Category: Sam Omatseye

While debates flourish over whether or not we need a national conference, we should take some time off to reflect on our frenetic search for an answer as a nation. This search predated our independence in 1960, and the search reminds one of the Greek myth of Sisyphus. It is a story of a man who carries a rock up a hill and when he is almost at the top, the monstrous object falls back to the bottom of the hill. Sisyphus carries it up again and it falls back to the bottom and the travel up and down the hill continues for ever. It fits into a perpetual rigmarole. In the words of poet Okigbo, it’s like a coming and going that goes on forever.

Nigeria has been yearning for a formula in that fashion since Lord Lugard made Nigeria one in 1914, and the odyssey from one constitution to another, from one conference to another, has turned Nigeria into a pathetic narrative of search without rescue.

Some Nigerians with the patriotism of desperados have clasped President Goodluck Jonathan’s carrot of a confab. Better an imperfect jaw-jaw, they contend, than a pie-in-the-sky war-war that defines the hope of callers for a sovereign national conference.

Desperation often reflects a hasty and uncoordinated soul. So, the hankerers after a sovereign national conference have said if we want to get it right we have to be sincere and deliberate. But from the way the nation is constituted we cannot have a sovereign national conference, or a conference of any type that will satisfy enough Nigerians. This is a recipe for paralysis, but it is true. The convener is as important as the convention itself.

To convene a conference must imply the convener’s readiness, like Kerekou in Africa, or Charles de Gaulle in the west, to cede his powers to the convention, which includes control of the purse strings and the military. We know of the conflict between legal sovereignty and popular sovereignty. Jonathan’s concession of a confab admits that the legal one is not so legitimate because many of our elected officers rigged their ways to power. The people have a right to withdraw their mandate.

The politics of ethnicity and the deep suspicions among the elites have cast us as a nation that can only succeed if we have a leader with a heft of a charisma. That charisma must transcend calculations of primordial loyalty either to tribe or religion. Even those who lack such insular worship of tribe and faith need to convince us, in their image, that they have such grand vision. Our tragedy is that no such personage has emerged in all our history. The only person who had it was Nnamdi Azikiwe in the morning of his warrior life as a nationalist. But he too was suffocated by the Nigerian disease and lapsed into ethnic fealty.

Nigerians are not ready to accept anyone as a Mandela today. Without such an overarching personage of great moral grandeur, we cannot be trusted to convene a conference of general acceptability. Americans had Washington and Franklin. Yugoslavia had Tito. I have also wondered if the election of representatives will not provide the beginning of crisis. Since the political class will take the lead, allegations of rigging may undermine their bona fides as the people’s voice. So, ab initio, a problem stalks. After that hump, can we guarantee that we shall accept the referendum results?

Basic to the clamour for a confab is the height of suspicion among the ethnic groups in the country, and that re-emphasises the suspicion that we shall never solve our problem by merely going into a conference. It is this suspicion that has raised the hobgoblin of regionalism, in the west, east, north and even the south-south. We have decided to take shelter in tribe rather than nation, or we have decided to call our tribes nations, and the only time we love Nigeria is when we can ride it to personal wealth or win sports tournaments.

It all shows a failure of the political class, and their inability to work out a template of values. Where no one trusts that his governor or his senator represents him, even in their own ethnic cocoons, we understand that the problem transcends tribe. It is just about the right values. It is the callow political class that cannot accept loss when it happens, cannot make a scapegoat of a corrupt colleague, or will not build an airport that does not leak. That class is to blame, and also a citizenry so browbeaten into seeking crumbs that it settles for a token school or hospital or road for performance. A few weeks ago, a plane could not land in Benin City because the airport, newly renovated, had no landing lights. The airport is also leaking barely a year after it was opened. In spite of N255 million for luxury cars!

In the same city, Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole pointed out that if we do not have a country, as it is asserted, “we should start building one.” He gave example of himself as a minority who won an emphatic victory over a son of the soil. President Jonathan won elections in many non-Ijaw areas in 2011 because many wanted to give a chance to an “other.” But he has governed without a sense of inclusion. If he had governed like a statesman, people will talk less about retreats to tents of tribes and faith.

Tribe does not give food or shelter or good education. Good leadership does. Few, for instance, can complain about the governor of example in Lagos, Babatunde Fashola ,SAN, who seems in a hurry to do everything from roads to schools to even registration of residents.

That is the conference of performance. A string of good works will abolish narrow loyalties. We have had many panels to examine virtually everything in the country since independence, and this abundance of archival details mocks us. Is it about the minority problems, oil, education, federalism, civil service? They are in the archives. Is it about student riot, corruption, sports management or health care, or infrastructure or power? You only need to seek and you will find. We seek in this country and we find. The missing link is rescue. I call it panelism. We are always learning and never coming to the action of the truth, to paraphrase St. Paul.

We need to create a museum of panel reports. We must have the worst records of a country that has discussed everything and implemented little. The museum should show all the panelists, all the files, or the memoranda, all the narratives. We can go there to see our solutions, and maybe that museum will tell us that we have already had a confab. We only need execution. Documents will ultimately result from any conference now canvassed, and I hope it will not find its way to that museum.

Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence is about a rejected lover who creates a private museum to memorialise his times with a girl, including cups, bed sheets, hundreds of cigarettes, underwear, etc. Are our sundry reports times of innocence? Maybe it is naivety. Those are wasted opportunities, what poet Wordsworth calls a “sordid boon.” Or are we just happy in our misery with the militants, slums, Boko Haram, joblessness, etc.? Maybe we are like Sisyphus who never arrives. Albert Camus, also a Nobel laureate, says Sisyphus is happy and loves the fruitless routine. I don’t wish Sisyphus on us.

We seem to be missing the point on the raging scandal on Aviation Minister Stella Oduah. The hearings at the House of Assembly have cast the drama as a matter of rule of law. It is, but it is less important than the power of conscience.

What if Oduah followed the rule of law, and what if the NCAA followed the rule of law? Does that mean that purchasing two cars of less than 40 million in the open market can now be whisked off at the sum of N255 million?

If Oduah gets away with it, it will be because the law failed us, and the law fails us in the face of grave injustice when conscience runs foul in a society. Our lawmakers seem to have fallen so much under the spell of the law that they are losing sight of the origin of law. That is, the law was made for us and not us for the law.

In her appearance at the hearing last week, Oduah said the cars were not bought for her. For the purpose of fairness, let us agree that they were not meant for her as Stella Oduah, but was it not meant for the office of the Aviation Minister? Now, how do we distinguish Oduah and the office of the minister? So long as she is the minister, is it a ghost who will ride the car, or a spirit that will inhale the blissful coolness of the air conditioner, or will the windows alone enjoy the sonority of the sound system?

Granted that the car would not go to the office of the minister, is it not a property of the ministry? If such a car of outlandish luxury goes to a ministry, will it be assigned to the office of the directors or cleaners? So, the minister ought to understand that the law was not designed for frivolity. And if it was bought for the ministry at such a princely sum, was it possible for such a thing to happen without her knowledge? And if it happened without her knowledge, does it not show that she was not in charge? And if she was not in charge at such a delicate moment of her work, why should she remain as Aviation minister?

It is in answering such a question that the law meets integrity. But the obsession with due process in a way that may sacrifice morality portends danger. Oduah and her fellow travellers are taking that tack.

Whatever the trajectory of the scandal, some facts have not been denied. They include, one, that the cars cost N255million. Two, that the ministry in whatever guises purchased them and the minister knew and endorsed them. Three, that Coscharis sold them, and four, that the First Bank unspooled the loan.

The ‘what’ of the story is so overwhelming that the ‘how’ is of subordinate importance. The ‘what’ is moral and the ‘how’ is due process. The ‘what’ contains so much rot, so much puss that how it soiled the house and its superlative stench will only be important in how we prevent it next time. But that will happen only after the cleanup.

So, the cleanup should have happened since the facts broke into the public space. It should have entailed the resignation of the minister immediately and with an apology to the Nigerian public. If she did not, her boss President Goodluck Jonathan should have, at the most merciful, asked her to proceed on suspension pending the determination of the case. His committee to investigate the matter is unnecessary. Another fact has it that the national security adviser played a role in the messy affair. Yet he has not resigned from the committee. How do we expect fairness where a member of the triumvirate will be a judge in his own cause?

The role of the private sector is a part of the mess that has had inadequate attention. The questioning of the Coscharis boss Cosmas Maduka should not shed light with a view to determining Oduah’s culpability alone, but whether the car dealer does business in consonance with the moral standards expected by business leaders in Nigeria. Obviously Maduka wanted to show that he did not break the law, but had to sell for profit. The real tragedy was that he did not violate the law. Ditto to First Bank.

If this society cared for its own moral fibre, the chief executive of the bank and all those involved would have resigned their positions or the board of the bank would have demanded it. As for Coscharis, all governments would have blacklisted it, and members of the public would have boycotted it as matter of principle. This same bank, as others, will not grant loans to many enterprising Nigerians who need merely N2million loans to transform their lives.

Punishing companies and their wheel horses will set example for others doing business in the country. But if the sense of right and wrong is footloose in the land and the culpable ones go scot free, what happened in the Aviation industry would be a model rather than a warning to all wrong doers. As I stated last week, this practice of collusion between the public and private sector constitutes the norm of corruption in Nigeria.

The law does not make people good, but people make the law good and, consequently, people become good. People make the law good by example, and that refers to the leaders. The law is important, and it is the soul of every working polity. But the law can entrench injustice if it operates without vigilance.

When a car that sells for five million Naira sells for N10 million, the society ought to frown against it. It does not have to be a matter of law but of conscience. It is not justice to sell one thing to a person for one sum and to another person at a different sum, especially when it is a government that thrives on due process. If it was haggled upwards, on what terms or circumstances did it happen? Did that justify swindling a process? Why smuggle a car with armour into a deal for the sports festival in Lagos when the state had no knowledge of it?

“When men are pure, laws are useless,” noted former British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. “When men are corrupt, laws are broken.”

Clearly, the law is being manipulated in the breach in the National Assembly hearings. Conscience is a feeble and supporting cast in a drama of felony. We must uphold the law, but not at the expense of justice. Justice is mute without the tolls of conscience.

When I saw President Jonathan in a prayerful pose at the tomb of Jesus, I initially agreed with those who wondered what he was praying for when Jesus was no longer there. The tomb was a museum piece, not a worship ground. After all, when women visited the tomb after his resurrection, an angel asked, “why seek ye the living among the dead.” And Jesus himself declared, “I am he that was alive and was dead. Behold I am alive forever.” On second thought, I concluded he could say a prayer there if he keyed into the words of St. Paul who enjoined Christians to invoke the spirit of Christ’s resurrection. In that case, President Jonathan could have prayed Christ to imbue him with the spirit of resurrection when he returned to Nigeria, so that he could resurrect a dying nation: resurrect infrastructure, jobs, healthcare, rule of law, education, etc. But did he offer that prayer or a selfish one?

Many lovers of language and metaphors use the word quisling as though an English word in essence and roots. It is, but not like most words. It means traitor, but it was the name of a Norwegian politician. His attitude, so noxious and so aberrant, imposed his name in conversations all over Europe and, later, the rest of the world.

His full name was Vidkun Quisling, and the Q was written in capital letters. His notoriety arose from the cauldron of the Second World War when the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, rolled his then impregnable military machine from country to country in a bid to lob all of Europe and the world into the fire and fury of a Nazi empire. While resistance flared all over, Vidkun Quisling collaborated with Hitler as a Man Friday to orchestrate Norway’s surrender to the German Reich. He reigned for a while as Hitler’s planting before the Nazi behemoth unravelled and Quisling lost favour and fell into the dunghill of history.

He became a metaphor for anyone who betrayed his people. Winston Churchill popularised it when he used it in a speech. To quisle, a verb from that name, has fallen out of use. But quisling has remained an irreplaceable word, especially in political dialogue.

In the Southwest today, quislings abound, but two of them come into sharp focus as conversations stir in Ekiti State as the governor, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, marks his third year in office. Two persons are bracing themselves to take a battle to him and the people of the state as next year’s election looms.

The two men are the Ondo State Governor, Olusegun Mimiko and a former commissioner in Lagos and member of the House of Representatives, Opeyemi Bamidele. These two men once paraded themselves as progressives, a term that is increasingly losing its pristine beauty because of many comers uninvited.

What is at play here is not that Governor Fayemi has not done well. They are ambitious and drowsy in search of raw power. If Fayemi is not transforming the infrastructure of the state, if he is not turning the educational system from the rut he met, if he had not revolutionised a sense of belonging in all with his welfare programme, or birthed rule of law in a way that made accountability inevitable, one would have said they wanted to change the government for good.

When Governor Fayemi was sworn in, I wrote in this column the high road ahead of him, and I wondered how he was going to tackle a state so idealistic yet so forlorn. Within a year and half, I drove through the streets of Ado Ekiti, and I witnessed a transformation at variance with what obtained while I left the city on the day of his swearing-in. The streets narrow, unlit and dust-laden, the houses discloured, the brow of its inhabitants shorn of optimism, Ekiti did not seem, even with its new chaperon’s good intentions, capable of the lift you see in its streets today.

So why is it that some persons want a change? If it is because a person belongs to another party or group, say the PDP, one would not sense any moral disappointment. Once political cycles come, opponents will fight through creative ways to wrest power from the incumbent, even if the incumbent has performed miracle. Fayemi has not performed miracle. But his miracle is on the make. Even then no one should ask the PDP not to fight. It has the right and the obligation to test its waters.

But when politics is seen only in Machiavellian terms because one nurses an ambition fuelled by a grudge, the whole principle of leadership is abused. That is what I see in the upstart Bamidele and his ambition to run.

He is running with confidence given to him by his fellow quisling, Governor Mimiko. When I wrote a column last year, Brother today, gone tomorrow, I witnessed an eruption of choreographed rage from his publicists. None of them pointed out any major achievements except markets that local governments’ funds could build without whimper. They also pointed out a token clinic for mother and child. He should go to Lagos and Delta States where a whole lot has been done in that regard. He is still building a model school up till today.

He earned in this column the glory of the title, the whitlow of the west. In the five fingers that represent the five states in the Southwest, Mimiko is the quisling. Immediately he won the election, he ran to master Jonathan in Aso Rock for a photo op. We all saw the quisling in full colour during the governor’s forum crisis when he pitched his tent against the progressives and voted for his master’s candidate. None of his loud supporters came out of the vestry of ignominy to defend his role.

Jonathan with the PDP now see him as a bridgehead to capture the Southwest for the president. It does not matter that it creates a crisis for the PDP mainstays. But for Jonathan, the best PDP chieftain in the Southwest is the impostor, the one who goes about as a Labour Party wheel horse. He would not formally join the PDP because he would be accused of overt betrayal. He also knows how effective the subterranean work can be in politics. He is shooting from the shadows.

That is why he is backing Bamidele, now overfed from the other side, who now feels the hubris of all those who cannot resist the overweening impulse of ambition. Having served as commissioner for close to three terms in another state, he wanted to be governor of his state. And that was fine. But he acted as though he was fighting for Fayemi while the latter battled in court with the man with the phony Awo cap. But Bamidele already had started building a political infrastructure for himself in the hope that the courts would fail Fayemi and that would default into an opportunity for him to arise and shine.

Faeyemi won, and a disappointed Bamidele failed again in a Senate bid. Too impatient, he moved over to the other party that he so publicly disdained in words and deeds. Now, it is not about opportunity but opportunism, a pragmatic desperation. So he bivouacs with a quisling and a whitlow, who has the nod of master jonathan. He becomes the lackey of a lackey. He, a lackey of Mimiko, the whitlow, who is Jonathan’s lackey. Bamidele is now servile to the slave of the presidency. It is like what the Argentine writer, Luis Borges, describes as “a mere discipline usurping the place of clear thinking..” The black American author, Edward Jones in his novel, The Known World, recreates the story of black slaves who owned slaves in the age of servitude, a servility within servility.

One would expect that people want to move to freedom from slavery like Mandela, but Bamidele and his slave-master are doing the opposite. A new movie, titled 12 Years a Slave starring Nigeria’s own Chiwetel Ejiofor, recreates the true story of a man who moved from freedom to slavery. That story is as true then as it is today.

The tragic death of Olusegun Agagu, former governor of Ondo State, was sad enough news. But what was sadder was not so much that other humans died in a plane crash bearing his remains for final interment. One cannot but recoil at the superstition that draped the story.

The story now surfs in informal circles, especially in the social media, that the crash happened because the former governor once held the steering at the head of the Aviation sector as minister on the watch of former President Olusegun Obasanjo. Rumours sully the living. But it can desecrate the dead.

Stories like that reflect the shallowness of the average Nigerian who mixes reality with fiction, a mordant fact of our ignorance, including among the educated. No one can gainsay the fact that the Aviation sector, even under Agagu, did not deliver a safe airspace for Nigerians. He goes to the grave with that pitiful legacy.

But to turn that into a sort of divine answer does not address the fundamental tragedy of the Nigerian condition. In a sense, it exonerates the inefficiencies of today where a minister of Aviation sees performance in the sector in the meretricious adornment of airports. New structures and designs are sprouting in airports. Colour replaces substance.

See, for instance, what happened once the plane crashed. Fire fighters did not arrive, according to reports, until about 40 minutes after the crash. Was the airport not supposed to have a standby firefighting squad? Is that not standard practice? Reports had it that some of the dead might have survived if the rescue workers arrived on time. One particularly searing example was of a man who struggled to free himself off the wreckage trap but fire caught his trousers and eventually lit him to death. Such inefficiencies did not start with the Jonathan administrative. It has been with us. We witnessed a number of crashes before the Dana crash and its deep tragedies. Not many Nigerians are satisfied that justice has been done to Nigerians by that voluminous loss of blood even of the Dana episode. Yet the Dana fleet, by some legal legerdemain, soars in our airspace still.

We have had many teams on varying panels, many investigations, lots of corrupt money trailed over the past decade. Yet we still fly the Nigerian airspace with trepidation. Nothing could make one fear more than what I experienced recently in the Murtala Muhammed International Airport on a trip out of the country. After the baggage checks and immigration where heat was more prominent than light, I walked through the corridor to the boarding gate. Just on the corridor, I beheld two buckets that should belong not on that hallway where international travelers passed. They belonged to the bathroom. But as I moved closer, I was shocked to see that the buckets stirred to the sound and rhythm of drops of water from the roof. I took the photo, and I was surprised that no one, not any international traveller, stood to look.

I asked, with a journalist’s curiosity, whether it was just that day. No, said one of the staff with a sense of irony. “The ting don dey dere for months now. Anytime rain fall, we dey bring buckets outside.” That is the story of Nigeria. Yet, less than a hundred metres away, furious work buzzed over expanding the facility. Such inefficiencies in the Aviation sector bring tragedies.

It makes no sense to look at the merest pious trifles to explain the tragedy. If the crash paid back Agagu’s follies as Aviation minister, God complicated the story by saving Agagu’s son. The others who died did not commit any crime against Nigerians. They did not play any role in the serial stupidities of our inefficiencies. We must learn as a people to observe, and not delve into mysticism where simple Inquiry will lead to light. We cannot arise and shine as a people until our light comes. We still walk in the dark corridor of lies we weave to cover our lazy minds as a people.

As I write this column, the Port Harcourt International Airport has been abandoned. Why? Politics. The Aviation Ministry is working in Lagos, Benin, Enugu and a few others. The airports look beautiful. But beauty is not safety. We had these beauties when human beings became ashes. The new trend is giving us ashes for beauty. Beauty makes no sense without truth. Hence, poet John Keats wrote that beauty is truth and truth beauty. When beauty lacks truth, we experience the sort of horror of the air crash.

It does not make sense in the Aviation industry. The same lack of rigour abounds everywhere. We are experiencing it-in-education. If we continue to trifle with education, are we not going to produce half-done pilots?

We fail to understand, as novelist Leo Tolstoy shows in his War and Peace, that so many factors lead to a certain historical fact, and we have to examine them critically and piece them together. That is the way we can turn ourselves to the glories of science.

Science does not, in my view, necessarily forbid the spiritual. But many shallow “spirituals” hide under God to propagate lazy ideas. Laziness of mind is the major culprit of our system. God helps those who help themselves. We do want to help God, so he can help us.

When we have such lazy minds, we witness the tragedy that befell Agagu and others. It contrasts the novel, The Great Gatsby, where a man, who grew rich and threw parties to everyone in the city and showed great generosity, died alone and was buried alone. His acquaintance called everyone who enjoyed his largesse to his funeral. No one came. Yet in Agagu’s case, many wanted to come, but some of them died who wanted to mourn.

That is the sort of sad and twisted story that Nigeria can spurn through inefficiency. It is the lugubrious strain in Fela’s song that “dead body get accident.”

It is time for us as a people to remember that the Nigerian tragedy happens everywhere, in hospitals, in schools, in homes, in the streets. And most of them come from a system that lacks standards. So many ingredients spoil the Nigerian soup. Blame the minister and other factors associated with flying in the country. We should not rush to bring the superstitious. It makes us not better than the one who steals the money allocated to buy security equipment or hospital drugs but says God will save them. He then buys a private jet and a Dubai mansion.

We don’t have a minimum standard. We just allow things happen because we believe God will take care of things. To paraphrase the Poet Niyi Osundare, they say the stars made it.

“With their backs to the sunrise, they worship the night.” Robert Ingersoll did not think of Nigeria when he penned those lines. We should not let that quote, in its malignant irony, to haunt us still.