Category: Sam Omatseye

Some persons had problems with my outing last week, and they could not hesitate to tag me a bigot.

I had looked at the question of who owns Lagos, and my views spewed out a binary effect. The Yoruba came in aplenty to applaud while the Igbo responses were overrun with venom. I wrote neither to please the Yoruba nor rile the Igbo. But truth is a furious bullet and, in this case, it seemed to have lodged itself in an Igbo spleen. As Apostle Paul wrote, “we can do nothing against the truth but for the truth.” I wrote in surrender to the truth. If it hurts, it is because of human failure to embrace what they fear.

My historical conscience forbids me to act like the character in Shakespeare’s Tempest who, for personal ambition, “made a sinner of his memory to credit a lie.”

The issue of who owns the land wakes up hidebound loyalties in trenches of tribe and faith. We may recall the Itsekiri saga and how the Urhobo wanted to seize Warri from the Itsekiri by changing the title of the monarch from Olu of Warri to Olu of Itsekiri, even though his palace is ensconced in Warri.

The rampaging Urhobo – and my mother is Urhobo – conflated their numbers with proprietary rights. A similar travesty unfolded in Ugborodo in Delta State over the EPZ crisis between the Ijaw and Itsekiri, a problem that President Goodluck Jonathan turned into another episode of chauvinism in his now documented reign of divide and rule.

President Jonathan stoked the ethnic firefight between the Yoruba and Igbo in Lagos. He failed to rein in his opportunistic self-interest even as he freely played the ethnic and religious cards, all in the pursuit of ambition.

Those who say Lagos is no man’s land have turned it into a sort of cause celebre by levitating the fate of the Igbo as a race of victims. But victimhood has morphed into a weapon. So, if Anyim Pius Anyim, as secretary to the government, filled the parastatals with his kinsmen, it was because they deserved it since Igbo were marginalised in the past. So, if Okonjo-Iweala said the Igbo exceled in tests, they should be given job priority. And when former army chief Ihejirika filled posh positions with his kinsmen, he should be excused because of his people’s history.

This is not only victimhood but also victimisation of others. You don’t endanger the future by avenging the past. Society is about living and let live. Even in the United States where blacks have been left behind, the society has choreographed a system of affirmative action that negotiates, at least constitutionally, a process of rehabilitation for the coloured folks based on social contract. It anticipates conflict, so it works by understanding, not by imposition.

The Igbo say they developed Lagos, and therefore they have a right to determine who wins an election. No one can deny the Igbo contribution to anywhere they go in the country. They have done well, especially in the area of merchandising. But to say they developed Lagos? That is a fallacy. History should bear us out. Most of what we know as Lagos today was created not only by the Yoruba indigenes but also by the Yoruba non-indigenes. Whether it was Surulere, or Ikeja, or Badagry or Ikorodu, or Epe, it was borne out of the pioneering genius of Yoruba non-indigenes, especially the contiguous Yoruba like the Egba, the Ijebu, even the far-flung citizens in Ondo and Ekiti. Lagos was a major part of the western region and the resources of the western region under Awolowo and later Akintola turned Lagos into its kaleidoscope of today. The Yoruba, for commercial outreach, set up Ajegunle. Even they don’t claim to be indigenes but see Lagos as Yorubaland. And it is. If the constitution allows residency, Lagos should not be both guinea pig and sacrificial lamb. If others don’t play by the rule, why should Lagos? Fair is fair.

The port has been cited as a major asset of the city, but it’s by no means the only city with a port. Lagos bloomed because of the indigenes’ laissez faire culture, their syncretic worldview, erecting a big tent that has winnowed prosperity from the gifts and efforts of all.

Others who came to Lagos have contributed and they should not turn that into proprietary disdain. If the Igbo claim they helped developed Lagos, we have to put it in perspective. They have been good at merchandising, what some call buying and selling. A modern city is about its technological forays, its innovation in commerce, its new ideas in culture, its ability to turn the soul of a place around by its bona fides in these lights. You don’t claim to be innovative when you ape and fake another’s genius and sell it as original. That’s not technology, and it is not innovation.

So other than making profits for themselves buying and selling, few other roles have been claimed by them in the unfurling of the progress of Lagos. Other ethnic groups live in the city, and many who come from south-south have not trumpeted their bona fides like the Igbo. As Soyinka said, a tiger should not proclaim its tigritude.

Again, Nigerians in Europe and the United States have won elections as mayors and councillors, etc. When I was a Gordon N. Fisher fellow in Canada, an Igbo young man won a student union presidential election in a university in Ontario. He vied not as Igbo, but as a fellow student. If he canvassed his ethnicity, he would have lost. The Yoruba fellow who won a Houston election barely a decade ago was praised for his ideas and warmth to all city dwellers. But in the Lagos case, an Igbo candidate sees himself not as a Nigerian candidate but an Igbo candidate, and some of his kinsmen are now boasting that their sights are set on Alausa.

This is the sort of triumphalism that even Chinua Achebe – no innocent in this clannish game – condemned in his There Was A Country. If you claim a place as no man’s land and you act with a superior air, it means the expression “no man’s land” is tongue in cheek, a rhetorical subterfuge. It is paradoxically a euphemism implying that you own it.

If the Igbo claim to own Lagos like the indigenes, I would like to see them do things with selfless virtue for the city. They should build schools, hospitals, or construct roads, or give scholarships or any of such things that benefit not just them but the city at large. If they see Lagos as home, let us see some charity. When you live in a place for profit, it does not show love until you give back. Paying taxes is good. But that is a face-saving argument. No one comes to Lagos to pay tax but to make profit and a living. But that is all right. Let us not be hypocritical. One of the reasons they voted for Agbaje is that the candidate promised tax relief. All great economies thrive on taxes. Check the UK and U.S.

The tension between the Igbo and Indigenes arises from the sense that Igbo do not know how to play the balancing act between being Igbo and Lagosian. When you vote in an election in Lagos and vote Igbo rather than Lagos, it means you see yourself as an alien who is here to conquer. That is the wrong spirit, and Agbaje did not help matters when he promised to install an Eze for opportunistic reasons. He forgot that there are other ethnic groups here. If he won and fulfilled the promise, he would have opened an ethnic can of worms. If the Oba’s lagoon effusion was inelegant, it was prompted by such harebrained campaign promises from Agbaje. He borrowed from Jonathan and his PDP whose Igbo project began when they wanted Agbaje to run with an Igbo running mate.

The concept of no man’s land rides on love. The best example was in the First World War during the Christmas Truce. British and German soldiers abandoned battle to hug, exchange banter, cigarettes and prisoners between opposing trenches. The space between the trenches was called no man’s land. They even played soccer as Robert Graves – novelist, poet and author of Goodbye to All That – relates in an account.

We should avoid a gloating triumphalism, but embrace a cooperative élan. My identity should not drown yours. That is often the root of all crises. It inspired Jean Paul Sartre’s famous line, “Hell is other people.” The incoming governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, has a task to rid Lagos of the Agbaje and Jonathan incubi of division and unite all. Given his level-headedness, he will. It has been done before and it can today.

Since the Oba of Lagos uttered his controversial Lagoon jibe, Lagos has come under a certain attack. It is the foray called, “No Man’s Land.” By that the settlers say Lagos is Nigeria’s city and no ethnic group should lay claim to it as their own.

The position came into play in the just-concluded governor election. It also reared its insular head in the aftermath of the National Assembly and presidential polls in which non-indigenes scooped a haul of seats by besting indigenes.

This sort of attitude is not only arrogant, but also inherently disrespectful.

No one settles in a place and displays a proprietary disdain because the indigenes open their hearts and minds and money to them.

The point often made is that Lagos was Nigeria’s capital city, and because of that it soared into a special status in the country. On that score, they argue, the indigenes have lost the right to claim it. It is now Nigeria’s Jerusalem where every tribe and tongue and worshipper has as much right as the other.

This sort of thinking is defective on a number of points. One, it is historical revisionism. That Lagos was a capital city did not happen out of a whim. Where were the other ethnic groups when the indigenes fought wars, built the city, and turned it from a near wilderness into the mustard seed of city? Did they know when Kosoko and Akintoye duelled for the throne? In the colonial era, Lagos was not the only city they treasured. Others included Calabar, Port Harcourt, Lokoja, et al. The reason Lagos transcended others is rooted in the indigenous population’s attitudes to others, their cultural liberalism and economic expansiveness. The colonial authority focused on it, and developed it because it opened itself to such fertility of progress.

Lagos also allowed itself to flower during the fury days of nationalism, breeding names like Azikiwe, Ojike, Mbadiwe, Awolowo, Adelabu, etc. In fact, the dominant party was NCNC, and it was an umbrella for all tribes. The non-Yoruba politicians learned Yoruba, and that itself was homage to the indigenes. How do you learn the language of the indigenes and say it is no man’s land. Zik was fluent in Yoruba, and it helped him ascended the roof in the high noon of Nigerian nationalism. Lagos was not the only port city, and was it the only city that persons surged to make a new beginning? But Lagos exceeded others because of its indigenous people’s open arms.

What happened in the past few weeks with the Igbo against the Yoruba was unfortunate because both ethnic groups have lived together in Lagos for a generation without much rancour. In fact, many of the Igbo have resided in Lagos without a sense of alienation as the indigenes have given them free rein in commerce and culture.

But it was the last election that triggered this, and it was the shadow of President Goodluck Jonathan that we should blame. He came to town to incite the non-indigenes, including those in the Niger Delta, against the APC. By implication, he characterised the APC as a Yoruba and Hausa party. He even held meetings with them without decency and in one of such outings he said INEC was discriminating against them in the distribution of PVCs. Those who are quick to call him a statesman should note this.

Jimi Agbaje, the PDP governorship candidate, fuelled this by ratcheting up the emotions of the Igbo against the ruling party in the state. This ethnic card led to the vote pattern in the presidential poll. Southsouth and Southeast people decided to vote against the ruling party based essentially on ethnic as well as religious grounds. The factor of faith ossified the revulsion against the APC. Even though the APC prevailed, the pattern revealed ominous fault lines of faith and tribe.

The concept of no man’s land is a prostitution of the constitution that allows residency in Nigeria, and therefore allows any person of whatever tribe to contest elections anywhere as long as they are constitutionally accepted as residents. It is prostitution because few adhere although all should. If Lagos accepts and acts it, it is expected to be respected by all. But as far as I know, it is rare to see what happens in Lagos anywhere else in the country.

It is this lack of hostility to strangers that has now been taken to mean acquiescence. Only Lagos has grown to accept the spirit of residency requirement for election. Other parts of the country accept it, but only philosophically.

But before Jonathan, the indigenes have not openly challenged Lagos as Yoruba land. The last time it significantly caused rumpus was in the 1950’s when Zik wanted a Yoruba man, Prince Adedoyin, to step down from the legislative seat for him. He refused and Zik went to his father, and his father, an Oba, shunned him. Zik had earlier boasted about the role of the Igbo as the tribe of destiny in Africa, and that led to ethnic self-awareness among the Yoruba who had naively believed that the Igbo elite were playing politics without tribal fidelity.

The Yoruba, especially with the Ibadan People’s Party, scuttled Zik who was on his way to become the first premier of the Western Region. Zik cried foul, and lobbed a charge of tribal politics against the indigenes. He did not especially help himself when Eyo Ita, a minority in the East, was denied the chance to be premier of the East.

The Yoruba self-awareness in stopping Zik reflects Shakespeare’s words in Hamlet: “Beware of entrance into a quarrel; but being in, bear it that the opposed should beware of thee.” That self-awareness is palpable today in Lagos.

The bad blood in the past few weeks contradicts the feeling of mutual peace both ethnic groups have had for over a generation. Even during the civil war, the Yoruba did not only keep Igbo property, but kept their rents. It is unfortunate that it took the serpentine zeal of a Jonathan to rake up suppressed bad blood. It is the same Jonathan that did not fulfill any major promise to the Igbo and who only fattened its opportunistic elite with juicy contracts and appointments. In Lagos, all ethnic groups have enjoyed dividends of good government. It’s not perfect, but Lagos has remained the state of example.

The United States has always called itself a melting pot, and that means all who come from outside should not impose their will, but be part of the society. That is in contrast to Canada known as a mosaic. In a mosaic, outsiders maintain their full will but outside the mainstream.

The poet Walt Whitman noted this about America. “I am large/I contain multitudes.”

But we have to go back to healing now, and learn to live together. No group needs to be punished for how it voted. It is part of the beauty of democracy. But it means we should learn to understand that diversity calls for the acceptance of the other side in a bid to build a society not hampered by clannish virtues but riding on the wings of merit.

 

Kudos Ambode

His is a victory for healing. We have a first-class brain with a profusion of experience in Akinwunmi Ambode. Again Lagos is in good and fertile hand. As they say, no shaking

 

Man makes machine. Man fears machine. The creature becomes god to its maker. The fear of automaton makes us cowards of progress.

That is the irony of the card reader. Some politicians, especially of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the other parties that have not even published an ad nor afforded a rally, have rejected the device. They remonstrated before the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) demonstrated it. Even when its test showed that it worked for most part, they would none of it.

The PDP hierarchy, including the governors that visited Lagos last week, is living a lie. Humans inhabit their own illusions and can deny the evidence before their own eyes. “The mind is its own place,” wrote poet John Milton in Paradise Lost. “It can make heaven of hell and hell of heaven.”

They complain that some cards were rejected at the tests. Of course, that happened. Reports attributed it to potential voters’ hands that were slimy or oily or muddy, and what that calls for is voter education. Come to the voting booth not only with clean hearts but also with clean hands. Cloned cards were uncovered, evidence of experimenting by some fraudsters. The lag time was a factor, too. Some people felt it took too long for the machine to authenticate some potential voters.

We expect INEC to improve its work, and that’s the point of the test. For those not happy that it might take a lot longer on the polling day, I ask patience. Better to spend a day and elect the right person than to go quickly into perdition by rigging into office a phony for four years.

The machine does not rig. People do. It does not know PDP or APC. Why not let the card reader rather than people determine who wins and who loses! Who is afraid of accuracy?

Some balk at the machine because they think they will lose. When the PDP complained about the percentage of PVCs distributed, they were hypocrites. Ekiti polls PVC distribution was less than 40 per cent, but they never kicked up any dust over it. Now they know the power of card readers, and they are bubbling with fear.

Is it not the same government that glowed over its technology savvy when it introduced cashless banking, and e-financing on the official level?

What the PDP is doing has so many instances in the past. Humans who loathe progress resist technology. The name given them is Luddites. These were English men in early 19th century who protested the birth of new machines in the textile industry because they replaced jobs. The PDP men are the Luddites of the 21st century. They fear they will lose their jobs.

In spite of the Luddites, the textile industry used the machines, and the world saw progress. More jobs leaped out of the new technology, but they were new jobs that required new skills. Such hugely transformative works are called disruptive technologies. We have them in the offing now, and the next 50 years will be different just like the last 50 years. The womb promises such geniuses as fusion, robotics, genomics, etc. Where was Steve Jobs 50 years ago, or cable television, or wireless phone? Did we at independence contemplate companies like MTN, GLO, Etisalat that now outshine the mainstays of the day? Now we even have a National Communication Commission even though it still has to learn how to regulate properly, like enforcing regulations that make carriers pay their dues to other carriers and policing the parasites whose applications prey on the infrastructure of the big operators. But those are challenges of a new Nigeria, a sign of modernity.

The PDP is afraid but all we urge is a little courage. Do they know that slavery and slave trade ended in the 19th century less out of charity than technology? With the industrial revolution sprang new machines, and they made superfluous the sweat and brawn of black men and women from the continent that novelist Joseph Conrad called the heart of darkness.

They now wanted Africa for raw materials and not raw men. As my teacher, Professor Tunji Oloruntimehin, memorably put it, “it was an act of enlightened self-interest by the Europeans to give the Africans a new role in the international economic system.” So Wilberforce, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, even the Quakers poked the conscience of the slaver and appealed to the tribunals of sympathy. You can add a writer like Harriet Beecher Stowe with her subversive novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. When the author visited Lincoln during the civil war, the president said, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this war.” Yet it was a new greed for the other African resource that singed the beast of war. Eli Whitney, for instance, invented the cotton gin in 1807, the same year that slave trade was abolished. The gin cancelled the work of slaves working the cotton plantations.

We need a new mindset, a scientific mindset, and if leaders lack that in the 21st century, how can the society ever develop an inventive imagination. Philosopher Karl Popper once said that we cannot predict the future because we cannot predict technology. We are at the mercy of technology. Today the United States leads the world for that reason, unveiling marvel after marvel. The Luddites were British but Britain was the heart of the industrial revolution. That was why it created an empire where, as some of its citizens boasted, the sun never set. The industrial revolution in Europe followed the scientific revolution that helped to rupture the Holy Roman Empire. As my other teacher Professor Femi Omisini echoed, it was “neither holy nor Roman.”

The PDP governors should bow to the card reader. The Presidency and its party should not try to subvert the future by manipulating the judiciary for a court judgment against it. Even the courts benefit greatly from technology. Where would justice be without biometrics, DNA, etc.? “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” crooned Alan Kay, the computer icon. The past invented today with all the gizmos and their bells and whistles. To reject the card reader is to reject progress.

There was a story of a movement that called for a museum of all inventions. They said humans had reached the limit of imagination and no new invention was possible. One of them was, of all people, Charles H. Duell, the commissioner of the US patent office. Hear him: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” He said so in 1899. But that was before the Wright brothers gave us the aircraft, Gugliemo Marconi the radio, before man ascended the moon and Steve Jobs radicalised our lifestyles. In 1943, IBM chairman Thomas Watson said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Did Obama not change election campaigns with social media? Yet the same American president ran into a snag when his website on healthcare collapsed. His society flayed him, but they didn’t want it to fail. Now it is humming. To kill technology is to kill time. “You can’t kill time without injuring eternity,” said D.H. Thoreau.

When leaders campaign against technology they fail as role models and cast aspersions on the future. They stop the society from dreaming. Once a society stops to dream, it lives in its myths, which are lies that suffocate. Let us remember what Karl Popper said, “Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths.” If we don’t fight our myths, we cannot make progress. We will lag behind even Ghana, Senegal and Sierra Leone that have used the card reader.

The President seems to have turned the Southwest into a sort of theatre. Playwrights of comedy cannot outplay him. Soyinka, Clark, Osofisan, Rotimi would bow to the creative sparkle of Goodluck Jonathan. For piety, we saw his role as evangelist. In one church, he prayed. In another he gave an “almost” sermon. Never mind he lied that he was invited. In one of the churches, the head said he invited himself.

For vanity, he danced shoki with scantily clad girls, showing himself a hip leader in good standing with social gravity. He has a special talent for latest dance moves, like the azonto wiggle that made his legs too heavy to chase after the militants who ferreted away the Chibok girls.

For officialdom, he commissioned a power project and asked a PDP candidate, Jimi Agbaje, to cut the tape. So serious was the affair that it fell short of its mission: to boost power wattage. For politics sake, he shunned decency and chose a candidate instead of the governor to do it. After all, the seriousness was matched by Agbaje’s recent comment asking Nigerians to identify who was more handsome between Buhari and his master Jonathan. That is the quality of his bold quest for Lagos? Farce as governance.

President Jonathan’s drama moved to the level of burlesque, which refers to a self-inflicted illusion of making yourself bigger than you are. So he moved around the traditional rulers. He begged and blessed them simultaneously. He begged for support and blessed them with dollars. In any emphatic way, he has not denied, neither have the obas. The accusation came from none other than the governor of example, Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN. A president bribing obas with dollars when the Naira is cascading ignominiously to about 230 to a dollar!

The President has not read much of Yoruba history, and if he had, he should have realised that Yoruba monarchs are only a tad more influential than the Igbo warrant rulers of today. By the way, the Igbo political elite and the so-called kings are like the warrant chiefs of the colonial era. Their powers over the people are minimal.

The Yoruba wars of the 19th century clipped the imperial grandeur of the Yoruba kings and princes. From having only monarchy they developed virtually every system in the modern era. The Ekiti had a confederacy, the Egba, a federalism, the Ibadan a republicanism and the Ijaye a military autocracy. All of that doused the power of the king before the British set in.

He made the matter worse last weekend when he humbled himself for prayers with some obas. Was he, the evangelist of a lifetime ago, saying a Christian amen to those prayers, most of which must have drooled with incantation? Or did they dilute it with English? What happened to all his bowing before the pastors and mounting the pulpit as the anointed one?

But that was not all the drama. He played the divider, too. He was quoted as saying that the non-Yoruba in Lagos were not receiving PVCs, implying discrimination. That tells you what? That Jonathan’s heart is not with the Yoruba. He is trying to give back to the Yoruba what some politicians of the Western Region did to their foes in the wetie tumult. They chanted, o rowo mi, o rokan mi, demo ni mowa (You see my hand, but you cannot see my heart. I am only pretending.) Jonathan is posing for votes. If he loved the Yoruba so much, why is he playing the non-indigenes against the Yoruba in their own region while splashing dollars and receiving their prayers?

But his real acolytes are the pariahs of the Yoruba nation. That is his drama by proxy. His men are the buffoon governor of Ekiti State, Ayo Fayose, the whitlow of the West, the mimic Mimiko, and a raft of renegades like Agbaje, Olaniwun Ajayi, Olu Falae, Ebenezer Babatope, Adesiyan, et al. The new agenda: that they want Jonathan back in the saddle in order to implement the points of the national conference. What self-delusion!

As Femi Falana has aptly explained, the national conference did not give the Yoruba what they craved. How could it when some Yoruba conferees were either naïve or tendentious enough – or both – to believe that the confab would amount to much. The Yoruba wanted regional autonomy, parliamentary system, state police, special status for Lagos, et al. the confab gave none of these. The conference ended before the political campaigns started. The President promised he would implement the recommendations through the National Assembly. He lied.

Once the affair was over, he set up a committee – like his many other impotent ones – that has receded into silence with no evidence of work. Now that he needs the Yoruba vote, he has rallied the traitors of the region to concoct a tissue of lies about Jonathan’s newfound love for the Yoruba. Granted he has the powers to implement the confab report, that report does not contain what the Southwest has hankered after for decades. So what was their post-confab summit about then? About a non-existent desire! They want to con their fellow tribesmen with a poison carrot.

If he loved the Yoruba why is he waiting six years after he mounted the saddle to show it? Why is he playing the ethnic card against them in their own backyard? Now he just nominated for minister Obanikoro who was implicated in rigging and blackmail scandal.

Jonathan should read the Yoruba history. If he does, he would realise some facts. One, the Yoruba at heart are the only ideological race in Nigeria. Two, they always did not see themselves as a people, except in language and some shared sensibility.  The Ekiti was Ekiti and the Ijebu was Ijebu. Everyone was under individual ethnic tent. Hence they had the paradox of an empire where one group, the Oyo, lorded it over others. That order collapsed with the Yoruba wars, with fissures that gave birth to a new set of elites, and systems and even cities. At the cessation of hostilities, a war-weary people became Yoruba, but they searched for a common political identity. Meanwhile they excelled at the level of culture, especially education, on the African continent. Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the greatest Yoruba man since Oduduwa, emerged after the reign of Herbert Macaulay. With him was born the ideological Yoruba, away from loyalties to ethnic ramparts.

Awo formed the Egbe Omo Oduduwa that foreshadowed the Action Group (AG). That was the birth of modern Yoruba political identity. According to historian Sklar and other chroniclers of the time, the majority of AG members adopted Awolowo’s idea of Fabian socialism. There were a few dissenters and stragglers, but they either cohabited with the NCNC or became opportunists within the party. The dangerous ones were not the Adelabus who pitched their tents elsewhere, but men like Akintola. They acted as though they loved, and grew like stalwarts until they unveiled their true hides.

But Awo’s prestige and stature grew over the years, and he became the reference point of progress not only in the West but all over the country. In our history, no Nigerian equals that Ikenne son in accomplishment, even in nobility. Everyone wants to be like Awo. So they want to associate with the platforms he might have endorsed. The Afenifere group today with shysters is one of them. We have other groups like the SDP, the Accord Party and even the UPN. They act like Awo insiders. Oscar Wilde said the coward shows betrayal with kisses, only the brave with the sword. These men are kissing Awo with slobber full of poison. Awo stood for free enterprise, integrated rural development, a sturdy education system that is free and infrastructure development. These men that hang around Jonathan cannot show proof that Jonathan espouses these ideals in the Southwest after six years. As Premier of the West, it did not take six years before Awo established his genius in the region, a thing that made a British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, to say if Awo were a British Prime Minister, he would have been one of the best. The best of the Yoruba breed inhabited his soul: the warrior’s heart of Kurunmi, the republican vision of Oluyole, the cooperative elan of Ogedengbe. The raft of renegades of today’s Southwest only has Judas’ mousy eyes. They are mercantilist opportunists and desperate carpetbaggers who want to play Esau with the pride and patrimony of their people. They are Jonathan’s people. They are the Jonahs on the Yoruba ship of state. So they should be thrown overboard on Election Day.