The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • The odd couple

    The odd couple

    If you sat down to pen the profiles of Nigerian politicians, the first casualty will be loyalty. They cast betrayal as realism. So, for most politicians, many Nigerians were wrong to see the recent Senate rumpus as a morality tale. The Nigerian masses and politicians inhabit antipodal universes. The masses live in the world of good versus evil. Politicians bask in the world of us versus them.

    It is more like a game. Whoever wins is not intended to go to paradise. He is master of this universe, not God’s. As for the loser, better luck next time. They play the game with the excitement of children, but with the soul of Lucifer. Because of this game, many die, businesses atrophy, careers collapse, families vanish, whole towns are set ablaze.

    Nothing reinforces this narrative as the alliance of Atiku Abubakar and Olusegun Obasanjo in the intrigues to install Bukola Saraki as Senate president.

    Saraki knew his indebtedness to both men. After his first session as Senate helmsman, he paid a visit of gratitude to Atiku. Barely a week later, he flew to Ota to pay homage to Obj. When was the last time both men agreed on anything?

    Last year, Atiku did not seek and Obj did not enlist his support for the Adamawa titan’s zeal to be president.

    Not too long ago, Obj mocked the Adamawa titan when he was reportedly adopted as the consensus presidential candidate for the North. In front of reporters, the Owu dramatist as politician zipped up his Vicks inhaler and sniffed on it. Then like a moment of mock erotica, he exploded: “I dey laugh!” That was in 2010. Atiku, also gloating in his fleeting glory, fired back: “I still dey laugh!” That moment exemplified the narrative of two men. Once friends, once confidants, once partners, once making sacrifices for each other, once fighting each other’s battles, once playing off each other’s humour, once at table for breakfast, lunch and dinner, once co-conspirators, once number one and number two citizens.

    This is the story of David and Jonathan in another universe. But in Nigerian politics, it is the story of Jesus and Judas, or Caesar and Brutus. Each of them can slink out of one role and be the other. They are no saints and never perjure to be saints.

    In a story of the Owu chief’s trying times, we learn that Atiku visited Obj at his Ota Farm to tip him off on his impending arrest over coup plot in the Abacha era. When Abacha men arrived, a livid Atiku railed at them, showing his disgust for the arrest of a good and innocent man.

    After the story of the coup and Obj’s freedom, the Owu chief rose from the ashes of near obloquy and oblivion to a sort of statesman. The world said he was the only man who could save the nation after the ruins and intrigues of June 12. He picked Atiku, then governor-elect, to serve as vice president. This was tag team, many thought. Obj worked well with him, and delegated much to the deputy, including leaving executive meetings for him to preside over. There were many instances of backslapping and high fiving between them.

    But the long blade did not last in the quiver.  Suddenly the Owu chief, known for his foxy ways, realised he had put a jackal in charge of his roost. David and Jonathan became Caesar and Brutus, and it was hard to tell who was Caesar, since Brutus dripped out of everything each did. Plots of impeachment, court rulings, underhand deals with friends and foes, regional alliances and counter-alliances laced this story of two friends who wanted to bring each other down.

    But both of them found a common cause in Saraki. So bad was their rivalry and malice that the enemies of each of their enemies were their enemies, just as we see in the internecine battles in Syria. Saraki’s cause brought them together. What happened is no love fest and no hate parade. They still despise each other and need each other. What happened was no marriage. Their divorce is as permanent as their marriage. Saraki knows that, having triumphed in a Machiavellian theatre. Their alliances are like how writer Oscar Wilde describes marriage. “In marriage, as in war,” the bard asserts, “it is permitted to take advantage of the enemy.”

    Nor is Atiku or Obj alone. Remember Goodluck Jonathan? His friends are deserting him now. When APC was in the making, all comers converged. Those who believed and those who didn’t. They came for spoils but not for the masses, most of them. It was the platform for carpetbaggers. Beware when everyone loves you. Trouble is coming. In the aftermath of the NASS elections, we are not sure what APC is now.

    President Muhammadu Buhari’s everybody and nobody refrain has presented him as an aloof chief executive. That leaves the field for lieutenants, party apparatchiks, go-getters, buffoons and leeches to stake their games.

    A Buhari administration may well bring out the Lucifer in our politicians who will now play politics at his expense while swearing in his name. They see it as a game. They will try various cards, options, stunts, etc. If this goes, they keep going until something else works. In Yoruba, they call it “eyi je, eyio je.” It is a cynical game and a source of great scholarship at a sublime level. It is called the game theory. It has fascinated scholars for over a hundred years and spun 11 Nobel prizes. Perhaps the most famous is John Forbes Nash, whose theory earned him a Nobel Prize for economic science in 1994. He and his wife, who inspired a film called The Beautiful Mind, died recently in a car crash. But the game theory has been used to heal bodies, install statesmen, solve economic crisis and anticipate the future. But the difference between the developed world and ours is that we apply it with the bile of Beelzebub.  In our politics, we sell our souls. Like the stock character of many plays and novels from Goethe to Marlowe to Hardy, our politicians are like Mephistopheles, the Faustian demon who helps people sell their soul to the devil. So, while our politicians speak colourfully in colourful clothing and dole out money and rams and chickens to the masses, they are playing the game and wagering their souls.

    Buhari, as Segun Ayobolu warned in his column last Saturday, should beware not to play policy without politics as he did in his first incarnation in power. The military men in politics outfoxed him. He had to wait over two decades to return.

    In a democratic era, they are more foxy and ruthless because they play like children and scheme like the devil.

     

     

    INTELS, our ports and monopoly

    The word “trust” conjures confidence from others. But in business, trust originally meant something larger. It denoted confidence among businesses that came together under one umbrella. But as greed creeps in all human affairs, so did it happen to companies called The Trust in the Second Industrial Revolution. It led to the Anti-trust laws intended to restrain their poisonous influences as monopolies and oligopolies.

    In Nigeria, a company called INTELS is working on a dubious directive from the Federal Ministry of Transport and transmitted by the Nigerian Ports Authority. It came out in the last days of the Jonathan era against the law. It allows INTELS to negate the 2006 ports reform law that allows cargoes to berth on any port of choice in the country. INTELS now wants to monopolise, by the directive, all oil and gas cargoes at Warri, Onne and Calabar where it operates. This is monopolistic greed. Every cargo should berth wherever it pleases. Both ObJ and Yar’Adua governments reversed similar orders and set free the ports. Buhari should do same. It promotes fairness, choice and efficiency.

  • First storm

    First storm

    Some have called it Buhari’s litmus test. Others have said, he rose above the fray. Some others said, it had nothing to do with Buhari or APC, but it signalled that, in Nigeria, democracy had come to stay. A voice of a partisan edge growled that it was the rebirth of PDP.

    But the battles for the Senate and the House signified Buhari’s first storm. The cloud gathered, the lighting flashed, droplets of rain drew faint lines on the horizon. But President Muhammadu Buhari did not know they presaged a storm. Or did he encourage the elemental fury and play bystander?

    It was so perhaps because of his often quoted assertion that he belonged to everybody and belonged to nobody. While the Senate sat and anointed Bukola Saraki as Senate President, the senators regarded him as a nobody even though he called a meeting of all party leaders, including members of both chambers. Or was he the somebody who goaded them on as though he didn’t?

    The other miscue was when Femi Adesina, his media spokesman, broke the ice and said it “somewhat” served the higher purpose of democracy. And analysts wondered, how could it be good when your party lost in its first battle after the elections? Later, in an apparent contradiction, Garba Shehu pitched in for the president and said the APC senators defied their party leader and president. Is it the case of a stern, muscular Buhari playing a wishy-washy card?

    I chewed both releases and wanted to know if Adesina had one brief and Shehu another and whether one was intended to annul the other. That, I thought, was the problem when two persons serve as a president’s spokesmen. I think it is not neat and looks at best like duplication and potentially as a battleground. For the sake of both gentlemen, I hope not.

    “Somewhat” in Adesina’s statement implied ambiguity in the process. But Shehu’s follow-up indicated that the president was interested but not interested enough. For a party of change, that is not good enough.

    But by defying their party leaders and conniving with the opposition, we shall say it was the dubious triumph of politics over commonsense or over values. But what is politics, but the art of the possible. That was the point of the Saraki victory. But the presidency has not up to the time of writing made any indication of moral tone. It has spoken the language of politics and law, and not of values. The reason Buhari was voted in by those enamoured of his biography was his moral and puritan appeal. We did not see this in this first and auspicious test.

    Some have said Saraki was going to win anyway. So why did he not wait for the president? It was an overthrow of decency, if it was political marksmanship. But for me, neither Saraki nor even the PDP lawmakers deserve all the blame. Were the PDP supposed to wait for the president because of an APC meeting? The PDP lawmakers do not belong to APC, so they had the right to fuel the rebellion. On the meeting the party scheduled, we learned that Buhari’s advance party was at the venue, but he did not come. Why not? Shehu said he was about to come when the fait accompli of Saraki’s victory occurred. Was that not enough reason for the president to express open disavowals of condemnation rather than a tame Channels interview? Or shall we say the advance party of the president was a dummy and he was not going to appear at the meeting? After all, Adesina said it was a party meeting and not the president’s.

    That is where the spirit of loyalty failed in APC, and that is where Saraki and company, including Atiku Abubakar, lacked moral grace. More blame lands right at the doorsteps of the president. And I think the president knows that, and that accounted for the afterthought that was Shehu’s frenzied intervention on Channels Television to clarify the president’s stand. The meeting could have been held earlier. Perhaps the previous night.

    But the die is cast. Both houses have leaders that defeated the party choices. I think it is an early lesson for the president, unless the president wants it so. He should now understand that his presidential office compels him to be interested in the direction of politics. If he did not have his politics right, he would not be president today. He would not have the opportunity to set policies. Politics defines policies. What policies can he champion with a Senate full of the members and sentiment of the ancient regime?

    Atiku Abubakar, who lost to Buhari during the APC primaries, recently said the president is a leader and not interested in politics. Atiku, a restless man of ambition but little vision, received Saraki after the victory. He confirmed all the reports that he championed rebellion in his party. The peripatetic harlot of politics who sways right and left simultaneously, may be smacking his lips, but he is no noble man of this era.

    I hope Buhari has learned that he has to be both politician and leader. If you are president, it is because you have a vision. If you have vision, it is because you need men who think like you to pursue the vision. So, as president he was wrong if he stayed off who emerged as leaders of both chambers. And if he didn’t, what sort of agenda can he push now?

    Dogara emerged in a clear contest in the House, and a graceful Femi Gbajabiamila has conceded. If Saraki and his men had waited and allowed the other APC men to be in the chambers, he probably would have won. That could have dispelled suggestions of bad faith, desperation and even the air of hurried primitivism that sullied the process of his emergence.

    President Buhari has started off on a learning curve, and he ought to know that both houses can paralyse him if the PDP works with Saraki in a camp against those who were absent in the chambers.

    What has haunted the president is the “everybody” and “nobody” refrain. I don’t know of any successful leader in modern democracy that is not interested in the leadership of the legislature. The parliamentary system places the law chamber at the centre of activity. The challenge of the Obama presidency is the hostility, sometimes racism, of the Congress. He has not been able to work with Senate leader Boehner. And when Nancy Pelosi was Speaker, she even sometimes did not pick his calls. Obama has disavowed the mushiness of schmoozing with the lawmakers. They have paid him back in brutal kind.

    The National Assembly story is good in that it has given the opposition a new bite, a potential fang. Opposition reminds me of the lament of Poet Walt Whitman: “my enemy is dead. A man divine like myself is dead.” You need your enemies. APC needs a soulful opposition.

    But the APC will end up a contraption of convenience if it allows itself to collapse so early. It will be bad for our democracy, and it will deprive us of the quality of dialectical tension required to build a vibrant democracy.  The APC was built in order to kill its merging partners. They should not hark back to ACN, CPC, ANPP, etc in the pursuit of a spoils system. It will only suggest that what we have is not a party but various parts that have come to pack their own parts of the booties. It will be naïve to shut out their birth places, but to hold on to them as reference points of loyalty only tells us that the party has a lot of work to do to build a family.

    It also tells us that the battle to entrench it as a platform of ideas has not begun. This is still a democracy of big men and not of conscience. That is the lesson President Buhari must take from the National Assembly narrative.

    The National Assembly story may determine much of the pattern of the Buhari era. He should beware not to shoot himself in the foot. As a solider, the message cannot be lost.

  • Eagle and earthworm

    Eagle and earthworm

    He strode into the hall to the cheerful buzz of editors. After the hoopla and acrimony of the polls, Lagos was  serene with hope. The task of the new governor was to articulate what he wanted to do.

    No, he was quick to note, he was not going to address us on his plans. They are all public knowledge, enunciated during the barnstorming and debate of the election season. That night was for the bonhomie of conversation. Over meals and drinks, he could hear from the gate keepers of news and commentary their sense of the city, of what the people yearned for. He, too, would unveil the entrails of his minds.

    Very quickly, the quiet evening eased into intellectual repartee. Jokes came as jibes, jibes as jokes. Introspections burned out of fiery lips. Questions rippled in the air. Suggestions laced insights. In certain moments, it reminded me of what I read about salons of Enlightenment Europe where some of the great ideas were birthed. But that night did not soar that high, it just had intimations of it. At least, as it referred to Lagos State, the oasis of Nigeria.

    The man in the middle was Governor Akinwunmi Ambode. With his beige agbada and cap now illumined with a smile, now shaded with a somewhat beatific mien, he knew quite early that the editors were pregnant with curiosity.

    What was he going to do about Apapa and its congestions? Lekki is a new suburb out of control with its traffic snarl? What the hell is the story about Lagos’ over N400 billion debt? What about the Ikorodu and the Mile 12 roads and Ayobo and the Fourth Mainland Bridge?

    The governor understood that the fulcrum of the night’s obsession was how to move in Lagos. To move Lagos ahead, the residents have to move well. This harked back to my first-ever conversation with him over a year ago. His passion then was transportation. His thoughts chimed in with the concerns of the editors.

    Once he spoke, he wrapped up the audience in the methodical cadence of his speech. Never mellifluous but never boring, he spoke like a man working towards a mathematical solution. The accountant in him was in rhythm. Whether he spoke about the financing of Lagos in which he clarified that the debt was a mere three per cent of the state’s mammoth money and it was to be paid in between 25 and 30 years, or about the train project inherited from the Fashola administration, he was focused on the dynamic of a city on the move.

    He spoke with the mastery of figure and place. His about three decades of work in various parts of Lagos shone through. He spent most of those years in local governments. Whether on Mushin, or Badagry or Ajegunle, he spoke not with professorial abstraction, but with the familiarity of a yeoman. Remember Maracanã Stadium? Not the fable of Brazil, but the athletic audacity of Ajegunle that named a playground after the South American landmark. He referred to it when an editor spoke about a yet uncompleted stadium in another part of town. He said he had just discussed it in an earlier meeting, in which he laid out plans to rev up community sports in the city of Lagos.

    He had touted his immersion in the interstices of Lagos as his special resume for governorship. He showed that with superfine lucidity, in answer to every question. It was as though he had spent his entire life preparing for the job.

    So, what about the traffic situation. “We are going to have a traffic summit in Lagos soon,” he announced, indicating that he had anticipated the worry about how Lagosians move. He also articulated some ideas roiling his mind in specific areas. Should we continue with roundabouts on the Lekki corridor, or introduce American style intersections? Although he admits erecting flyovers could ease vehicular flow, it will take some time to accomplish. His eyes were focused on quick wins first.

    On Apapa, an APC government in the centre could lead to better collaboration to decongest traffic while also focusing on the need to develop the other ports. He would leverage that virtue to revamp that economic hub. All developments seem to move towards the island. Reversing that trend is one of the virtues of the rail project, he said. The cost to complete it is, however, humongous, but it is a task that beckons. So, he noted the advantages. The journey from Mile 2 to CMS is about 20 minutes, including about four stops. That means businesses can erupt along the way with improved property value, and development can move to other areas, such as Ikorodu and Ipaja. Another deep sea port also awaits in Badagry with its promise of tourism. All these will take attention away from the island.

    As people move, so they dream. Life is nothing without movement. “There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here,” noted Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher of the human id. He said further that “life itself is but motion.” The whole purpose of movement is to stay still, so that we move again. When we leave home, it is because we want to stay at work, at that party, at that friend’s home, at the birthday, at that funeral. But eventually, as the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard notes, we want to go home. All literature from Soyinka’s The Road to Kerouac’s On the Road to Conrad’s Lord Jim to Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi, man’s chief aim is rest, an irony for a restless creature.

    The night left out some key discussions about health care and education, especially about Lagos as a melting pot, given the firestorm generated about lagoon and peaceful coexistence. It reflected either satisfaction with Ambode’s inaugural speech about building a rainbow coalition for all, or a sense that it was just a political distraction from a peaceful city.

    Governor Ambode told senior civil servants that he was not going to reinvent the wheel, but to oil it. As he simplified his mission to the editors, his dream is to make life easier and Lagosians happier.

    He is going to ride on the foundation set by the Asiwaju Bola Tinubu administration and built on by Fashola’s. As Seneca famously noted, “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” With his clinical mind and ample experience, Lagos seems to have rolled into the hands of an able manager.

    Governor Ambode has the advantages of both the eagle and earthworm. As the eagle, he has been at the top tier of administration as the accountant-general of the state. He has walked through the portals of the world’s best schools from Harvard to Pennsylvania. As the earthworm, he has wallowed in the labyrinth of the people. He has worked and lived in Mushin, Ipaja, Ajegunle, etc. So, he has smelled the rose and touched the offal. He has the palate of the palace and poor. He has hugged kings and swaddled orphans.

    It’s time to turn these gifts into assets for Lagos. A man fondly called AA, Governor Ambode has an A-plus mind and has the potential to be Nigeria’s alpha governor, both in Alphabet and in Acts (AA). As the Nike add urges, just do it.

  • From Goodluck to Goodwill

    From Goodluck to Goodwill

    My great joy is that darkness did not fall on the country on May 29. A new democracy illumined the entrails of Eagle Square.

    Jonathan, with repressed, if dignified, reluctance passed the torch to the dangling septuagenarian general who should now rise to the role of avatar.

    The day began with the glory of the soldier. From my seat, I thrilled to the elegant discipline of the parade, the colours, the starchy beauty of the uniforms, the stentorian authority of the commanding officers, the blend of the martial with the cultural. The bright and sultry morning rippled with familiar church and folk songs drummed out by the military bands to the accompaniment of saxophones and cymbals. With gusto the audience watched the formations. The lines were now straight, now fluid, a jigsaw puzzle broken and restored. The soldier’s feet rose, zipped forward, stamped down, up again in rhythm. The shoulders turned and eyes glowed in tandem with erect necks. It was the military at the service of the civil order.

    The irony was not lost that in this transition, a man was morphing from a general to president. In this ritual, the army was playing the role of this glorious surrender. Perhaps it was the last rite of Buhari officially ceding the army in him to a democrat. He swiveled from GMB to PMB – President Muhammadu Buhari.

    There was a torch of vanity to some guests. Nigerians who came wanted to be seen and heard. They appeared and spoke with their sartorial displays, especially the ex-this and ex-that. They wanted cameras to click. Others saw it as opportunity to rise out of the shadows, to commingle with perceived potential powers brokers of the new dispensation. They twirled their business cards, fawned before the new big men. Some told the big men stories about their past meetings or something they did together. Some others just worked the memories of the big men to remember them. “I was that guy or that woman, do you recall?” they would ask, simpering. The big man would feign a kindled memory. Yes, he remembered and asked after the family, and both moved on.

    Some just wanted to be seen so they could be drafted into a project or job. Cell phones were at the ready to take pictures with the big men, just to force some sort of intimacy even if the big men only obliged out of courtesy. I observed this more at the two banquets, the inaugural one with Jonathan attending, and the gala, which was an APC gig.

    Once Jonathan and Buhari arrived, the formal ceremony began. The ushering in of GEJ was more dramatic than Buhari’s, and that’s understandable. It was the last grand act of the departing President. Guards accompanied his SUV on both sides as it glided slowly to the front of the state box. The man alighted and walked in with his usual casual gait and smile into the box and his seat, his last front roll in Nigerian history.

    When Vice President-elect, Professor Yemi Osinbajo (SAN) strode to the platform for swearing-in, the audience realised that something epochal was happening. Once he, and his elegant wife, had read out their oaths of office, a sigh of history filled the commodious square.

    Then we saw the rites that followed after PMB was sworn in, and it dawned we now had a new president. An era had passed. Jonathan stood with respect to the majesty of a system that ushered him in just four years earlier after he had eased into the position when Yar’Adua died.

    He seemed lonely from where I stood near the platform. He was almost unaccompanied in his last day in office. Not his wife, not many of his presumed great friends were present.

    More telling was when he walked out of the platform through the steps to his vehicle. He never returned to the state box to say a final goodbye. As he descended the steps, he met the tall ex-governor Timipre Sylva, shot out his hand and shook hands with the man he ousted with impunity from the Bayelsa throne and hounded with the EFCC.

    “Sylva,” he said with a smile. Sylva smiled back and greeted. It was curt and telling. I wondered what coursed through the ex-president’s mind. Was it disguised defiance or apology?

    What was more curious was when his SUV left. The crowd around the car waved with deep feeling, but it seemed a genuine pity glazed their eyes as they saw him go. He waved back through the tinted window.

    The stage turned to Buhari, who mounted a vehicle and rode around the square to inspect guards and wave to the audience. The army again regaled us with their poetry of the parades, a thing that made me wonder if it was this same army that chafed at the predations of Boko Haram. I also thought the army was so beautiful it is a pity they have to shed blood. I loved the 21 gun salutes and the chaotic flutter that greeted the release of birds at the inauguration.

    The highlight, however, was Buhari’s maiden speech. It was elegantly couched speech with the right tone. The crowd cheered to the everybody and nobody phrase. But I still wonder if it meant he did not belong to APC or those on whose back he rode to power. It will be clear in coming months. For his and our sake, I hope he did not mean he would not have primary constituency of consulting. No great leader in history shunned the platform on which he rose. His speech reflected a Unitarian impulse when he espoused the independence of local government.  A throwback to military era? He did not seem to be in sync with the idea of fiscal federalism by promising to interfere in erring states. Did he mean it in an authoritarian way or as moral leadership? I expect that he could use his bully pulpit to initiate a constitutional federalism that is at odds with today’s malformed structure.

    Some expected a hammer and anvil temper, but I disagree. His pitch dropped halfway through, indicating tiredness. His handlers must learn to manage the exertions of a man of his age. His speech might have been shorter given the ritual rigours of the day in relentless sun. For me the speech was less moving than the one he gave at the gala later that night where he spoke from the heart.

    On the gala, what was Tunde Ayeni of the N5 billion campaign donation for GEJ doing there? Has APC decided to associate with such characters? Not good. The beautiful Joke Silva, who was compere, either naively or out of sublime mischief, acknowledged his presence. It was a dark spot in a fine day. I expect that he – with the Vice president – will publish the declared assets as promised during the campaign. He owes that to Nigerians as a matter of honour. With Boko Haram pounding Borno and Yobe, it is surprising he has not even announced his chief security adviser, as well as key staff. As he has noted, the job at hand is urgent. It is still early days though, but Buhari must dispel fears of the dillydally.

    Well, “the revels now are ended,” noted Shakespeare in The Tempest, and Jonathan is no longer in “cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces…solemn temples…” His time, like an “insubstantial pageant,” has faded into thin air. The substance now belongs to Buhari. It will work not with good luck but goodwill with hard work.

    Ambo and the rainbow

    For all its grandeur, Lagos State Governor Akinwunmi Ambode’s inaugural speech struck a tone of harmony. After all the truculent cacophonies of the campaign season that saw religion pit itself against religion, and tribe overshadowed tribe in bitter acrimony, it was heartening to hear the new governor note that Lagos is for all. In his voluminous white agbada and sunny face, he promised to erect a big tent. I call it Ambo’s rainbow.

    His opponent had tried to cast him as the candidate of a part against all, and the image of lagoon drenched a sense of coexistence Lagos always knew. In the coming months, we expect to see fruits of this so that the past of doubt will give in to a future of peace and plenty in Lagos, the oasis of Nigeria.

  • Curtain closes

    Curtain closes

    The Jonathan era ends in a few days, and he departs without the sort of farewell party that heroes get. It was a mock epic when he ascended the throne. We thought we had made a giant of a small man. When the curtain closes, it will be a humpty-dumpty disaster, an epic collapse.

    But it will be less a Jonathan collapse than the fruit of our collective naiveté. On voting day, we cursed ourselves with our thumbs. It was an example of how democracy can fall on its own sword. Every democracy, though, is entitled to its own tears.

    Yet, when his story began, many expected he would serve as a revolutionary tonic. That was what gave him a rousing mandate, if it was all based on sentiment. The sentiment was real across the country. As Oscar Wilde noted, humans are not rational beings. We are sentimental beings.

    The only region immune to that infection was the core north. That region, however, has had to sulk or yelp or resort to self-help in the past six years.

    But not they alone. Everybody. We all saw a man with a deceptively meek face and mellow voice and pious appeal con a nation with the apparent simplicity or even naivety of both mien and gesture. He was supposed to be the meek man upon the throne.

    When his predecessor Yar’Adua was sick, a cabal with a parochial world view and ruthless will to power shielded the frail, gaunt, disappearing soul and wove yarns about a miracle rebound. He was already on his way back to office and to duty, and all his detractors wished him dead. They were half right. His detractors thought the death of Yar’Adua would give the country a sort of divine verdict:  a victory over the north’s proprietary hubris that “entitled” them to rule over the rest of us.

    It was though not a case of whole-hearted malice. They did not wish Yar’Adua dead because they hated them. After all, Yar-Adua was, when healthy, a modest performer. But the detractors could live with his demise because it offered a bright new vista. It enabled the nation to robe their humble candidate with a royal apparel. Bring the casket for the solemn dead. But bring the diadem and let us crown the little man made giant by fate.

    So, Jonathan was a project of necessity. A son of a humble village tucked in the backwaters of oil who had no shoes and no pedigree and no royal boast. A son who had nothing but his instinctive connection to the common folk. A man Baba Iyabo loved and adopted as a son. Why not him this time instead of the hauteur of the past? Why not give him the grace of our collective claps and vault the pauper over the princes who failed?

    The rhetoric and intrigue of the cabal were barefaced, and they turned the national stage into a drama of the dead who must live in spite of the verdict of God. It was like the Poem In Memoriam by Leopold Senghor in which he lamented about the “dead who have always refused to die.”

    No one heard Yar’Adua speak in his last days, yet the cabal said his voice roared like the waves. No one heard his muscles crackle or his feet stomp, but they said he was up and about. No one saw him, yet they made us seem blind while they alone saw. They witnessed the miracle that was meant for us. They made us seem absent at our own theatre. We all became Thomas Didymus. But they did not let us believe until he was in a state beyond our sight. The only commoner who could see him was a mortician.

    It was also not about keeping Yar’Adua afloat but a contempt for a man because of where he came from, about a royal occlusion of a subaltern from power. This column fulminated, and defended Jonathan’s right to succeed Yar’Adua. I even titled one column, “Let Jonathan be.” It was injustice and it defiled the holy order of the republican spirit to deny him.

    But Jonathan eventually prevailed. Democracy and good sense had their way over the cabal, a word that suffused the national conversation. Peace defeated peacock. With the fears of the soldier’s return to power, the nation’s breakup and constitutional stasis over, Jonathan’s victory took another narrative. It was no longer about the right of a vice president to become president.

    It was the tale of a commoner who had a right to the regal palate. An Otuoke man had the right to be president. Even though his party signed a pact of zoning, he was immune. A caveman can clutch at his rights without honour. But a man of honour will not live with himself though he has a right to the prize. His honour forbids it.

    That was the beginning of this column’s falling-out with Jonathan. It was clear he was not going to run a country based on values, but crass opportunism. It was the birth seed of impunity and corruption. When most Nigerians lined up behind him, this column warned about the danger ahead. First, I believed that he ought to have stepped aside, and organised an election as a statesman and not staked himself for the throne. His zoning pact demanded that. The moral future of Nigeria deserved it. Ambition came before country, Jonathan rode on small sentiment and he became president.

    The other objection was that as acting president, his regime had begun wholesale awards of contracts of jobs not done. We were too dazed by the biography of the shoeless applicant for us to see the leaking roof.

    Today, we have seen him take trillions of Naira into a prodigal’s market. He bought a lot, but he brought home nothing.  We owe $60 billion. That is why, as he leaves power, power is worse than the first few days of his office when Barth Nnaji crafted the roadmap of power. The eastern brothers and sisters who loved him in spite and even because of his sins, cannot point to a second Niger Bridge. Maina, NNPC, Oduah, Alison-Madueke and subsidy parasites are poster faces of impunity and corruption. Even arithmetic was corrupted, and it took his defeat for 19 to regain its integrity, bona fides and superiority over 16.

    The commoner is poor, and the country too. As he leaves office, fuel queues have returned. It was so at the beginning of his reign. It is so today as he walks into the sunset. Sad. Anticlimactic. Paralytic.

    His story is the contrast to a man of history known as Mahatma Ghandi. He also came from a humble past. But he rose to become a lawyer, and during the nationalist maelstrom against British colonialism, he was both architect and point man of the fight.

    But he, unike Jonathan, began as a dolled-up aficionado of western suits with jacket, white shirt and tie. His feet were not of the Otuoke variety. He had shoes. But as the struggle wore on, he chose the path of true simplicity. Ghandi learned from Thoreau to actualise the principle of civil disobedience.

    He decided to do away with the finesse of social polish and sartorial nicety. He wore a spare cloth called khadi and he gave terror to Britain. So frustrated was Churchill that he barbed him with a racist slur, calling him a “half-naked kafir.” His simple ways were marked also by fasting for the cause of Indian liberation and peace. He ranks with few men of austere dignity in history like Jesus and Budha.

    Jonathan moved from the niggardly background of a shoeless man to a regime of profligacy and insensitivity. It is a bad way to draw the curtain on a man on whom a people were well pleased and invested their future.

  • A brave new world

    A brave new world

    Winning an election, like that of Buhari, sets forth a series of theatrics. The easiest is the first act. He looks like a kid, who just won a prize or is celebrating a birthday. Everyone comes with a smile. They shove and tumble over each other with a congratulatory message.

    They pop bottles, except Buhari would not drink given his teetotaler ways and detached dignity. No cakes will he cut either. Music flows, but not of the owambe variety but drums roll and throats are let loose with political party chants and songs.

    The second act is the loyalty play. Everyone wants to remind the winner how close they were. They want to show how they fought for him, and spent their resources, sold their houses, secured loans and nearly died in accidents.

    After all, one of the loyalists will say he (Buhari) can see the scar beneath his knee (he rolls up his trousers). They visited the hospital many times. The winner cannot forget when they just started out two decades ago. Others will start speaking the same language in deep and effervescent accents. They will spin yarns about village life or when they were only two together one hot afternoon drinking kunu.

    Loyalty naturally gives way to intrigues. The other guy was always undermining the party and spoke one or two unkind words about him as candidate. That short fellow was seen once or twice in furtive shadows dining with the opposing candidate. No, don’t mind that other guy in white top, he does not know anything about holding an office. Others do the work for him. Or it is time to pay back our tribe after many years in oblivion, etc.

    The sober act is the rare one, and that concerns me today. It is the phase of ideas. Few do anything in this area. But that is a crucial part. GMB has said he will use technocrats. That is fine. But technocrats alone cannot make a great team. Some people fought the way to Aso Rock, and if he runs a government of technocrats, he will need politicians to keep the government from falling.

    Technocrats perform; politicians connect. If you don’t connect with the people, your performance will come away like a baby that is still born. You see the baby but cannot hear it. The cry is shrieking not from the little wonder in the mother’s arm but from the one carrying the little wonder. He will find a few “technoticians” – those who inhabit both virtues – and they will be invaluable. He should remember that the primary task of a leader is to raise leaders.

    What concerns me in the realm of ideas is not to parrot the clichés about infrastructure, or education or power or health care. GMB said all these during the campaigns, although the details of implementation are another. What bothers me is the nature of what the British call the exchequer. Our purse is lean, and the revenue generator is atrophying. States cannot pay salaries, and some people are angry with governors for their impotence. They forget that all the resources of states are government controlled, and the absence of fiscal federalism has paralysed states in many ways as revenue drivers. They rely primarily on taxes. To generate taxes we have to animate the private sector. But the economy of the real sector has come to its knees and relies on the federal purse. Banks wait for the money from the federal and state governments.

    States that have gold or have capacity to generate income from power cannot make money. If you have limestone, it belongs to the Federal Government. Oil states are entitled to only 13 percent. We are witnessing the chokehold of a federal leviathan. When the federal fails, everyone fails.

    While we wait for the liberation of states as semi-independent engines of growth, the fulcrum of any economy is the private sector. Humans are the best resource. They are the nucleus of productivity.

    I focus on two areas of creativity. The first is the technology area. The second is textile. The other day I visited Umuahia and my cell phone ran out of power. I sent for a replacement. But it worked only for two days enough for me to return home to my original one. My first thought was to rile at the phony genius. But I have had to rethink this opinion. Those who make counterfeit cell phone, televisions, etc, betray a fundamental talent. They know how to make things. Many of them do not have formal training on these but they are products of enthusiasm.

    Abia State Governor Theodore Orji had set out a modest effort to work on formalising the skills and turning their talent into gems for the country. But it is a good start.

    The Buhari administration should take a special look at these young men who do these things we call “fake.” If they know the technology, they should be encouraged to strike out on their own, and create new ones. These men are idealists. As D.H. Lawrence said the most idealist nations make the most machines. The United States has led the world in this regard because the society enables the environment for individuals to develop stuff and later puts the infrastructure and resources of state at their disposals. Buhari can borrow a leaf from Lincoln’s words in this regard, “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or can not so well do, for themselves – in their separate, and individual capacities.”

    A new book on the Wright Brothers written by historian David McCullough is making waves in the west today and it celebrates the rigour, dedication and enterprise of two brothers, Wilbur and Orville, who revolutionised how we move.

    It is a pity that the Southeast states have not jumped at the inspiration of Governor Orji to pool their resources to turn the enterprising élan of the young technologists. In them sleeps the germ of an industrial giant. Isreal today leads the world in semiconductors and they have their equivalent of the Silicon Valley near Jerusalem. It began when the Defence Ministry laid off workers and enabled them to produce chips for their armoury. Many companies sprang up, and the United States encourages them with billions of dollars of free money every year.

    The textile industry is another instance. Nigeria was the capital of textile in West Africa, and Kaduna and Lagos were two of the mainstays before they gradually collapsed. The talent is still here and the genius is coy in dormant minds of many Nigerians.

    The Buhari regime needs to look that way, as well as other areas like furniture, food processing, etc. where, to quote the poet Dryden, lies “God’s plenty.”

  • Dickson’s hypocrisy

    If you knew nothing about Bayelsa State Governor Seriake Dickson, you would mistake his press release at the weekend for an act of patriotism. He did not succeed in fooling many people. First, he wrote the advert – or his press team did it for him -with a view to discrediting the governors who were his fellow gangsters not too long ago. He now wants them to go so that after May 29, a new and responsible Governors Forum will be born. Maybe he has ambition to be the new leader, but that is beside the point. When did Dickson wax into a democracy lover? We have not forgotten that he was one of the vandals of democracy who subverted arithmetic in the name of election. Was he not one of the 16 who claimed that 19 was an inferior number?

    The prose was inelegant for most part but that’s no sin. He wrote, “The leaders of the NGF from the majority party have always tried to use it as a stepping stone, and an instruments(sic) of the enforcement of their will on their political parties and the nation.” What impudence from an elected governor! How did he become party candidate and governor? We were all here when GEJ used him as his poodle to become governor. He basked in impunity. If anyone is to talk about democracy and patriotism, Seriake Dickson should not even be seen. To hear him is sacrilege.

    His minders should have advised him to keep mum like the River Nun at night

  • Let them pay

    Let them pay

    During the election campaigns, she was in battle gear. Not her ankara dress beneath a head-tie that mocks the humility of a villager.  Some may see her dressing as part of her armoury though. But her fiery tongue is her battery of attack. Her opponent is dapper, if not so brilliant. The two hotshots threw potshots at each other.

    War is about propaganda, and elections in Nigeria are like going to war. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, with her usual gusto debated former Central Bank governor Chukwuma Soludo on the state of the Nigerian economy.

    In spite of his exterior of objectivity, Soludo seized an opportunity not only for redemption but revenge. Since he fell flat as a governor candidate and retreated into oblivion, he had been looking for a chance to bait the PDP brass.

    Okonjo-Iweala, on the other hand, wanted a moment not only of triumph but of triumphalism, to give the former vicar of our money the Mayweather treatment. With her vintage scarf and emphatic diction, she wanted to pulp Soludo into a PacMan of finance.

    Now we know who packed a punch. Soludo said things were pretty bad. Ngozi said things were on course, and a rosy horizon emblazoned the future.

    Last week, we had our confession. She said we have already borrowed close to half a trillion Naira to fund our recurrent expenses, like salaries, paying rents, etc. This is barely a quarter into the 2015 budget year.

    So, we have it. Ngozi lied to Nigerians then. To be charitable, she probably did not know the facts then, or she knew it differently at the time she squared off with the central banker. Even in her vicarious confession, she did not show the humility of contrition. She threw jibes at governors, thereby blaming others for her own inadequacy.

    So the scores are in. Soludo won, Ngozi lost the ball. But winning is not what we are about in this matter. We should be bothered about our economy, and where we are headed as a nation.

    What has happened to this country in the past half a decade? Not long ago, oil price soared to its acme at about $110 per barrel. We spent a trillion Naira a year on defence when Boko Haram held sway and other trillions went into a number of sectors, including education, works, presidency, payment of bills, etc. We did not save for the rainy day. We did not account for the money that flooded out of our purses.

    We expected things to be rosy permanently. We expected the fat years to burst with juices forever. Suddenly like the prophecy of Joseph that went unheeded, the lean years fell on us. We had no answers as the oil price fell precipitously.

    Some are happy that Jonathan did not win. If he won, Ngozi would not have been forced to make a public confession of her government’s recklessness and profligacy. We would have kept borrowing and burrowing with a good face into a crash. Just like the crash that hit the west when Obama took the sceptre as United States president. That was the case with Greece when the bank Goldman Sachs worked with a consortium of finance houses to manipulate the loans and covered up the dreary situation until all that was left were stiches. The rich do not live on stitches.

    Today, Greece is paying for the lies of those years that the locust ate. Many Greeks have left their country and close to a quarter of the population don’t have jobs. They are now cajoling and blackmailing Europe to bail them out of the iniquity of their past.

    A big task has fallen on Buhari now. We know that recklessness boils down to corruption. So many sinners have taken part in this party of rapine on our patrimony. They have stolen us dizzy, and some of them are either looking for how to distort the books or flee.

    Buhari has assured Jonathan that he has nothing to fear. But I wonder if that statement itself can hold our broken dam. If we have to wage a war on corruption, we have to stop the bleeding. But we cannot close our eyes on the recent past, especially when the government’s recent activities still bear significance on today’s life.

    Some people have stolen our money, and so we want our money back. I am not interested in how many years a man goes to jail for stealing our money in the past half-decade. I say past half decade because it will be meaningless to go back indefinitely. But we should address the recent past, partly because we experienced the greatest devastation on our resources under Jonathan.

    All we need is to look at the various contracts and see what work was done and not done. We should do the math and ask for the money of what is not accounted for. If the work is for N2 billion and it is evident that only N200 million work has been done, we should ask that the job be completed at a certain specified period and ask for the accounts and where the balance of the money is. If the contractor cannot account for it, that person must either by cajolery or force of law or plea bargaining made to give us the balance of the money.  If it means selling the Dubai mansion or the South African estate or the private jets, they must realise that we want the money.

    We are in a bad place as a nation. We don’t want to look like the futile dance of the forest in Wole Soyinka’s play, where the past could not save the future. The past is in our hands, and we need to act with boldness. There are many poor who cannot feed, and many ignorant who want good schools. Many die who could have lived with a little help with this drug or that dialysis machine. We have the Second Niger Bridge to build and many homes that need power at night.

    Our money stolen in the past few years amounts to trillions, given our budgets and work not done.  I am not calling for revenge, but restoration. It is about restitution, not retribution.  We should save the nation from the crime more than from the criminal. It is not about saving a brother but about being our brother’s keeper.

    We need systematic approach lenient to those who cooperate and ruthless to those who huff and run.

    Getting our money is not about forgiveness. Getting our money should be a public matter and the stigma and opprobrium should stick to the thief. The word thief is mild. They are robbers. The American outlaw, Jesse James, once caviled at being described as a thief. The offended bandit said he was not a thief but a robber, an armed robber. He belonged to a great class of evil doers rather than the petty aberration of a common criminal. James always came to mind whenever GEJ’s “stealing is not corruption” is referenced. GEJ was dodgy and hypocritical. Jesse James did not conceal his daredevilry.

    We should not forgive. This is no time for Christian mercy. It is a practical way to show mercy for the suffering millions who are victims of corruption.

    If we look at it as revenge, we shall miss the point, though. It should not come across as punishing a group, tribe or region, but individuals who violated public trust. After the First World War, the Europeans of the Allied nations called for revenge or what was called reparations. Some yelled that they should bleed the Germans till their children squeaked. It followed a revenge policy that alienated Germany, gave birth to a false prosperity known as the Locarno Honeymoon and later the Great Depression. Ultimately came the revanchist rise of Nazi Germany. The Second World War ended that sanguinary hour.

    We need the money not to punish the thief but to save the poor and a crawling nation.

  • The prodigal sons

    The prodigal sons

    The bell is now tolling. The Abuja high rollers are packing their bags and heading out of town. President Goodluck Jonathan is not an island in this regard. He leads the pack. Also in the wagon are familiar wayfarers: not just ministers and advisers and hangers-on, but a generation and tribe of politicians.

    They have vaingloriously called themselves “mainstreamers.” This is a word of opportunism. They say their people should not stay back to play state or regional politics. It is better to follow, like sheep, the scent of the stew. And in our skewed federal structure, the aroma of the centre bustles in a big and liberal pot. All insiders can eat from the accompanying fufu. The fufu, in its outsize extravagance, compares to Achebe’s feast in Things Fall Apart where those eating on one side cannot see those eating on the other.

    So, the so-called mainstreamers are, properly defined, “main-eaters.” They are the carnivores of our democracies. In other words, they are the man-eaters who scavenged on all the fat-cow contracts, glamour trips and money declared missing in the past half-decade. They gorged on the NNPC’s unaccounted billions, flapped haughty wings in tales of impunity, whether in the MDAs or in the ministries or Presidency. They mainstreamed while the rest of us majority snorted as islanders. It was corruption writ large.

    But nowhere did this predatory logic rear itself more than in the Southwest. Its ancestor was the Owu chief, our Olusegun Obasanjo. He lured the tribe, while he was president, away from the canons of the Afenifere group. They had coalesced in the Alliance for Democracy.

    It was the beginning of the tribal traitors. They sold their patrimony for a mess of centralised pottage. It became clear who was on the people’s side.

    They had it going for them for a long time. The so-called Afenifere bigwigs launched smear campaigns against the mainstays of the AD, who would not yield to the tantalising follies of centralised lucre. The Owu chief puffed with power then and worked with the renegades to sweep the Southwest states for the PDP, leaving Lagos and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu as the lone tree in a deforested swath of progressive politics.

    The story of the so-called Afenifere bigwigs underpins what some psychologists call the fear of gratitude. Most of them who call themselves Afenifere dynamos today once gleefully nestled in Lagos State under the beneficence of Tinubu. But they loathe their benefactor. They are like the men who did not return to say thank you to Jesus after their miracles. The older Afenifere think he is too young to be that powerful and his kindness hurt. His contemporaries’ envy is couched in the poisonous cliché: why him? The younger ones want to pull him down. The fear of gratitude merely means the fear of saying thank you to the person who rescued you. It is the buffoonery of arrogance. This fear leads to another, more malignant one: the fear of contempt.

    The best example of this is recorded by Edward Gibbons in his all-time classic, The Decline and Fall of Roman Empire. He told the story of Emperor Maximin, a coarse, low and sanguinary fellow who rose to the apogee of Roman pomp and power. He felt a sense of inadequacy, and decided to kill anyone who knew him when he was nothing and helped him along the way. The same psychology is played in Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, Titus Andronicus, where Titus gave up his right to the royal throne to another man. That man played along with a scheme to kill Titus, so as to justify his hollow manhood.

    So, the Afenifere bigwigs have since 2003 mounted a campaign based on fears of gratitude and contempt against Tinubu. They have plotted, plodded and preened for many years, and boasted with only stumbles and falls to tell their stories. One of them is the whitlow of the west, the mimic Mimiko, who genuflected and pleaded for Tinubu to save him from the machinations of the chief mainstreamer, the Owu Chief. He had been swindled out of his Ondo State Governorship slot, and he wanted justice. Tinubu was his only lifeline, and the oxygen came aplenty. Once secure in his position as governor, he played Brutus. He did not want to say thank you. When he was in trouble he pledged to belong. Once he was rescued, he feigned an independent giant. His is a prostitution of the virtue of self-regard. He is a fraud.

    He worked with all the others, including the old men and fuddy-duddies hungry for financial fountains. They were mercenaries and leeches, bleeding their own race to nest their high places.

    They coaxed Jonathan to their side after their leader, Obasanjo, had abandoned them. They were a decapitated group, a mere body without ears, eyes, hair, olfactory lobe, medulla oblongata, or mouth, but flailing with weapons in hand, swishing in the air. They fell like humpty dumpty. From a lone state in Lagos, Tinubu with tact, diligence, wise daring and a talent for talents took the west and now the centre, making him the numero uno ever of Nigerian politics. Since 1999, it was for him the success of a long distance runner.

    On March 28, they lost the centre, and that capped the tragic story of the mainstreamers. Suddenly, they no longer saw the mainstream, since the water was now dry in Abuja. They turned their eyes to the Lagoon. With Jonathan behind them, they embarked on a journey of revenge.

    If they lost the centre, they could not do without Lagos. So all resources poured into the state of excellence.  Their bridgehead was a certain pharmacist who staked all his past doings in the progressive camp for a vaulting ambition. In the process, he lost a sense not only of ideology but values. Jimi Agbaje knew he was in a foul crowd. Hence his campaign posters miniaturised the PDP logo and enlarged his name and picture. He was an unwilling joiner. He made it look like he was the pearl among swines. It was a colossal gamble of moral significance, a thing he would explain for the rest of his life. How come his name jingles among militants, ex-convicts and quislings?

    The battle for Lagos was a waterloo. They have now drowned in the Lagoon. After losing the centre, they have lost the state. They may play stragglers with Fayose and Mimiko, as the last redoubts of an expiring tribe. They are the prodigal sons of the west, only theirs is more tragic because they have no home to which to return. They are neither mainstreamers nor regionalists. They are dead-enders. They have now been exposed as moral cretins. They remind one of the words of the Russian poet Pushkin: “In our vile times, man was, whatever his element, either a tyrant, or traitor, or prisoner.” It is true to the renegades.

    But the mainstreamers were taken for granted in other regions, especially in the Southsouth and Southeast. They have to now scramble for the limited resources in those states. Their big, fat appetites will now be humbled before such governors as Dickson, Okowa, Udom, Wike, etc. President Jonathan knew this when he decried defecting PDP men. “Those people running and those already cross-carpeting, will come back on an empty stomach because they (APC) will touch the primary members of their party before they get to them. They know you are coming because you are hungry; and before it will get to you, the food will be gone.”

    In Achebe’s feast, handshakes snapped across the fufu. But as GEJ warned, the APC is in no mood for such fistic felicity.

    In the Southwest, they are more or less in the lagoon. On Tinubu, their envy evokes the refrain from American writer H.L. Mencken, who wrote, “the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy.” Hence what is left for them is a smear campaign. From mainstreamers, they are now “main screamers.”

  • Irony of power

    Irony of power

    In 2012, I wrote a column titled “military coup in Bayelsa,” and it referred to how President Goodluck Jonathan deployed all the branches of the Nigerian military to oust Timipre Sylva as governor of Bayelsa State. It was an election as military operation. The police were also involved.

    This column was a lone voice in the wilderness. I warned that the travesty was not only about Bayelsa or Sylva, but the loss of grace in our democracy. Newspapers merely reported, commentators looked elsewhere and even the opposition kept mute, except a comment by the often-prescient Asiwaju Bola Tinubu who wondered why Jonathan invoked the military like a sledge hammer on a fly.

    By impunity a new governor was “installed” in Bayelsa in the name of Seriake Dickson. The nation went on as though nothing happened. Last month when the people ousted Jonathan with their thumbs, the electorate’s great complaint was the reign of impunity. It began with the ouster of Sylva and the silence of a charmed nation.

    Last week, history had its revenge. Sylva was announced to lead Buhari’s team that meets with secretary to government Anyim Pius Anyim to dismantle the edifice of the Jonathan administration. Jonathan had acted as god over Sylva, ousted him from office like a gangster and unleashed EFCC after him. Now, Sylva is presiding over the dismantling of the Jonathan era. It is an object lesson on power. Ebenezer Obey sang, “Ile aiye o to nkan.” (This life is vanity). While GEJ unseated Sylva with force, Sylva is doing his in the gentle glow of the law and Jonathan’s capitulation.

    In those heady days, many missions were sent to Jonathan. They included elders from the party, the Governors’ Forum, Southsouth governors, elder statesmen in the country. Emissaries begged Jonathan to allow Sylva pursue a second term. He gave audience to all and pretended he accepted the pleas. In many instances, he said he knew nothing about the plots and it was party democracy in action. But he would intervene to save his kinsman.

    Sylva swallowed many instances of personal pride that reminded one of Tolstoy’s lines in War and Peace, “It is better to bow too low than not low enough.” Jonathan acted as though all was well. In spite of that, Jonathan allowed the armed forces to back a kangaroo election and Seriake Dickson gloatingly became governor by impunity. Governor Dickson must have quietly embraced Buhari’s win as it has saved him the possibility of the Sylva treatment. In its solitude, this column followed the days of infamy, including the silence of Nigerians.

    Once Seriake “won” the election, Jonathan “the Snake” slithered out in true venom and said he backed Sylva’s ouster and endorsed an earlier incident when hoodlums hurled stones and “pure water” sachets at Sylva in the stadium. The serpentine triumphalism at that time did not forewarn many Nigerians about the kind of man they had at the helm. This paper wrote an editorial titled, “Stoner-in-chief.”

    We were later to see Jonathan show impunity, instance after instance, in his six years in the saddle. Rivers, Ekiti, and the series of militant outbursts are a few examples. This is also a lesson for Buhari and all who are mounting the saddle anew in May. Power is transient. As Shakespeare wrote, “Man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority…”

    We saw another instance last week. Oil minister Diezani Alison-Madueke spoke to reporters. I found that remarkable. And she actually answered questions propounded by “press boys.” She could humble herself in a hijab to see a retired general. She spoke about such topics that were taboo in her eyes in her days of vanity. She spoke about the alleged N10 billion spent on jetting around the world, the missing $20 billion, etc. This is the duchess who would not even give the National Assembly the benefit of her regal presence. And her president supported her. The same duchess who appeared at public events as though she was bored and did the audience a favour? Last week, she spoke to reporters in a mood of accountability. The scales of royalty have fallen. The wedding is over and all the frills are now giving way for the true picture of the bride.

    We also see the same script in Delta State. Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan was denied a chance to have a say not only in his possible successor but also in becoming a senator. Jonathan’s plot with his men was to entrench Senator James Manager, a fellow kinsman, to return to the Senate. That would give Manager an automatic berth as majority leader. It would then go into history, as they calculated, that the nation would have an Ijaw president and majority leader. As part of the scheme, a ranking PDP senator, Victor Ndoma-Egba, would be denied the opportunity to return to the senate so as to give Manager a thoroughfare to the prime position of majority leader. Neither Uduaghan nor Ndoma-Egba will be in the Senate. But Manager will be an inconsequential man in the chamber compared with what he sought.

    More importantly, the President, Clark and other so-called party wheel horses who hatched this low design will be missing in action in Abuja as from May 29. They thought they knew tomorrow and could play god over the destinies of fellow humans. God, however, had something to say about that. It reminds one of the words of the Psalmist, “I have seen the wicked in great power, spreading himself like a green bay tree…lo, he was not: yea, I sought him, but he could not be found.” In the same vein, Jonathan, Clark, et al, will be missing in action in Abuja.

    This is the nature of power. If we see power as a mandate, we shall not vacate our duties to the people and human conscience. The poet Dryden wrote, “As streams are, power is.”

    It has been said that power should only go to people who are mature; who understand that it is not about puffing and huffing. It is about responsibility. Perhaps that informed Aristotle’s admonition that only full-grown adults who have succeeded in other fields should go into politics. But it does not guarantee anything, and Lincoln knew about this. Many people who plotted his ouster were close associates. Hence he said, “If you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”