct? It paid a major role in swindling Americans in the mortgage scandal a few years ago, and paid $13 billion in fines. It also paid $1 billion over the “London Whale scandal” and $6 billion over the manipulation of a felon called Bruno Iksil. It paid $2 billion for allowing Berne Madoff swindle innocent American investors. It was in cahoots with companies, such as Goldman Sachs to tease Greece into its crisis by crafting a system to hide its debt while profiting by it. Now, Greece is suffering alone. If JP Morgan cannot live with transparency in Nigeria, we can live without their geeks. We abhor another Greek gift

  • Lean is here

    Lean is here

    These are no easy times. But life sometimes needs times like these to turn us on to our greater gifts. But are we ready?

    The price of oil has plummeted. States have to borrow to pay their bills. No one is asking for some things we took for granted.

    We are not speaking about the emergency on power, the construction of infrastructure, the rebirth of education, or the shrewd touch on health care. The first question is, where is the money?

    So, the lean times are here. The irony, though, is that a counter-narrative to the lean times still tells us that while reason agrees about the lean times, the emotions say something else. The head is cool, but the heart boils.

    Reason tells us that this is no time for extravagance, or the showy moment to boast about a revolution in health care, or a swagger over infrastructure achievements.

    When the footloose era of Jonathan dawned on us, it took a while before we knew we had fallen into a prodigal boom. The Biblical fat years came in all their phony glories. It was not a time of investment, but of consumption.

    The Bible itself says: “In times of prosperity, rejoice. In times of adversity, consider.” Well, it’s time to consider. Time to see how we can fly out of these woes of little money, plenty of poverty. It’s time to forge new strategies, new ethos, new ethic.

    But the story from states about unpaid salaries only warns us that we heard the sermon on the mount, but we have not felt it yet. The head has not met the heart, and the chasm between reason and emotion is the reason workers are at odds with their chief executives.

    Oyo State Governor, Abiola Ajimobi, struck a courageous note. He has shown that given the state of the finances, the state cannot afford what it took for granted. It has to cut its budget according to its inflows. That is the fact of life. When there was money, the state could afford a lot of bills, pay salaries, WAEC fees, et al. Now, in spite of the about N26 billion it received recently from the federal-backed loans, it still cannot meet up with its entire backlog.

    He says the government will step up means of boosting revenues. Workers, who now show the side of emotions, are not quite impressed with the sermon from the mount.

    Salaries have to be paid because the children must eat, the roof over the head must not cave in and when a child squeaks with typhoid fever, an unpaid salary will not jolt the patient to life. Homilies such as the call for belt-tightening do not turn into miracles.

    So, there. When PMB took over, we started gradually to peep into the real issues. The rot of Jonathan’s sewers came to an opprobrious light. The nation could have caved under if he won the election. Those who voted in PMB, voted for change. It was a clamour with high emotional decibel. But what did change mean. For some it was the ouster of the GEJ. To some others, it was a fulmination against the Niger Delta upstarts. To others it was to bring in a northerner. To a few conscious advocates, it was to usher in a revolution in ethics and economy.

    Few reflected that such a change carried with it many long hours of discomfort. But we had started to see the discomfort before the end of the GEJ era. Some states could not pay salary because they were blindsided by two factors. One, the idealism of worthy projects that they thought could go on with the dollar. Two, the squalor of corruption at the centre that made the idealist look like a spendthrift.

    Suddenly, it was not about building a school or a health clinic. It was about paying civil servants. Translation: governance has shut down.

    If we want change, and we are bogged down with the exigencies of paying salaries and doing nothing else, it means two things. One, the civil service is not productive enough to make the state rich or live above water. Two, that if we stay that way, we are headed to paralysis and we shall mope at the decay in all sectors.

    We cannot remain so. But there lies the challenge. How shall we allow the civil service to hold the majority of workers and citizens in the states to ransom?

    To keep the workers is to keep the states down. But to screen the workers and weed out the dead woods? That makes reason triumph. But what of emotions? In his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote that man is not a rational creature. We are all emotional beings, he asserted.

    That is why workers are saying they cannot lose any of their staff.

    The irony is that in that decade, governments have been in a fury of hiring to boost their image as sensitive organs. That so-called generosity has now held them captive. We hired to feel good, but now we have to fire to feel good. It’s like constipation. We enjoyed the meal, but now we need the physician.

    President Buhari has been showing signs of plugging loopholes, and staving off corruption.

    Healing will take time, and unless we start a conversation about how to fight off the fat in the system, then it is like looking for change without accepting the consequences. During the age of revolutions, it is called revolutionary remorse.

    Change in a society like ours is tricky. What is inevitable though is that we cannot sustain a bloated bureaucracy that deprives most people the opportunity to pursue their dreams.

    Building good roads, good hospitals and sound educational institutions creates room for productive citizenry. Where all the money goes for salaries alone is a pain. Governor Ajimobi put in words what PMB is translating into action. I wonder how we can do this without civil eruption?

  • Pastor, hunter, politician

    Pastor, hunter, politician

    The profile of the new Secretary to the Government  of the Federation (SGF) has brought into bold relief why many wanted the Buhari administration to appoint one from the onset of his reign.

    Given the sort of man Buhari is, he needed a quintessential bureaucrat. But an SGF is not just a bureaucrat. He is the mediator and by-way between the ministries and MDGs on the one hand, and the political elite on the other.

    So, while the SGF is a politician, he also bears a bureaucrat in his breast. He is therefore a binary man of government. He should laugh and dabble in the vainglory and thespian affinity of the agbada or babaringa in one moment. In the next moment, his brow should knot with figures and competencies and visions and roadmaps of projects, etc. In his full profile, he should swivel with almost animal reflex from one to another, as though he were born to speak with the politician and the permanent secretary in equal flourish of data and register.

    We know the personage called Muhammadu Buhari. He is tall, gaunt, with a boyish smile that contrasts at times with an intimidating scowl. That scowl reminds me of that moment in his first world press conference as military head of state. “The press,” he roared, if we call it roar with the thin, firm, almost babyish muscularity of his voice. “We will tamper with that.” He probably will say “temper” today.

    But that scowl comes rarely now. Maybe because he wears only civilian clothes, has been subjected to the mellowing of democratic ethos, has been subdued by the battering of age and the dew of time. In fact, because of the deliberateness of his actions, many believe he has lost a vital part of his principled fire. They say he is conscious of his peremptory past, and he is more wary of being cast in the mould of a despot.

    Whatever the case is, Buhari still bears the carriage of the austere leader with deep pious reserve and disdain for material extravagance. His assets now in public glare reveal a man more in touch with the bounties of nature than of the bank.

    So, his secretary to the government must compensate for his “lapses.” He must belong to what Max Weber, the authority on authority, calls “the legal rational” order. Buhari falls into the Weberian charismatic order. People of his class do not rely on position for power. He has what Harvard Professor Joseph Nye calls soft power. But it dwarfs the hard power of position. Weber sees it as the “authority of the extraordinary and personal gift of grace.” But of all the authorities, it is the most mysterious. Even Nye notes, in his The Powers to Lead, that nothing in itself guarantees a person charisma. Not voice, money, height, carriage, royalty, etc. Napoleon was smallish, Churchill burly, Lincoln tall and ugly, De Gaulle tall and handsome, Mandela tallish and handsome, Roosevelt tall on wheel chair.

    Enter Babachir David Lawal. The new SGF is a politician but he has had his experience in industry. Big-boned with an effervescent spirit, his first stark contrast with Buhari is that he is a pastor in the North from a minority tribe known as Tilba. But he worked in the Niger Delta for a few years where he can spin yarns about the men in that region and their habits of fashion and work. He worked with the Delta Steel Company in Aladja in today’s Delta State, after graduating in engineering from the Ahmadu Bello University.

    He also worked with Data Science Limited and NITEL. He has traversed the private and public trusts, and he broke out to be an entrepreneur with his own firm, and has been a member of the engineering and computer elites in the country. That is the bureaucrat.

    As a politician, he worked in the Northeast and rose to be the All Progressives Congress vice chairman in  the region. But the intriguing thing was his role during the Boko Haram high noon of infamy. He was a pioneer in rallying the hunters to fight the bands of militants. The story of how these hunters mounted counteroffensives against the militants will one day be told. He rallied them with dane guns, bows and arrows. We recall some of their efforts. In one of those battles, the hunters beat the BH boys where our armies failed.

    Lawal was also, as a politician, a victim of his support for Buhari, when robbers attacked him and claimed it was because of his support for Buhari in 2011. The irony was that he was alone in his choice as a Buhari supporter when others looked Jonathan’s way. Some hoodlums attacked his church, The ECWA Gospel Church, and burned down the building. They left a bold picture of Buhari as emblem of their rage. Lawal’s fellow church members accused him of collaborating with the arsonists.

    There we go. We have seen how he can be both politician and administrator. The job of SGF is not equals part bureaucratic and political. I daresay it is more political. But it’s bureaucratic component looms. It determines whether the government can succeed or not. For a charismatic character like Buhari, he leads because he is a leader. But for Lawal, it is the rules, not ruler, who is important. That’s why his job is tricky. Part of his job is to forestall the sort of nightmare that novelist Franz Kafka painted about bureaucracy in his book, The Castle, where a visitor cannot find the chief bureaucrat even after entering the castle.

    Some modern theorists of administration, who speak of transactional and transformational leadership latch a good leader to all virtues and categories. He must have a dose of each. Weber identified a third leadership type: the traditional. In Nigeria, it refers to patriarchs and feudalist leaders like kings and emirs. Some have said the evolution of the Catholic Church exemplifies the three types: Jesus (Charismatic), Priests (traditional) the church itself (legal rational).

    The same sort of chemistry is required to work in states. A blend is important between governor and SSG. We are seeing that in Lagos, for instance. The secretary is the lingua franca between politics and the bureaucracy. When the connection fails between president and SGF, a great adjustment is necessary.

    Powerful bureaucrats change the course of history. We know of Simeon Adebo and Jerome Udoji. Sometimes politicians do it well.  A great example was Obafemi Awolowo, who blended the bureaucrat and the politician, although one got in the way of the other at times. In Kenya, journalist-turned-bureaucrat John Githongo was a great anti-corruption warrior. India has a long list of them but Krishnan Menon is unforgettable for his many work. In the United States, a soldier George Marshall helped rebuild post-war Europe with the Marshall Plan. French man Jean Monet helped turn a steel industry as the germ for building the European Union.

    It all depends on how well Buhari will put Lawal to work, and how much visionary and strategic vitality Lawal will bring to the table. We now have the SGF. Hopefully, in a few weeks, we shall have the ministers and the Buhari engine should start to whir.

  • Not yet Eleyinmi

    Not yet Eleyinmi

    Sometimes when Bukola Saraki sports his agbada, he bears resemblance to Chief Eleyinmi in the familiar but now defunct Village Headmaster television series. Saraki, like Eleyinmi, wraps a certain mystique around his hands. So he hides them inside the voluminous sleeves.

    But he lacks two vital qualities associated with Chief Eleyinmi. The Village Headmaster thespian does not wear suits. Two, he projects a Rabelaisian sense of humour and effusive candour that titillate his audience in spite of the actor’s patrician peccadillos.

    Eleyinmi drinks his tea or water or wine by grabbing the spoon or glass under the protection of the fabric. Saraki does not. Saraki also wears the western suit that exposes and takes away the sanctity of the hand.

    It is quirks like these that made me write a cover over a decade ago in Sunday Concord on political fashion. If Saraki was a factor in those years, he might have played a prominent part in the cast. Unlike Eleyinmi, however, Saraki does not make you laugh.

    He did not make anyone laugh when he hid, in the name of ambition, in a nondescript car in the National Assembly in the wee hours in order to be Senate president. He did not amuse when he made an impolitic quote defending men of his class about not taxing the Nigerian jet set. So, by his reckoning, we should not have special taxes for jet owners. He did not amuse when he abandoned his party and supped with the enemy, again in the name of ambition. Absence of principles can be amusing, but the former kwara State chief does not know how to suck us out of our sulks.

    He did not amuse when he rebuffed his party leadership by not conceding any of its demands in the spoils of Senate office.

    He might have amused us, though, when he slid his way onto the prayer ground with President Muhammadu Buhari during the recent Muslim festivities, and allowed the impression to pass that he had somehow won over the chief. But it was not a laugh he wanted credit for because it was against him. It recalls what playwright and Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett designated as “a laugh laughing at itself.” It was not an Eleyinmi moment though. It was more of a Baba Sala episode, a rip-roaring farce.

    He did not get much of an attention from the President in that holy hour. He probably lost it.

    Even Eleyinmi, for all his sweet obnoxiousness, never played the obsequious role. He was a chief who knew his limits and was funny any time he bowed to the calm and chastening rhetoric of the king. He betrayed the innocence of a boy caught in a prank.

    But our own pretended Eleyinmi does not know how to play that innocence. Rather than admit a wrong, and eat his humble pie in public, he has engaged in a contradictory drama. He is begging and fighting simultaneously. He waited for House Speaker Dogarra to bow to party pressure before he realised that the legislature had its limits. He has sent emissaries to beg the President and also to beg the Lion of Bourdillon. I am not aware how sincere and how effective these odysseys of humility will be. But it is significant that the man who thought he had subverted decency in the name of power still remembers how to bow.

    At the same time, he is taking a battle to the head of the EFFC. His perception management of this matter leaves much to be desired. Not long ago, the EFCC held his wife for questioning over corruption charges. It clearly rankled his skin deep enough for him to show his hands and deliver a fistful to Lamorde, the EFCC boss. So, wielding the power of the Senate, he is going after the man in charge of corruption by throwing charges of corruption at him. The merit or demerit of the case is beyond me at this point, in spite of what news reports have said about the petitioner’s pedigree.

    But the whole drama of his fighting and begging after acting as the Eleyinmi of Nigerian politics must sicken even him. He is now surrounded by the hyenas of his ambition. He wanted to be a giant. He thought he had attained the status, and then he looks like the characters in Wole Soyinka’s Nobel Prize-wining play, A Play of Giants. It is farce that leads downhill. In his play Macbeth, Shakespeare describes it as “vaulting ambition, which overleaps itself.”

    Edmund Burke, the master theorist of conservatism, who saw power and penned ruminations on it, including about the French like Robespierre, Danton and the little general Napoleon, wrote: “The greater the power, the more dangerous the abuse.”

    While he battles to stay afloat in what is a looming morass, Saraki has to consider another man of power, Federick Douglas of the abolition era of slavery in the United States. Power is about negotiation in a spirit of reciprocity. He must consider what to give, and he must not look like the giants of Soyinka’s play. Hence Douglas noted, “power concedes nothing without a demand.” The other side asked, but he did not give. If he is not careful, he will be given away. He should read Professor Niyi Osundare’s poem on him and his likes, especially the line, “wind vane politicians with multiple tongues…”

  • Ambode, Agbaje and all that

    Ambode, Agbaje and all that

    The Appeal Court ruled in the past week that the PDP had no case against the victory of Akinwunmi Ambode as governor of Lagos. When I heard the news, I asked myself, why did Jimi Agbaje put himself through all these? It is still a question for which I have no answer. He put himself in the centre of an inglorious storm. At one time, he defended Jonathan and came short of calling his rule revolutionary. What does he think now with that regime’s corruption stories unravelling? He also became a militant, mouthing rhetoric, defending the perpetration of turbulence in the Niger Delta should Jonathan lose. It was because of tongues like his that some are praising Jonathan as a hero for conceding what he lost: the people’s choice. He also became a royalist of subversion and anti-royalist in the same breath. A royalist of subversion when he promised to install an Eze Ndigbo as a ploy to divide Lagosians along ethnic lines. He was anti-royalist when called for the punishment of his own king, the Oba of Lagos. He fell into farce when he asked Nigerians to compare who was more handsome between Jonathan and Buhari.

    Is this Agbaje going to make a pirouette to the side of truth again? Even though he joined the Southwest rearguard of reaction, the fuddy-duddies who wined and dined with the Otuoke fellow?

    It’s obvious to all now that he was no match for the man who beat him. Governance is not about foppish razzmatazz and punctilious lies. Well, the coast is now clear for Governor Ambode to voyage ahead. And President Buhari should also join him in the all-too-important task of taking Lagos to the next level. Ambode, a methodical, no-frills persona, is now poised to make us forget the episode of the turncoat campaigns. The courts have their uses.

  • It’s sad, said Sa’ad

    It’s sad, said Sa’ad


    [dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s a pity that Bishop Matthew Kukah was the only cleric who stuck out his neck for Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. It’s also a pity that the only one who does not want to be a hypocrite is on the burner of fiery criticism.

    It’s also a pity that corruption, the bane of our history and cultural fabric, was played down by Nigeria’s most intellectual man of God.

    But these were not the most telling of my experiences last week. I debated GEJ with a prominent writer, and he defended the scum of his era. His case: Nigeria created Jonathan and Nigeria had to live with him. Was Jonathan a corrupt man, I asked? He wallowed into meaningless obfuscation.

    He would not accept that his administration was bad. Neither would he agree that his government misruled this country. He said he was good for Nigeria.

    After that conversation and the gaffe from Kukah, I told myself that no ruler in Nigerian history has corrupted fine minds like Jonathan since the IBB era.

    The philosopher David Hume once asserted: “The corruption of the best produces the worst.” He reeled out this line in respect of religion.

    In the same week when all sorts of foul charges were pelted at the door of Jonathan’s regime, the ex-president was photographed bouncing off a private jet. He wanted to see animals at a Games Reserve in East Africa with his wife and others who followed him on another private jet.

    The same week when the Immigration boss was suspended for corrupting the process of employment, the NPA was reported to have spent N160 billion of N162 billion it made last year. The NPA story also tells us that most of their dealings were undervalued, a code word for corruption.

    Kukah, a constant motif in Nigerian debates, is a master of the rigmarole. You hardly know where he stands on an issue. He navigates a warren of narratives, entices you with his folky ability to spin a yarn, props up the pros and cons with almost equal poise, and berths in a never-land. A few times he is caught in a position, he is exposed. He did that when he profiled the ethnic groups in the country. And now this.

    He probably needs to read Jesus’ admonition that “let your yea be yea and your nay nay.”

    Why Kukah’s case is sad is that I expected all those Christian clerics who did not have enough of Jonathan as a son of God to say something. Did Jonathan not visit all of them? Did they not endorse him? Was it not because of them that his numbers went up in the Southwest? Was he not doling out prophet’s offerings in dollars?

    Are they not aware of all the revelations now? Is curse not in the house of the thief, according to scriptures?

    Why did they leave Kukah alone to say what all of them probably thought? Did they not robe Buhari in Boko Haram clothing? Was Buhari not the devil? Or have they changed their minds, or are they rethinking them? Many of them who claimed to hear from God, did they hear wrong?

    “He that hath my word, let him speak it faithfully,” wrote Prophet Jeremiah. “What is the chaff from the wheat?” Did Jesus not say, “I have not sent them, depart from me, ye that work iniquity?”

    Was it a mistake? Why not repent openly? Prophets can err, but they owe it to their flocks to own up. None of them has gone back to their flock to discuss what happened in the Jonathan era? Was it the veil of Satan, or they said what they did not hear?

    Why has any of them not asked the CAN leader Ayo Oritsejafor to speak in the spirit of contrition about the waywardness of their prophesies and injunctions.

    Kukah’s peace committee, as Tatalo Alamu noted, was not intended to shoo Jonathan out of power. It boomeranged with Buhari victory. They erred by asking Buhari to follow the rule of law. He had not flouted it or shown any sign he was going to.

    When outrage was bursting out ears about the sums of money allegedly stolen, it was out of sync with the Gospels and human dignity to use rule of law as veneer. Then Kukah showed their true colour when he said Jonathan did a spectacular thing, so we should move on.

    The good voice of the week came from the Sultan of Sokoto, Sa’ad Abubakar III, when he asked that all thieves should go to jail. That is the sort of thing Jesus would have said.

    History is replete with men of God who associated with rulers of decay. Recently, the era of George W. Bush was marked by clerics who paraded the White House. Eventually his ranking among people fell. The man who had mentioned Jesus as his role model left office as a liar and “murderer.” The same clerics fell into moral filth and disgrace.

    Kukah did not lose his way, I think. The fog just cleared and our eyes just opened to his vision of Nigeria. Clerics are good on the pulpit, but we should not be pupils of their conduct. The Bible is replete with men of great revelations who erred in conduct from Abraham to Peter the rock.

    “If I had served my God as I have done my king, he would not have given me over in my grey hairs.” Those were the words of Cardinal Wolsey who mortgaged his sacerdotal conscience to King Henry VIII of England. Henry VIII was a monarch for life. GEJ reigned only for about eight years.

    “So the clerics returned to their duties. Shakespeare’s rendition of the quote hits the bull’s eye. Since most of the clerics have not ruined their callings. Here is Shakespeare’s rendering in his play Henry VIII: “Had I but served my God with half the zeal I served my king, he would not in mine age have left me naked to my enemies.”

    The bard of Avon anticipated Kukah who is now being roasted by his enemies. Wolsey did not follow the law. Henry the VIII who wanted to break with the Catholic Church to have a divorce and marry a Boleyn sister, met resistance in Thomas More as Robert Bolt’s dramatised in his play, A Man for All Seasons.

    Thomas Cromwell was More’s counterpoise as shown in Hilary Mantel’s novel, Bring Up the Bodies. Both books shed light on the critical time in English and world history. It pitted men of God against worldly opportunists and their kings. Robert More alone survives today as a man of conscience.

    I enlist this column with the Sultan. Probe and jail. The Jonathan era was a corpulent corpse. It stinks and infects. Ebenezer Babatope, no role model, says Jonathan was pure. Technically maybe. But not morally. If you preside over rottenness, you cannot be free of its stench.

    But if there was a law against foolishness in leadership, GEJ will go to jail. But he will have to explain to us as a people how all of these happened on his watch. Just as the CAN and its members should explain how their ‘eyes of understanding’ did not see what the lay voter saw of the corpulent corpse of the GEJ era. Lying is corruption. It’s time for all to be true to themselves. As Shakespeare wrote in Henry VIII: “Corruption wins not more than honesty.”

    [news_list display=”category” category=”24″ count=”6″ show_more=”on” show_more_type=”link”]