The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Eyes on Ojulari

    Eyes on Ojulari

    What observers have missed out about Nigeria’s new oil helmsman Bayo Ojulari is not just that the caps fits, which is a gorgeous cliché. It is that President Bola Tinubu has chosen the right man for this moment in Nigerian oil. After the oil act, the country needs a man of industry steeped in the commerce and mechanics of oil. As Mele Kyari passes on the torch as a transitional figure, Ojulari now has the chance to light the tinder of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPCL) as Nigeria’s fortress of oil.

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    The president picked him because Ojulari has the past for the present. He is an engineer who has traversed such mainstays as Shell where he worked at the very top, straddling policy and commerce, mechanics and philosophy. This is a well-rounded way of taking on the state of oil with its grappling with prices, the revving up of two refineries and many that are small and modular. With a behemoth like Dangote in the mix, he has the heft and pedigree to relate. It is also a time to confront further the power of crude cabals stealing in the creeks. He can now rejig the sector and set out, barreling ahead with our output per day.

    He is gifted with good executives, including Rowland Ewubare and Adedapo Segun. Ewubare is an old boy of Government College, Ughelli.

    Ojulari has swum in oil at the world stage. He has been in the upstream and downstream sectors. He knows the ins and outs of the industry. He can now set it onstream.

  • Is Peter Obi the praying mantis?

    Is Peter Obi the praying mantis?

    Pitobi amused me during Ramadam. First as a feeder of the poor. Second, as a praying mantis. Was he trying to show that he is now a Muslim or that he has sympathy for Muslims? So, when he sat among the small boys to break his fast, two things struck me. First, he was not eating the quality of rice the poor often eat. He tempted the poor with his upscale cuisine. The jollof rice was rich. Its colour could tickle a palate. I don’t know where it came from, but those boys must have been very titillated that evening when they broke their fast. They must invite him again as a good customer. Or he invited them. It was probably from Kitchen Republic or specially prepared by some happy chef. In the next Ramadan, Pitobi should wake up at 5:30 am and join them. Not his evening version of Iftar when no one can verify whether he had ofe nsala for lunch. Two, he did not communicate with the little guys. He was just eating and looking. How could he. He had not long ago showed contempt for them when he rallied his Christian elite in the name of election. He had too much contempt to relate to them. He was just smiling to himself. He was making love to himself.

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    I say praying mantis, because this was the same Pitobi who rallied Christians against Muslims, a pilgrim and crusader, not long ago. He ran as a saviour of the kingdom. He does not have to pray, but show interest. Maybe he would go to Mecca next. But if he must pray, let us know if he will apologise to those Muslims he threw dirt at during the 2023 presidential campaign.

    He is beginning to pray down our democracy though with ignorance. He says democracy is collapsing because he lost the election. He says no one should be elected unless they have over 50 percent of the votes. If we were to follow that, we can have only two parties. His Labour Party would not be in the running last time. This man needs to go and read history and political systems. There is a reason we have parliamentary systems and presidential systems and hybrids, from the United States to France to the United Kingdom to India.

    If he has a humility to learn, he can go to any university in Nigeria, especially now that he has a lot of idle time to cross religious line in journeys of hypocrisy. If he cannot go, I can recommend some books for him to read. He needs light.

  • Fubara’s Samson syndrome

    Fubara’s Samson syndrome

    The battle in the George Nwaeke household epitomises the fever in Rivers State. Rarely does one family unfurl the story of a society and a nation. For such dreams painters brush, novelists fantasise, playwrights dramatise and even biographers recall. They try to weave a social trend through the thread of a home, a family, an incident. For epic poets, history has given a lot of fodder, like Sundiata, Shaka, Ogunmola, Nana of Itsekiri, et al. Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman erupted from a historical moment.

    As the country comes to terms with the state of emergency and its aftermath, the Nwaeke family opened a window. We see the wife Florence in hysteria about a N15 billion blackmail. Around her, persons say nothing but look either in horror or approval, or in mockery of both quiet sentiments.

    She is, at that moment, a desperate wife, a romantic, social activist. To others, she is a Nollywood wannabe, a political hireling, the new face of the Fubara antic. She goes on, against the background of a high-tone furniture, as though she wants to crawl on the floor. But she does not. Her husband, Dr. Nwaeke, and head of service who resigned, has flown to Abuja. He replies his wife in public. This must be a precedent. The family washing its dirty linen in public. It is like the political family of the PDP. Wike and Fubara deny each other.

    The man says he is a former insider of the Fubara political machine. He saw all the workings of the former governor. His details are unflinching. He says the bombing that many saw as the casus belli for declaring a state of emergency was going to be a teaser, the first of many bombings that would turn the state into a sprawl of fire. It would stagnate the state and country. What did he mean? That Fubara wanted to reignite the ‘we tie’ inferno of the First Republic. In the Western Region, there were no oil pipelines. Fires and smoke repainted the streets in death and blood. Fire was mythicized, spat out by the gods. Juju was an oven conjured by babalawos. Streets became ovens. If the Rivers case was to torch oil, juju toasted the cars and houses and political enemies in the wild, wild west. It was wild, wild waste.

    Dr. Nwaeke was saying that Fubara had a Samson psyche. He wanted to pull down the Nigerian state, and possibly make the army come. Nwaeke charged Fubara of treason, of trying to overthrow our democracy. Was that what he meant when he told the youths that they would get instruction at the right time? Was this a case of a man who wanted to pull down the state if the state did not have him?

    No one has had this kind of charge since the treasonable felony against Awo in the First Republic? Fubara is no Awo, not in insights, stature or moral fibre. But Fubara had the resources to do it. The Department of State Security (DSS) ought to look into it. They ought to fight for the facts. Fubara has denied these allegations, and if they are not true, then, Dr. Nwaeke is the culprit.

    Nwaeke relayed his facts like a good raconteur, the late nights, the comings and goings in the state house, the dialogues, the names. We cannot forget graphic details of money, bags of money, in dollars hauled in and out.

    He said Bauchi State Governor Bala Mohammed came along, and Fubara wanted to back a northerner like him to confront a Tinubu second crack at the presidency. He also spoke of the funding of media and social media influencers to shape the narrative. Of course, we are aware of the television lawyers who were dead from the neck up when Fubara bombed the icon of legislature, the House of Assemby. They were dead from the neck up when he overthrew a branch of government and made four men the lawmakers, and pooh-poohed the constitution and the 27 men who were legitimate. They lost their tongues when he signed a budget in defiance of the law and built a cabinet on nothing. The lawyers goaded him on. PANDEF, especially under Edwin Clark, gave him the ballast while blasting his opponents and FCT Minister Nyesom Wike.

    Was it therefore true that all these persons were just working for money, and they did not believe in the Fubara cause? Look at it. These persons are now silent. No money to bomb pipelines and houses. They are not saying anything anymore. They are not organizing. The only person who dared was Governor Diri of Bayelsa State who posed as representing the Southsouth governors. When did they hold a meeting? Where did they meet? Who was present? Where is the communique? Who signed it? No wonder Edo Governor Monday Okpebholo called him out and he has remained mum.

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    The elders, including Peter Odili, who was an elder in name and age but not as sage, are not saying anything. Is it a confirmation of Dr. Nwaeke’s assertion that it was all fueled by filthy lucre. The words and agitation have quieted because the bags have stopped coming. The man in charge, Vice admiral Ibok-Ete Ibas, has shut the door. If we must hold the elders and the political folks and even the youths and social media responsible, we must not forget the lawyers. Shakespeare asserts, “the first thing we do, let’s kill the lawyers.” I am saying even if it is the last thing, the lawyers are not without guilt in fueling Fubara to fury. They all shooed him off the cliff. Humpty dumpty and what a great fall!All the king’s men…

    But it is an insight to the place of flattery and selfish prodding that men in office go through. They are turned into what Bertolt Brecht painted in his play, The Good Woman of Setzuan. The gods give a poor woman money and she becomes popular and everyone wants something from her. But generosity is becoming a problem, and she takes a disguise of ruthless business man, and that makes her new character unpopular and they want to stone her to death. Fubara is an example of the good woman who cannot turn bad and is wrecked by being “good.” A character says “I’d like to be good but there’s the rent to pay.”

    We have a democracy of rentiers and the rentiers wrecked Fubara through blandishments and favours. There is a place for generosity in a democracy, but not one powered by liars and frauds. The lawyers, elders, media rentiers and politicians steamrolled Rivers State into the state of emergency. They were the bones and muscles and bloodstream in the personality. Fubara just gave the roar, and he roared into perdition.

    Democracy must work with good persons though, in the line of Goethe, “Noble be man, merciful and good.”

    For the state to return to its quiet times of democracy, nobility is the key, not frivolity.

  • It’s all noise

    It’s all noise

    So, they say the president could declare a state of emergency but leave the house members and the governor intact. What does that mean? It means rolling tanks and stamping jackboots on the streets of Port Harcourt. But the house members could go ahead and impeach Governor Sim Fubara?

    But wait! These are the same people that say the house members should not impeach him, and that it would be an act of bad faith and a call to turmoil. What turmoil? Blowing up pipelines and blowing up houses, putting lives of political enemies and innocent civilians in peril. So, the president should send Nuhu Ribadu and his team to look out for those who want to turn the state over to the devil. Meanwhile, those in office still retain the resources and capacity for turbulence?

    It is quite unfortunate that it is reason that is upside down. The state of emergency is to stave off violence, but what if the violence will remain a clear and present omen so long as those who would foment are in their ferment because they have the power and pocket?

    Those who say this and call for constitutionalism were the same persons who prodded Fubara against the law. Against the same constitution, he set up a four-man legislature. They were the same television lawyers and commentators who kept mum when he blew up a legislative monument by way of the House of Assembly building. He also, against the constitution, passed a budget with four men. Also, against the constitution, he defied court order and organized a local government election.

    The same persons, against the constitution, are saying the Supreme Court erred by maintaining that Fubara defied the constitution. If the top court ruled otherwise, then he  would have acted like Obasanjo when he asked a dawn cabal of about six men to impeach a governor. It was the same PDP that did it and hailed it at that time. Obi said nothing then. Atiku was in PDP then. They did not stand up to their guy.

    They also, with intellectual mischief, refer to the Jonathan era when he slammed emergency on three states, Borno, Adamawa and Yobe. For those with truncated sense of the past, Jonathan was set to dismantle the democratic structure. This essayist joined the voices to restrain him. Why? The problem was not the political structure. The governors, including now Vice President Kashim Shettima, were not the fulcrum of the crisis. It was Boko Haram. In fact, Boko Haram menaced the political structure having mowed down and planted flags in local governments in most of the states. The state of emergency was needed to protect the political structures.

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    In the Rivers State case, the threat was the political structure. The players, in both arms, were at loggerheads, and the victim was the common Riverian. The democratic structure was going to overthrow democracy in the state. So, what is the value when it precipitates anarchy?

    The governor and the lawmakers were, in the words of Shakespeare, “both in either’s powers.”

    We are a nation that denies history, even as recent as a month ago, especially if amnesia bestows profit.

    We were witnesses when President Bola Tinubu called the warring parties, Nyesom Wike and Fuabra together with the state elders, and they signed a truce. And, on good authority, I report that the president had spoken to them individually and together many times. But they saw the truce as a piece of paper, a peace on paper and pissed on it. Each side did go rogue when they were not playing to the gallery. Sometimes, going rogue meant playing to the gallery.

    After the Supreme Court verdict, elders, including PANDEF, started looking for ways to avert impeachment. It is naïve to expect that the lawmakers would not want to impeach Fubara. Fubara was acting like a born-again respecter of law when he visited the House to submit his budget. He was stooping to conquer and the lawmakers knew it, so they did not take the bait. If they did, they would have legitimized Fubara. And the same fellows who hailed him for breaking the law would now hail him for obeying it.

    But his obedience was going to be a sacrifice. He would have enmeshed the lawmakers into his scheme, get his allocation, organize his local government elections, take over the state levers of power, cruise into 2027 with victory, and replace the 27 lawmakers with his own, and he would become all in all.

    Wike and his men knew this. At that stage, it was a question of power. Those who expected both sides would tamp down their vitriol and work together did not understand the interstices of power. For them to work together would require what Chinua Achebe describes as “niceties and delicate refinements that belonged elsewhere.” In the same novel, A Man of The People, Achebe posed: “What is modesty but inverted pride.” These guys had no modesty, but they fought for the jugular.

    There was no prospect other than a standoff and a standstill. If they were statesmen, we could expect both sides to wear off their malice and act as civilized men. But mutual suspicion brewed. If one man acted gentle, he would be the other’s fool. Hence, it was a zero-sum game. Novelist Bassie Head called it, “a question of power.” Thomas Hobbes wrote his Leviathan at a time England was a land of turmoil and standoffs. He proclaimed that “man is, by nature, selfish.” He knew that 17th century England did not abide the niceties and delicate refinement, but butchery.

    The first state of emergency in this country, in 1962, is sometimes invoked. The Awolowo part of the Action Group and the Akintola renegades precipitated semblance of a stalemate, not a true stalemate. They wanted Akintola out. They had the numbers. Those who lionize the Awo group over that fraught era do so because Akintola was a traitor to the political society of Egbe Omo Oduduwa and the AG that gave birth to him. For him to continue was seen as asinine, and Akintola’s decency gave way to Machiavellian hubris. AG men enacted what  is called real politik.

    Akintola could have finagled his way into power again and prevented Adegbenro from replacing him. He would rig his way in later. Tafawa Balewa, who had grudges against the Western Region and Awo over many issues, including its model governance, prosperity and the support of the Middle Belt Congress and the Calabar-Ogoja-Rivers State project, exploited an apparent turmoil to declare a state of emergency. Akintola was voted out with 66 votes out of 117. Akintola’s men would not relent, and were therefore planted by the centre. That state of emergency was an act of Akintola violence to nullify a democratic vote. The Privy Council in London endorsed his ouster. Was emergency a forgone conclusion? No. It was political machismo and machination.

    What the Rivers State players on both sides provided was what historians often restrain themselves from saying: inevitability. Those who say it was hasty, or excessive have not provided any alternative? By definition, in a state of emergency, nothing is sacrosanct. That is why it is so called. Democracies have been known, since the time of Greece, to foment autocracies. We are even witnessing it today. Russia votes a tyrant every election cycle. In the United States, the people voted a convicted felon. Democrats installed a plutocracy. What Rivers State gave is what is called kakistocracy.

    Section 305 reflects what philosophers refer to as hermeneutics, or reader-response theory. Everyone reads it from their own interest. The activist who must oppose government and the opposition will read it the way it likes. Remember they did the same to justify Fubara’s errors. They say, the section does not give the president powers to suspend the elected officers. It does not deny him the powers either. Soyinka responded a little hastily when he said it was “excessive” but he was still going to “go deeper and find out what was going on in Rivers State that led to what I consider an unfortunate step in our federalist journey.” No law covers every scenario. Hence, we have judges. The drafters often presume the good faith of its executors. That good faith was what President Tinubu exercised.

    If a Bokassa was a governor and became an unchecked butcher, or if we had a person like Caligula or Nero as governor, and the people could not stop him, or if a governor starts a secessionist drive as we saw in the 19th century United States, shall we say the structure should remain? Shall we continue with the law so that sin may prevail? God forbid. The law was made for man. Lincoln knew this, hence, in a democracy, he suspended the habeas corpus, and he was supported by Congress. Many called him a despot then. But he needed to save the union first. Democracy must obey necessity.

    Fubara told the youths that at the appropriate time, they would get instruction. A day after the lawmakers sent a misconduct note to Fubara, a pipeline hugged the skies with flames. As we say, a witch cried last night, and a child died this morning. Who does not know the connection? As my father Moses used to tell his children, quoting the scriptures, “If thou be wise, thou shalt be wise for thyself, but if thou scornest, thou alone shall bear it.” What happened was a warning this essayist has sounded in the past. It required no prophet, but just commonsense. But like Okonkwo of Things fall Apart and Sophocles’ Oedipus, the players saw the end but yielded to death wish.

  • The first malcontent

    The first malcontent

    It is only in Nigeria that a man like Mallam Nasir El-Rufai can offer a glib lip to the public. In other climes, he will bury his face and weep. After he gave an interview about never joining the PDP, he jumped into an empty shell called the SDP, and he wants the world to shout hurrah.

    Many are looking at his national profile and paying less attention to the effect in his home base of Kaduna. As they say, all politics is local.

    In his home, especially the APC, his defection is seen as a surrender. It is also seen as good riddance. As he left, many are rejoicing while others are calling for accountability. Those not happy include those whose houses he demolished with a bulldozer’s glee. Those he rid of their jobs. Those who want peace but he drove a wedge between Jesus and Mohammed. He coddled the bandits but, on his watch, they plundered, raped and killed.

    What of projects for which billions were allocated but no evidence of work even started? Over 25,000 civil servants retrenched and unpaid? What of chiefdoms taken from people and given over to herdsmen like the Ikulu as Leadership newspaper columnist Simon Musa Reef narrated, or roads neglected like the Kafanchan road where Governor Sani has intervened?

    The markets shut down, and they remained shut down until he left. While he was governor, he demolished shops, and the entrepreneurs are not happy. He sacked teachers, and the mallams of makaranta are not happy, especially after he hired replacement teachers and did not pay them. He gloated openly over the slaughter of Shiites in his state. He did not betray the milk of human sorrow. He could not even pretend. In Southern Kaduna, they accuse him of declaring curfew while the goons rumbled into their homes and huts and grunted afterwards like hyenas of occupation.

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    The local government politicians did not like him. The lawmakers, perhaps except for his son, have nothing but contempt for him. He is perhaps the only governor in the history of this republic that his legislative colleagues instituted a corruption probe on his activities in office. He might call himself a statesman but I don’t give him that flattery. If he accepts the notion that he is a statesman as he deludes himself, then he is a statesman without a state. I had characterized Peter Obi with that epithet once when he lost his party in the state before he lost his state to another party, and he has never gotten it back. PDP is not ruling the roost in Anambra State. Now, as a labour maven, LP is an underling.

    Here is a quote from a press statement by a charity, the Sheikh Dahiru Usman Foundation: “Under El-Rufai’s administration, security forces carried out violent night raids on our Tsangaya schools. They stormed dormitories, brutalized students and staff, and forcibly removed children from their hostels under false pretences. Some of these children remain unaccounted for to this day.” The foundation has given him up to the end of Ramadan to issue an apology. Failing that, they promise to take him to court.

    If El Rufai were an iroko, we would see an earthquake in the state. He left the party like a loner. He is a maverick without a structure. No big-time politician, no crowds cheering him out. No big crowd receiving him into the SDP. Rather the youths of the party have described his coming as the profile of an “undertaker.” They described him as “unfit and morally unqualified.”

    How could he move anything? As governor, he could not deliver Kaduna State for Tinubu. He gulped a mere 29 percent to Atiku’s 40 percent. What did he do for the president to feel entitled to anything in the government? He did not support the incumbent governor, Uba Sani, to be governor, and if the activist did not draw on his own pedigree, his iteration of the APC structure and his grassroots appeal, APC could have lost both gubernatorial and presidential polls in the state. We can see why his leaving did not inspire a squall. There was no comet seen, the ground did not tremble and even the al majiri did not scream or stream the streets.

    Ebenezer Obey sang, “Oyingbo market did not notice that no one came.” In the same token, Kaduna did not notice that anyone left, except for the relief that an irritant is out of their way. They can now sleep without the pesky mosquito on the window sill. He also left as an act of surrender. Having sought the obeisance of the governor and not had it, he accepted that Uba Sani is the numero uno of APC in the state. He had done enough damage. The people have shushed him away like a vagrant goat bleating about in the yard.

    The real noise is grating ears outside Kaduna and on twitter. He has been the nasty bird upsetting the dawn with songs without flavour.  He wants us to forget that he has cases to answer in Kaduna, over his stewardship. He wants us to think he was such a delicious kilishi in the APC. The gourmet meal must be missed. He feels he is such a giant that one has to crane their neck to see him in the room. He is like Nobel Laureate Gunter Grass’ character Oskar, who is small, insecure, peevish and has to scream to be noticed. His screams and all the plates and pictures and furniture have to break, shatter and scatter. He is a public desperado banging his shoes to gain attention. He is Nicodemus except that he believes he has miracles to offer.

    He is not the only disgruntled in the APC. He is just the first to move. He is the first malcontent. He is the Taiwo of defectors. He has been sent to see if the journey is worth it. They will find out, as T.S. Eliot wrote in his A Journey of Magi, that “a hard journey they had of it.” But in Kaduna APC, he is the last malcontent. The party has been disinfected.

    He is a metaphor of a fractious and fractured opposition scrambling for a voice. The thing is, whether it is Obi, or Atiku, or El Rufai, or Kwankwaso and the sundry others clucking in the shadows, they are all wounded men. Rather than heal, they want to fight with their limp hands, groggy feet, bruised eyes. If they come together, we shall have a coalition of the wounded, a battery of the battered. Let’s drink to their health!

  • Mary Slessor’s baby

    Mary Slessor’s baby

    It was my first and last encounter with her. It was virtual, and I wanted the world to see her and hear her before going gentle in that goodnight. Technology abbreviated our connection. The pictures failed, and the voice feeble when it transported across the zoom waves. When it was not feeble, it often tripped off.

    I heard her and took notes, and even recorded some of her sayings. It was good for the notes but not for television. Barely a month after that memorable encounter, Lady Mgbafor Melinda Okereke passed on. She was not a celebrity, but it was because, in Nigeria, we sometimes forget those we should remember and fail to honour those who deserve it. Lady Okereke was a twin, and not just a twin, she belonged to the first generation of twins – or ejima – saved after the scourge of twins that Mary Slessor defined her life by stopping. She was a gentle warrior, a liberator without arms. A paragon of the gospel not as an imperial weapon but as the spirit of the just made perfect.

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    Lady Okereke may be the last of that grateful generation. We can call her the last of Mary Slessor’s babies. Her twin sister Lucy died in 2012. Mgbafor was 94. As she recalled it, when she and lucy were born, Mary Slessor was already dead and buried. She died in 1915. Mgbafor and Lucy were born in 1930, and Slessor’s army of missionaries got wind of them in Arochukwu in today’s Abia State. They were Arnot, McKenneth and Dengham. They quickly rescued them at the Maternity hospital in Arochuckwu and kept them away from the hawks of culture, human birds of twin preys. Achebe captured this in Things fall Apart, but it is a story gaping for champions of narration in literature and history.

    The Scottish women preserved them in hostels and virtually trained them. They only saw their parents during holidays. She attended the Mary Slessor Memorial School, until she finished in standard six. She insisted to me that she did not attend primary school but standard school, which was what they were called until the 1960’s. In gratitude, she and her sister became missionaries and nurses and worked in Kano for a few years but the adventure was discontinued when Nigeria gained independence in 1960. “We were left like sheep without shepherd,” she intoned.

    All the missionaries left the country because they no longer had legitimacy or the permission to operate.

    I asked her if she ever visited Mary Slessor’s grave, she said no, and had no reason for it. She did not know of her rescue until she was 12, and did not know of Slessor until she was 15. As The Nation’s Edozien Udeze reports, fragments of that murderous barbarism still lurk some communities in the country. Mary Slessor is an example of what one person can do to rewrite history. The monuments may exist in schools, hospitals, hostels and churches, the real monument is the transformation of the society from fear to freedom, from bloodthirsty humans to humane.

  • Lion and the jewel

    Lion and the jewel

    One thing is sure. The history of the Senate, nay, the history of law making in Nigeria will never be written without that compound name: Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan. Some might even add, that that provenance must include the history of Nigerian politics. At least, the history of Nigeria romance, high-profile or low, city or subaltern. The history of man and woman. An inflexion point since that Edenic dawn when Eve slew Adam with her guile – maybe not!

    Some might call it a story of impertinence. The story of rebellion. A legislative equivalent of a gang rape. A penile tale. A servile tale. No one can dispute that it is the story of beauty. A woman, fair, imperious, intelligent, daring, against a powerful man.

    It is understandable that many thought she was suspended because of her sexual harassment charge. That is the power of sex, and beauty. Beauty is a dazzle, an obfuscation. The imagination of the public was entranced into a one-sided verdict, charmed by beauty into a foreordained fable. Steamrolled, henpecked. Beauty will save the world. Dostoyevsky might mean it in other lights. Not in the context of Natasha. Maybe Austrian Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, garlands the right sentiment. Says he: “Beauty is the beginning of terror.” In another place he writes, “an angel is terrible.”

    Senator Godswill Akpabio is a lover of humour who says he would be a comedian, if he comes to this world again. It’s no time for humour.

    First, the people say the Senate “gang-raped” the woman by not giving her fair hearing. Fair hearing? She sat on the wrong seat, against the rule. She wanted a better chair so she could be seen and preen, her vanity toppling the law? She wanted to stand up in the majesty of her resplendence, sash over her dainty locks and head, her eyes bold and her skin aglow. Camera as witness.

    Her accusation was about a public fantasy about a man and a beauty, Soyinka’s Lion and the Jewel, a beauty and a beast. That sort of fantasy can invoke rage. The rage about justice, a powerful man oppressing a fragile creature, a man exploiting patriarchy in a legislature full of red-blooded souls. Also, about envy, about why a man should amass such powers, and not them, why a woman should have such beauty, and not them. It is about opportunity. Time to nail Akpabio, the man who said things they did not like. Like “we are eating.”

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    But the issue is the issue. Did Natasha have proof of her case? Was it because she had been shunted out of the limelight? So, she decided to behead the man at the top? She was given an opportunity to appear before the panel, but she scorned them. She said she has concrete evidence, but no one has seen it. Shall we crucify Akpabio because he is a man, because he is her “boss,” because he can tease and make sexual advances? All men can make sexual advances. It does not mean when a man does it, it is true.

    Beauty is a magnet. It is a snare both for the woman and the man. This is not the first time beauty will subdue headlines. When it erupts, we forget everything. We forget bad governance, tribe and faith. We forget education policy, the slum of Mushin, the billions stolen yesterday, the foibles of tyranny.

    In the military era, a certain beauty known as Jennifer Madueke rocked the nation, a svelte, fair, benumbing vision, captured the imagination. It was a different kind of story. It was during the IBB years.  Names plopped down into the public ears.  From army generals to inspector general of police Oyakhilome to, can you imagine, Beko Ransome-Kuti. Civil rights took back seats to the blights of the flesh. A journalist, now famous, pointed her neck as the centre of her power. Neck like a cake, ramrod like a snake. She was the day’s Delilah. A beauty knocking down the mighty. It was a story of drugs and lust, penis and penance.

    Nor is it new. Even the only man God called his friend in the Bible was in thrall of a beauty naked in the wash, Bathsheba, who birthed a child that birthed many who birthed the holy Jesus. How could we have the Anglican Church today without a beauty. Anne Boleyn captured Henry the Eighth, who admired “her pretty duckies,” who must marry her first and upturn divorce history, and cut off the Catholic Church and form the Anglican. If beauty is the beginning of terror, as Rilke asserts, the king beheaded Boleyn, because of another beauty. Recently IMF chief failed to be French president because of a bubble of perversion with a West Arican immigrant and hotel maid, a tale retold with gusto and bravura in Chimamanda Adiche’s new novel, Dream Count.

    In ancient times, we learned of Cleopatra, who entrapped Antony and slaughtered her brother. Theodora was so beautiful that emperor Justinian of Rome changed the law to marry her , though a whore, a whore who fired male senses more than any seraph. If beauty formed a church and broke another, it touched off the greatest war in the ancient world. It was because Jason married Helen of Troy. Shaka the Zulu fell because of Noliwe, and Thomas Mofolo retells this tale but not as succinctly as Poet Senghor who wrote “the weakness of the heart is holly…” and he killed the beauty in order to “escape doubt.”

    But it is doubt that Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan leaves in the trail of her petition. For two reasons, though. One, she accused the man in his house, and the husband did not hear, and the space between them and the man? We need geographic illumination. It is interesting that the man did not say he heard to buttress his wife. Two, Reno Omokri she accused has proven her wrong in public. Her past has tainted her credibility until she has “concrete evidence.” Many may be enthralled with the witchcraft of her beauty, to paraphrase Shakespeare, but her claim must be proved. As Virginia Woolf writes, “Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.”

  • Adichie counts her dreams

    Adichie counts her dreams

    There is something eternally charming about Chimamanda Adichie’s new novel, Dream Count. One thing struck me. It tenants a quartet. In her case, four women. Two big-name writers precede her. Wole Soyinka with his Interpreters and his latest novel, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People in the World. The stories are told from four people’s perspectives. Chigozie Obioma’s latest civil war novel, The Road to the Country, also is about four people. Unlike both novelists, Dream Count is all about  women. Soyinka’s all about  men.

    Adichie’s women are Nigerians and one Guinean. The three Nigerians are Chiamaka, Omelogor and Zikora. The Guinean woman, Kadiatou, is the most compelling personality in the novel. But all four lament their lives in the United States. Chiamaka is a travel writer who dates white men after white men, and is obsessed by the haughty soul and intellectual pretentions of a black American who has nothing but contempt for her. Zikora bears a child for a successful Ghanaian, Kwame, who doesn’t see her again or the child. Omelogor is a disillusioned banker full of brio and cunning intelligence, who leaves banking in Nigeria to study pornography in the U.S.

    The core of the story is Kadiatou, called Kadi for short. It is the most beautiful part of the story. Sometimes she evokes in my mind David Diop’s Beyond the Door of No Return. Adichie rides high with flair and flow that sometimes surpass Americanah and Half of A Yellow Sun. She immerses limpid prose in rural Guinea and Conakry with familiar mastery, sometimes incantatory, sometimes poetic, but often brilliant. Kadi leaves Guinea with her child to the U.S, and she is sexually molested in a New York topline hotel by a VIP, the story inspired by the true-life story of the IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who molested a West African woman. She loses the criminal case even if she reportedly won $6 million in civil settlement. It is a different iteration of older male versus vulnerable female in Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck. Omelogor is fascinating as a confidante of a bank CEO who perches on a chair where peacock billionaires and indolent politicians launder money in uncountable zeroes of naira. She filches a few to play “Robynhood” to indigent women. It is graphic and Adichie writes like an insider. Unforgettable is Zikora’s mother who deceives husband and daughter of failed pregnancies though she has lost her womb after Zikora’s birth.

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    The Economist magazine pans Adichie’s novel for being explicit instead of  implicit, being the hallmark of the craft. Adichie has often said you must show rather than tell. There is something to the Economist critique, but the criticism is probably hurt because Dream Count ribs the West’s pharisaic hubris, and it delights to see Adichie act as today’s Moliere as she tears apart phrases and words the West deploys to assure itself as civilisation’s moral and liberal powerhouse.

    Yet, when the West writes glowingly about the novel’s Nigerian women, we must note that they are all Igbo women, nothing wrong with that.  A tribal trope when Omelogor befriends Hauwa to brandish an air of a liberal while she puts down other Fulani employees as little minds, and cannot confide in Hauwa about her “Robynhood” scheme while her Igbo kin know. The writer seems to tease the audience with a character called Jide. The reader may think, at last a Yoruba character. But Jide is short for Jideofor, who cannot land a Lagos job until he presents his name without the Igbo surname but as Jide Thomas. The men in the book lack moral heft or interior nobility, and the women enact the last verdict, as though a novel from the Elizabeth Cady Stanton. That makes Dream Count’s author a sort of feminist czar. The novel begins slowly, sometimes bullying the reader with didactic lines but it wakes up and runs masterfully.

  • Hell Rufai

    Hell Rufai

    Nasir El-Rufai made it a date on television, and he thought he should let us know it was his first interview. It is what media theorists call pseudo-event. An act billed as more than it is really worth. It would have been less than a hype if he had clipped his lips since he left office as Kaduna State helmsman.

    But the voluble fellow has been talking, and he has not stopped. So, it is not new that he granted an interview. He just created a stage in order to ballyhoo. Very soon he will grant another interview. He likes to talk, he likes to hear his voice, he wants to be the tallest person in the building.

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    But what he said in the interview that struck this essayist were two. First, he tried to describe the president as an “area boy” while distinguishing from omoluabi in characterising the nation’s leader. How bitter could one get to reach down to such a nadir of thought and language! The other thing he said was that he was no longer a friend to his successor, Governor Uba Sani. He added NSA Nuhu Ribadu and he implied they are in cahoots to undermine him. Ribadu lashed back, but Governor Sani has always restrained himself, which is a classy way to respond to such a man.

    Now, who is he to speak of friendship? Ask Obj, who was once his friend. In the heydays of their warmth, he knelt to him. He was an obedient public servant, but the kneeling was not accidental. It was a calculated humility. He wanted to stoop to conquer. He eulogized Yar Adua, and knelt. He praised and kneeled for Atiku, kneeled for Buhari. For goodness’ sake, he kneeled for Asiwaju Tinubu. He has turned his back to these guys. So, who wants to be his friend. He thinks being his friend is a prize. Rather it is a price. No one wants to pay. He says he won’t go to PDP. He said the APC has left him. Who would not leave such a man who does not stick to a friend?

  • Our top comedians

    Our top comedians

    Comedy is a cousin of tragedy. When comedy enacts a scene, it is like a traitor in the family. It makes us laugh, but it is often about something sad. I think this way about two characters in our politics today. They are from different geopolitics, although they belong, by coincidence, to the same party.

    Both are the funniest duo in Nigeria today. In politics, that is. Outside politics, the gold card goes to Pastor Odumeje. From the Southwest, the honours go to Governor Ademola Adeleke of Osun State. From Rivers State, Governor Sim Fubara takes a bow. Two events last week puts both men in bold comedic relief.

    In Rivers State, the Supreme Court came down with a hammer on the Rivers State local government polls, and it berates it as illegal. It means all the ceremonies undertaken by the governor, the abuses, the voters register, the lineup of electors, the signing of results, and the jubilations of victory, all of these were what literary critics call burlesque. They were first up there, pumped up as balloons. Then the whole thing came down, burst and great was the sound of justice.

    The top court also said the comedy of a three- or four-man legislature was a farce – my own words. But it affirms the 27-man law chamber. We cannot forget that Fubara underwrote a budget with a sprinkle of men. He set up an executive council  with a few lonely men as lawmakers. He has been plodding along with a mockery of democracy.

    As for Adeleke, it was  about a local government and a demolition. He dissolved the local government, but the courts say he has no right to do so, that the terms of the incumbents have not expired. The court of appeal, that is. Then, with a sense of farce, he goes to a lower court to legitimize his action. The lower court, against all reasonable precedents, grants him order in defiance of the higher court. He goes ahead to conduct the poll, a sham of an election. His party, just like Fabara’s, sweeps the polls. And to avoid the clash of the winners as we saw in Rivers, Adeleke says the “winners” should not go to their offices. So, from winners take all, they become losers take none. They won but they lost. They are winners on paper. They are trustees of the mandate in waiting. It is a victory without spoils, a responsibility without power, a status without stature, a post of impotence.

    So, both men, Adeleke and Fubara, are funny, but they are not fun. Fubara is still examining the judgment. His lawyers want to make a continual buffoon of their client. So, they are looking for lacuna to exploit. Some lawyers are denying the Supreme Court verdict of the lawmakers as to whether they have defected. They are waiting for the top court to eat its own words and go back to its vomit. It reminds me of the words of Jesus, who poured woe on lawyers for taking away the “key of knowledge.” Money has held lawyers spellbound, so they turn the law with the facility of their crafty minds. Hence Shakespeare said, “the first thing we do, let’s kill the lawyers.”

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    The tragedy is that we need them. Some scholars are beginning to doubt the durability of the democratic idea because of the ability of men and lawyers to upend a popular system. We are seeing it in Europe, and the United States. It is a Hobbesian world we are walking into. It is a time for vigilance. In the sweep of human history, democracy has been a blip. We have had different forms of autocracy hold sway for most of human civilization, and we should not presume that it cannot die away. Democracies have voted in autocracies in Ancient Greece and in the 20th century.  In the U.S., the poor voted in a plutocracy. Nothing is guaranteed.

    With strong men with populist bravura and cunning, we may have a democracy by name, but the system would be essentially autocratic. We are witnessing that under Trump today. They are the models for Adeleke and Fubara. They are just not that clever yet. As the Russian novelist and philosopher Maxim Gorky wrote, the “only people who deserve freedom are those who fight for it every day.” Vigilance is the capacity for survival. Autocracy is beguiling; hence systems and masses tend to fall for them. It seduces hysteria. It is a charming brute. Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, predicted that democracy will flourish as families break down to smaller units. His idea is that large patriarchies favour despots. That idea has been disgraced in public in the 20th century with the fascist seductions of Hitler, Franco and Mussolini in Europe and Pol Pot and Mao in Asia.

    One of the problems of democracy is the impotence of the courts, that is righteous courts. A court does not have an army. So, it can issue a verdict. The executive branch that controls the armed forces clips the police and soldiers. Nothing happens. We are seeing this in Osun right now. Lawyers are coddling Fubara and quietly cajoling him to defy.

    Hence, I say both men are comedians whose latest acts do not inspire laughter. They make us wince with fear for our system. They are different types of comedians. Fubara is not the laughing type, and makes us laugh just by his slapstick acts. We call such comedians dark. He does not intend to amuse, but he cannot help himself. What of a line like, “the jungle has matured.” Or his acts of lashing out at his predecessor when he is imitating his style of launching projects. Or when he says “I am not afraid of you.” His is what is called deadpan comedy, the sort that Soyinka gives in A Play of Giants. Or Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest.

    Governor Adeleke combines fat and athletic to give us dances. His dance cannot win a formal prize but it entertains more than those formal dances because he is so unoriginal that it seems original because of who is dancing. It is like an agabya entertaining everyone and no one has to laugh at him. His rambunctious humour is like Baba Sala, or Jagua. The difference is that Adeleke is governor and some people need quite a few laughs in a time of desperate need. If he cannot give the people bread, as Roman Poet Juvenal prescribes, at least he can stage a circus, spontaneous, unscripted, rip-roaring circuses. The local government poll saga shows the thin line between comedy and tragedy. After all, Trump is a funny man, an entertainer who is blowing up the world. It is like Nobel laureate Gunter Grass who turns a comic style to script a Nazi feast.

     Comedy and anomie are like beauty and beast. The beauty, like Delilah, is like trouble. Hence Ayi Kwei Amah calls his novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, a testament to beauty as impostor. It is not John Keats’ definition as truth. It is more like poet Rilke’s view that it is terror. Hence in her novel, The Death of Vivek Orji, Akwaeke Emezi’s protagonist treasures how Amah spells Beautyful in his novel by retaining the integrity of the noun. Adjectives undermine the souls of matters. That is the fear that our two top comedians may want to bring to our system. Comedy is beauty, but not the sort we are getting from the top guns in Rivers and Osun.