Category: Sam Omatseye

Every January we focus on the Army. Nothing has brought this more in focus than the President’s sweep of the top brass. We should swivel back to the man who invented January for the Army and the army for our politics: Major Kaduna Nzeogwu.

Close to six decades after his act, his story still wraps itself in ambiguity. Some say he was good for our politics. Others say he deflowered the Army by bringing the hallowed institution to the forbidden porch of politics. Some say he brought tribal hubris that eventually led to the civil war and the suspicion that festers today between the Igbo brothers and the rest of us.

His supporters said he did no such thing. He was as de-tribalised a Nigerian as you can ever be. So, who was Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu?

In spite of the tomes on the man and testimonies by friends and relatives, the man who shot bullet into the agbada of politics still confounds pundits. Yet, the story of the man epitomises the narrative of our politics and the significance of its armed forces in our lives today.

When he led the coup, he attracted universal praise across the country. But some say he never led the coup. Some accounts say the leader was Chris Anuforo, and Emma Okocha argues this in his updated book, Blood on the Niger. In his There was a Country, Chinua Achebe narrates that Nzeogwu was offended that Ifeajuna paraded himself as the leader. Yet, in virtually every narrative, Nzeogwu rumbles as the thunder of January 15, 1966. He was not to make the announcement but Major Ademoyega. But he seized the initiative.

He led mainly Hausa-Fulani soldiers to kill the most iconic Hausa-Fulani in modern history, Sir Ahmadu Bello, the sardauna of Sokoto. Some say the soldiers could not have done otherwise. He was their commander. But they knew the target as the turbaned hero. Others explained that it was because of the ascetic temperament of Nzeogwu. He was more Kaduna than Chukwuma, never spoke Igbo, was fluent in Hausa. He also abhorred the poisons and prisons of character: women, alcohol, tobacco.

He was a conservative radical. He wanted change but not of the libertine variety. He craved an upright society. He belonged to what you would call the right of politics. But he wanted integrity and we did not have it in government. Our politicians quaffed and baffed and looted the treasury and did not live up to the moral obligation of the vote. His moral fibre bristled against it.

Some have therefore argued that Nzeogwu was too upright to indulge in petty loyalty to tribe. Yet, we have seen that when the coup unfolded, the killings were lopsided. Hausa-Fulani leaders were killed. Yoruba leader Samuel Akintola was killed. So what happened to the others in the East, and they were left untouched? Even the head of the army, Aguiyi Ironsi, was unhurt.

Critics fault Nzeogwu. The others did not do their job. But they were Nzeogwu’s men. Another point of view introduces the Awolowo dimension. The coupists, it has been asserted, planned to hand over to the Yoruba sage. We have no definitive evidence, but the story has wafted permanently into the coup lore.

So after a few days of the coup, and questions flew about its genuine purpose, praise diluted into doubt. And those who saw Nzeogwu and his men as true Nigerians cast them as tribalists. But how do we delineate the Ademoyega inclusion? Was he conned, naïve, or did his ethnicity prove the case that the coup’s intention was patriotic and some bad eggs failed and smeared the goodwill of the rest? Was he a quisling? In his book, Okocha quotes Lateef Jakande as being aware in jail of the higher purpose of the coupists after they struck. That remains vague and the former Lagos State governor will do well to shed light on this. But Awo never associated himself with Nzeogwu and his men till he died. That adds to the Nzeogwu mystique.

Yet when Biafra was born, he fought on the side of the Igbo. In spite of his pedigree, he never commanded any force and Ojukwu treated him with suspicion. Circumstances of his death remain foggy. Some accounts say he never believed in Biafra and wanted the Nigerians and the Igbo reconciled without bloodshed. Yet he died in Biafran uniform. He was a Midwestern Igbo, and probably suffered the suspicion that other officers from that part of the country laboured under. Isichei, Nwawo, etc never had major commands in Biafra as General Alabi Isama shows in his book, The Tragedy of Victory, which is the best book yet on the civil war. They were not Igbo enough and not Nigerian enough.

At the bottom of the Nzeogwu mystique is whether he was a good soldier or a good man, and whether the one embattled the other. Is it possible to be both in full or good measure? Charles de Gaulle was much older when he shot to limelight. He was too much of a good man to be the good soldier of the like of Petain and his Vichy collaborators. He was conservative in outlook, Catholic, lacked fluency of speech. But the good man in him preferred the patriot to the quisling even if it meant running away from his fatherland to fight from outside.

Would a de Gaulle have donned a Biafran fatigue after killing an Hausa-Fulani icon and accused as an ethnic chauvinist? Not likely. Did Nzeogwu play the survival game and waited his time? Probably. We shall never know.

The concept of a good soldier often comes with historical examples. Josip Broz Tito organised anti-Nazi militia during the Second World War as resistance against the conquest of the Slavs. In the colonial era, Charles Gordon, held on to faith in his Christian God and Pax Britannica, to hold Sudan during colonial times. Though out-manned and outgunned, he preferred to be beheaded by the Mahdi. His case problematises what is good soldier and good man. Ariel Sharon, who just died, had this personal battle. He began as a butcher of Palestinians and died a reformer.

That is the mystique that surrounds Nzeogwu today. He wanted to save his country, but he died for another. His best friend was Yoruba – Olusegun Obasanjo- but he was accused as a tribalist. He was a loner, but the sins of others have tarred him. He was a conservative who wanted change.

His life, with all its contradictions, is the history of Nigerian Army even today. While many acknowledge its messianic potential, nobody trusts it for redemption. It seized power to clean the Augean stable, but the officers became carpetbaggers.

This year promises to be the worst in recent times. It also promises to be the best. I make this contention because the scroll of 2014 unfurls with awful foreboding. Only a few days in, we are learning that a hit list bubbles. The presidency denies it. Governor Amaechi, Buhari and Tinubu are names highlighted in the target list.

Whether or not this is true, this year has not begun on a rosy high. Tension thrives on both sides of the political divide. The PDP and the APC are not acting as sportsmen but as antagonists on the verge of a war in which blood and guts are collaterals. What no one has addressed is whether it is Nigeria we want or our individual or group interests.

In Rivers State, it seems we are witnessing the love of family over the love of country. The first lady has staked a proprietary attitude to the state, undermining the governor. The police commissioner has also defied the state chief labourer as well as the inspector general of police. It does not seem the national security adviser has a latch on him. The reason is that the first lady has her thumb on police commissioner Mbu. The president has not restrained his wife. The question is not whether family is more important than country. It is whether the president can distinguish between what he owes his wife and his country.

Still on family, why are Nyako and Tukur playing the game of sons in Adamawa? Each of them, one a sitting governor and the other a former excellency, wants their son to be the governor next time. Have they turned their state into private patrimony, such that no one can be governor unless his blood curdles with the colour of the father’s name?

We have seen the fealty to friends, too. Why would the president not discipline or fire aviation minister when all the evidence is before him over the car scandal? Why has the oil minister not received a query over spending N2 billion on travels? There are many questions to answer, including his choice of Tukur over his party faithful.

We also saw this in the Anambra State governorship election where some partisans conflated loyalty to tribe with fairness. It was openly advanced that a particular candidate was a planting of outsiders, and therefore not worthy of being governor, even though Ngige is the best whoever shepherded the state. Loyalty to tribe is unavoidable, and even salutary, but where does loyalty to country dovetail with loyalty to tribe?

Some elements in the Niger Delta have started to speak in apocalyptic terms about razing down this country if their candidate doesn’t win. Is it Nigeria we seek, or our tribe or family? Or political party? We heard the same temper of rhetoric in the buildup to and in the aftermath of the 2011 polls. The tendencies of ethnic and regional love upended any sense of nationalism, which some would see as the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Those voices are not helping us in the search for a nation. We have to build a nation. Rather, we are building personal fiefdoms. We saw president and an ex-president writing letters and neither of them exhibited presidential dignity. Obasanjo wrote his to lionise himself and show up the incumbent. The incumbent replied with a façade of restraint while revving up past irrelevancies to show superior morality without answering questions about Oduahgate or the mess in the economy, and even failing to clear simple facts about an international transaction for Rivers State water project. Who loves the country, or who loves themselves?

We also witnessed the formation of APC, which has brought together many strange bedfellows. People who have been seen as belonging to different tendencies in the past now cuddle under the same party umbrella. Politics has been described as the art of the possible. Foes cannot be permanent. But the question remains if some of the partisans are inspired by a need to rescue Nigeria or as a mere revanchist platform. Are some of them joining because they want Nigeria to have a two-party state, or are they driven by a sense of frustration from PDP, a sense that they did not get what they wanted on that platform? So, is their move to APC less out of love for Nigeria and more about greed for a new way to advance personal interests?

Some have said the APC has big names and therefore collision is inevitable. It is the role of the APC chieftains to prove that this is no personal agenda but the zeal of a collective to entrench a higher political realm for the nation. Big names are good for politics. Lincoln, Churchill, de Gaulle, Mandela. Even families, especially if they are democratic in instincts. The Kennedys, the Bhuttos, the Ghandis have helped their nations advance democracy even better than some political parties and groupings. It is where royalty embraces republicanism, where democracy romanticises feudalism. APC’s big names can either advance this position or fluff it. The strange bedfellows can turn their beds into steamy romances or tragedies. But if the APC comes across eventually as a mere gang-up against Jonathan, then it will lose its patriotic promise.

We need to see persons and groups who show love of country and not exploit it for family, tribe, friends and party. We have had this before in this country. During the years of democratic struggles, we saw this in those who fled the country and lived in uncertain circumstances abroad. Rewane, Kudirat and Moshood Abiola and many anonymous warriors became martyrs for this democracy. Those who did not die sacrificed a lot, and lived uncertainly abroad. Soyinka, Enahoro, Tinubu, etc.

Those who think that criticism or even opposition to Jonathan is unpatriotic are as narrow-minded as those APC chieftains who come to that party merely to win elections. The Jonathan votaries forget how Mark Twain defines patriotism, “supporting the country all the time, and the government when it deserves it.”

What we need is not the NADECO-style sacrifice, or the sort that Charles de Gaulle gave France when he would not yield to Nazi domination along with Petain and other Vichy France cowards. He flew to Britain ahead of plots to court-marshal him for treason. Treason for trying to free his country. Churchill growled that de Gaulle carried the honour of France with him on that small aircraft.

We are not seeking sacrifice of family in the way Mengisto Haille Meriam reacted to threat to kill his family when in captivity. He said they should not only kill them but butcher them. That was his own version of love for Ethiopia. He became a butcher himself. Nor am I asking for the Greek version when Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia so the Greeks could get into Troy. A similar story is in the bible about Jephtah who had to sacrifice his daughter after a vow of battle. That is not what we ask of those choosing family over country.

We should learn the Mandela example, who understood the prize and price of patriotism. If our leaders won’t sacrifice or lose their Winnie, we are not asking for that much. We only want a year of rules and civility, and any sacrifice for that won’t necessitate bloodshed. Jesus said, I would rather have mercy than sacrifice. I am not asking for either. I want us to follow the line saying, “to obey is better than sacrifice, to heed than a fat of rams.” With this mindset we can turn a macabre potential or year of cause celebre into a one joyful calendar. This way, we can turn worst to best.

What went through the mind of Winnie Mandela when the world serenaded her dead husband? Was she lamenting what might have been? Why was it that she, once lionised as the angel of the struggle, had fallen into a sorry footnote of the Mandela legend?

Theirs was not just a love story, a partnership, or marriage gone sour. The story of Winnie and Nelson was the love story of the 20th century. With about one and half decades gone in this century, no love story has surpassed their fiery narrative of the heart.

It is essentially a great love story because of its failure, its inevitable run against the rock, its tragic filaments. All great love stories are tragic. Shakespeare had to kill Romeo and Juliet to bring fairy to their romantic tale. In the novel The Great Gatsby, a man spends his whole life to acquire a big mansion and lavishes the whole town with party after party to gain a girl’s attention. He fails to enthrall the damsel but dies for her. Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau blighted his fabled reign with his marriage to Margaret Sinclair whose love he could not combine with his work as the nation’s helmsman. The list is benumbing. Humphrey and Lolita. Samson and Delilah. Kafka’s Gregory Samsa. Anthony and Cleopatra. Achilles and Helen of Troy. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Jackie was the last American queen because she knew John F. Kennedy. Not Marilyn Monroe whose story was another bloodied odyssey of love. As for JFK, some accounts link his assassination to some love trysts.

Mandela was married not to Winnie, not to Graca, but the world. But he died without what was dearest to him: love of family. Nothing personified that love more than Winnie. In an interview with American Charlie Rose, an embarrassed Madiba spoke about his time in jail, his preference of his family to the love of the world, and how he sometimes had self-doubts about the struggle and wondered if it was worth all the sweat and solitude, especially given the harassment his wife Winnie suffered in the hands of Apartheid goons.

In his reticence and shadows on his face in his Charlie Rose interview, Mandela could not conceal the love he still had for Winnie. Yet Winnie’s part in the collapsed romance has tended to fire the interests of feminists. “What did you expect Winnie to do with the husband in jail for 27 years?” ask her defenders. She had blood flowing in her veins, she had suitors in the struggle, she was young, bewitching, eminently sexual. The husband ought to understand that he was not available to sate her needs.

By the time Mandela left his gaol, Winnie was no longer young, about 60 years. So why did she not abandon the honey, unlike Winnie the Pooh, and go back to her husband? Why did she not mortify her flesh? Rather, she kept on pursuing the romance with one of her gang leaders, who was already married when Mandela left jail.

They argued that Winnie sacrificed flesh for myth, she lost the opportunity of being Africa’s greatest woman. She might have been at Mandela’s side, in the battle for Africa’s greatest struggles, against tyranny and dictatorship, and for equalities of all peoples and demographics. She might have finagled her way into the graces of the people and run for the presidency of South Africa.

Rather, it was a divorce story that ruined the narrative. Mandela lamented that years after he left Robben Island, Winnie had not spent a night in his bedroom. Evidently, a cuckolded Mandela wanted his wife back after the romp with other men. He understood that Winnie had never been his wife, even before he went to jail. He was always in the fight, absent at home, in a peripatetic thrust for the freedom of his people. Winnie never enjoyed him before jail and when in jail. “Don’t ask of me, my love, the love I once had for thee,” crooned poet Mahmud Darwish. Mandela may have had part of that sentiment. When he left jail, it was Winnie on his side. He had her picture in his jail, and caressed it as though groping his wife.

But the romance did not actualise when he returned. How could anyone blame Winnie, who had never connected with the man? That is the existential problem. Winnie lost the opportunity to be like women who grew into their own on their spouses’ shoulders. Corazon Aquino was leader of the Philippines, but before that she called herself a plain house wife. The assassination of her husband thrust her into greatness. She rallied the nation on behalf of her husband in what was called people power. She conquered the foes, became president and initiated solid reforms in the economy, human rights and democratic practices.

Hilary Clinton stood by her man in the fiery days of the Lewinsky scandal. She was adroit a politician, a role she never could have attained without Clinton. The medical programme of Obama today was first initiated when she was first lady. Hilary became senator, the most travelled secretary of state and is still a possible nominee for president of the United States. Jackie Kennedy, in spite of her marriage to Greek millionaire Onassis, still earned the unofficial status of democratic queen.

Argentina had Eva Peron, whose husband birthed what historians call the Peronist era in Argentine history. Eva was a beauty and star politician, thanks to her husband. She rose by fighting for her man while Juan Peron was in jail. Her loyalty touched the man’s tender parts. She was even rumoured to have mobilised the rally that freed him from prison. He married Eva, in spite of negative stories about the beautiful actress. She rose to become a great politician, feminist, fighter for social justice. She even soared to mystical grandeur. In all of Latin America, her picture stands next to the Virgin of Guadalupe as the most popular woman. Movies, plays, novels have bedecked her, and Madonna starred as Evita in a famous movie of that name.

But Mandela could not blame Winnie for not soaring with him. He knew that he, in a sense, killed the woman’s spirit with his lack of romance. But Winnie made her choice. She opted for mortal joys in place of images like those of Aquino and Peron, or even Clinton. She chose to be martyr for love rather than country, and the wrong love. She opted against sublime immortality. But she has her immortality assured, but a much stained and low and humanised one. Maybe when the Madiba was being put to rest, she reflected back and wondered if she could have resisted the promptings of the flesh and stood by the man who was about two decades older. But Juan Peron was also that much older than Peron. Eva Peron died at 33, and she had a state burial. Some analysts said her advantage was a short life. But who knows.

The Madiba story reincarnates a classic South African love story: between the warrior Shaka the Zulu and Noliwe, the beauty. In spite of his beauty, Shaka takes her life. Poets and historians argue that Shaka kills her because she humanises him, he is afraid of her, he cannot stand such glow of a humanity in his warrior life. So maybe the Madiba killed Winnie, that is Winnie’s love, so he could be the love of the world. The poet Senghor sums it in a poem Noliwe: “I would not have killed her if I loved her less/I had to escape from doubt.”

Mandela died without his full manhood, having failed to conquer the love of his life. He gained the whole world but not his fairy. Winnie will go down in history as the one who pooh-poohed history, or was pooh-poohed by history since her story ended for us when she divorced the husband who romanced the world. Mandela did not love the country less, but he loved Winnie more. That pain followed him to his stately grave.

Anytime I contemplate the crisis in Rivers State, I inescapably see the impish finger of love. In the miniature crisis of that oil-rich state, I see the vaster arc of the story of love not only in our history but the history of the world. A nation is nothing without the roles of its romances, especially among its political and military elite.

The bedroom, in its sultry and solitary silences of moaning and pillow talks, determines the public square whether it is a matter of poverty and wealth, war and peace, gods and bigotry. From the martial age of the gladiators to the digital ardour of the computer, we are bound by love. But this is not always sweet savour. Love stories, in their best, can be tragedies.

Perhaps that is why poet Geoffrey Chaucer crooned: “who is so foolish as a man in love?” Shakespeare calls it “wolvish-ravening lamb” in the saddest of all love stories, Romeo and Juliet.

In all our history, we see love stories if we peer deeper. We just witnessed the death of a failed romance with the passing of Nelson Mandela. The Madiba, who conquered the great army of prejudice and cruised into a history as a star among the pantheons, could not conquer the very person who kept his spirit alive in 27 years of captivity: Winnie, his love.

He came out, emboldened a race to freedom, taught a world the power of forgiveness, tore down walls of hate and fear, but it was sad to read his confession a few years after Robben Island that Winnie never spent a night in his bedroom.

Yet, before he died, he did not blame the woman he divorced. They were physically apart, but he never knew the joy of life the way other men embraced it. His romance, purely political, belonged to the world and it had no blood or flesh in its content. Not that the love for Winnie was all sexual. He might have surmounted that. But its content was more vigorous, ineluctable and infinite. He could not grasp it with all the might of a lion that had become the Madiba.

So it is with all Nigerian stories. If Dame Jonathan did not have roots in Rivers State, and has not exhibited a proprietary attachment to Okrika, maybe Jonathan would not have fought so hard against the spirited Governor Rotimi Amaechi. Maybe if President Goodluck did not love his wife so much, he might not have allowed the gangster rage in the state. Also, some say maybe Timipre Sylva will be governor of his home state Bayelsa today, if Dame Jonathan did not show so much umbrage against the man.

We have seen Dame Jonathan speak with so coarse and authoritarian a pitch that few persons with an office backed by the constitution can. But with whose backing has she carried such reckless men as Wike and Bipi, if not with the understanding connivance of the man at the top? Take way the romance between them and peace will probably have found a way. Probably.

We cannot even forget that the name Nigeria was borne out of the romance between Flora Shaw and the first governor general of Nigeria, Lord Lugard. The lady, a fierce and influential columnist with The Times of London, suggested the name. That might not have happened in the board room of colonial power if she did not share the bedroom with the helmsman of the protectorates that became Nigeria.

We have read so much of the Nigeria civil war, and all we encounter are the gory passages of blood, bullets, ogbunigwe, hate and all the fierce follies of human ogre. Yet we can say that it all began with the crisis of the Western Region that pitted the grand, rimmed-spectacled Awo with the barb-tongued wit known as Akintola. While historians have besotted their tales with the ideological and ego dimensions of the male hubris, they leave aside the juicy interstices of romance. Few have documented the role of Faderera Akintola in prodding the premier to defy the party leader, Awolowo. Many stories have made the legend, including the one when she yanked the phone from her husband and spoke defiantly to Awolowo. She announced to the sage that they were in charge of the region and he should not hand orders to the premier her husband.

We know the Western Region crisis, with its ensuing state of emergency, snowballed to a national crisis. That propelled the five majors’ coup with its ethnic reverberation and its inexorable push into our war of brothers. Further back into history, was it not the love of Bayajida, the eponymous northern figure, that birthed some of the major cities of the North, like Kano, Kaduna, Zaria, etc., the Hausa Bakwai and Banza Bakwai. One man’s romance sired a race.

When IBB was head of state, he created Delta State as a homage to his beautiful wife, Mariam. Even though Warri was a natural choice for capital, he chose his wife’s hometown Asaba. Interestingly, as narrated in Emma Okocha’s book, Blood on the Niger, Mariam’s father was killed by the federal troops in the pogrom of Igbo in the Midwest. IBB reportedly met her in those days.

If not for that romance, the role of first ladies may not have been elevated to what it is today with some doing well and others turning it into a platform for Jezebel’s acts. Major Debo Bashorun’s recent book, Honour For Sale, unearths how the first lady wielded powers that the husband in all his military majesty could not rein in.

And it is not in Nigeria alone that we have witnessed this as Mandela’s tale proves. Winston Churchill exploited his mother’s American roots to persuade the United States to help it out of the enveloping genius of Hitler’s army in the Second World War. “I have a latch key to the American heart,” growled Churchill. In that same war, the British royalty suffered a moral setback when one of their own, King Edward, confessed to Nazism and was forced to abdicate his throne.

We cannot forget as well that we might not have the Anglican Church today if King Henry did not want to divorce his wife for a Boleyn sister. England had to cut away from Rome, and all the stories of heroes and villains of that era with Thomas More, Cardinal Wolsey, etc., would not have happened. Plays like the Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons and the recent Booker Prize winning series by Hilary Mantel show how love stories never die. Mantel’s latest release, Bring Up the Bones, has come across as one of the best novels in recent times. Paris bred its own warm narrative with emperor Napoleon and his wife Josephine. Everyone except Napoleon thought she was beautiful, and he changed policies for her and even crowned her an empress.

In a multi-ethnic state like Nigeria, this tale is even more potent. The President, a Bayelsan, is married to a Riverian, and we see its consequence. It shows that love knows no boundary, and if it can help solder different peoples and states, it can also breed soldiers of hate. It is an asset we can use. If we look across the country today, a number of governors have such interconnected romances, either directly or not. Governor Suswam of Benue State has boasted about his Yoruba wife. Rotimi Amaechi has shown that his wife is from across the Niger. The ebullient Godswill Akpabio often reminds all that his wife is from Enugu State. The governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, has often spoken of his wife’s Urhobo connection and an Igbo nephew. The urbane Delta State Governor Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan is Itsekiri with strong Edo and Urhobo pedigrees. Asiwaju Tinubu’s wife, Senator Remi Tinubu, is Itsekiri and Sylva’s wife Alayingi hails from Ibibio. Tatalo Alamu explained that part of Akintola so-called quisling attidue may come from a romance of his parents to have northern blood. So the western crisis may have partial roots in romances between the families of those who went to war.

All these are products of romances in quiet disinterested pasts. That is why all those who champion ethnic causes in this country should note that when they birth a boy or girl they are not sure whether they will be a Suswam with a Yoruba wife, or an Akintola with roots that reach far into the north. A child born is a gift to the world, and you cannot guarantee what winds of romance will catch them. This is a love not, readers, for the Yuletide. Merry Christmas.

For former President Olusegun Obasanjo, letters are not only a therapy. They serve as a locus of power. He is not a great letter writer, but he writes with great zeal, pouring out the constructions of his emotions through his longwinded sentences.

With his stumbles, he is not an example of how to write a sentence. This is not the age of the letter, but of the text message and email, and they call for laconic entries. Obasanjo wrote an 18-page letter. But it was originally longer. Interventions of close friends and associates compelled him to prune it and defrock it of its libel and vaporous excesses. In spite of the editing and lawyerly emendation, the letter was irredeemable.

Great political letter writers of the past, like Lincoln, Churchill, even Zik and Awo, did not go into meaningless streams of consciousness and interior monologues. Rather they provided insights into their times and roles. Novelist and Nobel laureate Saul Bellow turned his character Herzog into a neurotic letter writer, who wrote to virtually every great mind dead or alive and contended with them on the issues of the day and their days.

Obasanjo has written to virtually every leader since he left power in 1979. Each letter lionised himself and valorised his time in office while mocking the doings of the man in power. Shagari, Buhari, Babangida suffered the most from his irreverent barbs. The only real leader he did not undermine with his epistolary bombs was himself. If he had some humour he might have written himself and titled it, Dear me, in the fashion of the autobiography of writer, filmmaker and comedian Peter Ustinov, who addressed the book to himself. If Obasanjo wrote a Dear Me letter, it might have been to tell the world how dear he was as a great leader, and would have lacked Ustinov’s laugh at himself.

Yet if you read the letter he wrote to President Goodluck Jonathan, you are bound to be in two minds. He lined up a series of weaknesses of the Jonathan presidency but he did not say anything new, except the charge that President Jonathan was arming assassins and had a list of enemies numbering over 1000.

The fundamental question arising from his letter is, who gave Obasanjo the moral authority to say what he said in the letter. He is guilty of virtually everything he said in the letter. He accused Jonathan of running an undemocratic party. He was guilty of that and it led to a move by governors to oust him. He accused Jonathan of supporting elements of other parties against his party as if he did he not do so. He even sponsored the formation of other parties. He said Jonathan imposed Tukur and could not bring peace to the party. Did he not do that in the time of Audu Ogbeh, and he had to subvert his reign?

He charged that Jonathan promised to govern for one term, but did he not seek a third term? He upturned an otherwise brilliant constitutional effort because he did not get his dream for presidential longevity. He had the effrontery to report at Mandela’s death that he asked Mandela to stay for a second term. Mandela had a superior sense of history and statesmanship.

He accused Jonathan of being insincere about his proposed confab, yet he mobilised state resources and men to organise a conference only to botch it over the third term fiasco. On corruption, he set up the EFCC and ICPC to hound his enemies. Now, he is accusing the president of presiding over a worrisomely corrupt regime.

On the issue of killers, Obasanjo’s time in office witnessed the killings of star politicians, and none of the culprits was earnestly investigated or convicted. Bola Ige was one of them.

But I say to myself, why did Obasanjo not start the letter by apologising to Nigerians since the letter was more to himself than to the president. He should have demonstrated remorse that he precipitated the problem of leadership in the past decade and half. His term in office never set a foundation with his bumbling in the area of leadership by example, fighting corruption, power sector, infrastructure and health. The naira plummeted significantly in his era and more people were out of job when he left office than when he mounted the throne. He also imposed on us two leaders. One was Yar’Adua whose physical debility was well known to him. This incapacitated him, the presidency and the nation with the gory tales of constitutional stasis that threatened the democracy. Two, he gave him a deputy he knew was inept and lacked the intellectual rigour for that exalted position. Nothing in his Bayelsa stewardship recommended him.

We suffer the consequences today as he has delineated in his letter. He did not have the humble virtue to accept his role in this tragedy. Rather, he wrote with divine delusion, asserting that God used him as an instrument to install Jonathan as leader.

It is clear Obasanjo wrote the letter not so much out of patriotism but because the son has murdered his father on the throne. It is the political equivalent of an oedipal clash. The godfather has lost grip of the godson. The father’s ghost is now bewailing the parricide in public. He admitted that he had written to him in the past, but Jonathan had ignored him routinely. He wrote that Jonathan had told him that next to God and his parents, Obasanjo was the most important in his life. Obasanjo is therefore jealous of the Clarks, Anenihs, etc, whose voices find the president’s ears rather than his.

So Obasanjo’s letter was not about Nigeria. It is like his previous letters. He wanted to draw attention to himself. It is like the lines in W.H. Auden’s famous poem, September 1st, 1939. The poem lamented those who crave what they cannot have, and that is “not universal love/ but to be loved alone.”

Yet, we have to admit that nobody could have made impact with that sort of letter in Nigeria like Obasanjo. It is a testament to the failure of our political class to throw up a personage of Mandela’s mystique that only a person like Obasanjo with all his moral baggage can write such a letter with credibility. I will say I am glad he wrote the letter. I am glad that he said all the things that his party apparatchik would not say, or what his opponents will say with less potency.

Yet, I am sad that I am glad he said them. I am sad that I am glad because he alone could have said them. Yet we need Obasanjo to provide evidence for the allegation of a killer squad, and the list of the over 1000 targets.

President Jonathan will do well to address the nation on all the issues raised. They are grave and several, some of them have been raised in the media and by his opponents. He should not dismiss them merely as a catharsis of a frustrated godfather. They have implications for this democracy’s survival, and his legacy if he cares.

When he eventually soared into silence, we were shocked even though we expected it. His health became a drama not of an impending tragedy, but a spectacular ending. The sort of ending Shakespeare described as “sweet sorrow.”

Many craved the chance for a last peep at the dying man, even if he was in a futile rage against his dying light. Throughout his life, we saw the fighter who was a man of peace. He wanted to avenge the white man but he became a reconciler of races. He had a bad temper, but he lightened the world with his supernova smiles and his torso dances with children, if ungainly. Unlike his contemporaries, he did not die in office so he could live in the hearts of his people. He was the one who first invited his foes to dinner and then to share power. Later they shared the Nobel Prize. A statesman who felt cold comfort in a politician’s robe. A revolutionary with royal bona fides. He had every reason to be bitter, but he became a proselytiser of one world. A Samson in battle, a Solomon in council. Heroic and stoic.

He forgave everyone who in 27 years stole his vital years, a law career, the pride of family, gregarious bliss of friendship. He became an inmate, menial labourer, active vegetable, loner, wearer of shorts, mine worker, hewer of water and wood, an innocent in jail, at the beck and call of his white accusers.

He returned bigger than his superiors, became president, a statesman, citizen of the world, an activist for the world’s ravaging disease, a concert organiser, a host of presidents and students, and by the time he turned 95, he had morphed from human to a saint, from villain to champion. The pugilist who never relished an uppercut except against injustice, who never wept because they damaged his tear-duct at a salt mine, who hid his quiet solitude at not really having a traditional, stable family, who adopted the world as family. The man after turning 95 had become, in his odyssey from apotheosis to apotheosis, the most towering figure of the past 50 years. In company with such colossi as Churchill, Roosevelt, Lincoln, he belonged to the ages. So when Nelson Mandela died last week, we were relieved of the angst of expecting. We were taken out of our misery.

“Anticipation is more potent than surprise,” wrote poet Samuel Coleridge. It was a great and delicious misery. Never was a death so expected, and never was its arrival so celebrated. A celebration so solemn as the man.

Yet it is his death that strikes me in this column, and I use it to tell the story of Nigeria. I wondered, if we had a Mandela here, if we would have called for a national conference. He emerged from jail to face a South Africa on the verge of what many called a civil war. He faced ethnic suspicions, racial tension, intraparty fission, elite disarray, ideological warfare. His freedom had caged his country in chaos. He needed to bring them together.

Many say that was his greatest legacy, he who grew up a man of feuds became the symbol of one South Africa. In his death, that is the envy of every testimony. He acted “with malice towards none and charity to all” according to another reconciler, Abraham Lincoln, who wove heroism out of the throes of division.

It is the tragedy of us as a nation that we have never had a personage like him in all our history. Not even Herbert Macaulay, with all his nationalist grandeur, left this world with enough heft to hold very ethnic group in awe. All our heroes have been ethnic heroes, and all of them died ethnic champions. We have never had a truly Nigerian hero, one who fired our imagination unsullied by tribe or faith.

The closest would have been Nnamdi Azikiwe, who, after taking over the mantle from Macaulay, rose in stature, and fired our zeal as a polyglot liberal with easy charm and warm diction and bonhomie. But he lacked the moral stamina, first when he had to deny the partisans of his movement and ran away into hiding when he thought the colonial lords hunted him. He also could not rise above Chief Awolowo’s Action Group’s corralling of his NCNC footprint in Western Nigeria. It denuded him of the chance to be premier. Rather he paid Awo back in his ethnic coins by ousting Eyo Ita. So the Zik of Africa had shrunken into the Zik of Igboland. In the Second Republic, he presided over the NPP that was essentially an eastern advocate. When he died, after his nine lives, he was seen principally as an Igbo icon. Although we pretended it was a National burial, just as Ojukwu’s, the Igbo saw his funeral and the approbation of his life as principally theirs.

Of course the passing of Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, enmeshed Nigeria into its sanguinary chapter we call the civil war. He was unabashedly a northern imperialist with regal hauteur and a sense of entitlement to Nigeria for the North. His death was mourned mainly in the North. Nzeogwu might have thought he was doing an anti-feudal good, but he ended up with a profile of slayer of a people’s beloved. It made Nzeogwu a tribal champion.

For Awo, he had an austere pose, an almost ascetic grandeur. He was the most profound, methodical, and visionary of any leader we ever had. The greatest Nigerian ever, he crafted templates that all the other regions followed for governance. Few can doubt his role in turning the Western Region into a place of wealth and envy. Paradoxically when Awo died, it was not essentially a Nigerian death. It was a Yoruba death. Awo’s role in stealing Zik’s thunder in the West has irritated the Igbo up till today, so also were his assertion about starvation as a legitimate weapon of war. We cannot forget the oporoko and second hand clothes speech, or when he sent a Yoruba man to Sokoto to represent UPN at the polls even though the party had Hausa.

Achebe, no icon in that regard, described Awo a tribalist. A nation lives the way it mourns. In each of the deaths, the Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo saw them as the heroes, as their special tragedy. Each tribe was an exclusive club of mourners, jealous of their funeral woes and tears, their magnificent misfortune. The deaths of our icons have followed the big three patterns noted above. All the whites and black tribes, and Indians and other Asian indigenes of South Africa saw Mandela above the parochial traps of tribes and race. None of our leaders has been seen to have flown of their primordial cages. Perception is the problem. We don’t trust or even forgive.

It calls for extraordinary statecraft, an ability to persuade by words and deeds, by character and symbolism. We are not Nigerians yet. In many states, politics of ethnicity has ruptured prospects of harmony.

Mandela did not organise a national conference. He did it by example. This is the way our political elite should grow. United States President Barack Obama cannot build a coalition like Mandela partly because of his race and partly because of his inability to connect with people on an emotional level. This Mandela had aplenty. He combined a mystique of moral grandeur, a playful humanity, deep empathy to bring people to his side.

We want leaders who have mastered the “other,” a Yoruba or Hausa leader who can feel the Igbo deep in his bones the way President Clinton warmed to blacks in the US. Or an Igbo leader not ensconced in his tribal cocoon.

When they die, and all Nigerians mourn, then we have that sense. Gani Fawehinmi inspired close to that pathos, but he was an activist, not a political leader. Such a leader would not fall to narrow cant or tantrums, but will contain the Nigerian multitude, like Madiba did his people.