The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

Three unwise men

One is stocky, nearing ninety, with a comic face, dons a riverine hat, has a bitter tongue in his head but loves his role for not being a role model. Another is tall, slim, past middle age, has a face of shifty calmness, a lickspittle when he wants something and a Judas afterwards. The third is a prince who is a pauper in wisdom, who has made a living only because of his birthright; he is past middle age, not very articulate but a chameleon who knows how to live in and out of uniform.

This is not an age of riddles. Nigerians don’t need much elucidation on the identities of the trio described above. The first of course is Edwin Kiagbodo Clark, the so-called leader of the Niger Delta, who fattens on the identity of President Goodluck Jonathan whom he calls “my son.” In fact, he likes to call a lot of people “my son” or “my daughter.” Sonship and daughterhood have suffered from many tongues.

The second is the quisling governor of Ondo State, Olusegun Mimiko, otherwise known as the whitlow of the west. He is the man who has come out in true colours to the citizens of Ondo State and the vast, now wiser Yoruba race. Like leaves of autumn, he no longer can hide the colour of his teeth. He has been forced to laugh in public.

The third is Sambo Dasuki, the blue blood, who prides himself on only one qualification: that he is blue blood. On that score he rose in the army. On that resume again, he is the national security adviser to President Jonathan.

These three men epitomise the gloom of the moment. They are Jonathan’s trusted men. They are the point men of tragedy. There, of course, are others, like the buffoon governor of Ekiti State, whose audio tale is still unfolding. And Doyin Okupe, who was booed out of a church recently for campaigning against Buhari. But those are for another day. Then we have Musiliu Obanikoro, the minister whose imploded gubernatorial fantasies are driving him into all sorts of public misbehaviour both in and out of tapes. Then we have the service chiefs who have presided over cases of desertion in the military. Yet their failure to defend democracy on February 14 was desertion in chief. As Shakespeare noted, if correction lies in the hand that committed wrong, to whom shall we complain? One of them, Badeh, even scampered away with his family when the dreaded insurgents came calling in his village.

Back to the trio. It is because of these men that we have not known our next president now. The elections would have become history. But these men were afraid, just like their principal Dr. Jonathan. Since he has a PhD, I want him to write a thesis for political science with a tentative title, “the fear of elections: the Nigerian example.” At least, that PhD thesis would be seen by all, not the one on biology that is only heard but not seen.

Clark acted his part as an elder who is not elderly when he opened the slaughterhouse on INEC chairman Attahiru Jega. He was the first to call for the firing of INEC boss. Why? Because the man said he was ready for the polls. This elder who is not elderly was afraid like his master-son, Jonathan. After that, he led his Southern Nigerian People’s Assembly, an umbrella group of desperate fuddy-duddies and expired statesmen, to endorse Jonathan for a second term. Recently I saw a cartoon in a newspaper of Tompolo carrying him on his back to Government House, a spoof of his role as an interloper in the affairs of Delta State and how he now works obsequiously with militants, the same men who want to burn the country if his master-son loses. Let us not forget that the same elder who is not elderly had once stated that Jonathan was not in the second eleven of Niger Delta when the Owu chief made him vice president. That was the last time he was true to his conscience. Now, he calls the same man his son.

Mimiko, who has turned into a mimic governor, was very loud in supporting the service chiefs when they said they were not ready for elections. He is expecting Jega to be fired, which will light the tinder of crisis in the polity. The whitlow of the west’s younger brother is now being told that he would succeed Jega in newspaper speculations when the INEC boss is fired. Neither the mimic governor nor his professor brother has dissociated from the speculation. The speculated removal of Jega is so fraught with evil that Jonathan denied it in public. Why have both of them kept a sepulchral silence on it? No man who guards his reputation lets such words slip in public without rebuttal. Although Jonathan said he would not sack Jega, who can believe him? Did he not say that he went on his evangelical spree because the churches invited him? The churches said he invited himself and they could not say no. He placed his flawed finger in the holy of holies. If he could lie against the church of Christ, why can’t he lie about Jega? Did he not say in that presidential chat that PVC collection in Lagos was about 30 per cent when it had pushed around 60 per cent? It was presidential charade, not chat.

Dasuki was the first to fly the kite. A national security adviser did not talk about security in Chatham House when he raised questions about February 14. He spoke PVCs. He became a politician, not a security man. For a man who has lived both in and out of uniform, he thought he made the right sartorial choice in Chatham House. He wore neither uniform nor civilian clothes. He was naked, exposed as a civilian hireling. When he was appointed NSA, the reason was that, being a prince, he would help destroy Boko Haram. I wrote in this column that Jonathan erred in judgment. Boko Haram is a virus of paupers. A prince could not relate to them. A few weeks after, Dasuki stopped travelling to speak to emirs, who were also targets of the insurgents.

These men have been afraid of Buhari, and that is why the president and his men have published unprintable material that could cost newspapers billions in libel suits. Abraham Lincoln went through a similar fate. His detractors said he could not speak English, that he was a third-rate lawyer, that he was a backwoods man (bush man), that he was like a baboon, that he descended from an African gorilla. But he won the election because the time had come for him who had failed many times in his political career. He freed slaves and saved the union. Churchill’s political obituary was written in the House of Commons when he was 65 years old. He became perhaps their greatest leader ever.

It is clear Nigerians are tired of Jonathan and that is why we did not have the election last Saturday. They want another chance, just like the Governor’s Forum polls. They asked for time, only to subvert arithmetic. Sixteen became bigger than 19. The Ekiti audiotapes reveal what role the PDP assigns the military to rig elections. Before Lincoln became president, mammoth forces amassed against him and the abolition of slavery. Ralph Waldo Emerson then wrote, “the hour is coming when the strongest will not be strong enough.” Wise words.

Agbaje, Ambode, Sanity, et al

I received a text message twice last week from Lagos For All raising sanity questions about APC governorship candidate for Lagos State, Akinwunmi Ambode. Is this where the Agbaje Campaign is now headed? After failing to defend its candidate’s subversive gaffes, it now walks the dangerous terrain of fantasies. Agbaje joined the ranks of Tompolo and Asari Dokubo recently by saying that if Jonathan loses the election, Nigeria will be shut down.

The Governor of Example, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, exposed the man for not paying taxes but only paid for 2013 and 2014 and evaded three years. In a federal system, he also wants to sell his state’s birthright when he says Lagos belongs to the Federal Government. After all those implosions, the campaign cannot steer its course aright. Rather it is trading in insane fantasies. Is that what his godfather Bode George taught him?

In his short story The Madman, Achebe tells of a chief who runs naked in the public square in reaction to a man he had mocked as mad. Who became the madman and who is the specialist? Apologies to Soyinka.

February 16, 2015
The ambush

President Goodluck Jonathan once had a father. His name is Olusegun Obasanjo, aka Owu Chief. Father was so good to him that he schemed for him, imposed him on others, defended him against a weak and wizened man he made an elder brother to Jonathan. Predictably the elder brother passed on.

Eventually, father did Goodluck the ultimate favour. He perched him on power. Son showed gratitude to father. Father gloated openly over the triumph of son. He loved the son because he seemed pliant, obeying his every caprice.

With time, however, Goodluck did not have a good relationship with father. He looked at the reign of Obasanjo and saw how independent he was, how he flexed his taut and crackling political muscles. He wanted to be like him. But he discovered that they had different traits. He could not perform the press-ups and other political regimens exercises like father. Father is a bull, bullying, hectoring and riding roughshod. He is of a different breed. If father is bull, he loves another kind of creature, the one that does not shout or snarl, that leaves no mark where it inflicts damages, the feline, subterranean, slithering, sinuous, singeing masterpiece of the bush. The snake, that is.

He had to have another father. Quietly he divorced his father, and adopted another one, from the past. His name is Maradona. The difference though is that the Maradona he wanted to adopt was a colourful man, a soldier who had quotable quotes like “we should use what we have to get what we want,” which was a code for corruption. Or that he is “the evil genius.” He also had an elegant wife, even if many thought her a beautiful shrew.

Goodluck does not have the panache, that dramatic flair. His marries a woman without any of the attributes of elegance or taste or refined breeding. His speeches are droll, quotable only for their lack of insights and puerility. For instance, he says, “Boko Haram will go away someday” or “I am not Pharaoh…” Or “I don’t give a damn.”

But he loved the essentials of the man Maradona. He loved the art of deception, which is what snakes have in common with generals. IBB was a general who basked in deception until he deceived himself out of power. When you bring deception to governance, you go very far like the snake though.

The Owu Chief sulked quietly in his Ota farm before he started writing letters in his usual flourish and showing openly that storm brewed in the once halcyon family, and father and son no longer hugged or backslapped. Scowls now reigned where smiles bloomed.

Perhaps that explained why he visited his father recently. He wanted to hone the skills of deception from the father-master. The father rejoiced in his Minna mansion at the visit of the son. He played his Maradona game, by first adopting Jonathan, then renouncing him by saying his corruption makes mincemeat of his own fabled rottenness in office. Later he seemed to adopt the son again. It is credit to his Maradona majesty that no one can say for sure if he backs Jonathan or not. In the last Council of States meeting, he pitched his tents against Jonathan’s generals who said they did not want Jega to go ahead with the polls. Maradona father knows how to tread without footprints.

But Jonathan has been playing true to his new father. In the now contentious issue of postponed elections, he began by playing the game like his new father. He met with United States Secretary of State John Kerry who suggested that it was not proper to postpone the polls. Jonathan the faithful Maradona did not say he disagreed about election date. He simply said he would hand over on May 29. Just then, his National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, trotted to Chatham House in London where our governors and sundry politicians like to flaunt their credentials. He, a national security adviser, did not speak about security issues in the upcoming polls. He lamented over Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) that were not in enough hands for the elections. The presidency still said they were going to the polls on February 14. INEC chief Attahiru Jega assured the nation that he was ready for the polls and that 96 per cent of the PVCs had been sent to the states, while at least 66 per cent had been delivered to prospective voters.

When the PVC debate slipped out of the hands of the PDP, they began to shift the debate to security. Elements from the PDP began to suggest that February 14 was unrealistic. We should put it off. Reason: insecurity in the Northeast. Jega said most of the Northeast was not in the hands of Boko Haram. Even though the national average of persons with PVCs was 66 per cent, the average in the Northeast was over 70 per cent in Gombe, Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states.

In the Council of States meeting, only the service chiefs and Jonathan and the PDP governors did not want the elections. Former heads of state and chief justices and APC governors wanted it to go ahead. The whitlow of the west was singled out as pro-Jonathan, anti-election, anti-people henchman in the meeting. His name is Olusegun Mimiko, otherwise known as the quisling governor of Ondo State.

Insistent, the president sent out his mouthpiece, the voluble Doyin Okupe, – who was recently disgraced in a church – who showed that the president was afraid of the polls. He said one area was outside the powers of INEC: security. So the trump card was eventually in the open. When a snake wants to strike it will show itself since it is not a spirit. This newspaper reported on Saturday that the President demanded a six-week postponement from Jega. That very day, Jega announced that he was putting the polls off by six weeks. The witch cried last night and the child died this morning. Who does not know the connection?

In times of crisis, people show their true colours. We know the president cannot hide his false meekness. He can go to as many churches as he pleases and tell the Christians that he does not want to campaign as though he is talking to fools. We know the president was afraid of the polls all along. We know wolves in sheep clothing.

He has come out, like autumnal leaves, in true colours.

We should realise that Jega was coerced to change the polls dates, no matter what the INEC chief says. Jonathan withdrew security by letting his collaborating cowards of service chiefs declare they cannot work for the elections. Jonathan is the commander-in-chief. He it is who has abdicated his first duty to the citizens. The service chiefs only played along.

Jega could not answer the question as to whether he could guarantee that the elections would take place on March 28. He alluded to the constitution, which mandates an election a month before May 29. Nigeria is, apparently, relying on Chad and Cameroun who have turned the giant of Africa’s army into a dwarf of cowardice in battle. Smaller neighbours have become the Samson and David of the war on terror. Does that guarantee that they will sweep Boko Haram out by March 28? The Americans with all their sophistication have said it will take years to defeat Islamic State in the Middle East. Jonathan says six weeks. I foresee a constitutional quagmire that will bring the nation to brinkmanship, if not to its knees. When in March Jonathan and his men still know they are headed for a defeat, they would still raise the spectre of insecurity. They would invoke the doctrine of necessity and say that they want the constitution changed so that we can get more time to prepare for elections. May 29 will no longer be sacrosanct. I foresee a Jega resignation or ouster of some kind, and a struggle between those who want the constitution and those who don’t.

What we see today is a president who is running away from a time. But he cannot run away from time. He is running away from the people also. But both time and people will catch up with him. Maradona did same, postponed election after election and handover dates after handover dates. Eventually, the inviolate voice of the people spoke. Time always overthrows tyrants.

February 9, 2015
Prophecy

For the first time since this column’s debut in 2006, I will not install a new article. Rather I am re-printing the column I wrote on April 18, 2011, a few days after Goodluck Jonathan won the presidential election. I confessed my worries about the man’s victory and its implications for Nigeria. The column’s prophetic insights do not make me gloat, but are a cautionary tale to fellow Nigerians to look before they leap as we enter another election cycle. While apparently making me a seer, the prophecies do not make me a special prophet. In his novel Blindness, Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago says it is not blindness but refusal to see that ails our civilisation. I saw the wreck of the Jonathan presidency coming because I decided to see. The following article, titled: “No excuse,” is re-published whole. Read on and reflect.

No Excuse

The system worked, and we can say that Attahiru Jega has so far overthrown the fears of sceptics and ululations of cynics. After his initial bumbling, he is gradually becoming Nigeria’s model of an electoral mastermind, acquitting himself with aplomb, grace and calculation. He still has a few acts to pull off, and I have to wait to deliver the final and definitive verdict at the end of the election cycle.

So, as the tallies came in yesterday, it was clear Goodluck Jonathan would emerge the winner in the election for Nigeria’s top post. Even though I voted differently, I must hand him my congratulations. But the congratulations come not from my belief in the wisdom of the majority but in the majesty of the democratic process. Democracy is the voice of the people, and although the people have not always voted wisely or understood the import of their votes, no superior system topples it as the pulse of the people.

Let us not make any mistake about this, Nigerians did not vote for Jonathan because he has any plans to redeem the nation from its protracted woes. Jonathan has never staked himself out as a transformational leader. Few of those who voted for him think of him as a man of vision, as a man of competence, or as a president of executive gallantry. They think of him only in sentimental terms.

So when in the next few years, things don’t get better, no one has a right to blame Jonathan. Most of us did not vote for him to tackle the epileptic malaise of the power sector. We did not vote for him to tackle the dangerous slide in education. Our universities are some of the worst in the world from competing with some of the best. Many of our young do not know the rudiments of math and basics of syntax. If they remain so, and even get worse, we don’t have to blame the man at the top. He was not voted in to sow the seeds for the wise men and women of the future.

If our cousins or sons or fathers cannot find healing in our hospitals, we should not pour woe on the poor and ineffectual health care system. We let it be so with our own hands. If we read of huge sums of money in the centre going into waste pipe projects and dud dreams and a lack of accountability for billions of our money and patrimony, we should rather shout hallelujah.

Today we spend about 90 percent of our money on recurrent expenditure, which means only about ten percent will go to the construction of roads, the establishment of first-class hospitals and schools for the minds of the future. This has implications for the value of the naira against major world currencies. So if in a few years the naira slides to N250 to a dollar, and the cost of akara rises from N10 to about N100, we don’t have to blame the president. He earned our votes for a different reason.

There are four reasons I point out for Jonathan’s victory. One, the profusion of cash. Two, a class issue. Three, retreat to the rampart of tribe and primordial loyalties. Four, faith.

No one can doubt the sheer amount of cash that went into the Jonathan campaign. Billions of naira followed billions. Across the country, it was not a matter of whether you believed in Jonathan. It was whether you were a good contractor who could deliver. Whether it was politicians, cultural icons or business moguls, you were in on it if you could make a case for Jonathan. In the media, you could not miss out on the barrage of adverts, on radio, television, newspapers and magazines. It was sheer volcano, ripping apart the budgets and presences of the opposition. It was clearly an unequal contest. One needs to know where the money came from.

Was it NNPC, was it the money we could have spent on schools or hospitals or roads that got diverted? What of all the money reeled out by the Jonathan administration recently for some capital projects? Where are those billions? This is not a Jonathan problem alone? It is malaise of our politics. It is an undue advantage of incumbency in our politics, and it is not restricted to presidents.

Yet, as spending goes, I don’t think we have ever witnessed this extravagance in our history or anywhere else. The campaign did not deny the charge of spending N100 million per campaign stop across the country. And for the election proper, N3 billion was deployed per state. By some estimates, the Jonathan campaign may have spent at least N250 billion. How many roads can that construct, or how many people can that take out of poverty? How many schools would become world class?

The other issue is class. The imperative to get the Jonathan appeal across the country compelled the campaign to work with so-called leaders of thought, traditional leaders and business persons. They have one thing in common: the yen for power, privilege and pots of cash. So we had people who came to the Jonathan camp not because they loved him but because he flattered them with money to become part of the “new power circle”. It helped because Buhari and Ribadu were perceived as opposing the concept of governance as racket.

The other issue was ethnic and primordial ties. Those in the South voted him because he is one of them. Those in the North also voted for Buhari. In all the country, Osun State seems the exception voting for Ribadu. Majorities elsewhere voted their ethnic position. In a radio programme on Saturday, somebody called in to say he voted for change. What change, asked the anchor? The person said the first time he would vote in a person who is not a northerner.

The fourth reason is faith. Many said Jonathan is a Christian and that was enough for many. Bakare is also. But he is a maverick, a deviant manifestation of belief in Jesus. Bakare was not better or worse than his Pentecostal co-travellers who, by winks and nods and coded sermons, asked their flock to vote for a man of their faith.

So there. None of these had to do with whether Jonathan wanted to make Nigeria a 21st century nation. It was about his humility, his willingness to tout his shoeless origins, kneel before a pastor, flesh out the smile of the meek.

We just voted in a “nice” man, and that is good for Nigeria. If things don’t get better, they should not complain. The people can vote for their elevation and diminution. Jonathan can help their cause by transforming Nigeria. But can he? Can he free himself from all the hawks who made him president and who have entrapped him this past year?

He can prove his critics wrong. Will he? Does he have the fire in his belly? But we just have to wait.

February 2, 2015
Disrespect, death wish and lies

Governor Ayo Fayose thought he pulled off a great score with his insolence of an advert against General Muhammadu Buhari. And he did. For infamy, that is. And PDP faithful, including Femi Fani-Kayode and Olisa Metuh, bedecked themselves as Goebbels reincarnates because of their juvenile tales about Buhari’s certificate. Except that they are counterfeit remakes of Goebbels, who was known as Hitler’s liar-in-chief.

If Fayose’s lack of culture unveils the mistakes voters make in a democracy, the likes of Fani-kayode and Metuh indicate the failure of a generation – for throwing up barbarian upstarts as party denizens and role models. You can throw in the legal infantilism of a man like Mike Ozekhome.

Fayose’s lack of respect for elders and jockeying with death remind me of my encounter with former Senate President Chuba Okadigbo. He had insulted, with flamboyant irreverence, the Great Zik in public and dismissed his words as the “ranting of an ant.” Zik was upset and railed back at him with avuncular rage, cursing him that he would rise to the top but fall precipitously, like humpty dumpty. Those with superstitious imagination believed that Zik’s curse hit Okadigbo in his later years as his song grew suddenly dark and passed away like a jolt.

But beware of curses, even if they convince the facile minds. However, it was his sense of guilt that struck me when I confronted Okadigbo at the Lagoon Restaurant in Lagos a few years after his errant rhetoric against the great politician. I asked Okadigbo if he had apologised to Zik, and if the great Owelle accepted, or if he had not, and why not. He was having lunch with some guests and was put off, because he had expected me to cushion him with flattering questions as most reporters did.

Okadigbo flew into contained fury, and rambled about his peace moves with the old man and that it was not my business. I reminded him that when he ribbed the Great Zik, he exulted in public and why would he want to make it a private mea culpa if he did. That ended the dialogue.

Buhari does not have Zik’s flair for the dramatic, so Fayose may not expect a curse from the old general. Nor is it necessary. Fayose, in his primitive gusto, just showed to the Ekiti people why democracy can expose its own underbelly, its fatal terrors. When a clown mounts the throne, and whips up ethnic hate, it is no longer fun or funny. For those practitioners of the high art of comedy, it is a most dangerous oeuvre into the dark soul of society. It is like what playwright Samuel Becket describes as a laugh laughing at itself. It is sad. He made us laugh at ourselves in a gloomy way. Fayose wished GMD dead, and when it ignited an uproar, he repeated it. His party dissociates itself from it without condemning him. Not even President Jonathan, who the advert favoured. It was consent by silence, by a wink and a nod.

The newspapers that aired the adverts preferred money to decency. They now know they made a mistake. Freedom of speech is no licence to indecency. That was why the Pope cautioned the French and the editors of Charlie Hebdo magazine that desecrated Islam in the name of freedom of speech. As Machiavelli noted, “where everybody is free, nobody is free.” Machiavelli was no prude himself.

What was wrong with age? Did Churchill, the last lion, not roar with Britain at age 70 when he led his country in victory over Germany in the Second World War? Did the British not re-elect him at age 76? Did he not die at 90 exactly 50 years ago? Did Charles de Gaulle not reign in France until he was 79 years old? Were Churchill and De Gaulle not the greatest modern leaders of Britain and France? Did Mandela not salvage South Africa from the abyss of ethnic and racial turmoil at 76 years old?

Do we remember the presidential debate when Reagan was asked about his age, and won over Americans with a quip? “I will not make age an issue in this debate. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” It was Reagan’s winning quote of the election. Fayose is no student of history, but he did not need to study history to learn decency. His Yoruba upbringing might have taught him a thing or two about dealing with elders.

The certificate scandal should not be on whether Buhari was qualified. We should ask a different question. How come the file of an army’s commander-in-chief does not contain his certificate? How did he get other equivalent certificates and those that surpassed secondary school certificate? The question should be directed at a desecrated institution. Who sneaked into his file room? After all, how did he gain admission into Mons Officer Cadet School in the United Kingdom, or Defence Staff College in India? How did he obtain a master’s degree in Strategic Studies at the America War College in Pennsylvania, United States?

When he released his certificate, Fani-kayode, whose devotion to political harlotry is irredeemable, started clutching at straws. He also had fits of hallucination with his mendacious partner, Olisa Metuh. In this age of harlotry, Fani-kayode has swiveled in the chairs of political loyalty from PDP to APC to PDP. He is entitled to his own beds and partners.

When he released his certificate, Buhari must have thought he had laid the matter to rest. But hallucination was at full throttle. Fani-Kayode and Metuh saw what they wanted to see. In semiotic and literary circles, it is in tradition of what is called hermeneutics, or reader response theory. Thinkers like Althuser, Roland Barth, Shklovsky, and a few others explicated this human trait. Minds of mischief read mischief. As a man thinks in his heart, so he is, says the Bible. The text loses innocence in the eyes of the wicked. So even if Buhari takes the certificate from Cambridge and places it before him, they would not accept. They are worse than Thomas Didymus, who saw the evidence of Jesus and exclaimed in agreement, “My Lord and My God!” Fani-kayode and Metuh would start asking questions like, where are his uniforms and the spoon he ate rice with, etc?

In the West, it is easy to know if a person graduates from an institution. When I practised journalism in the United States, a Nigerian had lied to me that he was a neuro-surgeon, and his family and friends about did not deny it. I published a story on him. Then his estranged white wife materialised and denied that the man ever attended a university. He was a fake. All I did was place a phone call to the university he claimed gave him his certificate. They told me he never walked through their portals. The fake did not challenge the university. I used the instance to teach my students in the same university on the pratfalls of sourcing and reporting. Let’s not forget the disgrace that billionaire Donald Trump brought on his head when he tried to prove that Obama was not American. The racist failed to distort his birth certificate.

But it is not the driveling of men like Fani-Kayode and Metuh that should worry fair-minded Nigerians. It is when a lawyer like Mike Ozekhome plays devious games with truth and legal integrity by backing falsehoods. If Buhari has a master’s degree, it means his maximum is more than the required minimum. American War College could not admit him without requisite qualifications. Ditto to Mons Officer Cadet School in the UK. Facts are sacred, and opinions can be foolish. It is that sort of obsession that Charles Dickens mocked in his novel, Hard Times. Facts are meaningless without their use.

The pettifogging over certificate arises from mischief to divert attention from the real issues of the campaign, about war on terror, corruption, infrastructure deficit, failed education, etc. We can now ignore the Fani-Kayodes, Metuhs and Ozekhomes.

January 26, 2015
Mary Slessor meets girl bomber

When Mary Slessor visited this part of the world exactly 100 years ago, the killing of twins scandalised her missionary soul. Locals thought them a taboo. Twins sprang from the bad spirits in the ether world. So, slaughtering them did not amount to barbarism. Rather it freed their cultural consciences. Mary Slessor may have seen the killers in the light of Apostle Paul’s words, that their “consciences were seared with hot iron.”

But they did not hate the twins. They only feared them. The strange creatures were malformed dainties. They had to let them go. The culture wept when ogbanje’s slipped out of its own fingers. But the same culture exulted at the barbarity of its own hands that wrung twins to death.

Mary Slessor did not judge them. They did not know what they did. Even in Achebe”s Things Fall Apart, the novelist only scratched the surface of the benighted act, and no one looked at that primitive era of infanticide with righteous horror. Culture defines morality, and when culture is dark, good can be evil. Like in the poem Paradise Lost. Poet John Milton paints Satan in magnificence as a brutish beauty. “All good to me is lost,” chants the devil in that epic opus.

One hundred years after, the child still suffers in solitude. What will Mary Slessor think of the fate of the child today in Nigeria, especially the girl child? In the past half year, Boko Haram has hatched a new idea. Girl children are now deployed as bullets and bombs. They are no longer beauties but beasts. They haunt the innocent in the market, in the public square, on the populated streets, in churches. Young girls are innocents, but they are the scare of the adults and children and men. This is the height of perversion. They are like horror movies where girl children doom adults.

But Mary Slessor would have mused on the savage irony of the day. Young girls roused a different odium a year ago. We frowned, including in this column, at the sexual perversion of girl-child marriages. A governor married a girl of about 13 years, and he tried to fetch justification from the constitution. We mourned the prevalence of VVF, the physical damage and the psychological trauma, of the big men crouching in sexual ecstasies over unformed female organs. Governors do it. Senators do it. Bankers do it. We moan it. But no one has stopped it.

Mary Slessor would have campaigned against it. A moral heroine of that day, she changed a whole culture. Can a voice rise today to save the girl child up North? Mary Slessor had no Internet, or newspapers, or television, or the sort of bandwagon convulsion of the #bringbackourgirls movement. Yet she succeeded with the charisma of faith and majesty of moral suasion. Is this an age of irretrievable evil?

It is justified falsely in the name of religion. The answer, we opined, is the brilliance of education. Reports have shown girls in revolt. Some run away into an uncertain world, but prefer the wilds of uncertain streets to the servitude of sexual tyranny. Others sulk to their hoary graves in sullen slavery.

Now, while bemoaning this, we face another tyranny: the girl bomber. Last month, Zaharau, a 13-year-old, did not detonate her bomb in the Kanti Kwari Market in Kano. She disavowed the paradise of her so-called liberators and chose to live. Others have gone who obeyed.

Is the girl child not an endangered species? In one case, we moan rape. In the other, we mourn their murder-suicides. Those who marry them see them metaphorically as bombshells, alluding to their physical charms. The others see them as bombshells. The Chibok girl saga still haunts a nation that looks with paralysis at the failure of a government to do something strong, or to even pursue even a symbolic story that could ease the pains of the loss. The president visited Maiduguri to mark the Army Day Memorial, but was it an act of empathy from a president? He has not up till now visited the town of the notorious abduction. Does the president’s visit assuage any conscience? Who would say the president’s visit was not cynical? He goes to Maiduguri one month to election at the same time CNN features the eerie testimonials of Nigerian soldiers who buy their own uniforms and cannot access drugs. They confess that Boko Haram soldiers have better weapons and are better motivated.

In those circumstances, how would the Boko Haram fighters not raze down Baga town, and make away with the girls, and kill the men and recruit the boys? The greater evil is a government that fails its primary responsibility: security of its citizens. Foreign media have flayed President Goodluck Jonathan for condemning the attack on a French newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, while keeping mum over the massacre of Baga town that wipes the place out of the map.

How are we sure these girl bombers are not being radicalised by the sect, and launched back at us as messengers of death? Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, has terrorised many villages in Uganda and environs, and abducted hundreds of girls in the past decades. Some of the girls are stigmatised while others with children from rape and forced marriages are trapped forever. That is the prospect for the Chibok girls and others abducted. Zaharau’s case is another dimension. Her father decided to volunteer her for Boko Haram. This is another form of early marriage. Rather than force their 13-year-olds into marriages, they prefer apocalyptic paradise.

By ceding their kids to the sect, they believe they have done good to the Almighty. Whether they are defiled sexually or strapped with bombs to die while killing others, the parents think they have done good to their souls and to the Almighty. The new defilement is bad. I don’t know which is worse though. Is it the girl who lives in psychic turmoil all her life in a forced marriage or the one who dies in meaningless martyrdom in the name of the Almighty? One a living dead, the other a dead living.

This tragedy happens only when a state fails. That is why the president’s visit only helped to worsen a sense of alienation in the beleaguered citizens in the Northeast. If President Jonathan had visited them often and done more symbolic acts, his empathy would have registered, but not a few days to elections.

Essentially, to save the innocent girls, we must mount a campaign around the North to tell girls not to allow anyone strap any devices around their body. It is time to incite girls against murderous parents. These girls are too young to know what is happening to them in the name of religion.

Let us do what Mary Slessor would have done. Let us save the girl child. Girls are the mothers who fashion families that make cultures. It is one of the great tasks of this generation.

January 19, 2015
Parable of Father Mbaka

The signal tear is his poster photo. It glistens a narrow line down the right side of Father Ejike Mbaka’s face. It makes him a sort of modern day Jeremiah. The word Jeremiad arose from that Old Testament prophet’s molten tears over the iniquities of his time.

But whoever watched the video or read the full text of the Catholic cleric’s crossover night sermon of December 31, 2014 will know that his was not only a jeremiad. It was also a fiery rebuke. Father Mbaka had been around, but he only now gained national traction because of his pious perorations against the failings of the Jonathan administration.

In the Southeast, he had always been a phenomenon. The Igbo always knew him, whether it was when he twisted the ribs of the swaggering “Ebeano,” Governor Chimaroke Nnamani, or when he ripped open the hypocrisies and vanities of Governor Sullivan Chime, or even when he was much younger and fulminated against the barbarities of the Abacha junta. His shrill voice, like John the Baptist’s, ruptured the wilderness of sin in the east. Now, in this harmattan season, he has poked the Jonathan government out of joint.

So intimidated is the PDP hierarchy that a sulky silence is the only reaction to the less-than-an-hour bombshell from the pulpit. Olisa Metuh, who often bursts out of control, became a wimp and responded with a whimper of conciliation, almost begging the man. And President Goodluck Jonathan, who has now lost decency in his campaign speeches, could not bait the righteous tiger when he visited the neighbourhood of his lair at the Adoration Centre in Enugu at the weekend.

The only hefty voice who objected to Father Mbaka was Cardinal Archbishop John Onaiyekan, and he appealed to the inviolate supremacy of the Catholic hierarchy. But the gentleman cleric deliberately forgot that Catholic priests of Mbaka’s stripes do not bow to the Onaiyekan school of docility. He comes from the tradition of liberation theology that began in the 1950’s in Latin America. That brand of theology sees the gospel through the plight of the poor, and harangues a society that preaches the love of Christ when wealth and inequality lash the back of the weak and lowly.

With such stalwart priests as Gustavo Gutierrez of Peru, Leonardo Boff of Brazil and John Sobrino of Spain, the Catholic Church was jolted out of its elitist and tyrannous torpor. They probably had read of the exploits of Martin Luther who thrived on the ideas of Erasmus and Peter Abelard in the Scholastic era that led to the rise of the protestant movement. But these Catholic priests of liberation did not want to break out of the Church. They galvanised it as a platform not only to humble it but turn it into the way for the poor. Since then, some Catholic priests have pitched their tents with the downtrodden, and compelled the pope to recognise the poor. The present Pope Francis is the first modern Pope to exercise this radicalism with his emphasis on the poor and attack on tyranny in the world. While an Enaiyekan may frown, Pope Francis will cheer on his priest.

The effect of liberation theology coined by Gutierrez has ricocheted throughout the church around the world, especially where poverty and oppression are palpable. The priests see the word of God as a sword and latch on to scriptures like Paul’s that noted that Jesus was poor so that we might be rich. It resonated in the communist era, especially in Poland when a Catholic priest, Jerzy Popieluszko, found common cause with the Solidarity Movement that buried communism. Or in South Africa where anti-apartheid forces formed groups to rail at racism. In Nigeria, we have seen a few. Olubunmi Okogie, now greying at the temple, once ruffled the army brass. Outside the Catholic Church, we have seen a few do it. We cannot forget what Reverend Mbang did in the Babangida era when top officers sat in cold comfort in the church as the cleric tore them apart on network television. The irony of Catholic defiance is rooted in the history of the church’s cohabitation with tyrants, whether in the Ancien Regime in France before the revolution and even in the Napoleonic era or during Nazism or under Mussolini or the Sawdust Caesar’s regime. Perhaps that is why they throw up upstarts and rebels in the name of the Lord. They are contrasts to the Pentecostal order who tend to either distance themselves from or preach partnership with authority as we witness in today’s Nigeria. They don’t cry out against the sins of social injustice.

References to such scriptures as Roman 13 that call for obedience to temporal powers are self-serving. God cannot ask his people to obey rulers that lack the fear of God. Paul who wrote that fought against the order of his day and was beheaded, a radical of his day. Did Moses not rise against Pharaoh, or Daniel against the king? What of the trinity of Shredrack, Meshack and Abednego? Did Herod not pursue Jesus into a manger? Would the Lord have been born if Herod had his wish? Did Jesus not die a rebel? Did Prophet Nathan not rebuke King David? That is the logic of Mbaka, and the liberation theology. They know that the kingdom of God suffers violence.

So those who say that Mbaka once endorsed Jonathan should have listened to the sermon and the parable of the birds. He said, in his recantation, that Jonathan the bird did not fly in his vision, and he had to turn. The anointed Peter in the Bible, and whom Paul called Cephas, once had to reverse his position when he was rebuked by Paul. Those who know little about the lives and working of priests criticise him. They should know that the path of the just is a shining light that shines more and more to the perfect day.

Rather than flay Mbaka, why not probe the content of his sermon. He said Jonathan has failed. He said the Southeast has not enjoyed his service in spite of the Igbo support. Is it not true that President Jonathan has recruited the Igbo elite, plied them with positions and contracts, and neglected the common Igbo man? He has conned the Igbo with promises of bridges and roads and economic progress that never happened. Jonathan is a psychological booster to the Southeast, an Ojukwu reborn in a phantom Biafra victory. Hence he calls himself Azikiwe during elections and becomes Goodluck thereafter. His victory benefits only the top Igbo acting like the warrant chiefs of the colonial era. This is political 419.

President Jonathan is enemy number one of the Niger Delta. He rose on their back to power, and he has done nothing significant. For all their mediocrity, the military under Hausa-Fulani soldiers built refineries, petrochemical plants, major schools, etc. What can Jonathan say he did other than pursue Ijaw agenda? Even at that he has only energised a few of them. The Ijaw are some of the most pauperised in Nigeria. They sit on black gold and look like rust. The number two enemy is Chief Edwin Clark, an elder who is not elderly, and plays the role of interloper in the politics of the region. His age-mates now take the back seat because they have done their best and are tired. He is either saying un-elderly things or doing them.

We should heed Mbaka’s parable of the four birds. It mirrors the classic novel, The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosinski, about a bird that was isolated by other birds because of its colour. It was an attack on prejudice, especially during the Nazi era. If the healthy bird in Mbaka’s parable could not fly, the Jonathan administration should heed it, and so should his apologists. If not, Jonathan is the Judas who betrayed the Nigerian people. And, as the good book says, “his place let another take.”

January 12, 2015
Chicken rebellion

Should I thank God or accident that I am alive? My beak scratches my plumage into high gloss. Inside this cage, I cannot gloat. But I rejoice that I survived two major cups. The cup of Christmas and the cup of New Year.
I join you humans to say, Happy New Year. But I say that with a survivor’s guilt. Some of my fellows tumbled from your greasy stews into your grateful stomachs. You are a rare breed of human vanity. Your rich know how to throw parties and your poor are past masters at acting rich. For Nigerians, vanity knows no class distinction.
If you caught me, I might have digested by now, or become the gooey waste in the belly of your earth. But I don’t count on my survival, although I thought things looked a little bright for me when some bad news started to trickle in for you humans, especially the variety called Nigerians.
We learned that your buying activities were looking bad. People were getting poorer, and that meant more of us would live. Earlier in the year when those who pray to another God celebrated their annual day of mirth called Sallah, I wept with foreboding. My hairy cousins started to disappear.
Your money called Naira with which you do things was healthier then – sick as it was – just like the rams that disappeared. I knew I had to eat as much corn and other grains. As one of your prophets said, eat and drink, tomorrow we die. I knew it was a matter of time. I had to lay as many eggs as fertility permitted, and I did a lot in that department, believe me. Some of us died during that Sallah festivity. The poorer ones of your race came to buy us. I thought the holy book prescribed rams? I hate those poor folks. The rich went for the hairy cousins with huge palates for grasses. How they skidded out of sight, baaing away as their hooves limped behind their potential devourers.
But when November threatened, I was afraid until I observed that fear gripped our predators more.
If you noticed, quiet jubilation stirred cages all over the country. Well, most of you could not get it, except those who specialise in the psychology of chickens. You guys are too busy humanising our quirks to probe us. You call the coward chicken, you seek our blood for sacrifices, our feathers as ornaments, our flesh as feast, our eggs for pastries. You forget we have lives too. We love and hate, and mourn and play.
We learned that our owners moaned two things. They kept talking about oil, but that made us sad. They said the price was falling, and we thought it was bad news. If the price of whatever oil fell, whether palm oil, or vegetable oil, we were doomed, or we were fried. It would save your buyers more money to buy us. Later they said it was black oil, and we were puzzled. Were they going to sell oil already cooked? Was that a new trade? Even that would be bad news because it would mean recycling our fluid of tragedy.
But it became clear when they said it was crude oil and only the nation sold it. They said the price was falling, and that meant many of your buyers would have less money. That was the good news. That followed another: that the Naira was losing value. We always hate that piece of paper. Once it passes between the visitors and our owners, one or two of us disappear. So, it was doubly good news.
One of us, the cock with reddish-black plumage, wondered if they had not saved enough? Humans saved for hard times, unlike animals. Except goats who chewed cuds. One hen cawed, “this set of humans called Nigerians love life too much. Their leaders said they had what was called sovereign wealth fund and invested lots of billions from excess crude account with foreigners and another tranche of money of about ten billion dollars that could buy all the chickens on earth were missing in their pocket.”
All of us looked at the Witch Hen, and wondered how a fowl could know so much. She cawed all night breaking down the terms for our poultry minds.
She said while all of us were busy cawing, crowing and pecking away, she listened to the visitors and owners and picked a thing or two. Witch Hen said it meant life would be bad in December and there was a chance many of us would survive. Nigerians had little money to waste on mortals like us.
I asked, does that mean those who lead the humans are not better than us chickens. What we have we eat and go out as waste, and life is good. We think nothing of tomorrow. Why do humans have to worry about tomorrow?
Witch Hen said because the humans make life difficult for themselves like paying rents, buying cars, paying people to treat them when they are sick, buying material to cover their head, body and feet, cooking and baking bread and building markets and making cages like the one we are in right now.
I asked again, is it that the breed called Nigerians want to be like us fowls or animals now that they cannot save or make themselves make more money? How come in other places they do things well? Are these people going to lose control of us then?
Witch Hen could not answer, but promised to listen more and get back with us with an answer.
Unfortunately, I may never get the answer. Witch Hen was whisked away a day before Christmas. Maybe they thought she knew too much. Witches are not supposed to last anyway. I still wondered, if the humans were losing their money, it meant they could not buy us. We noticed that more of us survived this year when the carnage of New Year and Christmas came. Our owners complained in their murderous ways that it was a “bleak Christmas.” What is bleak about what makes us survive, although it was bleak for us because they reduced the quantity of grains in the cages? Better to starve and live than end in those cauldrons of delicacy they call stews.
As New Year came, traffic eased in the market. We are happy we survived. We learned that one man who prides himself on leadership by feeding stomachs distributed a lot of us free. At least, he should have fed them well before they died. The fowls looked so frail and lean. This came from a man who once owned a controversial poultry operation and could have been one of us. It was foul profit for him.
Now that everything looks bad this new year for the humans, it means we shall survive as chickens. They don’t have much money to buy us. The only thing I fear though, is that when everyone starts complaining of hunger, will the leaders not magically recover the billions that can buy all the chickens in the world? Then they will imitate the poultry governor and distribute all of us free. I doubt they will find the money. But in case they do so or take their habitual loans, I am going to rally all fowls for a chicken rebellion. If you humans don’t know your rights, we chickens do. After all, one of you who won a prize wrote a play called A Dance of The Forests where millions of ants mounted a rebellion against humans for encroaching on their bushes. With our beaks, preening, bird flus like avian and about 140 other afflictions, we shall fight for a chicken republic.

January 5, 2015
For citizens Fahat and Zaharau

His name is poetic and so is his soul. She has a popular surname, although she does not belong to high society. Fahat Fahat is a soldier, and is one of the 54 sentenced to death for mutiny by the army court.

Zaharau Babangida played coy by not detonating a bomb strapped in her body beneath her hijab. She said she was forced to wear it and detonate it in the famous Kantin kwari market in Kano on December 10. Two other girls yielded to the order and died in presumed martyrdom, killing four persons and injuring several others. In irony, Babangida was one of the victims and her leg injury forced her to yell for help.

Both stories tell tales not only of innocence but how this generation of leaders has failed the young at every level.

The story of Citizen Fahat Fahat is compelling. His English is flawed, but his poetic imagination surges with pithy lines. This young man’s ardour for the army and his nation contrasts with his present and ominous case. It draws not only pity for him but for this country.

Technology and the magic of Facebook unfurl this story. When Fahat Fahat, 22, left for his assignment against Boko Haram, he wrote on his Facebook on May 21, 2013: “Nassarawa off I go Maiduguri here I come, one man one bullet. We do good things to good people and we do bad things to bad people (sic).” His adrenaline rush springs from that page like a martial tide against the insurgency.

But if it was mere juvenile effusion, he showed that he was a patriot. “we ar train to kill. God bless Nigeria armed forces.” (sic). This is not the sort of guy who would shy from battle. He gloried in his soldiery and his martial prowess. He did not cut the image of a coward in these lines. He posted his picture, his thin, ruddy face and sharp eyes. His black hood on his Nigerian army fatigue reflected a man primed for battle. He had no complaints at that point.

It was clear he loathed Boko Haram, and he characterised them as bad people, as indicated in his post of February 28, 2014, “I am commando trooper junper canta force galopa amphibios. Above all a gorilla d king of the jungle, am trained to kill the wicked, am proud to be killer, we do good things to good people and we do bad things to bad people one man one bullet sumtimes one man one magazine.” (sic).

A certain gloating vanity drapes his ardour, but it is the sort that drives the soldier of destiny.

Yet in the course of his call to national duty, he suffers personal tragedies. He laments not only the passing of his father, but of his kid brother, Umar. However, his zeal for the army does not flag. Rather he posts with irony the following words on July 24, 2014. “Bless Thursday I lost my dad on Thursday my little broda on Thursday. I lost my elder brodason on Thursday O Allah your name be prase.”(sic). He posts Umar’s picture on November 23.

After all the optimistic drama came this post from Citizen Fahat Fahat: “Hello ladies and gentlemen, I am soldier and I am sentence to death by the Nigeria army. Cause we did not go to fight Boko haram with out equipment. We ask for weapon insted dem gave death sentence.” (sic). This was a mournful post, a contrast from the exuberance of the soul that once exhaled, “Maiduguri here I come.”

For Babangida, her father wanted her to be a parody of Ibrahim sacrificing Isaac. But Zaharau is a girl, 13. The father took her to a Bauchi forest where they wanted to compel her to paradise against her will. She disavowed the paradise, but her father insisted. She eventually had her revenge. At the last minute, she disobeyed. But for the wound in her leg, she might have disappeared quietly out of the disaster scene, or maybe the father would have forced her back to the forest, to the arms of her tormentors. She was taken in a tricycle to Dawanau where her parents resided. She left her bomb in the vehicle. The driver alerted the police and she was arrested in a hospital. She wanted to live.

Zaharau reflects the failure of family, if the tale of Fahat Fahat connotes the failure of national institutions. For Zaharau, in her hijab, was a devout Muslim. She wanted to go to paradise, but not her father’s or Boko Haram’s. Her father failed her and the so-called custodians, the ecclesiastical lords of her faith. It is like the Greek story of Iphigenia whom her father, Agamemnon, wanted to sacrifice to the gods in order to secure winds for the country’s army. But according to the plays of Euripides, Iphigenia survived. So did Zaharau.

She is a case of a budding feminist, a woman who would not conform to the bestialities of patriarchal world. We know that virgins are promised the boy suicides. Nothing has been documented awaits the girls. This is canonical prejudice from the texts of renegades of the faith. “The corruption of the best produces the worst,” wrote English philosopher John Hume.

For Citizen Fahat Fahat, he worked for the army, but they wanted him to fight without arms. Yet, it is his duty to fight, and not to desert. Did he commit a crime? By law, he did. Mutiny is a crime. The question is who committed the crime first? His country or he? Is it the case noted by novelist Samuel Butler that “society creates the crime and the criminal commits it?” An army does not send its troops to battle bare handed. Fahat Fahat probably had weapons when he started, when he boasted of one man, one bullet. He could not post his deficiency of arms when it happened. It would have made him liable for a court martial.

But how do we define the army without armoury? Especially when we know the dark exploits of Boko Haram, which has now occupied 20 of the 27 local government areas of Borno State. An army without armoury fails the soldier. Was that not what happened to Fahat Fahat? It is not the fault of the army per se, but the fault of those who pay the army to fight. Does Fahat not know that we have voted about N1 trillion a year in the past three years on defence? Yet it is the soldier that is rescued by a foreign army on our border with a tinier military budget and smaller armed forces.

In the Babangida and Fahat stories, we see how this generation has failed the young. If everything is failing, why not fathers as in the case of Zaharau? If money has failed, why not the army against the efficiency of a guerilla force?

Fahat Fahat believed in his country. Zaharau believed in her father and the faith he confessed. Both father and country inflicted them with doubt and gave them death.

December 29, 2014
Donor’s paradise

When it ended, the Goodluck Jonathan presidential campaign train hooted into the night with over N21billion. It was an obscene night. Billions topped billions. Sycophant outdueled sycophant. They all wanted to impress the boss, President Jonathan. They were good boys and girls. Loyal. They had kept the faith. They abounded with filthy lucre and they were not selfish. They loved their leader. They cherished their president. So they donated and donated and donated.

Who were these donors? Not the ordinary folk, but those whom the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in holier times, would have asked a few questions. But not these guys. It did not matter that these billions were strutting out in the shadow of Christmas. Many Nigerians are wondering, in their beggary, how they could afford the small derika of rice and an arm or breast of chicken. They wonder whether parents and children would say, Merry Christmas, with a burp of joy. Or their empty stomachs would howl in protest by zero hour of Christmas night.

But don’t ask the friends of Jonathan who set the evening afire with a donation of N3 billion. How did the man from Otuoke, who had no shoes, suddenly have friends, who could donate N3billion? Who made them rich and how? These must be very good friends who did not know money until their friend sat over the pot of gold.

You must know the socialite Bola Shagaya, the woman who knows how to schmooze every first lady in town. It does not matter whether it was the raspy-tongued Turai or the na only you waka come Dame. She stood for the oil and gas industry that zipped out N5billion. That industry had to be kind to Jonathan. We know how they have become peacocks of subsidy, buying jets and palaces around the world. They are also grateful that life is good even when the oil price has plummeted to about $60 per barrel and the Naira tumbled to 190 to a dollar. After all, if it is good for them, it is good for all. It is the same country where they complain of oil theft in a huge scale. The gas industry does not worry the president even if it flares our billions away in the Niger Delta.

Transport and aviation gave N1billion, humbler than the oil and gas kings. They were celebrating the great contribution of the President to the sector. Its rickety trains that took The Punch reporter four days to travel North and back; an almost non-existent maritime transport except for canoes that capsize routinely across the country; or the aviation industry that sullied the air with one of his great scandals that cost him one of his jewels as minister. Or is it the SURE-P buses that few see around the country?

The construction industry donated N310million. This is modest, if you ask me. But what construction have we seen in this country in the past six years of Uncle Jonathan’s reign? Is it houses? No. Is it roads? Of course, no one can vouch for that. His best friends are from the East, and he promised them Second Niger Bridge, and fibbed in public that he had gone far with dredging. He has not even corrected the first bridge. The roads are in bad shape, and he is doing token work on Lagos-Ibadan Expressway after endless cries and condemnations. Well, we can say he reconstructed some airports. But its roof has started to leak. The extension in Lagos looks good. It leaked during the last rainy season. We hope they will be fixed before the next.

Real estate donation baffles me a little. What real estate are they celebrating in Jonathan’s tenure that they donated N4 billion to his campaign? The poor cannot boast of new homes. In Lagos, the governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, has constructed several. Maybe he can take a cue. Is it the palaces that his friends have all over the country and the world that they are celebrating? It must be that. Four billion can save many millions from poor shelter if the money is redirected from the Jonathan campaign to the poor. Jonathan can at least remember the poor as he once was without shoes and bag to go to school.

I am sure Dr. Adeshina, the agriculture minister, who is swanky with bow tie and vaporous rhetoric, would have swooned in his seat when his industry donated N500 million. The man lies that we have reduced rice import by 60 per cent. The statistical illusionist should gauge the frenzy with which the poor pine for Christmas rice. His well-stocked table must blind him to the arid misery of the poor man’s kitchen.

One of the most darkly funny donations came from the power industry. The announcer thanked the president for privatising the PHCN. They donated N500 million. These are the DISCOs and GENCOs, who have complained that they did not have money but have fattened on several billion Naira of support from the Federal Government. They were laughing at the consumers who complained that there is no power but their bills keep soaring. They must have laughed at the protests in the streets of Edo and Oyo states recently, and the loud grumblings of discontent everywhere. The privatisation was a typical Nigerian kill-and-divide phenomenon. This column is written on generator. This is the president who told TELL before 2011 that they would “dash” him their generators. Many Nigerians would want Jonathan’s generator right now.

The auto industry donated N450million, and I ask, for what? What has Jonathan done for the commuter? Cars are more expensive today than ever. He says he is working to bring plants to Nigeria. But the cars are more expensive than the imports if the duties were not hiked to “protect” the locals.

I won’t comment on the comedy of Jerry Gana and his friends, who donated N5 billion, or the N1.05 billion from Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) governors.

Two things also should bother everyone. One, were these donations all from the private coffers or disguises over public funds? Is this public wealth or private wealth? In Nigeria, the distinction is foggy. Two, given the poverty in the country, did the Jonathan administration not rue the hard times, that it is obscene to announce such huge sums on network television. Is it not insensitive? They even opened two websites to seek donations. They flaunt money when the economy is choking the average citizen. The people saw this and they are taking note that the man wants their votes. They should beware that the fundraiser with its fancy clothes and glitzy setting does not haunt them like Nobel laureate Harold Pinter’s play, The Birthday Party, where a jolly day eventually becomes a regret. It may be the donor’s paradise but the people’s nightmare.

December 22, 2014
Buhari’s evolution

W hen General Muhammadu Buhari emerged as the All Progressives Congress (APC) standard-bearer, my mind did not ponder the future. I did not contemplate President Goodluck Jonathan, his opponent. Neither did I mull over permutations of his running mate, and the fiery battle in the offing.

I zoomed back into important memories, but not in a sequential order. The first was a story I read about him during those years of long fuel queues in the 1990s. Ironically we are experiencing that now in Lagos again. The Buhari story took place in a Kaduna fuel station. The line, huddled bumper to bumper in a serpentine and interminable sweep, kept the commuters hopeful. Word passed from car to car, commuter to commuter, that a certain dignitary was at the tail end, waiting his turn. This man did not send somebody, like other big men, to sweat it in the oven of the afternoon wait.

Who was he? A stir of curiosity followed a consensus of sympathy. It was Buhari, the former head of state. He became a spectacle, subdued, without the frills and pomp associated with personages like him. Some walked back to confirm and to nod in obeisance, and passed the good news to all. He was one of them, in the gruelling grind of irony, the irony of a fuel-soaked land pining for drops of energy.

Suddenly, by common consent, all cars yielded for the tall, gangly man with the enigmatic, if sometimes cherubic, smile. They paid homage in hand waves and cheers as Buhari drove in and filled his tank.

The other was when the media asked him, after he became Nigeria’s military leader, what he would do with the media. “The press,” he roared back, his eyes aglow with rage, “I will tamper with that.” He followed with Decree 4 and jailed journalists. In that interview, he also evinced contempt for democracy.

Another memory: He was a GOC and our border with Chad was collapsing under the firepower of insurgents. Garba Wushishi was his boss in Lagos and dithered over whether Nigeria should flush them out– sounds familiar. Buhari defied his boss and rallied his troops to rumble North and restore Nigeria’s pride and border. When Buhari was announced as head of state, I read an article in a newspaper cutting of the Nigerian Tribune on a notice board at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife written by Ebenezer Babatope, a former role model in that light. Babatope wrote it during the Buhari border soldiery and alerted Nigerians to the messianic spirit of the general. Babatope was quite prescient then, a quality he has lost.

Buhari is one of the few men in public life who have evolved before our eyes. But neither he nor some Nigerians seem conscious of it. With a calm face and taciturn tongue, he cuts the image of the anti-politician. Yet, if military idiosyncrasy teaches guile, he did not imbibe it. We know the other military virtues: outspokenness, courage, discipline. Yet, no great soldier, from Wellington to Napoleon to Grant to Alexander the Great to our own Adekunle, ever snatched victory without the ultimate war quality: surprise.

Buhari is perhaps the most predictable politician in Nigerian history. He does not seem to surprise everyone. Yet, he is the most surprising politician in our history. Some say he is the most predictable because, one, he is above board. He is a top politician who owns no business firm, owns only a house, travels light, has little money. Two, that he does not love other tribes. Three, that he is a religious bigot. Four, that he cannot be a democrat because he has no taste for cooperative action.

Yet, the Fulani Jingoist picked a pastor as his running mate. He has an unadvertised familiarity with some of the major evangelicals in Nigeria. He is called a religious fundamentalist, but he was almost killed by those some said he sponsored. Only a few months ago, his convoy fell to the bombs and bullets of Boko Haram, ending the lives of some of his associates and aides. That paralysed the critics who accused him of being a sponsor.

A democrat? He disavowed this as head of state, but after soul searching, he decided to give it the loyalty of his emotion. Yet, Buhari is no archetypal democrat. Without cunning, how does a man like him become a presidential candidate four times? How does a man without money form a political party of influence? He is a counterfoil to a Nigeria where money answers everything. In the last primary, he contested against a money bag, and two governors, each of them capable of razing the bank. He does not schmooze with his fellow politicians. He is not gregarious. A politician orates to compensate for financial insufficiency. He is an unadorned speaker.

He is said to present only one attribute for presidency: his integrity. He will stop the financial bleeding in this Jonathan world leaky with billions. Yet, he gave an illuminating insight in a recent Channels interview with Seun Akinbaloye. Buhari noted that to tackle Boko Haram, Nigeria should have held a conference with our three border nations Chad, Cameroun and Niger, and signed a treaty over border movements with infrastructure of implementation. Rather, President Jonathan keeps travelling to meet a head of state who is in cahoots with a suspected terrorist who was given a so-called guided tour of a plane loaded with arms headed for the country where the insurgents thrive and preen. A bigot would not think so creatively and so publicly as Buhari did in the Channels interview.

If we say he is not a politician, he beat that tribe to be a standard- bearer four times. He has no money, he beat money bags several times. He is called a bigot and almost died in their hands and gave us perhaps the best idea yet on how to mow them down. We say he is not a democrat, but he formed two political parties and helped form a third and rose to become its standard-bearer in the most exquisite presidential primary ever held in our history.

He is described as an ethnic bigot, but in the primary he garnered heavy votes from across the country. Yet Buhari projects a sort of ‘innocence’ in his public persona. In spite of his virtues, he lives with the barbs on his personality. He is not in a hurry to deny charges. He inhabits a disturbing equanimity, and that is perhaps why some Nigerians do not know that the Buhari of 1983, who appeared on television to give his coup broadcast in a beret on a winsome young face, has evolved over the decades.

He is vilified as a sectional leader, but without money, oratory, cajoling and the bravura of political structure, he is at the head of the greatest political coalition in our history. That makes the challenge for the electioneering campaign compelling. His image, speeches, character, Nigerianness and ideological projection require an animation and brio.

Buhari has evolved but it is time for his image to keep pace.

December 15, 2014