The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • The right to beg (2)

    The right to beg (2)

    In the past week, the right to alms received a shot in the arm. It was Senator Shehu Sani’s shot at Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai. Sani supported almsgiving and clobbered Rufai as an anti-revolutionary.

    I was already contemplating this second instalment of my last week’s comment when Sani’s broadsides hit the news waves. I expected something new, sudden and even rigorous from his cerebral mind. He has been a mainstay of the civic battles of the North and has managed to present himself as a fighter not only with dignity but also for the dignity of others.

    We recall with gratitude his interventions in the tempestuous days of Boko Haram when they hoisted flags and burned towns and slaughtered human flesh and skewered virgins. He earned the people’s right and other Nigerians’ nod in his election as senator.

    But his words on El-Rufai’s policy on beggars reflect what happens to men when they swivel from activists to partisans. They lose the virtue of evenhandedness and fall into temptation. He said El-Rufai’s policies were anti-people, and the governor had decided not to appoint his (Sani’s) loyalists in office. Cutting bureaucracy, bringing faith rather than fraud to hajj, pruning expenditure and other El-Rufai policies cannot amount to anti-people policies.

    I expected his take on the almajiri issue to come with the candour of detachment and reflect legitimate logic. But the partisan wars between him and El-Rufai will unveil in the coming years. But my concern here is the almajiri hobgoblin.

    The El-Rufai take brings to mind the crises of change, and the way we effect change determines whether it works or not. It invokes Wole Soyinka’s play, Death and The King’s Horseman, a play some critics regard as the best work of his career. I think differently though. But it is a matter for another day. In his introduction to the play, the Nobel laureate ribbed commentators who reduced the theme to a “clash of cultures” and he described them as lazy. He, however, saw his work as embodying various themes relating to the tension of transition, and that is how I have seen that great play of audacious experimenting, poetic flourish and luminous characters.

    In the play, the royal is on his way from the world of flesh to paradise. A seductive beauty entraps him. So paradise can wait.

    Whether it is decadent or draconian, societies are often unwilling to accommodate the demands of change. That is why sudden revolutions are bloody and often fail. The French, Chinese, the so-called revolutions of the Europe in the mid-19th century did not rise up to the idealisms of their foot soldiers and dreamers. The American Revolution was not a revolution in the sense of the others because they sought to own their country. The others wanted to overthrow even the magna carta. Garibaldi. Bismarck. Cavour. Metternich.

    So El-Rufai had his heart in the almajiri’s place when he wanted them off the streets. He had done something exemplary in Abuja as minister.

    But in Kaduna, his action was too sweeping. But everyone, including Shehu Sani, should cavil at today’s incarnation of the almajiri. Ironically, it was the clerics who started it that bastardised it. The almajiri were not supposed to beg when it started in the Borno area many decades ago. They were supposed to be scholars. Jesus sent his disciples out to preach. He asked them not to go from house to house for sustenance. But they should remain in the place where they had food and shelter.

    The universal beggary of today’s almajiri is an abuse of its original concept. I visited Kaduna a few years ago and studied the system and even spoke with then governor, Namadi Sambo. It was clear he was thinking a policy of gradually getting the boys of the street, and his predecessor also had begun a programme that his wife pursued as an NGO after they left office. I visited one of the schools in Kaduna devoted to some of the boys. It was a full boarding school with laboratories, libraries, etc. Some of the students told me they dreamed of the professions. Pilot, teacher, engineer, etc.

    The modest gains then had started attracting some almajiri from outside Kaduna.

    It is therefore fraudulent to say that the policy of al majiri does not need expunging. What El-Rufai needs is a strategy of containment and elimination. I also observed that a northern state alone cannot deal with the issue. It is not a Kaduna problem. It is a northern problem rooted in its feudal history. First politicians, then Boko Haram recruited them.

    As El-Rufai has noted, they are bomb couriers. Calling them suicide bombers is to incriminate them. They did not know the evil they committed.

    The children would rather be an El-Rufai or Shehu Sani than a Jugunu who leads the colony of beggars. That was the shortcoming of Aminata Sow Fall’s novel, The Beggars Strike. It does not interrogate the morality of the priests and almsgivers. If we want to give alms today, we don’t need the almajiri on the street to sate our spiritual cravings. What are the babies’ homes for, the house of the blind, deaf, disabled? What of the scholarships that we need to give to many indigent ones in our midst, and the hospital patients, etc. Such giving ennobles. To give to the al majiri is to stunt their dignity. Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi shows no sympathy for the head of the colony, and his play looks at both the street and executive beggary. Also, John Jay’s Beggar’s Opera and Brecht’s Three Penny Opera excoriate a capitalism that enriches a few and exploits the poor.

    It is the hypocrisy of the wallet against the bowl. The rich and mighty endorse begging out of naivety. The western society found a solution by creating the welfare state, especially in the aftermath of the Second World War when more than half of Europe was flirting with communism. The Marshall Plan created a first crutch, and a well-organised system to cushion the weak followed.

    In 16th century, Holland broke out of the hold of Spain when the leaders, including William of Orange, gave their party the symbol of the wallet and the bowl. They had written a petition and a senior Spanish officer said to the woman representing Phillip 11: “Fear not madam, they are nothing but beggars.” The so-called beggars overthrew Spain and reclaimed their country. In the novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo writes an evocative chapter of the revolt of the vagabonds, including beggars and the lame to mock an insensitive society. We have to save and integrate them before they rise. That is when revolutions are sudden. Even if they fail, they carry cargoes of blood and death and years of pain.

    So to effect change, it has to be gradual, not the sort of wholesale style of El-Rufai. Yet he needs our sympathy for confronting a great wrong to a generation and a scar on our conscience. The whole North should approach it in concert and as a conscience.

  • The right to beg

    The right to beg

    A few weeks ago, Kaduna State governor, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, delivered a bomb, and its shrapnel ricocheted all over the media and the oil industry. It was at a lecture organised by the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalists. No stranger to controversy, the  governor suggested that the NNPC should be dissolved. It had become a cesspool of corruption, and splurges close to half of its receipts on itself.

    The speech caused quite a stir at the Sheraton Hotels venue, and later all over the country. As a discussant at the event, I intervened that such a prescription was rather sweeping. The problem, I contended, was not NNPC, but us. If we scrapped the NNPC and formed another corporation, we ran the risk of reincarnating the scum.

    NNPC did not materialise out of MARS. The leeches in its entrails are Nigerians. We need to purge Nigerians of our greed and impunity and set a standard for transparency before deciding on what step to take on NNPC. If NNPC dies from an official poison, we can bury it without instilling a new set of values. But it will be like a real-life pastiche of a movie like Jaws. The monster is killed, and a respite ensues. But in a cistern below, a little monster, its child, is born.

    It was a feisty debate before an audience of journalists, technocrats and practitioners of oil. The governor acquitted himself well as a master of broadsides.

    What struck me about his suggestion was its parallel with a step he had just taken in his home state of Kaduna. He had banned the almajiri from the streets, and he promised to construct a colony for them worthy of their dignity.

    The beggars kicked, and they did not beg the governor. They lashed at him for taking what they regarded as a high-handed step against an invaluable asset to the society.

    The irony was not lost on me. Within a week, he had taken a stand against two major heavyweights. The one, the NNPC, was temporal, and the other, the al majiri, spiritual. The NNPC represented money and the flashy lifestyle, bread and butter. On the surface, the almajiri represent bread and butter. But they are rooted in the faith of Islam, and they began as apprentices of clerics sent out to proselytise the ways of Allah and peace. They have morphed over decades as mere mendicants in the eyes of many. But those who understand their history and culture see them as integral to society’s conscience of charity.

    So, El-Rufai slammed the NNPC for its spiritual rottenness. In this regard, he wore the toga of a priest. On the other hand, he took on the almajiri as a materialist, wearing the toga of a man of the flesh.

    In both cases, he had good reasons. In the case of NNPC, he ribbed them for corruption as a spiritual cesspit. In the case of the almajiri, he wanted to save them to save the society. He contended that Boko Haram goons were using the boys as couriers of bombs and death without knowing it. So, if they were out of the reach of the goons, the society will have its berth of peace.

    The almajiri protested and they are appealing to a right often ignored by constitution mongers: the right to beg. Again, the story of the almajiri calls to mind the African classic novel, The beggars strike, by Senegalese writer, Aminata Sow Fall. It is the tradition of the power of the open bowl. In her novel, an official bans beggars and consigns them to a colony, just as El-Rufai proposed. Just as in the Kaduna case, the beggars protest. In fact, the city dwellers miss them, and line up in a long queue to give charity to the beggars. I am sure many in Kaduna, who had done good to the al majiri, are happy to have them back. Also in the novel, a holy cleric warns the government official that if he does not have them back on the streets, he will not rise to the post of vice president.

    That is the dilemma of begging. It became a case of the beggar becoming the nemesis of their tormentors who must beg them to keep his career.

    That, essentially, is the threat from the Kaduna beggars association. Their leader, Abdullahi Jugunu, an ebullient and visually- impaired figure, has become an instant celebrity as an exponent of beggary. He said almajiri lined up behind him and used their resources to fight for El-Rufai’s electoral victory, and that the diminutive governor had promised to appoint a special assistant on disability.

    He argued that they did good to society. That was the premise in Fall’s novel. They said many gave zakat, and it was essential as an article of faith.  German writer Karl Kraus once wrote that “there are people who can never forgive a beggar for their not having given him anything.”

    Begging is necessary, according to the thesis, because charity will vanish without them. The givers need the blessing of charity. It is a spiritual need. Even the Bible says those that give to the poor lend to God. The almajiri, I think, created a problem for El-Rufai, whose profile in politics rose with some of his actions as he ascended the throne. He has appointed a blind man, Mallam Aliyua Salisu, as special assistant on disability, and without a wink or nod he has allowed the almajiri back on the streets.

    That is where governance collides with culture. How does the governor handle the use of the almajiri as couriers without touching the sensitive button of faith and the poor as a class? Just as the beggars in Fall’s novel threatened to puncture their tormentor’s career, Jugunu railed that they would support his impeachment. It was life imitating art.

    It also shows how an organised lower class is more dangerous than upper class resentment. The NNPC dissolution may not have been easy if, perhaps, a Buhari dissolves it. But to flush out such a group as the almajiri takes a lot of guts. It is like standing in front of a wave. El-Rufai, never naïve in matters of politics, knows when politics flashes danger signals. Now he has to hope and pray that Boko Haram does not hit a market, a school, a prayer ground, etc. It is ironically a smaller headache than having the army of beggars erupt. Shakespeare knew that beggars are never meek. In the play King John, a character roars: “whiles I am a beggar I will rail.”

    In fact, beggars are dangerous because they organise themselves in bodies, and they have nothing to lose. Their leaders are usually fierce. Jugunu may not have the devilry of the beggars’ leader in John Jay’s play The Beggar’s Opera and its adaption by Bertolt Brecht in Three Penny opera. Both plays take jibes at the hypocrisies of capitalism, which I noted when former Jigawa State governor, Sule Lamido, cynically turned the almajiri into a class of official charity.

    The point though is that beggars are everywhere in the society, and the worst are the drones who parade the vaults of power. They offer nothing but cart away billions. NNPC was their charity. Some of them go to banks, take loans, never pay, buy jets and laugh at us from above. Those are the beggars we need to flush out first. They help sustain the almajiri system by not allowing us focus on how to mate merit to industry. Soyinka’s play, Opera Wonyosi, also adapted from Jay’s Opera, mocks both executive and plebian beggary in Nigeria.

    Perhaps El-Rufai the priest will now focus on NNPC. But he must first deliver the sinners and not point the way to hell, a la dissolve NNPC. He is one of four governors assigned to look at the maggoty edifice. We are waiting for a sustainable solution. Meanwhile, the almajiri exercise their right to beg.

  • Comrade and his women

    Comrade and his women


    [dropcap]W[/dropcap]e arrived Abeokuta in the first ink of dusk, at about 5:00pm. We were visiting the city’s most iconic figure, the white-haired, white-bearded, tall, grand fellow of many battles and accolades.

    Before we made the turn to the bush, a sign was unmistakable. Louis Odion, the writer in resting, who sat beside me in the car, read the sign. Roared Louis in a guttural register: “Any trespasser will be shot and eaten.”

    The imprimatur of the poet. All around were trees. We drove on, and a sense of rural splendour fell over me. The serenity of trees. Birds. Leaves in lush colour. Earth Edenic. Modernity alienated. A shadow cast not by twilight but by the peculiar colouring of a forest. It was as though I was on my way to my mother’s home village in Delta State.

    In a few moments, we saw what looked like a clearing. Looking farther, a big house, unpainted but tasteful, with a grandeur one would describe as quaint. Nothing ornate. Not the windows, not the stairwell. It was a house sitting in arboreal paradise.

    The vehicles parked, and in a few moments, the guest of honour, the sprightly Governor of Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole  and his elegant wife, Lara, materialised from a vehicle. We moved in and waiting was chief host, playwright, poet, writer extraordinaire Wole Soyinka. It was billed as a lunch but the vagaries of technology associated with his flight arrangement turned it into a dinner. Former governors, Babatunde Raji Fashola and Rotimi Amaechi, had visited earlier in the day.

    As we sat, I delved into wordplay and described the setting as “Adamic.” The Edo Governor appreciated it and turned to his wife and they exchanged a joke about the Garden of Eden, and the wife quipped that if the Governor was the Adam, then she would be the Eve. At that moment I started to contemplate Adams, just as W.S. served wine and later asked us to the dinner table with his wife Folake.

    I thought here was Adams, and the story of the man in the past few months revolved around women. The first was his wedding. He, a Nigerian, above 60, and the bride young and from Cape Verde. The news generated quite an attention.

    Those who attacked, especially young men, were probably envious it was not them. Those women who condemned the bride, mostly girls, were also envious she was not them. I wonder what W.S. thought about the couple during the bonhomie of conversation over wine and food.

    He, too, wedded Folake, but to less flurry of envious rage, maybe because we did not have Internet or Facebook then. But essentially he was a prophet of his own nuptials with his play, The Lion and the Jewel. I told myself, we had two lions and two jewels at the table.

    Nothing about this irony propped up in the conversation, and so I reined in my mischief. I took my time to watch, speak with and listen to a man I had admired all my life. That was enough peace for me eating his jolof rice, fried plantain and fish with the lubricating grace of red wine.

    But what I also thought of were Oshiomhole’s other women. The one was former so-called coordinating minister of the economy, Okonjo-Iweala and, of course, the big-eyed oil minister Diezani Alison-Madueke. When the Edo Governor started lashing out at the other women, attention swiftly turned from his beauty parlour to the beasts of the economy.

    Adams had noted how the so-called World Bank, Harvard and all the phony accolades of western brilliance of the finance minister gave us nothing but poverty. Ngozi was a failure. She was a disaster. When the Edo governor reeled out her financial iniquities, I felt especially vindicated.

    Very early I was not moved by her resume. She was not trained for the Nigerian economy, just like her bow-tie colleague now roosting like hens in another African agricultural employment. She was trained about the dependency of African economies.

    I know because I attended quite a few of them and I inoculated myself against their paradigms. She did not and that explains why she met a buoyant purse and left a leaky one.

    Then he visited the United States with President Muhammadu Buhari, and when he returned he unleashed a bombshell. One minister stole as much as six billion dollars from our purse.

    How much is that in naira? In my own calculation, it is at least N1.2 trillion. That money will pay all the salaries owed the state workers, build quite a respectable cancer centre in the country. He would not say who the minister is out of decency. But we cannot but know that the finger pointed at the oil minister. She was the only one who could have had that kind of access.

    The American officials cannot say such a grave thing without evidence. Diezani was the worst of the Jonathan era. She was a disgrace of a minister just as Jonathan was a scandal of a president.

    We raked in the most money in that era, we are broke today because of them. Adams had to come out with the facts because he, too, was outraged. It was Adams the activist, the fulminating labour leader that squared off against Iweala and Madueke.

    Was it not in the same era we had other women, like Mama Peace, and Stella Oduah. Mama peace, the first lady, with whom many Nigerians lost patience, spoke as though the nation was a Mammy Market and all Nigerians were subaltern, backwater denizens without culture.

    The evening eventually came to an end after close to four hours of exchange of jokes, ideas, etc. I could not but also note the sheer number of carved masterpieces in W.S. home. I called back his recollections of his search for an African artifact to as far away as Brazil. He wonderfully delineated the adventure in his memoirs, You Must Set Forth At Dawn.

    We left into the bush again, and then back into the urban jungle. But it was a gradual descent into modernity. We saw buildings here and there  interspersed with bushes until it was bricks and tars and cars.

  • The Family Dasuki

    The Family Dasuki


    Whose who hate history and have discouraged our schools from making it a compulsory course of study in our secondary schools should follow the interplay between Sambo Dasuki and Buhari’s men.

    For many, it has gone beyond whether the DSS had warrants, or whether the former NSA had 12 vehicles and five armoured cars, or whether Dasuki had a right to wrap soldiers around his home, or whether his driver spirited away five million dollars, or whether he was guilty of treasonable felony, or whether he clucked peevishly at Chatham under Jonathan.

    For many it is a story not of 2015, but of 1985. According to the story, Sambo Dasuki, then a dashing and ambitious army officer, led a group of soldiers to pick up then military leader Muhammadu Buhari. It was IBB’s coup. Sambo was IBB’s boy. The mission was to stop Buhari from firing IBB and a few other soldiers whose conducts were out of sync with the perceived moral gravity of the Buhari junta.

    Buhari, then as now, was a fatalist, and knew of the plot but reportedly did nothing about it. When Dasuki burst into Buhari’s presence and told him his reign was over, the tall, gaunt and defiant leader still demanded Dasuki and his men to give him the military salute as he was still their superior officer. They obliged before arresting their quarry.

    Buhari spent a long time in captivity. When he walked into a free air, he waltzed back into politics. He dueled IBB over June 12. Later, his body language and speech cadences reflected an unfinished match with the man who truncated him, and he ran for president several times. Some said he had to triumph over IBB, and the marker of that triumph was to take back what IBB took from him. His honour lay in returning to the throne.

    In the course of this epic duel, Dasuki materialised, sword in hand. He broke the first lance in Chatham House, and according to newspaper reports, he subsequently urged all means necessary to stop Buhari and his whirlwind of electoral change.

    Dasuki’s failure is common knowledge.

    So when DSS attacked, the temptation was to reconstruct the standoff as comeuppance. Buhari sought his pound of flesh, it is alleged. Whatever the truth of this matter lies in the speculative realm. And all we urge is the adherence to the rule of law. Dasuki is not above the law, and if he has questions to answer, his historic war with Buhari should take a backseat to the preeminence of the law of the land.

    What fascinates me further though is the irony of the Dasuki family. They are royalty, and the first hint was when his father mounted the throne as sultan. Some in the royal porch thought he had no right to the preeminent seat of the caliphate. In not many words, they called him an impostor. But he soldiered on as the first feather of the royal cock. Questions about his legitimacy haunted him, until the Khalifa, the goggled tyrant, swept him aside. Earlier in his career, Sambo had left his precious perch as a senior officer and ADC to IBB as well documented in Debo Bashorun’s book, Honour For Sale. Things did not seem to work. It was a duel between two eminently undemocratic forces seeking the public to adjudicate on who was legitimate. It is as though it was anticipated in Soyinka’s dark and cynical play, Kongi’s Harvest, where the king and the dictator provide the Hobson’s choice.

    Neither Abacha who ousted him nor the Dasuki family had any legitimacy on the streets, just as Kongi and the oba, and the result was a yam harvest that nourished no one in society.

    It took several years and Boko Haram for a revival of the Dasuki name. GEJ appointed him NSA, and the justification lay in his royal roots. He, a prince, was asked to work the paupers, Boko Haram, to a berth of peace in the Northeast. This column warned that Boko Haram had contempt for princes, and a Dasuki provided an antithesis of the militant’s dreams. It was GEJ’s capital misreading of the conflict of philosophy and social hierarchy of the northern cauldron and conundrum.

    His stewardship stumbled and fell, and Boko Haram became another manifestation of the royal family’s failure. Just like Mark Twain’s famous novel, the prince could not abide the pauper and vice versa. It was partly because of the prince’s failure that voters swept GEJ out of power and Dasuki floated along in the epic gale.

    The DSS standoff is the latest of the Dasuki epic, and something tells me we have not heard the last of it. It is stories like that of Dasuki that provide resources for imaginative novelists to tell tomes of stories of big families, slaughtered ambitions, hubris, intrigues, capitalist acquisitiveness and how such theatrics reflect and prey on the rest of the society over generations. Such books include Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, John Updike’s Rabbit trilogy, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks etc.

    Since the Dasuki family tasted the throne, it has lost its innocence. It is like Anton Chekhov’s famous short story called The kiss, when a man lost all concentration for a long time after an unknown lady kissed him in a dark room. He could not replicate the experience and spent the rest of life in despair of that magical moment.

  • Tears for Wike

    Tears for Wike


    [dropcap]J[/dropcap]ust like his Ekiti counterpart, Governor Nyesom Wike is one of the few people in Nigerian politics who should not be burdened with high office. His handling of the task of education minister was such a scandal that it was obvious that GEJ – no superior himself – had thrust an illiterate in charge of churning out persons of letters. He might have gone to school and evinced a measure of articulation. But his is education without culture. That was why Leo Tolstoy launched a campaign “to educate the educated.”

    His latest iniquity was a parody of Jesus when he promised to come back like a thief in the night. Wike decided to do his own in broad daylight. He paid two shameless visits to the Chief Justice of the Federation, Mahmoud Muhammed. The CJN understood the integrity of his office and the compromise that the governor’s call implied for the promise of justice in the land. He promptly made it public.

    Wike quickly clutched at straws to defend himself. He said he wanted to discuss the state of Rivers State renewal of the acting chief judge position. He said he was not there to influence the man over the ongoing case between him and Peterside Dakuku on the governor poll.

    As they say in my village, “talk another thing.” Does he know he is governor? Does he know that a governor should understand what is called conflict of interest? If, as he claims in his release, that he belongs to the body of benchers, who taught him law and how roguish were his teachers? Did he not know what due process was? Why did he have to visit twice and fail before he knew what he should have done in the first place? That is, write a letter.

    If he did not understand it, the CJN knows. He knows that corruption charges have hung over the judiciary in matters of election adjudication. If Wike (clumsily spelt Wilke in his own advertorial) did not know that, then he should not be in that position. Due process, especially in matters of justice, is sacrosanct. Tears for Wike!

    He stated that he visited the CJN as “a member of the Body of Benchers.”  So was it not Wike the governor who visited but Wike the member of body of benchers. The letter he eventually wrote, was it written as a member of the Body of Benchers or as governor?

    On what authority does a member of the Body of Benchers go to the CJN to resolve issues about the chief judge of Rivers State? He can’t answer these questions without exposing his mediocrity and lack of goodwill for the law.

    In any decent society, Wike would quit his perch as governor. But the man who acted as a boor as minister and irritant now as governor does not know better than harass and threaten journalists in advertorials over his own wrongdoing.

  • Blood in the sky

    Blood in the sky

    I recall my first flight out of the country on our national carrier in the early 1990’s. I had just won a prestigious professional fellowship in Canada, but I had to spend a few days in London. I had what was then an OK ticket. Technically, it implied I could walk right into the aircraft and to my seat.

    The reality was, however, a nightmare. More persons than available seats had Ok tickets. All wanted to fly out that Sunday morning. A melee was inevitable. In spite of our formal – some had flamboyant – dressings and the retinue of family and friends on hand to say goodbye, we knew the journey had no guarantee. Some people would return that morning to their homes. Families and friends reined in their farewells. Rather they joined the travellers in the many queues to secure boarding passes. The lines formed and collapsed repeatedly as though a human parody of the pack of cards.

    I was lucky to secure one, thanks to a relative who quickly sensed the formation of a new line and took her place in the front. Needless to say, after securing my ticket, the line tumbled over.

    That was the story of the Nigeria Airways. It was also that way in local travels. Travellers waxed into sprinters, and if your flight was called and you warbled, it was hard luck. Wait another time.

    The Nigeria Airways was a failure and a sad reminder about how government can ruin a great product. Nigeria Airways also blossomed in an age state-run enterprises when the current thought was government monopoly. Socialism was the bride of theorists and idealists.

    But the experience was one of corruption. Government bigwigs subverted protocol and obtained OK tickets. Business moguls also waded in and, of course, staff took advantage to make a killing. Nepotism, of course, had its pride of place.

    The nightmare seems to be coming back, it seems. The Ahmed Joda committee has recommended a return to the Nigeria Airways model, according to news reports. It will imply merging the existing airlines, and bring them under a national carrier. It is a return to the past of failure.

    “To stumble twice over a stone,” warned Cicero, “is a proverbial disgrace.” It is like taking the Titanic back to the Ice field, and expecting a miracle. This is the age of free enterprise, and it calls for competition. It does not call for control.

    We have never done it right in this country. Even our refineries, in spite of the good it did in the past, are wilting under what everyone knows as government fiat and corruption. NEPA went through similar rut and wrapped us around with a web of darkness. To resolve it, we have had to go through a ponderous rigmarole of dismantling. We are seeing what that is causing us today with the fingers of government corruption writ large in the GENCOs and DISCOs.

    Ahmed Joda is a familiar name in Nigerian bureaucracy. He was a permanent secretary when that position had the force of a bullet. Like Allison Ayida, he was called a super permanent secretary. So it was expected that he knew about the Nigerian civil service as much as anyone. But he worked in a different generation, in what I would call an antediluvian time of our government. His choice by PMB to head the transition committee was informed by experience but not imagination.

    The world has leapt past the range of the man, and his recommendation of merger may be a reflection of his ancient train of thought. I hope he redeems that perception by more sophisticated recommendations to the Buhari administration.  This is a world of free enterprise, not of monopolistic domination.

    Instead of calling for a single carrier, it should call for an enabling environment for the carriers to operate. One of the drawbacks for the airline industry is the financial predation of the banks. Airlines everywhere are heavy investments, and banks should not be made to impose interest rates at such high levels. In fact, this is not restricted to the airlines. It is the hobgoblin of Nigerian business. Small businesses have been suffocated while large ones lumber along.

    To ask them to collapse under a new sort of Nigeria Airways will attract tremendous taxpayer’s money and it will be a gamble. This is no time for gamble. Another thing: governments should realise that airlines, like many international businesses, groan under the present foreign exchange rate. It now goes for a dollar to about N240. This calls for caution.

    If the airlines are to merge, they should do it on their own terms. Forcing the marriage as they did with the banks is the wrong way to go. The bank mergers have eventually worked at tremendous costs. But it is a market that also offers variety. A single carrier would create a government misnomer. That is, a government will be held responsible for monopolistic practices. The United States president Theodore Roosevelt fought this against big business men like John D. Rockefeller because he knew the government had no stain on its shirt. He even fought with the financiers of his candidacy. He was a Republican and his main opponents were in his party. He risked their alienation to uphold a just cause. This was about a hundred years ago.

    The Nigerian government should not be seen to pursue such anomaly when the world, through laws and conventions, are backing away because of its moral wrong. Marriages, however, should be by consent.

    “A marriage is not a word,” crooned Oscar Wilde. “It is a sentence.” A forced one will be a death sentence for the airline industry again.

    The Daily Times is an opposite of the Nigeria Airways narrative. It prospered without government interference until the Owu chief came. As military head of state, Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo clipped the wings of the great newspaper, and its decline and fall became inevitable.

    The British Airways is the model for Nigeria’s peacock class today. But it used to be a conglomerate of sorts under government control. The owners knew it was not sustainable, so they privatised it. That unleashed its mammoth potential for profit. Nigeria is one of their great customers although they give us the least of their fleet.

    We need to open the door for our airlines to bloom, and not clip the wings as we did that of the Daily Times and the Nigeria Airways.

    We don’t want our airline industry to fulfill the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. The story of Daedalus, the father, and Icarus, the son, have become classics about misplaced ambition. Daedalus warned his son Icarus not to fly too close to the sun in the wings he made for him. It was made of wax. But Icarus disobeyed, and flew too high. He crashed because the sun melted the wax.

    Metaphorically, our planes are flying in bad weather, with clouds of hard finance and suffocating winds of official interference. Right now they would like to fulfil the famous quote from John Webster’s play, The Duchess of Malfi, where a character says, “Black birds fatten in hard weather.” But they are failing up there. The second coming of the Nigeria Airways may smear the clouds. We do not want blood in our skies.

  • No longer a pariah

    No longer a pariah

    President Muhammadu Buhari’s rise to power is a parable of tenacity and the happy pendulum of fate. No one counted on him at one time. His big and mighty foes feared his appeal. They waited for his venom to expire. Before the expiration date, however, he struck.

    Then those who pooh-poohed him, who sneered that he was no more than a grand and populist irritation, began to see him as the wisdom of the hour.

    They no longer flaunted their superior airs and credentials. Rather, they flocked to him.  They morphed into cheerleaders and wiggled their waists in the same band. But they rehearsed a different genre of music.

    When it was time to sing, their incongruous tunes collapsed under the throaty sonority of the majority.

    Now the majority’s symphony fell silent, we started to hear the dissonance of toads and crocodiles.

    Nothing tells this story more than the ambitions and cynicisms of three men. The first is the Owu chief, Olusegun Obasanjo, the peripatetic harlot of Nigerian politics, Atiku Abubakar, and the Kwara renegade, Bukola Saraki.

    As for the rise of Buhari, it calls back the lives of  Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. All three were outsiders of the vortex of power. In the case of Lincoln, he was too tall, ungainly and ill bred. Churchill was a loud mouth, boor and subversive. In fact, former United States president, Richard Nixon, noted in his memoirs that he drew inspiration from Churchill. His obituary was written off late in his life in the House of Commons. He turned out to be the greatest prime minister in memory.

    As for de Gaulle, he was an outcast in an age of national treachery when Petain and other French leaders sold the pride and birthright of France to the butchery of Nazi Germany. His contemporaries regarded de Gaulle as rebellious, foolish and puerile. Churchill plotted to fly him out of Paris in the turbulent flush of the blitzkrieg. Churchill remarked that de Gaulle’s soul encased the French pride in that flight of escape.

    Once these men became their nations’ leaders, they waxed from pariahs to messiahs. All who looked down on them later bowed. Those who did not bow wheeled into subterranean intrigues and acts of subversion. They wanted to torpedo the popular will.

    The APC crisis is still called crisis in spite of what some of its leaders call reconciliation. It is the act of papering over the cracks. The men who do not wish the party well only wish for the party their ambition. They do not love Buhari. They only sat in the train or rode in the same carriage because he was the only one in whose company they could clutch their selfish dreams.

    Their schemes are coming home to roast, not roost.

    Their plan was simple. Let us win in the Senate, make it a fate accompli. Later, we can con the president onboard. They took the president for a simpleton. Atiku formed the dubious coalition with Saraki and Obj because of the ambitions of 2019. The man who won 2015 has not settled down to office, their 2019 ambitions want to unsettle his administration.

    Yet we know that Obj, Atiku and Saraki are strange bedfellows. They are too ambitious for their own good. An Obj will not endorse an Atiku ambition. Atiku knows this. Saraki, for whatever egoistic delusion, thinks he can be Nigeria’s president.

    But in all these, they want to throw cats in the pigeons of the president. After causing confusion, they want to present themselves as angels of peace. That is the so-called reconciliation move. It is capital self-delusion and hypocrisy. They want reconciliation without truth.

    They say the Lawan and Gbajabiamila groups should accept the fait accompli of Dogarra and Saraki leaderships in the National Assembly. Now, how do they want to explain two irrationalities. One, the party arrived at one candidate. Saraki defied it, plotted with the enemy, waylaid the party and disgraced the majority vote. They forget that Lawan was Buhari’s candidate. After the fact, the governors of the party tried to save face. How do you live with the fact that a party decides something, some members flout it, and no penalties are imposed. Does that not turn the party into an impunity machine? Was that not one of the capital reasons the PDP was flushed out on March 28? Is the APC not going back to its vomit by starting off embracing the enemy’s mistake?

    All those behind Atiku, Saraki and Obj want to wield their influence to let the matter slide. Well, they won but it does not feel like victory. That is why they keep calling for peace. In spite of that, they show their true colours. Saraki said recently that inability of some state governments to pay salaries could be traced to corruption. Saraki has no right to talk on corruption until the charges hanging over his head are cleared. He cannot vault himself into sainthood overnight. He became Senate president on a corrupt lie, overthrowing the party convention. His is a victory without honour. That is why he remains the Kwara renegade.

    That leads to the second point. If they wanted reconciliation, why did Saraki and Dogarra spurn the party letter? The argument that the law is more important than the party is a self-serving line. The law towers above all, but law is itself based on honour. When we manipulate the law and defrock it of honour, we work against the very spirit of law. That was what the Saraki group did. It is haunting them, and it will haunt them forever. Reconciliation without truth is going to the future without memory. It is like pursuing an end without a beginning. If we reach where we are going without knowledge of where we are coming from, we will not know why we started the journey.

    Last weekend featured the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre. The speakers, including former President Clinton, stressed the need for reconciliation but it must be based on truth. We cannot wish truth over unresolved issues. It is like prospering on a lie. In South Africa, truth was sought before reconciliation. Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace tapped into the theme of truth and reconciliation by looking into the story of a professor who takes advantage of a female student and thinks he can get away with it by merely leaving his job. He spends the rest of his life grappling with the consequences. Booker Prize novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, The Buried Giant, looks at the unresolved crisis of the birth of Britain to show how a past of division cannot be glossed over by mere prosperity. The author referred to Bosnia, Kosovo, the second World War, etc, as some of the inspiration for the work, a fantasy of gnomes, elves, dragons, etc.

    Part of Nigeria’s problem is that we have not resolved many issues and we move on. But we never move on, and unresolved issues haunt us always, so woes pile on woes in our national life.

    Obj, Saraki and Atiku have a choice. They have to decide whether they belong to APC or they want to form an alliance to form another party. Atiku has PDM that never wins anything, and he cannot stand on his own. He has to play whore with others to get something. In his present style and content, he has not, and he never will, be Nigeria’s president.

    The choice still dangles before this group and their men. It will determine whether they want to work with Buhari or stalemate him.

  • A good man

    He lived for 106 years, but his claim to immortality happened for only six months. Even those six months he tucked away in the silence of a selfless memory. It is a lesson in humanity for the Nigerian elite.

    It happened in 1939 when Adolf Hitler loomed with his Nazi nightmare. With its death showers, starvation, rapes, torture, etc, the concentration camp beckoned all Jews. The world was numb with ignorance. The camps – in Auschwitz, Sobribor, etc – were not before then and had not since then ever installed human butchery and barbarism of that scale. Jews, whether father, mother or child, were rolled rudely into chambers and incinerated or burned to ashes through what was known as showers of death.

    Nicholas Winton, who just died at 106, did not then know about the concentration camps the way we know it today or the way the world came to understand it towards the end of the Second World War in 1945.

    He acted swiftly when he heard that Hitler’s army under the cover of its deafly air force known as Luftwaffe, would soon mow down Czechoslovakia. He called off his luxury pastime of skiing, and moved to the east European country for a mission of charity. He planned to save as many as 900 children by shipping them away from the underbelly of horror in Czechoslovakia. But he succeeded only with 669.

    Although of Jewish origin, all his family lived in Britain. He had no family ties in that country. He just knew children were in danger of falling into the jaws of tyranny. He did not have time. Hitler could plunge into the country any time, and so he materialised in the refugee camps in the country, and took down names and photos of the children.

    So, he made several trips in early 1939 between London and Prague. Aided by his mother, he set up the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, raised money, called for volunteers who could host the children. He raised some money but not enough. He made the difference from his own purse.

    It was a dark time, and he could not transport the children without bribing the Nazi officials. Never a moral purist, he bribed the Nazi police chief known as criminal rat because of his rank known in Germany as Kriminalrat. He cooperated and the bribes reached down to the train operators and officials in Customs and Immigration. The bribes greased the trains through barriers.

    He planned and paid for eight trains to take the kids from the country through Cologne, Nuremburg and other ramparts of Nazism through Holland. They were ferried to Essex, from there they took a train to London where British families received them, who took them on as children. It started in March and ended in August. Seven trains had eluded the Nazi monster. The last and eighth train had 250 children, but before it left, September 1 had dawned savagely when Hitler ordered every border shut down. The children the last train bore were never seen again, and it was assumed that they descended into the oblivion of the concentration camps.

    Within six months, he had written himself into the annals of charity and into the front rank of human love. For the rest of his 106 years on earth, nothing so spectacularly was associated with him. “One crowded hour in a glorious life,” penned the poet Thomas Mordaunt, “is worth an age without a name.”

    Yet everyone, in Britain and everywhere else, forgot Winton’s act. Not even the beneficiary children sought the man. He hid the scrapbook containing entries of the names of the kids and letters, etc of those months in his attic. He never even told his wife of his heroics. He was a disinterested hero. His wife saw them and probed him for answers. Even at that, he did not think it was any significant what he did. She thought differently, and made the information available to the media, and that was how the world woke up to a good interred in Winton’s bones.

    Most of the beneficiaries did not see their parents after the war. Hitler’s Nazi bears had lapped them up. Some of the parents tearfully parted with their children on train platforms and some of the children yowled not to part with their parents. Today, they call themselves “Winton’s children.” Some of them have soared to do good to their world. One of them, Renata Laxova, discovered a congenital abnormality named after her. Hugo Marom was a founder of the Israeli Air Force. Joe Schlesinger is a well-known Canadian broadcast correspondent. Karel Riesz is a filmmaker and director, among others, of “The French lieutenant’s Woman.”

    Winton operated in a time so perilous that the poet W.H. Auden described it as when “the clever hopes expire/ of a low dishonest decade,” when “the unmentionable odour of death offends the September night.”

    What has happened to our elite? How many of us have done so much good and cut ourselves out of our comfort zone for the weak and vulnerable among us? The irony is that we pride ourselves as weaned on the communal ethos. This column has called for the rich to adopt wards in hospital, students in indigent schools, chaperon the wild and wayward orphan, etc. It is taken for granted in the West where the individual is king. Yet here the rich stash their loot, their mansions and skyscrapers defy heaven, while their posh cars splash rainwater on the lolling poor.  Too many are poor, but where is the balm from the well-heeled? Boko Haram victims teem everyday among us, but we moan in the retreats of our cosy homes and wait only for the government. The rich make money mainly from the government, perhaps that explains why they do not think they owe anybody, after they grease back the palm that first oiled them.

    We should imitate Winton. It is good men like him that make a good society.

  •   Ambode and the Uche household

      Ambode and the Uche household

    Hers seems to be a failure of fertility. Ruth Uche stalked Lagos Government House for help. She has six children and all of them are twins. In a Yoruba household, it means you would have three Taiwos and three Kehindes, a glorious confusion. But Ruth is not celebrating. Her maternal joys often multiply in toils and tears. The father of the kids, one Benjamin Uche, has fled the home to dubious shelter in Ikorodu. In the United States, he will be called a deadbeat dad.

    She cannot fend for the children. A native of Abia State, the woman says her husband delights in the glories of copulation and not the rigours of fatherhood. He loves the biological rush of fathering, but lacks the impulse of fatherhood. Ruth even confessed to abortion. Dazzled by abundance, Ruth has too little. Abundance – of children – took away her pride, gave her pain, hunger and she pines for help. Even her in-laws have not afforded warmth of food or nearness.

    An angel of mercy came in the form of Nigeria’s alpha governor, Akinwunmi Ambode. He swiftly issued a directive to his erudite deputy, Dr. Oluranti Adebule, to give her welfare. It’s a bower of love such as this that chimes in with the spirit of Nicholas Winton.

    But it is a story of a failure of men in the Nigerian society. It is cowardly to leave your kids, no matter how poor you are.  Even if you have nothing, it does not excuse delinquency. In the United States, the husband would be forced to answer to the law.

  • To love and to hate

    To love and to hate

    President Muhammadu Buhari is caught in between love. Everyone wants to show they love him.

    It is happening everywhere like an epidemic. The EFCC tries to show him love. The NNPC is keeling over with that delicate emotion. The NTA is transmitting it in pictures and words.

    Of course in politics, we see it in droves. Bukola Saraki says he loves Buhari. The Owu chief, too, who clobbered him electorally and in snide comments would show only love now.

    Atiku, the peripatetic harlot of Nigerian politics, who battled him with war chest after war venom is awash with PMB love.

    The first show of love was the staff of Aso Rock who reported early to work in the spirit of the gangling hero of the day. Soldiers in their high and peacock perches are saluting him in lusts of deference.

    Let us not forget the walks, the advertorials, the politicians who now know that they only can swear by PMB. The ethnic titans, the religious zealots, the men cocooned in conspiracies against the man whom they thought had no chance to topple the simpering hero who now clucks in Otuoke.

    We forget that not long ago, these same persons had the venoms of rhetoric against this man. This is the man who did not have the qualification in the Army. He was the man who was too old, too groggy, too northern, too Muslim, too austere for the times.

    Now, we see the love of Buhari. But the love comes in different incarnations. There are those who love in order to keep their jobs. See EFCC has suddenly woken as the moral avatar, dusting up all sorts of revanchist cases. If Buhari is the man who can change our moral tone, so let us go after the so-called bad guys. It does not matter that under Jonathan we only pretended except when we went after his enemies, like Timipre Sylva.

    The NNPC felt the shadow of love. The pot of gold is the vault of lies. Many stories of fraud tenanted that institution. Buhari is aware. Fear flew in the halls, screamed in the files, boiled in our crude oil, scarred our ears. They wanted to show love, but how? This was one place that the phrase tough love had a new meaning. It was tough to lie about what was clear thieving of the national treasury. Buhari knew about it and he took a first step and dissolved the board. The list of the board members told us what sort of men presided over the kleptomaniac bazaar of our resources.

    Like the denizens of the DSS. No resources of wit to tap in order to show love. Now the president does not want them near him, at least for now. But he will have to use them. In a democracy, the secret service is the fulcrum of security. He knows that. But he is confronting an irony. The bastion of love is the secret service for a leader. But it’s like what Shakespeare said in Romeo and Juliet, love has become the hate. The bard called it “fiend angelical.”

    The Senate President, Bukola Saraki, now says he loves the President. He says he will work with the President. But he is at odds with the President’s directive and his party. He loves the President but humiliates his party. He benefited from a moral sewer of a process that installed him as president. He won a battle, and when his party with the President’s nod said he should conceded offices, he defied. Wasn’t that love, Saraki style?

    He loves the President and he is lying that he gave up his ambition for Buhari as though we were not in this country when he bowed out of the race. He knew better than Atiku that he did not want the humiliation and disaster of primary defeat. He bowed away from public disgrace, not for Buhari’s ambition. How does the PMB, whom he loves, implement his programmes when he, Saraki, cohabits with men who confess antipathy to the landlord of Aso Rock?

    He worked with Atiku, the man who now wants to play bee to Buhari’s honey. He spearheads mutiny so he can be the power Trojan of the APC. How does he explain his actions to his latest hero of today? That he undermines him in order to love him? If he loves him, he should tell his co-conspirator Saraki to yield to the party rule. Both are fair-weather men. They have always been. Within the PDP, or outside. As for Atiku, he never saw an opportunity of self-aggrandisement he did not embrace, even if it meant kissing Lucifer.

    As for the Owu chief, we saw him make a colourful act of tearing his PDP card in public. I hope we do not see, in the near future, another enactment of return. He would brandish a new card as the prodigal come home in a flourish. He did not tear PDP in his heart. He worked, in underhand shadows, with PDP men and Atiku to undermine Buhari. They plotted to make PMB’s early days a tempest. Is that not love, the Ota way? We know how he showed love in the past. Dance with the man’s wife today, oust him tomorrow. Dine pounded yam today, his office dies tomorrow. Remember Okadigbo, Ogbeh, etc.

    PMB will be taking a class in love these days with Judas’ silhouette in the background. He must feel special now that all those who knew him as enemy now bedeck him as the emblem of affection.

    He reminds me of a character in the most ambitious of all novels, War and Peace. Leo Tolstoy’s character was mocked all the time. No one laughed at his joke. He did not belong to the royal class. He was adopted by one of the mainstays of the upper class. He was renounced in love and society. But suddenly he came into a big inheritance. Suddenly Pierre was the most sought after in Russian society, anything he did made men cringe and any joke made them laugh. They craved the largesse of his purse if they sneered secretly at the large heart it came from. His new power became a lesson in understanding people. He eventually knew who loved him and who did not, but he learned later that the world was full of love, if in counterfeit expressions. United States President Harry Truman once said that if you wanted a friend in Washington, “buy a dog.”

    Graham Greene, in a short novel, titled the Third Man, shows how a man can be two at the same time. A man is buried supposedly and all mourn him as this great guy. But he is killed eventually after his lover knew him to be a fraud, the police know him to be a liar and his best friend know him to be a traitor. He dies once but mourned twice. The first fake burial calls him hero. The second knows him as villain.

    So, Buhari will worry who is real or fake among those brandishing love. But the real lovers are those who voted and who fought for him when he was mocked as a gangling zealot of tribe and faith.