The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Between bread and God

    Between bread and God

    Hooded and defiant, Kelvin Oniara held a community down below his knees and swagger. For those who knew him or knew of him, he was identified simply as Kelvin. There was an innocuous quality to this identification. He did not carry such names with frightening cacophonies or onomatopoeia, or the metaphor of a bellowing cat, or the sort of Niger Delta aliases that invoked the fear of the Maker.

    But Kelvin was all Kelvin needed to strike terror. He knew all dreaded him. He knew he could kidnap anyone. He knew he could slay any police officer or maim a soldier on the run. He knew he could cuckold any man, or best any village belle. He knew he could threaten President Goodluck Jonathan with an ultimatum. Until barely a week ago, when he knew he could not. There in Port Harcourt, where he was nesting, he fell into the trap of the security forces.

    Barely three days after, Kelvin, the gun-toting lord unto himself, reminds all of us of a coward barely two decades ago called Anini, who embarrassed a military president and an inspector general of police. Kelvin is now begging for his life and pleading with the authorities not to kill him. That falls into the stereotype of tyrants documented in literature, folklore and literature: that they are ultimately cowards projecting their fears in savagery, bloodletting and terror.

    But that is not what obsesses one about the recent development. It is that the man, with his gang, came outside in a parade to issue an ultimatum. He had children and old women surrounding him, and had them speak on his behalf, too, as though he was the new folk hero of Nigeria. They made him into a rustic Adaka Boro new-minted in the sultry quiet of Kokori village in Delta State.

    What should bother us is the possibility that a man like that could be a hero of sorts. But that is the reality where a never-do-well can abduct a rich man, especially a government type, extort at least N10 million, retreat to a backwoods society, buy more guns, and lord it over the village of poor people. He enwraps the village with a cocktail of threats and largesse. He could buy them food, pay the school fees of some of their wards, ply the old and vulnerable with medication, provide them with security. He wins their love instantly. He, a benevolent brute, becomes their provider and protector. So anyone who dares challenge him or blows the whistle is violating the integrity of their new welfare system. He or she becomes a traitor, especially when Kelvin enlists the support of a juju priest, whose first name Michael loses its irony in their soul. Michael Omonigho, the priest, could not save the hero. The gods may be to blame for losing the charm of prophesy to anticipate the arrest, or do we blame the priest, who bears the name of the angel of another deity, the God of the Bible? Michael means “like God.”

    The spiritual component of Kelvin’s system may be real, but the power of the man lay in guns and bread, fear and food. The twin worked well among the vulnerable in history. Food fuels artificial love.

    But this contrasts with another folk person in recent Nigerian history, the author and founder of the Boko Haram sect. When government failed, he provided what sociologists call the alternative society. He gave the young and vulnerable what the government could not provide. He gave them food, shelter, medication, wives and security. He became their god representative on earth when he gave them school. He gave them not the schooling of the Western world but the one inspired from heaven. That was the difference between Yusuf’s welfare society and that of persons like Kelvin.

    Very soon, when the largesse and physical security of Kevin fade, the people can return to the humility of their deprivation. But when Yusuf left, and because he left, the followers grew more potent. The followers latch on to the intangible, the something no one can hold and destroy, the something called faith. They had God.

    Men like Kelvin are gods that are earthy, evanescent and vain. But let us not think that this phenomenon began today. Persons like Yusuf and kelvin were created by a failure of government that has been with us for too long. If we can remember when self-help replaced government help, we can make sense of the origins of the Kelvins and Yusufs. When did we start to arrange vigilantes for security, buy generators for electricity, arrange sands to make our roads hold cars and feet, consult herbalists instead of pharmacists, dig boreholes for water, bribe to get passports, redefine miracles for success of our children by inventing fraudulent exam breakthroughs, etc?

    So the Yusufs and Kelvins only tapped into a tradition of dubious self-help, reflecting a perverted society lost to its mock genius. The individual has come to terms with the alternative society that filled the vacuum of government.

    So the Kelvin and Yusuf stories leave us the question as to what is stronger, God or bread? Kelvin gave bread but Yusuf gave the bread of life, according to the receivers. One illusion outlasts the other. The SSS, in collaboration with Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan, who has quietly and openly griped over the scourge of kidnap with significant success in Delta State with consistent onslaught on the distraction, has dislodged Kelvin. He must get the plaudits for Kelvin’s ouster and preserves one of his legacies of security.

    But the issue of the other giver of bread of life remains. Boko Haram, that is. The question has been asked whether poverty is enough to trigger such relentless massacres that we see in the Northeast. The answer is simple: No. But without poverty, it cannot stand for long. The rich and powerful with perverse education exploit and indoctrinate the poor. Nowhere in the opulent world do we see such sustained attack fuelled by belief. In Spain, we had the Basque separatists. We also had the case of Northern Ireland, but they were fuelled by the rich but they were purely political. They yielded to political settlements. But where politics masks faith, like in the Middle East, settlement cannot come from the genius of man.

    That is why the hardest gift to erase is what the takers see as the bread of life. It is hard to recruit a well-fed man to fight for a cause. To recruit, give the poor bread, and to sustain them, give them bread of life.

    The horror they inflict with deaths and fear reminds one of the short line of the Austrian poet Georg Trakl about the place of God in all of this human suffering, which he experienced during the First World War. He wrote, “The silence of God/ I drink from spring in the forest.”

    My question is, shall we eat bread to live or the bread of life to die?

  • Who is the boss?

    Who is the boss?

    The governors were right, and the governors were not so right. They said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the dame of the economy, should resign. The reason? Nigeria’s business of Naira and kobo – well, who talks of kobo these days except on paper? – has spun out of control. Now, as the debate rang through the economic and political corridors, I saw a big elephant, a beautiful, bespectacled, often defiant elephant.

    Her name is Diezani Alison-Madueke, the minister of Petroleum who would not brook a minister of state because, as an elephant, she would choke any competition out of the room and out of oil. That was why I chuckled as the governors, especially Rivers State Governor, the right honourable Rotimi Amaechi, called for the head of the dame.

    When she was appointed minister of Finance, her boss Goodluck Jonathan felt, as the other elephant in the administration, Okonjo-Iweala should not be hemmed in by finance. So, he designated her, without legislative backing, the coordinating minister of the Economy. I learned that so besotted was the dame about the title that she hardly honoured any petition or request that did not invest her with that grandiloquent honour.

    So, whenever anyone had a trouble with the economy, we pointed straight at the person in charge, presumably. So when the governors like the hard-charging Amaechi threw the bait, the ego of the dame of the economy could not escape.

    But further investigation would show that the woman holds that position more as a cipher than in reality. That is where the first elephant in the room, the elegant one, was ignored. Alison-Madueke, who speaks to any audience with a bored, superior air of a peacock, has escaped the jibe, except for the accusation pelted at her by some politicians.

    Okonjo-Iweala coordinates the economy only in part. She coordinates such areas as Customs, NIMASA, immigration, FIIRs, agriculture, power, etc. To that extent, we can say that she is a coordinating minister of the economy. But she is an outsider with regards to the jugular of the economy. That is, oil. She does not control the oil revenue. That was the point the Delta State Governor, Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, made when he said all eyes should point to the pot of the Nigerian economy, that is, the NNPC.

    Now, Okonjo-Iweala responded to the charge for her to resign with some hauteur, echoing her former boss Obasanjo’s words: I dey kampe. I don’t think the governors who called for her to resign expected her to cave in. They knew that the woman, a sure foot in Jonathan’s administration, would not stir at the gloomy predictions of her adversaries.

    So, what concerns this column is why does the coordinating minister of the Economy not own up to her limitations in the system. Why would she not admit that, powerful as she is, she has another woman even more assertive and defiant, and who enjoys better favours from the boss? Why would she not admit that, the elegant Allison-Madueke, whose office was accused of jetting around the world on a N2 billion bill, coordinates the economy more than the coordinator of the economy?

    The office is important, but the person can overwhelm the office or the office can swallow the person. In this instance, the office has half-swallowed Okonjo-Iweala. As for the elegant peacock of the oil ministry, the office is smaller than the woman who occupies it.

    The thing about the oil minister that riles those who oppose her derives from her royal pretensions. Was she not the one who stopped at Ore not many years ago and wept at the plebian sore, the purulent series of death traps, gullies, pot holes and craters that became routine thoroughfares of fatal destiny for the poor?

    Can we reconcile that lachrymose lady with the bespectacled, bored, superior, powerful supervisor of the fluid that holds the Nigerian vein? We can call her the model of the economy. Fashion critics have noted that upscale models in the top runways of the world execute their catwalks with often serious mien. They hardly light up. The upper crust hold in their joy, they do not fall for little excitements. They have seen too many joys, too many triumphs, so much so that they have to manufacture joys and triumphs in order to gratify their own pride. So, as sociologist Thorstein Veblen notes, they create their own artificial joys. That is why we have golf, polo, country clubs, etc.

    The low-brow model cannot but be excited so she smiles. She abides in the natural, and smiles and giggles sweeten the ambience of the poor. Alison-Madueke often loves the world of the ascetic face of the well-heeled. So, how can we imagine her fix an appointment to see Okonjo-Iweala in order to brief her as the superior officer? Can anyone imagine Okonjo-Iweala summon Alison-Madueke?

    It is quite clear that the economy is divided into two orbits. Okonjo-Iweala holds sway in one, while Madueke rules the roost in the other. But whose empire is bigger? Of course, Madueke’s. the NNPC reports to her, and she in turn reports to the president. We can see that there is no coordination in the economy.

    I wonder why the governors did not call for her to resign, although I would want both to quit, for neither of their stewardships helps us. But what is at stake at the moment is that the state governments have not had allocations in the past few months. A depleted state purse will mean many civil servants across the country, including the oil-rich ones, may have problems paying their salaries. Is another strike looming? Governor Amaechi complained last week about his inability to execute major contracts as he has had to rely on internally generated revenue since July.

    So, what is happening to the NNPC? If the Central Bank of Nigeria says it received $4 billion, why would NNPC report $700 million. That is why Governor Uduaghan shone his spotlight on that humungous pot.

  • Amaechi at barricade: a witness account

    Amaechi at barricade: a witness account

    Dusk amassed over the old GRA in Port Harcourt, but it preceded a darkness more profound and virulent. I was in a bus in a convoy of the Rivers State governor along with speakers of state houses of assembly across the country from 1979. One hundred and two of them rode in the convoy.

    It had been a grueling day, and my mission was to assess for myself the average day of Governor Rotimi Amaechi amidst the turmoil of today’s politics. The theatre has taken its toll on a discomfited nation. Jonathan versus Amaechi. Dame Jonathan versus Amaechi. Northern governors had visited Amaechi and hoodlums threw stones and cracked windows. APC versus PDP. New PDP versus PDP. State assembly imbroglio with an upstart and subversive minority soiling the dignity of a quorum by attempting to oust the legitimate speaker. Kidnap of a cleric. Reports of a city losing its halcyon ego to the barbarities of militants when Amaechi took office.

    I visited to understand how Port Harcourt, Rivers State and its governor held their own against this brimstone. The things I saw I did not prepare for. I did not know the governor had invited former speakers, he being an alumnus. I wanted to see if he still governed and how, or was I going to write in this column about paralysis in Rivers State?

    Once I arrived, I was poised to observe. So I joined the convoy at a model primary school. That tour took us several hours through his marquee projects from the morning until our return to the city and to another development I did not expect: the blockade at dusk.

    After spending a whole day hopping off and on the bus, climbing, walking, standing, taking notes, propounding questions, interrogating answers, studying the body language of the governor, and interacting with the right honourables, the last anyone expected was a blockade by the police. It began when the whole convoy made a precipitous stop at an interception.

    Initially, I chalked it up to a few snafus like a security breach by an unguarded civilian. But when it tarried, the reporter in me woke up, and I left the bus and walked about 50 metres to the front of the convoy. Then I learned that the police had sealed off the road, the governor’s favourite entrance to the Government House.

    I also learned that the New PDP secretariat was located on that road and it had been sealed off earlier on a court order. So, I wondered aloud, if you seal off a building, what has that got to do with the road? The road did not only accommodate the secretariat, but also residences of many private persons, including some expatriates, who were seen walking through the barricade having abandoned their vehicles. It also hemmed in denizens of the Port Harcourt Club and, more importantly, the state’s general hospital known as Braithwaite Memorial Specialist Hospital, and I wondered what happened in the case of an emergency.

    I walked to the barricade and I saw three police pickup vans parked end to end across the road. I saw aides of the governor trying to persuade the police officers at the post to open the road for the governor. We had spent close to 20 minutes at the spot. Suddenly, one of the police officers flared up, and said, “How can I take orders from a civilian? I cannot take orders from a civilian.”

    It became obvious that the men would not budge. A few minutes later, Governor Amaechi walked to the scene and since the officers recoiled from engaging him, he told a press corps, “You can see for yourselves. They don’t want me to enter the Government House on the instruction of the president and the commissioner of police.” He strode off to one of the buses and the convoy made a detour to the other entrance to the Government House.

    It was a frenzied evening, putting in perspective the crisis between the governor and the president. Ironically, the governor had received the president at the airport and had told me he planned to see him later in the day. I doubt if it happened. After the incident, I asked the governor if the commissioner of police had called him or if he had any conversation with him on the barricade. He said no.

    How come the chief security officer of the state fell in the dark about the barricade of his own road by the security forces in the state! That is the savage irony of the crisis, and all the shameless denials from the PDP offices cannot blot out what I saw.

    If they wanted to seal off a building, it was fine. But why the road? The military never lapsed to this primitive level. They sealed off many buildings in their draconian days, including my newspaper house. But the roads remained inviolate.

    Senator Olorunimbe Mamora, also an alumnus, summed it up when I spoke to him in the Government House: “It is the height of impunity and overzealousness.” Enough said.

  • The Olu and the gods

    Nothing reflects the conflict between ancient and modern like the hoopla coming from the Warri Kingdom, or Iwerre land. The king, Atuwatse 11, unleashed a sandstorm of faith, and the throne was rocked to its 1480 origin. The Olu said he had found Christ, thus tossing the god of his ancestors into anachronism. He said he would rather sever than serve Belial – or Umalokun, the goddess of the sea.

    He had renounced the traditional name Ogiame because it showed allegiance not to the God of Isaac but to his fathers who are now dust. He wanted to replace the anthem, and other rites and rituals of the throne.

    The development is a dream of poets and novelists. What the Atuwatse has done hallmarks a perpetual battle in the modern soul. How do we serve the God of heaven and abandon the god of the earth, or sea? He must have read parts of the Bible that said, “woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea, because your adversary, Satan the Devil, has been cast down…”

    But it would have been more potent if the Olu said he was not going to change his mind. But now that he has apparently bowed, what do we make of him? A Saul who became Paul and fell back to his vomit and became Saul again?

    Can two walk together except they agree, asked Prophet Amos. That is the conundrum. It is the collision of the gods, a classic that plays out in our lives every day, a contest of identities. Today the Christian God works when we shout hallelujah, the next day the god of Belial works when we don’t get that job or we can’t subdue that ailment. In our syncretic way, we have brought traditional observances into Christian or Muslim worship. It comes to high relief when a man on a high throne is ensconced in the conflict.

    Now, can we say the Olu has become a better Olu and a lesser Christian by this recantation? He alone can answer this, but what is clear is that you cannot serve the God of Abraham and that of Umalokun on the same throne. They are both jealous. He should have kept his worship to himself.

    If this shows the power of the kingdom, it also shows the limit of the modern king. Remember Mongo Beti’s novel, King Lazarus, when a born-again king of 23 wives had to renounce his wives and choose one?

    Even though the Atuwatse 11 has recoiled, the question remains if he did it for his own peace or the kingdom’s. If it is for the kingdom and not from his conviction, then we can say of him Shakespeare’s words from his greatest play about kings, Hamlet: the king has not left the throne, but the throne has left the king. But Auwatse 11 will determine that by his actions.

  • Saint among rogues

    Saint among rogues

    Politics abhors the hero. As a dominion of the possible, the first casualty is the idealist, the dreamer who thinks he can win the people to his bosom by marching the society towards an Eldorado. But politicians talk Eldorado. They just don’t believe in it.

    Yet once in a while, you see the anti-politician who runs riot against his tribe. It is a case of a real honour among thieves, a saint among sinners, a Saul turned Paul. Even at that, the people who go to the polls, who know the character of politicians, who know their alienation from truth and integrity, express dismay at this rare rendezvous between honour and disgrace.

    So when a councillor candidate named Olawale Jimoh disowned the victory foisted on him in the recent local government elections in Offa, Kwara State, a man of honour seemed a traitor to his class. He was not supposed to spit out a good morsel of meat good fortune threw in his mouth, apologies to Chinua Achebe in A Man of the People. In a body politic where genuine losers scream they won, Jimoh smells like an odd rose.

    But the story of Jimoh is not merely of a ward hero, but a counter-narrative to the tale of implosion now splintering the heart of the Peoples Democratic Party and a cautionary skein to the other parties, including the APC. Jimoh is speaking truth to power, he chastens the hectoring role of the president and his overbearing wife in the rumbles in Rivers State, calls for decency in Anambra State between the Uba brothers and the PDP mainstays, asks the opportunists in Taraba State to bow to the law and jars the PDP high command that it cannot sow falsehood and not reap its sour fruit.

    Whatever is happening to the party, Jimoh’s plea of truth haunts like Banquo’s ghost. When the PDP decided during the NGF election earlier this year that 16 upended 19, it did not expect that a minority number of governors – namely- seven – would claim to be the genuine PDP. By inverting the rules of arithmetic, Jonathan’s PDP is stewing in its own perverted morality. The splinter group is not playing the politics of right, but inflicting a revanchist morality on the party high command. It is basking in a Machiavellian sunshine. So those who say the splinter PDP is illegal miss the point. Legality has never been the fabric of the PDP. If they had upheld Amaechi’s victory at the NGF poll, they would not have opened the shutters to civil war in their ranks.

    They had expected Jimoh to say thank you and grovel with delight for his return certificate. Rather he thundered: “I am a bonafide Offa indigene, we are noted for our industry and truth. I did not win that election, it was rigged in my favour. I am a true Moslem who will one day stand before God and give an account of my stewardship.”

    Truth is also a casualty in Taraba, and they would not ape Jimoh, by simply doing what is right. President Jonathan says he would not interfere, but that is not true. He already has. He wants to preserve Suntai through the new brokered deal. He wants the Christian governor on the throne not just in name but as insurance against 2015, a counterfoil in the presidential sweepstake to an adversarial Muslim region. Suntai’s wife agreed that her husband cannot work to the high demands of the office. What does that tell us? That the task is above the rigours of his physical and mental powers. So why not allow the Muslim deputy take over? Rather the party brokers a lawless deal that makes the deputy governor the man in charge while the governor is a “ceremonial” head. We do not operate a constitutional monarchy, and the law does not make room for a governor as king or cipher. Even then the new arrangement does not make him a cipher when it is time to sign the cheques. So what name do we give the new arrangement? Cheque-ocracy?

    If Jonathan benefited from a system that allowed a sick Muslim to step away for a healthy Christian, why does he want to endorse the opposite? In his cynical play, he is biting the finger that fed him to the top. This is pharisaic hypocrisy. The Presidency has pitched its tent by the temple of lies in this matter. Jonathan is the leader of the PDP and whatever happens bears his imprimatur. Is it not because where Jonathan goes, the PDP goes? Is that not why Bamanga Tukur is still party chair? So, let us not kid ourselves. If he could interfere in both Rivers and Bayelsa state politics, why is it so strange to do so in Taraba? Is it because it is in the North or because the Niger Delta blood is thicker than Nigerian? Or he is not president in Taraba? Or is it because Bayelsa is his home and Rivers is the dame’s domicile? They don’t want to be like one of their own named Jimoh.

    Is Jonathan not against the Uba’s in Anambra because former President Obasanjo is in bed with that family? Nigerians are still trying to digest the notion of Chris and Andy playing faithful kin. It’s like Cain and Abel dining together after the fratricide. Blood seems thicker than water, even after the bloodshed. Are the Ubas telling each other the truth or just involved in what Senegalese novelist Sembene Ousmane calls the perfidy of lies and the hypocrisy of rivals?

    It does not matter that the PDP is claiming Jimoh is not the candidate. It is too late in the day. Where were they when he campaigned? Who was the real candidate? We can say that Jimoh may have been scared by the tempest of protest in the streets, but has that ever deterred politicians in the past? We all remember the picture of Omoboriowo caught eating pounded yam in the old Ondo State after the electoral heist. In Ekiti, Edo, Osun and other states, those who stole elections preened in spite of protests until the courts kicked them out for the present incumbents. A hero is not pure but exemplary in his humanity. That is what Jimoh tells us this season. He is not a archetypal saint, but a saint in the sense of the redemptive sinner, a Rahab of politics.

    He does not belong to the mainstream. He is what the Russian critic calls the superfluous man, an insider on the outside. He is the Byronic hero whose actions mock those who think they know all. Writers like Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin proved this. In his novel, Mikhail Lermontov calls his character the hero of our times. Was he not referring to Jimoh?

     

    Not Bunu Sheriff Musa

    In a recent column titled, Don’t marry that girl, I mixed up the name of former minister Bunu Sherif Musa with that of the former Governor of Borno state, Ali Modu Sheriff. I regret the error.

  • Suntai: Wanted dead or alive

    Suntai: Wanted dead or alive

    Football is like politics in the sense that everyone knows it all, everyone is an expert. So, hours after Danbaba Danfulani Suntai surged on our television sets, in newspaper pictures, in the viral fidelity of the internet, every Nigerian became a Suntai expert.

    Just as many Chelsea fans can tell why the Only One Jose Mourinho lost the thriller to the mechanical virtuoso team called Bayern Munich at the weekend, some people already know the state of things in Taraba State, a vortex of intriguers, egotists, leeches, warmongers, court jesters and opportunists. They know the man is not well. They know he can sign signature. They know he cannot. They know he can dissolve a cabinet, they know he cannot. They know his speech cannot last an hour. They know he can go on forever in the manner Hitler gave extempore speeches for three hours without interruption. They can swear he will slump after thirty minutes. They know he is dying. They know he can live forever. They know…

    It is what United States sports pundits call Monday morning quarterbacking, the ability to coach a game after the sweat is dry and the green turf empty as a church on Monday morning. The average Nigerian pundit, politician, human rights votary, democracy hustler, lawmaker, party apparatchik, newspaper reader is everything in the matter – a lawyer who understands the legal merits and nuances; a doctor who knows he is fit and unfit; a psychologist who knows what he is thinking and who is thinking for him; a prophet who knows what will or will not happen; a masseur who knows where aches and not; an acoustic expert who can analyse whether he sounds healthy or sick; and sovereignty because they know what the people think as though they have conducted a poll as “impeccable” as the Gallup.

    With no consensus now over anything in Taraba State, we have a Hobbesian turf, what the English philosopher called the war of all against all. Those who want him say he is healthy. Evidence? None. Those who want him out, say he is not healthy. Evidence? Nada. The spectre of impeachment has overshadowed the state house, and fear of a possible state of emergency reproaches our ability to think well.

    We must understand that eyes cannot always tell the healthy from the sick. Former U.S. President Franklyn Roosevelt conducted the Second World War on wheelchair as a polio patient. His lifeless legs did not cripple his mental powers. Josip Bros Tito held together Yugoslavia and the non-aligned movement until he died without his legs. The Suntai story is also a contest of science versus intuition, each party to the conflict politicising both. Each party believes in its imagination. Although Einstein says imagination is more important than knowledge, he did not have in mind what novelist Henry James designates as the imagination of disaster, which is what this crisis portends.

    Those who back Suntai want his deputy or acting governor Garba Umar impeached. The 26 members of the state house of assembly have rejected his letter of return, saying he did not write it. Some analysts say there are three parties at war: the lawmakers, the deputy governor and Suntai’s people. But they are wrong, there are only two: the deputy versus his boss or former boss. Those in the house who rejected his letter are playing the same script with Umar who claimed that the governor did not dissolve the cabinet.

    Basic to all these is the constitutional status of the office of governor. If the position was not this powerful, this magnificent, so flush with security votes and other aces, the battle would not be pulling down the heavens.

    The governor in Nigeria is like a monarch, just as the president is like an emperor. The powers are immense. It does not matter who occupies it, he is no more than a label. The power on the throne, the capacity to turn a pauper into a prince is in the hand of a governor or president. This power obfuscates how we define truth or integrity.

    Suntai left for ten months, and Umar took charge. Within that period, the loyal lawmakers have become ‘forsakers’ of oaths of fidelity. The deputy governor who bowed and trembled before him now feels not only an equal but a superior. The cabinet, whose commissioners must have groveled and lobbied desperately before and after they secured their appointments, no longer confer on him the lofty look of a god. What happened in between? The acting governor became a temporary god, decided who had contracts, who earned esta-codes in the law chamber, whose vote was fat or lean, who was happy or unhappy. The new holder of the purse string and infrastructure of power determined who to love and who to hate, and the people of Suntai now understand that. The former god Suntai who wants to be in charge of all the incantations and modes of worship now finds himself being banished from the holy of holies.

    So he cannot trust, like God cannot trust Lucifer, the one he put in charge of the kingdom. That was why the cabinet had to be dissolved whether it was by him or by his.

    Yet, it is obvious that while every Nigerian seems to know what the truth is, the man Suntai holds the key to life and death in this grueling drama. His is the omniscient god, who knows if he can do the job well or not. Or he knows if he can cool tempers by simply making his medical records a public matter, and let the experts come around and determine whether he should remain governor.

    His medical records do not belong to the privacy of his bedroom. He was voted into power for transparency, not to lock his strength or fragility in the dark. The job of a governor is immense. He takes care of the destinies of millions, he cannot enfeeble the destinies of the many with the selfishness of a single destiny.

    What is at stake is not Suntai’s wellbeing but that of the people, and the integrity of this democracy. Those who love him must show the love of the majority. If he clings to this silence, he indulges in what the constitution calls gross misconduct.

    What if he does not have complete control of his mental faculties? It brings us back to the Yar’Adua syndrome. The former president received lashes for insensitivity but it turned out it was his so-called kitchen cabinet that presented a false sense of the man’s wellbeing and triggered a meaningless call for impeachment.

    The gridlock is underlined by the fact that it is hard to prove that Suntai did not write the letter to the House about his return. But if he is fit to write the letter, it means he is fit enough to determine whether he can perform his duties. Consequently, he is alert enough to understand that he should make public his medical records. If he doesn’t, an impeachment proceeding is in order.

    His wife has been shielding him, a la Turai, from the public. This only makes her a Jezebel of this theatre. She ought to tell her husband the truth and encourage him to unveil his records for all.

    He cannot trifle with the destiny of his people and democracy. His party, the PDP, ought to insist on this. Similar arguments empowered the rise of Jonathan as president, and President Jonathan would have violated the principle on which he soared if he does not bring the majesty of his office to direct the affairs along the path of honour. Or else, it will be clear that Jonathan wants victory more than justice in this matter. And it will negate everything that made him president. What everyone needs is what writer Tolstoy calls the pride of sacrifice, which refers to a sublime state of satisfaction in sacrificing what is needed for the joy of all, an Abraham who gave Isaac. But that pride only derives from the sacrifice of pride. That is the real meaning of patriotism.

  • Nigeria beyond oil

    Nigeria beyond oil

    When an idea is planted and it grows, it does not necessarily generate joy. Since my days in the University of Ife, now known as the Obafemi Awolowo university, I had always contemplated our prosperity with fear.

    In the early 1980’s I began to understand the fragility of oil. It gave us the Lagos high rises, erected our phallic flyovers, emboldened a civil war, but embossed on our psyche a suicidal hubris. Oil did not only glisten, it served as our insurance against inferiority complex. It gave General Gowon the vanity to proclaim that Nigeria’s problem was how to spend its huge tranche of oil cash.

    General Murtala Muhammed meant Nigeria when he announced that Africa had come of age. For him, Nigeria that was the part of Africa had become the whole of Africa. Oil meant other things had to shrink. The pyramidal swagger of our groundnut did not, however, shrink. It disappeared. The palm oil produce, rubber, cocoa, and other examples of salutary pride, shrank. So did methodical approach to governance. So did morality, so did conscience. So did our obeisance to the dignity of democracy.

    We became a prodigal nation beholden to the spell of having, in spite of the threat that having could impose on us the wretchedness of having nothing.

    That was the motif of the conference held last week by the Nigerian Guild of Editors. The theme, Nigeria Beyond Oil, revived my fear. It gave me the sort of sensation Caribbean author George Lamming referred to when he said, “something startles where I thought I was safest.”

    In spite of the fact that we had always spoken of a post-oil Armageddon for our economy, we have not articulated it in a language as succinct and penetrating. That was why I wrote that when an idea is planted, it does not necessarily generate joy. Nigeria Beyond Oil draws from the concept of Delta Beyond Oil as initiated by the Governor of Delta State, Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan.

    But what does it mean? Many have spoken of it as though it is a call to the hoe, to return to our arched backs and humus soil. That accounted for why speaker after speaker at the NGE conference reified agriculture as though once everyone turned into a harbinger of food, our problems would recede into memory.

    We forget that food is wealth just as health is wealth just as the infrastructure and education of a people is wealth. Secretary to the Government of the Federation Pius Anyim set an important tone by showing to those who did not know that while oil is on its way out as the world’s supreme fluid, it is suffering a fall in value because of the many countries, especially in Africa, that are discovering it in huge quantities. The United States, in its ever-ready impulse to disrupt technology, had come up with shale oil and gas.

    But it took the voice of Governor Uduaghan to articulate it as an integrated idea. So, when he is constructing a road between Asaba and Ughelli, or providing scholarship to PHD levels to all indigenes with first class anywhere in the world, when he valorises healthcare for the vulnerable, young and old, it is because all of them have to work together to give us what economist John Kenneth Galbraith calls the affluent society. When did Germany discover oil? Never. What country holds the EU’s economic jugular? Germany. Those with oil act as though they don’t have them. Example? New Zealand. Such countries and even parts of countries like Alaska, put away the oil money aside so that the lean cow cannot swallow the large one.

    Nigeria Beyond Oil, like Delta Beyond Oil, does not vitiate the power of the farm. It actually elevates. It tells us to use it to grow food, but it is not to grow food alone, but know the value in the context of other things we do. Renewable energy comes in many manifestations. It comes from corn, comes as wind energy, as solar power, etc.

    But we cannot do anything without shedding the prodigal son syndrome. It abhors extravagance and the absence of discipline. It does not accept the irresponsibility of a minister who spends, because she can sign the cheques, the sum of N2 billion jacketing around the world in private jets.

    It is part of the Gowon legacy that our problem is how to spend the money. When Gowon said it, we were still a poor nation, if we are poorer today. The rich are richer than the former rich though. In the early 1970’s, the Mideast crisis shot up oil prices and our current accounts fattened like the Biblical cow. Nigeria became flush with money but we did not flush out poverty. The peacock class acquired a new vanity of squander-mania. We learned that a federal minister who did not care for champagne unless it cost N1 million at that time, and we applauded. Just as a president took it upon himself to visit countries all over the world as a sign of diplomatic finesse and bonhomie, or when clothes evoked subaltern smallness unless they were called wonyosi.

    The prodigal son had become us, and before our eyes, education standards fell, groundnut pyramid flattened, the naira plummeted from its pride to four to a Naira. Today, it is about 160, but we all know we are holding the money at that point artificially with oil money. Now that oil price is on its way down, we shall progressively have little power to prop the Naira. Its crash will have consequences that will make Nigeria so nervous that our devotion to God would make the evangelical fever of today look like the righteousness of the Pharisees.

    The Russian poet, Nekrasov, once described his country as “wretched and abundant.” He probably had Nigeria in mind with its huge oil reserve, agricultural plenty with produce rotting daily, with copper, gold, coal, etc. Yet the agriculture minister with bow tie keeps talking a big game with little evidence while we have a huge reserve of poverty.

  • Our boy wonders up North

    Our boy wonders up North

    These days, it sounds almost like a false irony to tether the word youth to peace in one sentence while referring to the North. Especially the Northeast, where youth conjures the images of the finality of blood and death, of daggers slitting throats, of AK47 brightening the nights with its staccato releases to helpless citizens, of whole families descending into sudden oblivion, and school children whose dawns are cut short in the midnight hour. In an ambience where massacre is routine, laughter only belongs to the tormentor like the predatory glee on the hyena’s face.

    I refer to the Civilian JTF, a group of young men who have charted a new path against the rapine and slaughter of the Boko Haram. They represent perhaps the greatest news of youth activism in this country in a decade. They are Nigeria’s unsung heroes. Even the media, famished for celebration, has been coy about draping these boys in sonorous lines.

    We have read in recent weeks, especially in the aftermath of the declaration of emergency rule in three northern states, of Boko Haram retreat. The extent of the Federal Government victory is still unclear, but, at least, in Yobe and the main city of Maiduguri, the activities of the group have suffered. The JTF has gone after the sectarian hoodlums with a measure of success. Because of the scanty media presence, we cannot ascertain JTF propaganda from fact.

    We are, however, certain that much emergency has pruned the reach of BH. Even the JTF high command knows that its work has been relatively made light by a group of young men who decided to take peace in their hands. They are volunteers for peace. They are saying that they want to live with peace, not the peace of guns and fear, but the peace that comes with civil coercion.

    In the peak of violence that triggered the declaration of emergency, the JTF made little headway. Analysts, including this column, pointed out the deficiency of the security agency, and the failure of the security agencies to provide fruitful intelligence. Not even the zeal of international cooperation from the United States and the European Union has breathed a respite.

    President Goodluck Jonathan fired the late Owoye Azazi and replaced him with the present national security adviser, Sambo Dasuki. The credentials of a former soldier and blueblood became the presidential explanation for the pick. I quickly responded on this page that it was a miscalculation to think that a blueblood could cow the insurgents when the emirs recoiled with fear at the sound of the BH. Palaces and top royals have fallen at the fatal hands of the group. It was, I argued, the case of the prince and the pauper, and it was futile to presume a prince could understand the working of the pauper community.

    On many occasions, the locals had caviled at the JTF and charged that the soldiers killed too many innocents. The actual perpetrators survived, and the soldiers alienated the communities who should be their allies. The soldiers shot blindly and relied on guess work. Consequently, many innocents fell.

    The young who tried to run and who did not do anything horrendous saw themselves under siege on both ends. The Boko Haram harassed them and the protectors, the JTF, unleashed their firepower. So for the locals, even when they ran from death on one side they met it on another. It was like the words of the poet Emily Dickinson, “Because I could not stop for death, it kindly stopped for me.”

    The young men decided to come together and volunteer their help for the efforts of the JTF. The initiatives began in a local community called Gonge, a suburb of Maiduguri. The body does not have the congratulatory vanity of many of our young groups, especially in the South, who band together for ostensibly humanitarian objectives. That is why some have recast the meaning of the acronym NGOs – non-government organisations – as ‘nothing going on.’ They brandish grandeur goals like democracy and human rights and AIDS activism, and draw juicy contributions from donor bodies in the western world, and either con or strike dubious partnerships with Nigerian governments.

    What the civilian JTF boys do is provide intelligence for the JTF. They go about with sticks, machetes and knives. They don’t possess firearms. They are clever lads. They are not held together by faith, so they are not necessarily Muslims, or necessarily educated. They are held together by love of land and protection of the innocents.

    They are clearly putting their lives on the line. They do not operate under the shadows. They mount roadblocks, and search the environment for infiltrations. They pass information to the authorities. A source said that the BH people frightened locals from snitching on BH partisans to the authorities because the BH often knew and came back to slaughter the informant. Now, the group goes to the authorities and report as a group and mask the identity of the real informant.

    They also understand some of the strategies of the group. Sometimes when they want to know their “enemies,” they could storm, say, a market and allow one of the BH guys to be identified and those who say bad things about him are identified by the others who blend like chameleons with the crowd. The enemies are identified for subsequent onslaughts.

    This is what the civilian BH boys are up against. We have had youth groups upset the tranquility of their regions. In the North, we are witnessing the ravages of BH. In the Niger Delta, we have had militancy. In the East, the swarm of kidnappers reined in the peace. In the Southwest, the OPC boys rumbled. Not in one of these regions did any youth group with the heroic sleight of hand and gallantry of the civilian JTF emerge. What we have had is opportunism.

    Not many would have thought that, in guts and righteous glory, the North would show the light. We cannot overplay the work of the boys from the North. They know that “the glory of the young man is his strength,” according to the psalmist in the Bible. They are using their strengths for extraordinary exploits. Philosopher Plato said “youth is the time for any extraordinary toil,” in The Republic.

    They made headlines when they identified women in purdah masquerading their involvement with the deadly group. They have not asked for funding, and no names have flaunted their activities to elicit filthy lucre. Governor Kashim Shettima expressed open support for them recently.

    This is a fresh departure from activist youths who prefer to campaign and kill for politicians. Some Boko Haram boys drew their firepower originally from working in campaign organisations in the North, ditto to Niger Delta militants. Bunu Sheriff Musa, a peddler of ignorance, once exulted over the illiteracy of his subjects as governor. He is an APC partisan, just like the pedophile Yerima. The new party should be careful not to sully their party with such subversions of role models.

    The civilian JTFs are an example of how to be young and fruitful.

     

    Kindergarten father

    OBJ blamed the younger generation for Nigeria’s woe. Pray, who is OBJ to speak up on who ruined Nigeria? No need to cherry pick names for why things have gone wrong. But focus on generations instead. Whose generation brought us the civil war, destroyed democracy with coups, plundered the Naira, sought third term, destroyed our preeminence in cocoa, groundnut and palm produce? Whose generation initiated the Andrews seeking pastures abroad? Who gave us grand armed robbers like Oyenusi, or do-or-die politics? Or graduate unemployment? Was OBJ not head of state when a newspaper cartooned his generous paunch with belt across when he introduced the first belt-tightening in the economy? Who lied about war heroics? Whose generation started opportunism, sowing when he did not sow, becoming a leader when they killed his boss Murtala Muhammed while he hid with his friend? Secondly when they killed his kinsman Abiola even when he opposed his mandate? Why is he with Jonathan again after the man ignored him? Now the father is going to the son Jonathan with whom he was not pleased before who was described as kindergarten by Akande. Now, from OBJ’s words, he taught his son the kindergarten Joe. So he is the kindergarten father.

  • History, civil war and our haunted house

    History, civil war and our haunted house

    I cannot remember their first names, but they captured my young fancy. Short, articulate with gesticulatory agility, they raised the tempo of their classes to the theatre experience. Since in my teen years I knew little about thespian ecstasy, the two history teachers gave us something close. They were Eshareture and Edeyan. I recall Eshareture’s dissection of the Yoruba Wars and the birth of Liberia. I cannot forget Edeyan’s ability to conjure back the tumble and heroics of the Niger Delta city states. In those days, the greed of England eyed our liquids – not below the earth and not black. They were red and white, and the juice of trees.

    After my days in Government College, Ughelli, I knew I wanted to study history and become a professor in that romantic inquest into the past. Not even my fascination with tales and language enlivened by the classes of Mr. Money and Demas Akpore, former deputy governor of Bendel State, took away the rapture of the past.

    At Ife, two major teachers, Professors Femi Omosini and Tunji Oloruntimehin, heightened my love affair with the subject. Oluruntimehin handled with irony and understated zest West African people’s treacherous tango with freedom and tyranny under colonial thralldom. Omosini, with wit and dramatics, engaged a feudal Europe simultaneously in love with God and mammon. After my certificated years, I have followed history year after year, reading histories all around the world and across epochs.

    Recently, when General Alabi-Isama published his civil war account, The Tragedy of History, I observed an irony. Most secondary schools in the country are doing away with the study of history, and the universities are diluting it, making history major study a lost cause. Now, it has to be history and international relations.

    The Alabi-Isama book, apart from its onslaught on the Obasanjo claims, was an invitation to the past. As the historian E.H. Carr asserts in his classic, What Is History?, it is “an unending dialogue with the past.” What struck me when the Alabi-Isama book came out was how the events of today look so much like the days before the civil war. Secondly, I discovered that our young, even the very bright ones, know little about that period. It is not their fault. Who taught them or guided them into that vault of our souls?

    As much Nigerian history as I know, much of our history is still unknown. How many know the details, for instance, of the most turbulent era of our history? Major Iluyomade narrated in detail, his command of the Ore confrontations during the civil war. Much of this has not been documented until this paper unveiled it. The Ore battle is the most mythologised of all the civil war encounters, but how much of this has been taught or documented in books or studies? So much of the war is wrapped in clouds. The Murtala Muhammed’s blood-laden command of the Niger bridge, the revenge pogrom against Hausa-Fulani in Asaba, the Abagana combustion, the capture of the Central Bank in Benin, the Midwest role, the battles for Owerri, life in Lagos, the minorities in the old Eastern region, the Yoruba relations with the Hausa before the war, etc.

    We have not had also in detail books about Ojukwu as a general, or his handling of the so-called saboteurs from the Midwest, or Gowon either as a weak or necessary commander in chief, Awolowo as the finance mainstay and dynamic of starvation or the stories of the three divisions, their challenges or exploits or limitations. All of these would form major studies in postgraduate schools and provide simplified materials for primary and secondary and undergraduate studies. Studies on most of these are perfunctory at best. I generated discontent in some quarters in a recent article on Alabi-Isama’s book, especially my assertions of Gowon as a weak commander in chief. Gowon was a nice man. Commander in chiefs are not supposed to be gentlemen alone, but officers and gentlemen. Gowon became too much of a gentleman to become an officer. If he became supreme commander as a compromise, he took it too lamely. He was a Christian to douse the southern suspicions of Hausa-Fulani hegemony, and he was a northerner to restrain northern hubris. He would not rein in Shuwa or Muhammed because he feared for his survival. Frankly, if he was rash with the two men, they might have ousted him and complicated the ethnic and political fragility of the country. But both men were killing Nigerians and Biafrans in avoidable bloodbaths. Gowon did not have cunning and statecraft like Lincoln, and he sacrificed his survival for a prolonged war. Murtala was on a tear pillaging his own men. Shuwa did not know the difference between strategy and tactics, and moved from village to village as Igbo ran away from their villages, fuelling the charge of pogrom, which was hard to deny. What of the last days of the war? Achuzia claimed he never went to Akinrinade to surrender. I would want to know if he went to him in the thick of night for a picnic. And why did Ojukwu run away? Or was Effiong then a traitor? Even a book on Air Raid will be a good document of that era. Madiebo said he lied about being at the Abagana massacre.

    A century after the conflicts, books roll out each year on the United States civil war. Abraham Lincoln’s role inspires books every year. The First and Second World Wars enjoy the chronicles of historians, novelists, memoirists, and they visit various parts, whether it is Operation Barbaroosa, or the Battle of the Bulge, or the battle of Britain, or the detention at Auschwitz or Sobribo or Hitler or Churchill, or the French resistance and General de Gaulle, or Musolini also known as the Sawdust Caesar, etc.

    If our young know history, they know their country. Tragically, the old, including our leaders, know little about our past, except the ones they experienced. If they know our history, they would know that some things happening today hark back to our past. The Rivers State crisis reechoes the rumbles of the Western region crisis. The killings of the North reverberate with the scatological details of the pogrom of the 1960s. The forming of the APC as a party harks back to NNA versus UPGA in the First Republic, PPA versus NPN in Second Republic and, under IBB, SDP versus NRC. Hence philosopher Nietzsche wrote about the theory of eternal return. The past makes us tenants of a haunted house.

    A few topics have engaged writers like the coup led by Nzeogwu and the countercoup. Even at that, the accounts come less from detached writers than memoirists whose stories stand on personal prejudice. The reason for this is the failure and decline of our education, and the philistinism of a society that would not read. Where are the equivalents of Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A study in tyranny, AJP Taylor’s The Second World War, or Albert Carrie’s enquiry into the same subject, or William Shirer’s tome, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or E.H Carr’s engagement with Bolsheviks Revolution?

    History is what we should honour and mourn, to paraphrase the classic Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton. To honour the heroes by telling their story, and mourn what we lost with a view to pursuing paradise anew. History is never boring, it is our engagement for renewal. The other day, I asked a student who Bukar Dimka was? He didn’t know. He was in his last year in the university.

    When we study history, we engage the present. We look at then to see now. A new movie, The Great Gatsby, is now running in theatres around the world, lashes at wealth from false values. It is based on a novel of the same title. Many critics say the revisit of the film is inspired by the recent economic crash just like the one that happened at the time Scott F. Fitzgerald wrote. They were right, but that book prophesied the power of history with the following lines: “So we beat on, boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

  • Peter Obi’s opera

    Peter Obi’s opera

    A few days earlier in Dakar, the humble capital of Senegal, on the seaside tranquility of one of its tony hotels, I contemplated Camara Laye, the under-song author of Africa’s most realised novel, Radiance of King. The book is a localised rendition of Kafka’s mad work of genius, The Castle. There the German Jew tackles the epic emptiness of search.

    I had not resettled here in Nigeria on my return when I picked up the rumble between Lagos State and Anambra State, and I could not but take another journey – mental this time – to Senegal. I recalled another author, Aminata Sow Fall, who wrote an African classic titled, The Beggar’s Strike.

    Governor Peter Obi, the feminine-voiced matador of Anambra State, should read that book, if he has not. If he has, he should read it again. It is the story of the revenge of beggars against the patriarchal art of oppression in Africa. In 2011, Gov. Obi did not show much empathy for the mendicant profession. The beggars came from Akwa Ibom State, and Obi did not like them. He ordered, according to the reports, about 29 of them out of the streets of Awka and Onitsha.

    Unknown to him, the wraiths and spirits of the beggars would haunt him, just as the beggars stalked the government bullies in Sow Fall’s novella. The alternative title Fall gave her book is Dregs of Society.

    Fast forward to 2013. The Lagos State Government of the governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, ordered the repatriation of 14 destitute persons to Anambra State, and Obi is crying foul. The beggars have come home to roost!

    No hoopla attended the Akwa Ibom incident from Godswill Akpabio, the ebullient governor of the state. This author does not know if Obi wrote Akpabio and handed the beggars to a government person. The Anambra State Government has not, as Lagos has shown, demonstrated in public any exchange of correspondence with the other government before the repatriation order.

    But as documents have evinced, the Lagos State government rescued the Anambra State citizens from the streets. They were not just lunatics but destitute. They were not child beggars as in the case of Anambra State, but adults. Unlike in Anambra State, the destitute received humane treatment. They enjoyed relocation from the severity of the streets to the serenity and comfort of shelter, food and medical treatment. The Lagos State Government also wrote the Anambra State liaison office to inform them that they had the persons under their care and wanted to relocate them. The State replied asking for details of the persons, and Lagos provided the facts. According to the state, the care was costing the state. So a plan was put in place with the knowledge of the state to repatriate the persons.

    Officials of the Anambra State Government were, according to the arrangement, to wait on the Anambra end of the Niger Bridge. But when the Lagos State bearers of the destitute persons arrived, the Anambra State Government representatives did not show up. The persons were then handed to a government office nearby. This negates the claim by Obi and some of the mischief makers that the persons were dumped at the bridge. I would concede that the Lagos State officials should have consulted Lagos and should have returned the fellows to Lagos.

    But this does not mean that the Lagos officials erred. Any government office ought to have taken custody of them and reported to the appropriate authority. What this shows is that Obi was probably not duly informed of the proceedings up to that point by his officers in Lagos and Awka, or the whispering, solemn-faced governor was doing havoc with the situation.

    The issuance of letters from Fashola’s government to Obi’s liaison office reflected earnestness and respect not only for the government of Anambra State but also for the persons involved.

    That explains why some Nigerians have expressed dismay at Obi’s irritability and emotive recklessness in his letter to the President as though Fashola had declared war on the people of Anambra State. It shows that Obi and his government do not operate on Fashola’s due process style. A letter from a government to another is sacrosanct, and a governor should not shout hoarse, and Obi cannot shout if he tried. But the virus of accusation has been read in many quarters as opportunistic and defensive.

    In the atmosphere of the registration of All Progressives Congress, Obi should be wary not to conflate an innocuous matter into an ethnic virus. This is dangerous and reckless. The Igbo form a significant population in Lagos, and the record shows that the Igbo have enjoyed warm reception in the state. They do business without let, and have earned rights in the state like any other group. It can be argued that other than Yoruba, the Igbo are the most favoured. They also play roles in government that Obi has not given any outsider in Anambra.

    In these days of ethnic rage, we do not expect a man like Obi to be what the Bible calls, “the accuser of our brethren.” In spite of evidence of letters, Obi lied that Lagos State did not communicate with the authorities of Anambra State.

    As Fashola has noted, why did Obi not call Fashola before escalating the matter into a potential Igbo versus Yoruba matter. Obi’s eyes are also set on the battle for Anambra State governor polls scheduled for November 16. He wants to pour venom into the relationship between former governor Ngige and his people by tagging him with the brush of the friend of the enemy, or the friend of the Yoruba.

    Akwa Ibom recently sent two destitute persons to Lagos, and Lagos did not raise any hubbub over it. The letters between both states also tell the decorum between both states. The use of the word deportation is not only wrong but tendentious. This is a federation, and the relationship between Lagos and Anambra is not between nations but parts of a nation.

    It is wrong and wrong-headed to exploit the destitute. The destitute is the worst any human can get materially. If Obi reads the Russian classic Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyvsky, he would accompany the old drunk who distinguished the destitute from the poor. The poor may have a little, and survive. The destitute person is like an empty well.

    But Obi should be careful not to fall into what is worse than material destitution. That is moral destitution. That wreaks of dishonor, and that was what I saw in a play titled, Three Penny Opera written by German playwright Bertolt Brecht. It is the story of a leader of a beggar’s colony who wants to take advantage of them for profit. He lost the pride of his daughter to the bargain.

    Obi should not prostitute the pride of Anambra State on the platform of political and ethnic opportunism.