The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • The rabble or the law

    The rabble or the law

    The cliché that one day is eternity in politics did not only happen in Adamawa State, it may be the Adam of things to come in the country. It reinforces the topsy-turvy of the polity. Heroes emerge in a climate of corruption. Startled stalwarts turn their assured strides into pussyfooting.

    Now, we know that barring another judicial jolt, Murtala Nyako has been yanked off the throne. Umaru Fintiri is finito. Bala Ngilari is the eagle landing.

    Where are the Ribadu sweepstakes for 2015? Whither Buba Marwa? The man rejected is now the head of the corner. Ngilari swished out of the shadows to become the lodestar. The humiliated has become the illuminated. Beware of the ides of the court.

    So, the Adamawa drama reflects what can go right in this polity when we follow law and order, when individuals count for nothing except under the spell of the grundnorm of political behaviour: the constitution.

    The Justice Ademola Adeniyi verdict is a city set on a hill. Fintiri and Ngilari are PDP. But Ngilari was their forbidden son thrust into outer darkness. Justice flushed him back as the Joseph of the city.

    But travel many miles south, we see the flip side. In Ekiti State, rapine replaced respect. A court judge was harassed by loyalists of a governor-elect. In the same country where a court rules to uphold decency, miscreants in the vanguard of a politician of so-called grassroots affinity turned the hallowed precincts of justice upside down. It became the beehive of bullying, raw chants, barbarous dances, mauling, shirt tearing. A riot of the earthy. Dark and Macabre. This is what playwright T.S. Eliot called Murder in the Cathedral, the violation of what is otherwise called sacred.

    The capstone of this absurdity is that the court is shut down. The reason: to stop any adjudication until governor-elect Ayo Fayose is sworn in. Fayose is believed to be afraid that the court may nullify his candidacy and thereby fail to become governor. This is a gangster approach to justice.

    We should not forget that this logic featured in the same Adamawa of today’s justice. A martial air of jackboots and brooding guns pervaded Nyako’s impeachment process. Armed men besieged the premises of the courts and home of the judge. Ngilari was forced to write a letter of resignation. The then speaker, Fintiri, was the head as Nyako and Ngilari spun in the headwind. With Nyako yanked off, Fintiri swaggered into Abuja to tell his masters that he had delivered. His masters said thank you faithful servant but we want somebody else as governor. Fintiri fumed. He was now governor with a lot of power and hand in the cookie jar. His masters flinched and said he should stay in office till 2015. Ribadu or other favorite sons would wait to replace him. That was an agreement. The court judgment has denied us the drama to come. Would Fintiri have played Jonathan with them and denied any agreement?

    Fintiri sat pretty, peacock-style on the throne. Then Festus Keyamo struck as Justice Adeniyi weighed in on the side of the law. In Adamawa, the rule of law has prevailed, at least for now.

    We cannot have democracy unless we respect the law of the land. In Adamawa, Ngilari claims he was coerced to write a letter of resignation. Imagine that Nyako was coerced to receive it. Even the law may not have saved Ngilari. Justice would have cried impotent in the Nigerian wilderness. But Fintiri and his cohorts were so sure in their perfidy because they thought they were law unto themselves. We are fortunate for their folly.

    Yet the political behaviour of the elite in both instances leaves much to be desired. It was not just a PDP errancy. The APC crouched in the sidelines to take advantage. Atiku Abubakar fished in the stormy waters.

    Power in the raw beclouded a search for decency. The principle of the separation of powers triumphed in Adamawa. That principle is at stake in Ekiti. It is because our politicians love the Greek philosopher Meno, who postulated that might is right. But for these politicians, they love to subject the state under their manipulative duress. They forget that two things make democracy work, the rule of law and the will of the people. It is not might that makes right. Right makes might. Or else we shall have, as is emerging in Ekiti, a Hobbesian law of nature where life is “nasty, brutish and short”.

    The concept of the balance of power inspired Montesquieu to prescribe separation of powers first implemented by the United States. It was to avoid hubris, where the executive usurps the judiciary. That is what we are witnessing in Ekiti. The president should not turn this democracy into a gangster enclave where the gang is star. Where powerful men trump the law, we have what Hobbes describes as the “war of all against all”. In that case, Hobbes says, “the law of nature and the law of nations are the same”. Episodes like that destroy democracy.

    But Fayose can say he is right. The people have voted for him. True enough. But the law that made the elections also made the courts. The concept of the rule of law is to check even the excess and barbarian instincts of democracy. That was the misinterpretation of Rousseau’s The Social Contract when he called for the supremacy of the “collective will”. It detonated the French Revolution that burned France, ended in the Napoleonic orgies around Europe and installed one-man rule instead of popular government.

    In Ekiti, Fayose’s rabble is in the throes of installing a first in Nigerian politics. On a raft of the rabble, he now has a society of thugs. If he continues with them into the state house, Ekiti will turn its society of thugs into a state of thugs, thereby enthroning the savage virtues of the street.Then might becomes right. That was how Hitler’s rabble rose. This column is not saying Fayose has the sophistication or organisation or intent of the Nazi party. But he has a grain of it to the extent that he works with a rabble.

    In his book, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Alan Bullock lamented when Hitler became Furher. He wrote that a street gang had taken over the most powerful country in the world.

    Fayose should decide whether he will subject himself to the law or subject the law to himself. Louis the 14th once said, “I am the state.” He said it in the age of absolutism, or the divine rights of kings. Yet long before him, the man who framed the French State, the great Cardinal De Richelieu, noted that the state is bigger than anyone, including the king. When the state is bigger than anyone, the rule of law prevails. When persons privatise power, might becomes right.

    The Adamawa verdict affirmed the rule of law. Now, in Ekiti, is it the rabble or the law?

  • As Dimgba departs

    As Dimgba departs

    “live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had? … I haven’t done so enough before—and now I’m too old; too old at any rate for what I see. … What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that. … Still, we have the illusion of freedom; therefore don’t be, like me, without the memory of that illusion. I was either, at the right time, too stupid or too intelligent to have it; I don’t quite know which. Of course at present I’m a case of reaction against the mistake. … Do what you like so long as you don’t make my mistake. For it was a mistake. Live!” – Henry James

    One afternoon in 1997, I walked into Mike Awoyinfa’s office and it was not the clatter of his type writer that ushered me in. Nor his familiar voice calling out for a copy. The air collapsed under an aroma. Before my eyes caught him as I stood on the threshold of his door, I wondered aloud. Who had turned the office of the Weekend Concord into a kitchen of rare delicacy?

    When I saw Mike, he was crouching in furious enjoyment over a plate. Pounded yam and what?

    “It’s Igbo soup,” he said between swallow-fulls. I was evidently an unwelcome guest in his hour of union between palate and plate.

    “Ask Dimgba,” he commanded. I was already hungry. I went out and asked Dimgba whose palate was also talking to plate.

    “It’s oha soup,” said Dimgba Igwe. It was my induction to that Igbo delicacy, but it was also a moment in national unity. Mike did not know the name of the soup. But he tried it because his friend, Dimbga, an Igbo man, ordered it. He also ordered it, and enjoyed it. Theirs was not a culinary union. It was a union of hearts that transcended tribe, history, family. They were twins by soul.

    “We are birds of different colours,” crooned Mike at the service of songs held for him at the Evangel Pentecostal Church on October 4. But they flocked together in stunning harmony in a friendship that lasted 30 years. It had the potential of another 20-year run if the impetuous madness of a car driver had not ended Dimgba’s life while jogging on September 6.

    Those of us who witnessed the friendship of Mike and Dimgba saw a mini-Nigeria. Tongues and tribes did not differ. In a corporate life where heads and deputies often did not agree, they were an alloy. The chemistry was unlikely given the trajectory of a larger Nigeria. I witnessed this unfolding, and it never occurred to me or anyone I knew that there was any tension, any suggestion that anything could bring them apart. Ordinarily, anyone who wrote such a script would be tagged a dreamer. Mike a free spirit. Dimgba a contained personality. Mike a lover of the social tempers of the day, such as music, drama, Sina Peters, etc. Dimgba in thrall of gospel music. Mike of the outdoors. Dimgba a home buddy. Mike a poet. Dimgba a word processor. Mike the adventurous. Dimgba the cautionary tale. Mike a Yoruba man. Dimgba an Igbo man. Their paths tracked in the opposite.

    Their friendship did not make Dimgba less an Igbo man or Mike less a Yoruba man. It only made them more Nigerian. But reality trumped imagination. Anyone who anticipated tension at the beginning now rooted for them. But they did not need anyone’s prayers. They were always together, in Lagos, in London, in the New York, in Germany.

    “It is not as if we did not quarrel,” Mike announced at the service of songs to a hall packed with media icons. Doyin Abiola. Sam Amuka. Ray Ekpu.  Dan Agbese. Nduka Irabor. Etc. He referred to his jeans affection. Dimgba did not like jeans. He was always formally dolled up. He recalled an occasion when the even-tempered governor of Delta State was looking for them. Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan did not see Mike but noticed Dimgba. According to Mike, Dimgba poked fun at him afterwards, saying how could the governor have noticed him when he was dressed like a mechanic? Ditto when they travelled business class when his sartorial humility was out of sync with others. Or when they drove to a fuel station and Mike would not want to pay for petrol, and Dimgba poked at the “Ijebu man.”

    Dimgba alone could reel out a biography of Mike at his 60th birthday. Affectionate and unflattering, it was executed with the candour of a brother. Dimgba trusted him saying he could leave everything in Mike’s hands and “go to sleep.”

    New Telegraph Managing Director Eric Osagie and I saw them in their Weekend Concord days as a study of human harmony. Osagie worked under them. I wrote a regular column. In fact, Mike was the first person to believe in me as a columnist and made me write every week based on the day’s cover story. Dimbga was the one that enforced the discipline. Dimgba also made the point of getting me paid for it.

    “Would you take your column to your landlord at the end of the month?” quipped Dimgba.

    Eric and I saw how Dimgba made Mike shine. Mike was impulsive as Dimgba was the stabiliser. Mike bubbled with ideas but the technocrat in Dimbga delivered the goods. Mike wanted to work for money but Dimgba knew how to turn it into bread and butter. They played without jealousy or envy. That is why private and work life merged.

    Their homes are next to each other, and there is no fence. Between this Yoruba man and this Igbo there is no barrier. That is the trust we do not have in the real world. Mike lamented that when he fainted on a Paris street years ago, Dimgba revived him. But he was not around for his friend when death visited him on a Nigerian road. He was out of the country.

    The church launched a trust fund for Dimgba’s family, his wife, boys and girls. All the governors and the president ought to deposit something handsome now into that purse before their attentions move away as humans do. Dimgba was a special journalist.

    Mike also now carries the burden of both families. It was evident when Dimgba’s son, Chinazam, paid tribute to his father. He broke into tears, especially when he said the hit-and-run driver “killed a legend, but not his legacy”. Mike put his arms around him like a fatherin consolation.

    He also nodded in approval as Dimgba’s daughter, Victory, rendered a song of plaintive power for her dad. Victory’s voice, kinetic and electric, is a talent that must be nurtured to stardom.

    But he also lived a good life and enjoyed it. Mike spoke about their travels, how in Helsinki he exulted at Sibelius Monument in honour of the composer Jean Sibelius, whose song inspired the Biafran anthem. In Egypt they saw Pharaoh’s tomb where Dimgba mused on the vanity of power. In Israel at River Jordan and how now he regrets turning down Dimgba’s offer to baptise him.

    Dimgba lived his life well in tune with Henry James’ advice in The Ambassadors: “Live all you can.” Dimgba did.

     

     Giving unto Caesar what is God’s

    The leadership of the Anglican Church gave a political award to President Goodluck Jonathan last week. They called it the Primatial Award for Excellence in Christian Stewardship. It is a shame that an offshoot of the Church of England could stoop so low to give an award that has no bearing in the Bible. What has the president done to warrant the citation that he has distributed Nigeria’s resources equitably to all Nigerians. What Nigerians. They also mentioned Al majiri. Almajiri school is not going to solve the boy or girl education in the North. In fact, it will become a term of derision and discrimination in future. Do schools for all. Such tokens are no virtue. There are more almajiri than the schools can take. Where did Nicholas Okoh and his errant clergymen get their statistics of equity from? They were playing the politics of religion at a time that the Nigerian church is under a moral attack. With all the corruption story around this presidency? They gave Caesar what belongs to God, or stellar men of God in our midst.

  • A pastor and a president

    A pastor and a president

    Ted Haggard was a colourful cleric in the United States. He presided over The New Life Church in Colorado Springs, and he spoke with vehemence against what he saw as the depredation of the liberal politicians, including gay marriage, abortion and the foul air of addiction.

    He hobnobbed with the Republican politicians. So influential was he that he rose to become the head of the evangelicals in the United States. George W. Bush was president then and he frequented the White House. President Bush was a star among the evangelicals because he projected himself as a born again, and pointed out Jesus Christ as his personal hero.

    Haggard, like Bush, looked with contempt at those who did not belong to their world of sanctity. The liberal intellectuals fumed at Bush’s pious contentment, and growled impotently at his swagger and increasing popularity.

    Haggard visited Nigeria a few times and Nigerian evangelicals, including the teeming adherents who purred at the dynamic sermons of the gifted American. They knew he was anointed. Everyone in the spirit saw it with their eyes of understanding. Fire and brimstone flared against sin from his lips. The oil of gladness soothed the righteous from on high at the hour of blessings and miracles. Who did not know that Haggard was a significant part of the divine nature enunciated by Apostle Peter?

    Well, while the peacock spiritual preened, the scandal broke, and Haggard admitted that he was homosexual as well as a drug addict. It was an earthquake as devastating as the earlier ones that rocked Christendom in the same country. But those ones did not carry the whiff of drugs or walk with the gait of gays. Those were adulteries with women, including the secretary.

    But there was humility about Haggard’s confession. He did not play holy or untouchable. He stepped down from his high horse as the chieftain of the holy nation as well as The New Life Church. His fellow pastors and followers prayed for him, but they distanced themselves immediately from him. They knew that God and the church rode a high plane. Every pastor, however successful or anointed, was a speck in the large garment of the church.

    Not long after, the magisterial control of President Bush also waned. His approval rating cascaded. The Bush of Jesus Christ who plumed himself in holy confidence was now a liar. He had corralled innocent Americans to a war based on a false premise. He was no longer the anointed king just as Haggard no longer reigned as anointed servant.

    They had taken advantage of God, church and their faithful to project a false morality about themselves. They had profited profusely while many suffered, including those who slaved for them. Worse was not their servile condition, but their servile belief. They sacrificed their minds for them.

    I reflected on this narrative in respect of the scandal over the unaccounted trip to South Africa of an aircraft belonging to Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria. No Christian would joy to that story.

    We must admit that the narrative is not cut and dried. We have no evidence that the pastor knew about the money. We could however say that he ought to know. He leased it to a company that leased it to another. Technically, as the owner of the jet he ought to know what it was billed to convey, especially if it concerned such a large sum of money. And the $9.3 million belonged to the Federal Government.

    If the purpose was to buy arms to fight the enemy, Boko Haram, it was a sensitive transaction. He was also a frequenter of Aso Rock, and he worked with the president in the fight against the bigoted vermin.

    So how can he explain how he did not know about this trip given these facts?

    When he acquired the aircraft, he did not use the opaque language about having a residual interest in the aircraft. It was his and he needed it as the chariot of the Lord. He would win souls with it. Never mind it is luxury in the air with all the bells and whistles. The souls will soar to God on the wings of the anointed word.

    But once the scandal broke, he receded into residual ownership. But what was worse was that he has not employed a language of remorse or rhetoric of regret in this scandal. He just defended himself as though Nigerians cannot add up the facts.

    He has used the high elegance of CAN to defend the government of the day. He has abused it and wrecked its cathedral beauty. CAN under him has lost its holy majesty and its appeal to the grandeur of God. Oritsejafor acts like a false steward. He is not like Prophet Samuel in the Bible who finished his task and laid it bare to his flock that his slate was clean. He is not like Paul who crooned that he had finished his task and awaited the crown of righteousness.

    He is soaring in the flesh. Yet, our evangelicals, the pastors and bishops, do not seem to know that they should ask him to step down as an act of honour. Such scandals are not good for the church. Whether he knew of it or not, for the sanctity of that position, he should not parade himself as the leader of the evangelicals. Just as Haggard did, he should bow out.

    But it means our evangelicals do not care or know the implication of the scandal to the meaning of Christianity if they cannot raise their voices against what he has done. If Pastor Oritsejafor was too busy to know what his aircraft conveyed, it means he was careless. He should pay for it. In law, it is called indirect responsibility. The aircraft was not acquired to harvest cash but souls. The Bible warns not just against evil but “an appearance of evil”. If he is innocent, he does not appear to be.

    As for President Goodluck Jonathan, it is clear he does not feel any public regret. Until his government proves the South African government wrong, the story will go down as a connivance of corruption between his government and a pastor. Two sacrosanct institutions, the presidency and the church have fallen into scandal. We should not forget that this is the president paraded as representing Christ in Aso Rock. Is this what Christians do in authority? The South Africans deny any arms deal. Who buys weapons or anything internationally these days by hauling cash? One of the achievements of this administration is the cashless policy. The violator is the initiator. What irony.

    Both the president and Pastor Oritsejafor have many people who sacrifice their lives, respect and talent for them. When they fail as role models, they destroy the lives. Like Uncle Vanyaof Anton Chekhov, Russian writer’s play, everybody who worked for the big man woke up to discover they had wasted their lives because they misplaced their faith in one man. The same happened to Haggard and Bush.

    President Jonathan and Pastor Oritsejafor should know that what is at stake is not their little egos. It is the souls of Nigerian people.

     

    Enter the Mutawallen Sokoto

    The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal, was bedecked with a stellar traditional title on Saturday. He is now turbaned for his accomplishments as a citizen. He is perhaps the most level-headed politician of his generation. His quiet but visionary hand has held the often tempestuous House on an even keel.

    This is the same House of riot and broken chairs in the past. He has never attracted scandal to himself. He is equable in temper and felicitous in language. He has secured the House and it does not play slave to the executive, and he has defended his legislative turf. He does not play the games of tribal and religious fidelity in the way that injures the commonwealth of citizens. He does not carry an air of the superior personage. That explains why all the rumoured plots of presidential-inspired impeachment did not fly. He knows how to hold his own without vanity or flamboyance. He is humble without servility, effective without showiness, brilliant without bullying.

    That perhaps accounts for why the Sultan of Sokoto, another icon of honour, is giving the honour to another deserving, unobtrusive stalwart of the Nigerian polity. Congratulations, the Mutawallen.

  • The sheriff meets the don

    The sheriff meets the don

    There was no comedy of errors, even if it almost pillaged your ribs. On the surface, you thought it was a comedy. If it was, it amounted to a sour and dark drama. Never mind that the one whose name was sheriff was supposed to be the don. The real sheriff acted as though he was neither don nor sheriff.

    But then there were no errors. We had what might have been a great and historic mistake. If it was a mistake, it cost his country dear in terms of prestige and moral respect.

    So it was that the sheriff, the real commander of the troops and the custodian of safety in the land soared on his aircraft out of town and out of country.

    The land broiled in pious carnage. He meant to do something about it and traveled to his counterpart in a neighbouring land where a sort of solution might be brokered. He had been under the gun as a weak and bumbling sheriff. Recently a white man with a clergy’s bona fides had accused a certain man of stocky build and defiant visage. His name was sheriff and he was fingered as one of the dons behind the carnage of dubious believers. Of course the clergy accused one of the real sheriff’s own chiefs. His own former chief under the gun for gun running had denied as well as the man whose name was sheriff.

    Now, many have said he did not know how to run anything except sit idle in office, sign juicy contracts and enjoy the sweet languor of high office. Maybe he wanted to prove everyone wrong. But the story of his meeting turned more a drama than solution, if ever there was one.

    Picture did not lie. Not this time. The sheriff of safety sat with the man named sheriff who should be named don, according to accusations. Neither betrayed an air of discomfort at the other’s company. In between them sat the host. So, what happened? Was the sheriff supping with the enemy? That was the question. The media and the civil society quaked with questions.

    The answer was as puny as the logic of the picture. The sheriff of safety did not anticipate the presence of the sheriff who was don. They merely met at the airport lounge. The counterfeit sheriff did not take part in the real dialogue.

    If this was no comedy, if it was no error, the best it can be was a mistake. And what a mistake it was. But was it that the sheriff of safety and his team, after a normal full term in office, did not know the implication of a photo op with the enemy? As a writer once said, could he not have told the don not to appear with him, or even his host that this protocol presaged disaster back home?

    But speaking of protocol, did the sheriff of safety not have an advance party that certified the coast was clear, and the big boss would be safe in limb and name. Well, he was safe in limb. But more important than limb, his name was soiled. He visited because many of his subjects had lost limbs and name because the sheriff as don stood accused.

    Even while on the aircraft after landing, they could have told the host to ask the sheriff of accusation to leave. If that did not happen, what else could we believe? That both sheriff the real and sheriff the false were false together in the right to fight against terror?

    It is in tradition that sometimes a leader can work with an enemy as leverage to defeat the enemy. In crime, it is standard practice. Even that is not done in the incriminating flare of the public camera. It is brokered out of sight, like in a studio’s dark room. After victory, the picture blooms to public gratitude. Even the sheriff and his team deny this. So what can we make of this than that a man who is accused of burning the country is a friend of the man charged to defend it. The friend of our enemy is our leader. What paradox.Why had the sheriff of safety not punished anyone for not alerting him? Does it not show that he was comfortable with this don as sheriff?

    The case is not helped by the story that the same sheriff was allowed to play don in his home town when about 200 troops guarded him from airport to his home. This was a few days after the so-called chance meeting.

    So who gave him the soldiers? Does it show that the man has been legitimated by sheriff the leader? No one gets so many troops on his command without authority, an authority as high as the former chief who was under the gun for gun running.

    So were people right then to say that the border blurs between the sheriff’s government and the carnage engine going on in the northeastern territory in the guise of a god. Are we witnessing a conspiracy of silence or a naivety of conspiracy? Somebody needs to explain to the people of the land. Anxiety chokes the residents as days dovetail into weeks with blood and death.

    In this war, residents are yet even to get an answer where an aircraft belonging to the head of clergies is caught with enough money to train a thousand poor kids into geniuses of true transformation. But the sheriff of safety is in league with the heavenly messenger. They say it was meant to get arms to tackle the carnage demons. What happened to e-finance championed by sheriff’s government? But some said the aircraft story was not a mammon against demons, as they claim. It was a case of demons stealing mammon in the name of God and country. The clergy who had heralded his entry into the aircraft league had announced it as a chariot of evangelism. Now, how did it become a carrier of filthy lucre?

    It might be that the sheriff of safety does not know much about how to keep his people safe, and that would be a grave allegation. But that will be a trifle charge compared to when we say he knows how to do the job, but he does not want to do it but undo it.

     

    Mbu the lion versus Amaechi the leopard

    Recently, the former police commissioner said he was a lion that caged a leopard. He was referring to his tour of duty in Rivers State where he made a travesty of the calling of a police officer. He referred to Governor Rotimi Amaechi as a leopard. It was good comedy, except the former CP just confessed he was the slave of Dame Jonathan and that as CP, he was playing politics. It is a pity that after that shameless effusion he gets nods instead of knocks from his bosses. But what concerns me is his abuse of the metaphor of the animal kingdom. The lion, as we know, guards its territory. Others scurry away when it marches, roars and bares its savage incisors. In Mbu’s violation, it is the lion that vacates the territory for the leopard. What kind of lion shrinks away from a leopard if not an empty and counterfeit one?

  • Once upon a soldier

    Once upon a soldier

    He was one of the most misunderstood persons who ever lived. Throughout his life, he was human, a spirit, a bigot, a murderer, a conqueror, a hero, a pariah, a wretch, a myth, a thief, a buccaneer, an inspiration, a conspirator, a soldier as liberator, a soldier as mercenary, a soldier of destiny.

    When he died, many shed tears. Many who shed tears were his colleagues who saw the tempest of battle with him. But his plight many years before his death should have drawn tears from the same colleagues now shedding tears. The tears of the big-jawed reptile with intimidating scales. But they scoffed at him. He was poor, lacking meat and succour. But they would not help him. They would not visit him. They would not make a case for him. They waited for the extravagance of death. When death stalked, they balked. At last it came as it must, and it came in its sad plenitude. His colleagues poured out the outrageous liberality of their encomiums. They gave him in death what he wanted in life. Old age does not abide poverty. In Tennessee William’s play about how capitalism destroys family bonds titled Cat on a hot tin roof, a character says one can be young without money but you should not be old without money. That is why Western economies guard social welfare programmes. It informed Governor Kayode Fayemi’s now underappreciated programme.

    He was a great general, a special talent, a commander of men, they are saying. Not that he had no fault of his own. But he fought that this country may be one.

    He was in charge of the 3rd Marine Commando, a special name he coined for his division. He was one of the triumvirates that fought the civil war on the Nigerian side. General Murtala Muhammed handled the second division, while Shuwa held the first. It is an irony that the man most vilified by the Igbos of the three was this man who just died. He is thought to be the pre-eminent hater’s hater. He could not stand an Igbo man. He was killing them in droves, the civilians and soldiers. His heart was steeped in ice.

    Is that not why they called him black scorpion? He preyed on Igbo blood for his breath of life. Yet if you read your history well, you know that this man never fought in Igbo land. He never, in all the 30 months of battle, stepped on Igboland. He launched his battle in the epic Bonny landing, and his division took clan after clan, town after town, creek after creek, city after city, culminating in the fall of Port Harcourt. Irony still, Colonel Benjamin Adekunle spent much of the time in Lagos, seeking men and materiel. When he was in the Niger Delta, he was hardly in the theatre of war.

    Yet he is more demonised than Muhammed and Shuwa, whose divisions made mincemeat of human dignity in the senseless slaughter of Igbos. Shuwa and Muhammed competed for infamy. Shuwa had no strategy of war. He roamed Biafra like a roaring lion, sacking towns instead of soldiers, his men killed and raped civilians at will. Muhammed’s division conducted rapine and slaughter, not only of Igbos but subjected his own soldiers to savage risks on the River Niger Bridge. The Asaba massacre of Igbos, a veritable war crime, took place on Muhammed’s watch. Shuwa unnecessarily created panic and refugees in Igboland.

    Adekunle, working with astute men like Alabi Isama and Akinrinade, carried surgical operations. But it was not as if he did not have his flaws. His rhetoric during the war did not help the Black Scorpion. He voiced contemptible language that he would not spare the Igbos, etc. It is the kind of rhetoric called trash talk in American sports. But it was inappropriate in war. One of the paradoxes of modern warfare is that we have instituted urban etiquette in the midst of barbarism. All war is barbarous, yet we force some courtesies on ourselves. Civility in barbarism, the Geneva Convention. Adekunle’s lips loosed themselves in filth when he boasted he would deliver OAU to Gowon ahead of the OAU (Organisation of African Unity) summit. The OAU he wanted to deliver were three key Biafran towns. O stood for Owerri, A for Aba and U for Umuahia. Gowon fired him before he ever stepped his boots on Igboland. Yet he should have used civilised language about his intentions. It is on record though that 3rd Marine Commando did not maltreat the Biafrans they captured. From Alabi Isama’s book, The Tragedy of Victory, backed by pictures and documents, we know that captured Igbos were either allowed to return to Igbo land or were absorbed and retrained by the 3rd Marine Commando. So Adekunle was engaged in vaporous rhetoric. His bark sinned against him. It made him a primitive biter.

    Yet, we know that his successes got into his head. War commanders suffer such vanities. President Truman recalled MacArthur when he would not subject himself to civilian authority. Hitler also dislodged Rommel from the North African front for defiance. He was mistaking himself for the war.

    According to Isama’s book and authenticated by Akinrinade, the black Scorpion plotted an ambush to kill both men near Port Harcourt. Adekunle thought the profiles of both men were getting too big for him.

    Yet, without a doubt, he was the best leader in the civil war. He fought in the most difficult theatre. And it was his division that ultimately secured the surrender, although Obasanjo took the credit.

    Yet this man lived most of his life after he left the army in distress. The only time I met him was in the late 1980’s. He still lived in relative comfort. He said good things about Babangida, so I presumed that IBB’s regime was good to him. But subsequently, stories about him showed he suffered, and suffered abjectly. It became worse in the last few years when he needed medical care.

    In his book launched last year, Isama cried for him, asked for attention to come to him. He never enjoyed it. His fellow officers, some of them who still live in great affluence, distanced themselves from him.

    He became a pariah. He fought because he was called to service. He was a human who became a fierce man of battle. He was just carrying out his duty as a soldier. When Americans protested against the Vietnam War, the civilians sometimes misdirected their anger at the soldiers who were caught in duty. In their book, We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, Hal Moore and Joe Galloway wrote about their risks and near death experiences in North Vietnam. But he lamented he did not do it because he hated the Vietnamese. He was doing it because he had to as a soldier. It was like the poem of W. B. Yeats, in which a soldier laments that “those that I fight I do not hate/ those that I guard I do not love”.

    Soldiery by definition has no innocence. Sainthood belongs elsewhere. Maybe Adekunle’s sin was that he was a good soldier. If he was, he was also human. In my childhood days, I heard tales of him making disappearing acts, waving away bullets aimed at him, fighting without a gun, etc. When I presented these tales to him, he laughed and dismissed them. People fill voids with mythologies. That is how many gods are born.

    Adekunle’s tragedy is that many people failed to see him as human. Yet he died the most human death. The foible of history is that, now that he is dead, he may never be human again.

    More poignant for me is that this man fought to keep Nigeria one. Today with MEND, BOKO HARAM, OPC, MASSOB, did he fritter away his goodwill, youth and life on a hopeless project? I hope not.

  • Do we remember?

    Do we remember?

    She is regal in a self-effacing way. But she is audacious in a plebian way. She lived the glorious contradiction well when Oby Ezekwesili paid a visit to The Nation last week.

    Her royalty is unofficial, but it is borne not from being a mainstay on some eastern throne. It is out of her personal idiosyncrasy: her carriage, suavity, diction, the sublime simplicity of her sartorial being, a sort of intangible air of audacity that emanates from one accustomed to standing in the high places of the world. Her biography in international finance and the vault of government affirm this fact.

    But her plebian bona fides come from her ability to stoop, to take on causes often associated with what we can call “radical,” an anti-establishment persona that sees her taking on the Jonathan government with as much vigour as she exercised when she stunned an APC gathering with a piece of her mind. And when she is at work, her big, bold eyes convey a daring that can shoot down an elite quarry. It can also soften in the lofty way of the same corridor of power.

    So that was what I observed in close quarters during her visit. She came with a train of the Bringbackthegirls devotees. Her case was clear. We should not forget the over 200 girls that some miscreants whisked away in the name of God. With some of my colleagues like Soji Omotunde, Tunji Adegboyega, Lekan Otunfodunrin, Dele Adeosun present, Ezekwesili took us through the story of the kidnap and all the drama that we have witnessed since. She spoke with deep feeling. But what came out of the meeting was that she and her group felt the media had moved to other things. The story of the helpless girls has retreated into a footnote with occasional flashes. Revealing her plebian side, she wondered if the government would be so nonchalant if one of the girls was a daughter from the tony class.

    It was a good meeting, and I had to do some personal reflections myself, and I could not but agree that we in the media have not been fair enough to the girls. Stephen Davis, the Australian political geographer, as part of his earthquake ‘revelations’ about Boko Haram, said that the girls are subjected to molestation, and that they are raped at will. I think Davis is in a position to know. He is a negotiator on behalf of the federal government. The Jonathan government, in spite of its volubility, has not unveiled any statement on Davis as yet, except the lickspittle comments from Marilyn Ogar of the DSS.

    Do we remember the girls whose crime was that they became boarding students in a school in Chibok to write an exam? Do we remember that these girls were surrounded and the kidnappers took all of them in buses on roads that ran through Borno State where a state of emergency was reportedly in place? Do we remember that the spokespersons of the military gleefully flattered our relief when they said they had rescued them? Later it turned to be an apocryphal effusion, and that the only girls who ran to safety did it on their own heroism?

    No one should forget that the president, in his ritual media chat, virtually denied that the girls were missing, and asked the parents to provide proof with the list? There was also an inversion of culture when the first lady, the dame and mistress of the English Language, asked the mourners to visit her. We know that the bereaved stay at home, and condolences pour in from high and low. They were asked to come from faraway to visit the mistress of English who wanted to know if “na only you waka come?” Do we remember the cry to heaven that “there is God o,” and those who kignap  should not embarrass her husband’s government? She was particular about those “sharing blood.”

    We also remember that the commander-in-chief left the Chibok people to their calamity when he cut off a visit to the place and up till now, he has not visited Borno State, in spite of calls for the commander-in-chief to take command.

    Shall we forget that Shekau appeared on a video and mocked our government? No one will forget that Hilary Clinton and John McCain made contemptuous remarks about our government.

    The story of the Chibok girls is a metaphor of the collapse of the war on terror. BH is running rampant about the Northeast. The Jonathan administration has spent a trillion naira a year on defence. Yet, as Borno Governor Kashim Shettima noted, they have superior firepower over the Nigerian army.

    The first job of a government is security. If that government fails on that score it has failed everywhere else. What the Jonathan government is feeding on is a cynical psychology. His government believes that it is a victim. His supporters are hyping this morose psyche by saying the northerners want Jonathan to fail. Who in the North, I sometimes wonder!

    Is it the emirs, who are under attack? Is it the top politicians who have been victims? Is it their economy that is going to shreds? Is it the mosques or their top clerics who are hiding? If these people are really behind it, then they must be really suicidal and cynical as well.

    Some elements in the North say the Jonathan administration is allowing it in order to achieve a goal: keep the Northeast paralysed and consequently deadlocked for 2015 election. That view is being bandied about. But we have no proof of that.

    Yet what is clear is that the Jonathan administration has proved itself incapable of fighting down the insurgents.

    Our soldiers are good men. They cannot, however, do beyond their training, command and equipment. We have not seen the evidence of the huge money expended on them. Is it corruption? If it is, why has the president not asked his men, the ministers and the contractors, to account for what happened to the money? If he has, why is the situation still dire in the North?

    If the Jonathan administration does not handle the insurgency, it has no right or moral ground to parade the clowns of TAN who want him to impose another four years of imbecility on us.

    The other point I noted with Ezekwesili is the failure of Nigerian youths. In my days at Ife, the universities of the country would be shut down indefinitely until the girls are brought back. Rather some moral impostors in the name of NANS gave the president an award. Not long ago, they also gave Bode George. Our youths are a failure. My generation is no better. At least we began well. They are a group of never-do-wells who spoil the few good youths around doing good things. But as a generation, it is tragic. However, I was glad to see a few of them with Ezekwesili in their visit to The Nation. It is a thing of cheer. –

  • The good soldier

    The good soldier

    His wife begs for him. He flees to safety. A foreign leader mocks him. Outsiders not only save him but do his job for him. After a while, the outsider gives up and retreats. He cries out for resources. He endures the image of a bully in one assignment and a coward in another. This is not a riddle, if a ridicule. But it is a commonplace and tragic depiction of the Nigerian soldier.

    This is not the profile of a good soldier. But all of these have happened to the Nigerian soldier.

    Nothing has reflected this more than the rapine and swagger of the militant group Boko Haram. It has been common to blame the Nigerian soldier, to call him a bully when he flexes muscles against puny quarries in elections. When he cannot sack a town like Gwoza where Boko Haram flaunts its flag, he comes off as pathetically weak and cravenly.

    But we miss the point. The Nigerian soldier is a victim. He is not a scoundrel, a coward, nor is his DNA formatted for cruelty. He is human like every Nigerian. He breathes like us, has a mother, father, son, daughter, foibles and virtues. He dreams of a great future and fantasises about a happy life of home and roost after the clatter and ruins of battle. He is a lion and weasel like every one of us. Some can argue he is more lion than  weasel from his career choice.

    Sometime ago, when soldiers mutinied in Borno State, the moral underbelly of their plight was unveiled. It was then that many Nigerians understood that the army was fighting without enough gear, without enough motivation, and without a sense of mission.

    That made some to wonder, what happened to the humongous defence budget year after year, amounting to about a trillion Naira a year in three years?

    We can see that the problem with the army is the same thing afflicting our sports, healthcare, education and infrastructure. It was not for nothing that our football players wanted their allowances before donning the national jerseys in the recently concluded World Cup in Brazil. It is for the same reasons that schoolteachers care less about their wards than their lifestyles and personal survival. Or that doctors shun their Hippocratic oaths in spite of the Ebola rage. Ditto the lawyer, journalist, civil servant, medical doctor, parent, etc. The average Nigerian is not invested in their country. We are patriots as cynics and cynics as patriots. It is the same reason 30 per cent pass WASCE that our soldier fumble in battle.

    The plight of the soldier is the failure of the Nigerian society. We failed the soldier before the soldier failed us. When the soldier cannot have his kit, when he cannot match the arms of his rampaging foe, would he not wonder in his private moment whether his bosses have sent him there, Uriah-like, to die? They see the same people fund fairy tale weddings, survive scandals amounting to billions, hear of military contracts and do not see the effect either in their barracks or in their remunerations.

    Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator John McCain hurled near imprecations at the Nigerian army. The wives of soldiers protested the war on Boko Haram because they saw it as exposing their breadwinners to a meaningless death.

    Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima once made headlines when he said Boko Haram was more determined and better armed than our conventional forces. If they could raze an air force, take over swaths of land, fly their flags, install emirs and declare a caliphate, and weeks after, our army does not dislodge them, then Shettima was right. He did not utter that statement a week ago. When he said it, Gwoza did not crouch under a new flag, and Chibok played coy of the world map.

    Now the latest drama was a tearful comedy. About 500 Nigerian soldiers fled their country for shelter in an apparently smaller, weaker country. More funny still, it was not the Nigerian soldier but the Camerounian that escorted them back to Nigerian territory. The smaller soldier saved the big one, a David came to a Goliath’s rescue.  Nigerians stood by and admired the soldiery of a neighbour as they saved our own. It was like a scene in the novel, The Good Soldier, where a soldier admires the man making love to his wife. He does not love the scene, but the cuckold envies the skill, brio and virility of the adulterous man. The author, Ford Maddox Ford, almost called his novel, The Saddest Story.

    The same Camerounian army rattled Boko Haram camps in our territory near their country’s border. Normally, what the neighbours did was a breach of international protocols. But we are thankful for their sins. Is it not the same army that once bred men like Adekunle, Alabi Isama and Akinrinade? We forget that General Muhammadu Buhari, as a GOC once amassed his army and, in defiance of his bosses, roared to the same Borno area to defend the same territory now besieged and rattled. Times have changed. Surely we cannot blame the soldier. The blame goes to those in charge of the soldiers. The political elite, that is. In his novel, War and Peace, Tolstoy noted that wars are won not by those who shoot the guns but those who devise them and the policy.

    The Boko Haram militants’ edge also is in belief. They believe in their caliphate and theocratic dreams. The militant group ISIS that is rumbling through Iraq today relies more on the clarity of its ideology than the fractious, ill-motivated Iraqi forces. Hence, it is taking a foreigner, the American, to blunt their edges. The Americans believe in their country.

    We should not blame the soldiers. We should blame those who have not motivated them to battle. Soldiers have honour when the country invests them with it. It is the political elite who makes them bullies in election and retreat against the militants.

    This is the shameful irony of today: that the army soars in Ekiti and Osun polls like an omnipotent. But on their behalf, wives are panting in public. Like the morally besieged Lord Jim in Joseph Conrad’s novel of that title, the Nigerian soldier is one of us.

  • Fayose and Okada riders

    Fayose and Okada riders

    Ekiti State Governor-elect Ayo Fayose has announced that he would not ban Okada riders, but that he would buy them helmets. Is that part of his stomach infrastructure? He may mean well, but he should realise that helmets have never worked as policy in Nigeria. One, it does not save limbs or torsos. Recently, an accident happened when I parked my car on a street in Lagos. As I opened the door, an okada rammed straight into the half-open door. The motorcycle bore a pregnant woman. The bike, rider and pregnant woman tumbled on the tarred road. The grace was that no fatalities resulted, but hospital emergency was inevitable. First, he should have stayed away from a parked car. Two, why was he carrying a pregnant woman against the law? Judging by the speed, why was he in such a hurry?

    Another issue is superstition. People believe helmets bear charms that steal others’ fortunes and brains. We have seen this before across the Southwest. Even claims of vanished genitalia have been brandished. So the Governor-elect should be wary of turning populism into death traps. His PDP counterparts in Akwa Ibom and Abia, etc., have banned the two-tyred tragedy. He should learn from them, if he does not want to learn from Lagos where the restriction has dramatically reduced deaths and injuries. Stomach infrastructure can be pursued with better finesse and better use of public funds.

  • Acts of Adadevoh

    Acts of Adadevoh

    She has become the city on a hill. Luminous. Heroic. She cast her quixotic light over the pall of a people. But Nigeria was supposed to be a shelter for self-absorbed individuals who cared little for anyone other than their own. Yet when many forswear the country as a breeder of heroes, a heroine emerges. In life and in death.

    We waited for Dr. Ameyo Adadevoh to die, to succumb to the sly finality of Ebola. The germs snatched her before we bowed to the gem that roosted among us. Act one: She met the now notorious Liberian and Ebola carrier called Patrick Sawyer. Act two: She battled him until he rattled in the hospital cage.  Act three: she caught the disease. Act four: Physician became patient.

    But when the physician-turned-patient sighed her last, it was neither the patient nor physician who died. It was a person, a woman, a mother, a wife, a neighbour, a humanist, a heroine, a Nigerian. These incarnations fashioned the story we now know as the Dr. Adedevoh sacrifice. That was act five. Curtains close. The play haunts an ogle-eyed nation, forever.

    She was not supposed to be on duty, could have been ensconced in the safety of home and family. She did not crave death, but death craved her. “Because I could not stop for death/He kindly stopped for me,” crooned poet Emily Dickinson. Adadevoh just wanted to do her job. Sawyer wanted to escape. Death spread its sooty hands.

    If Ebola can pass as a metaphor for Nigeria’s other woes, Adadevoh signified a fighting spirit. The disease at this stage is in its infancy in Nigeria. To kill it now will make a virtue of infanticide. The efforts of the governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, to contain the spread reflects a reflex of a ready government.

    Yet, we cannot but look at Ebola, especially its capacity to spread, in the context of our non-biological plagues. They start as though they are nothing. When Ebola started ravaging other countries, we presumed national immunity. In spite of warnings, the Federal Government did not step up immigration controls and border monitoring.

    We assumed, in our zest for pious grace, that God would not let it into our midst. That was how our major ailments as a people began. When the Niger Delta insurgents sowed its first seeds, we passed off the militants as irritants. Militancy morphed into a monster. Gurgling our oil with bunker and bunkering mentality. Blustering about justice but seeking none and showing none. Showy in rhetoric and lifestyle. Lapping billions as blackmail and bargains as their megalomaniac frontrunners rolled in the lap of luxury.

    Boko Haram started as featherweight zealots on the fringe. We might have waved them a cynical goodbye, but they grew and grew. Now they have attacked military headquarters, stirred a mutiny, made hermit of our president, immiserated our people, denied God and Satan in the same breath, mocked the first lady’s literacy, vulgarised our vocabulary, installed an emir, installed flags, popularised a bevy of school girls, radicalised a region and a religion, and paralysed governments.

    We can say same of kidnapping. It grew quickly into a high and dark comedy. From school girls to minister’s mother. From about-to-weds to the president’s uncle. One Christmas, travel to the Southeast was a surrender to the net.

    But all of this came because of a perversity of bad governance that pauperised and alienated a people. What pauperised us? Corruption. Yet, Nigeria was never this corrupt. In the 1950’s and 1960’s, corruption was reviled. Today, the term stomach infrastructure has become a plebian way of sanctifying stealing, especially when the president distinguished it by distinguishing it from corruption. Nzeogwu’s coup statement fulminated against those he described as ‘10 percenters’. In other words, the government men, politicians and contractors stole 10 per cent of the contract sum. Today, they steal a lot more, sometimes up to 100 per cent. Contracts are reviewed deliberately to magnet new funds.

    It has infiltrated everywhere. Education is no longer important except as a mark of vanity. My former teacher Biodun Jeyifo lamented in one of his recent columns in The Nation on Sunday about parent apathy to education. He had visited one of Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi’s model schools that he praised for their potential to produce Nobel laureates in science. But the administrators told him the parents of the children were not interested in their wards’ educational progress. Why would they when illiterates basked in billions and barked at educated and urbane people who worked for them!

    The last WASCE results showed only about 31 per cent pass. Yet when a Governor Kayode Fayemi or Governor Adams Oshiomhole insists on standards, the outcry of foul play ensues. When we know that so-called okada riders are a menace to the health and safety of a people, some so-called literate people turn it into a cynical campaign ploy. Or when we know that university education of quality is never cheap anywhere in the world, we holler about elitism without seeking ways to tackle it.

    It is corruption that started by instalments in the 1960s that has rotted the flesh. It kills our cells with the malignant consistency of an Ebola disease. I am impressed with the way the government – both Jonathan’s and especially Fashola’s government – has shown sensitivity to the spread of Ebola. If we had shown such moral gravity in our other challenges, we would be a nation of envy, not mockery.

    Adadevoh represented that vitality. She has shown that all is not dire for us. Albert Camus made the point in his classic novel, The Plague. It is a novel less about diseases of the body but of society. The human spirit triumphs when everyone stops seeing the problem as others’ but everyone’s. That is the legacy of Adadevoh. If hopefully, Ebola is finally behind us, her self-sacrifice will account for why an endemic did not become a plague.

  • Limits of force

    Limits of force

    Two events happened recently to serve as a parable of caution. They included the people’s victory in the recently concluded election that lofted Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola for a second term as governor of Osun State.

    The second was Nasarawa State Governor Tanko Al-Makura’s humiliation of the House of Assembly in the bid to install the hangman’s noose called impeachment.

    Both victories are a cautionary tale. They warn that the people should not be taken for granted. In both instances, two trends were halted. In the case of Osun State, Ogbeni’s victory rolled back the PDP’s machine of rigging and brigandage. In Nasarawa State, Al-Makura’s steadfast cunning and the people’s resistance reined in the contagion of occupation by impeachment. Both weapons by Dr. Jonathan’s PDP took the country with a force of defiance. They hid under the law, even when it was obvious that they acted like gangsters.

    The tragedy was that they used the law to foist their iniquity on the people. It is like T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral.

    In Osun State, they mobilised all the armed forces. The military has chafed under the rogue firepower and unremitting onslaughts of Boko Haram. But against a vulnerable citizenry, they acted like class bullies. They did it in Ekiti State and went away with it. Buoyed by their victory, they beat their chests and rolled into Osun State. The idea was to rig by fear. But the people had not guns, but guts. However, they had the volley of vote. They were vigilant and set their eyes against any evidence of manipulation.

    The soldiers arrested chieftains of the APC and could not even exercise a veneer of pretence with token arrests of some PDP men. They lacked the tact and subterfuge of a clever cheat. We heard their muscles crackle as they bared their hairy chests.

    Yet, in Iyiola Omisore’s stronghold of Ife, the soldiers, including our hooded guests of barbaric honour, drove the agents of the APC out of town. We are left with the figures that they presented to the world. We may never know, given the number he reportedly polled, whether Omisore was that popular. If he was, the military has lost the moral authority to stamp it as truth, if as fact.

    In spite of their moves, the people’s vigilance made the point. The lesson from the Osun State election is that when the people stand by you, no level of institutional force can hold sway and legitimate law by terror.

    Some commentators have wondered whether President Jonathan can have that much hauteur to inundate all states with soldiers in 2015. In Osun and Ekiti states, it was easy to overwhelm the people with forces. There was massive army recruitment across the country. Some said it was against the terror of Boko Haram. Could that also by a vicarious preparation for military saturation of the country for 2015? Killing two birds with an army shot? Could it be a case of concentrating the forces in the strategic electoral terrain in the country for mega-votes? Time will tell.

    Questions still abound. What if the difference between the winner and loser is marginal, how can we trust the result if it is rigged in favour of the loser? That explodes the often referenced point that you cannot rig where you are not popular. It is only when your heart throbs as one with the vast majority that rigging is mincemeat. Even at that, it is possible when the voters are quiescent. In a Nigeria of cynical citizenry, that still poses a challenge.

    In Nassarawa State, it was a case of the governor and the people versus the lawmakers. They set a machinery in process and retreated shamefully. They claimed that the panel set up by the chief judge was compromised because two of the panelists were card-carrying members of the law-makers’ party, the PDP. So they railed against the constitution. As lawmakers, why did they not believe in the law and go to court? They became lawless men of law, subversive, servile to a poor conscience, trying to torpedo the very essence of their existence.

    The people flew into a ferment of rage and made no mistake as to whose side they pitched their tent. In this rent-a-crowd generation, the spontaneous fervor of the Nasarawa street reignited hope of an innocent crowd.

    The PDP said they had nothing to do with it. Yet in statement after statement, they backed the lawmakers. Hypocrisy? Yes. Impunity? Bigger Yes. They had done it in Rivers State and Governor Rotimi Amaechi was in tune with the lawmakers. What we have is a minority of law-makers who want to fetter the law by impeaching with a measly numbers. Sleight of hand failed. Stealth went sour. The heavy hand of the centre scented the state with unrest. Recently, Governor Amaechi’s tour to the contentious Obio/Akpor Local Government Area melted into a maelstrom of melee, leading to filicidal and patricidal bloodbath; father and sons waging war to the death.

    I think of Samuel Beckett, the playwright and poet of spare and rare genius. Among other masterpieces, he wrote Waiting For Godot and End Game, two plays that the PDP thinkers might need to read, if they have not. This Nobel-prize winning works show that the powerful can get into a fruitless rigmarole in their push to win. And their end game is futile, and like the characters of the play, they will become crippled, blind, either unable to sit or unable to stand. That is what the impeachment contagion and the rigging mania have shown. The PDP suddenly became handicapped. They should turn to the people as Ogbeni, Al-Makura and Amaechi. Not in the perversion of the law.