The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

Don’t marry that girl

Former Zamfara State Governor Sani Yerima has become a metaphor for the wrong thing. Some politicians pray and strive to be statesmen. Others want to go down in history for planting the green, bright light of hope on the wilderness of despair. Some want to tackle education, healthcare, infrastructure, the rule of law, peace and stability. Alhaji Shehu Shagari was a naïve, irreparable bumbler as president, but he, at least, posted himself as the president of peace and stability. He never had violence to tackle although he did violence to the word by misusing it. However, he had to celebrate something, if it amounted to glorious vanity.

But Yerima wants a company all his own. He wants to be a poster child for tackling children for romance. Not the girl child for education, or the sanctity of fidelity, or the nourishment of the mother for maternity. His struggle, lofty in his eyes, is that any man worth his macho pride, with his hubris in high gear, can marry any girl once, according to him, she starts menstruating.

That is the education of Yerima. As our comedy turned farce of a political society has it, the matter came up for debate in the Senate, and the scores are out: Yerima one, Nigeria zero.

They deployed the law, while deliberating over citizenship and marriage and how anyone can renounce their citizenship of Nigeria. The lawmakers enjoyed temporary sanity when they expunged from the law a clause that said, “any woman who married shall be deemed to be of full age.” That was Section 29 (4) (b) of the constitution of Nigeria. Ordinarily the existence of that phrase would have made no sense and caused no stir because of the specification in earlier clauses in the constitution that pegs the minimum age of marriage at 18. But Section 29 (4) (b) had already inspired a special interpretation by minds with tendency to pedophilia. So, as the men take away the innocence of the small girls, they also take away the innocence of the phrase. The only way to sanity lay in deleting that line. How did the lawmakers lose their assured brilliance of expunging it? How did they yield, like the little girl, to the hectoring logic of the pedophile?

Senate President David Mark’s circumlocutions to a group of indignant women that included Maryam Uwais, Chidi Odinkalu and Oby Ezekwesili, reflect two things: one, we live in a man’s world that does not understand that the muscular cave man’s will does not enshrine wisdom and manliness. Two, that our lawmakers are still out of touch with the preliminary responsibility of the legislature.

We also cannot forget, if we would, the comedy from Ondo. Senator Ayo Akinyelure prostrated and waxed apologetic for appending his lawmaker’s imprint in that inglorious hour. He knew, unlike Yerima, that dire consequences awaited his legislative foolishness.

But that is the point. In spite of the hoopla in the media, especially in the South, the North has advanced a conspiratorial silence. Hardly a role model from the North has lifted a finger, or encouraged institutional umbrage against the pedophilia of one of their own. He, like many of his types in the North, do not understand that marrying a 13-year-old, is rape. To them, it is a brilliant catch, the downing of a sweet nubile bird from the virgin tree of life. They think God gave men the female folk for plaything, to scavenge, to toy with, to torpedo. It is all right to cut off the hand of thief; it is also right to defile a girl of nine.

What people like Yerima want the world to understand is that it is in accordance the law of Islam. There is no evidence in the Islamic law that encourages pedophilia. Islam calls for the dignity of women. What he and others like him are doing belong to a culture rooted in African male chauvinism. This practice existed in other parts of Nigeria in the past. But we all know that the law has criminalised any betrothal to a female below the age of 18.

We still see in all parts of Nigeria the abuse of childhood. We still see underage peddling wares in the Southwest, and East, and in the rural areas, gifted young girls are clobbered to death as witches. In Akwa Ibom State, Governor Godswill Akpabio is still waging war against the retrograde virus in our southern soul.

Yerima married a 13-year-old. He even had patience. Many have married girls below that age, even taking to wife girls of about nine years of age. A medical condition has resulted from this, and that is what scientists call VVF (Vesico Virginal Fistula), now rampant in the North. It destroys the pelvis and reproductive region of the girl. But the girl has nowhere to go, and so she must live with the inanity of her biological tragedy.

We must admit that, like the almajiri system now caviled at, the girl child problem in the North has festered for long. So it will take deep structural change to save her. The Boko Haram scourge is beginning to force the Northern elite to rethink the almajiri problem. It will take a generation to fix that. But it has to start now.

As for the girl child, the tradition has grown for long. The girl child who marries at the age of 12 knows that her daughter will marry at about that age. The men expect that their wives ought to be that young. It is not only enshrined in the culture. It is a psychological reality with the male.

But we know that the leaders can change this. We know they know how awful the system endangers the girl. The elite no longer give away their daughters to any man who wants to rock the cradle. They rather send them to school. Some of them attend the best high schools and universities around the world. In 2009, Aisha Dalhatu received the United States’ Award for Educational Excellence for her stellar performance in school. President Barack Obama handed her the prize. She hails from Kano, and she could have been any of those girls subjected to the deviant erotica of clueless old men. Many of the girls suffer this and their dreams suffer, too.

In my year as a youth corps member in Kano, I saw this daily. The apprenticeship into such marital servitude begins when the girls, in as early seven years old, parade the streets hawking trays of wares. They are subjected to the leery eyes and persuading libidos of men who invite them away from the streets.

The only remedy to this will be by law and support of the elite, not with people like Yerima and Goje. A law should make it punishable to the parents or guardians of any girl that does not complete at least a secondary level education. That will deter anyone to marry any girl and subject her to the lurid imagination of men with uncircumcised minds.

We have this sort of men everywhere in the world. In the U.S. and Europe, such uncouth men travel to Asia to patronise the market for underage girls. They cannot marry them, but they use them as sex slaves.

I call this the Lolita Syndrome based on the novel Lolita written by prose spirit Vladimir Nabokov. It has become the story of pedophilia, of an old man debauching a girl and running away with her. Some critics have seen it as metaphor for abuse of power. In a Nigeria of impunity, a Yerima can defend himself in the same way that our political class has thrived on impunity. Marrying a girl before the age of consent is impunity and a metaphor of our disdain for law and decency.

July 29, 2013
Obituary

When former President Olusegun Obasanjo penned his war memoirs, he called it My Command, a cocky title since no one expected anything less than command for a general’s account of his soldiery during the Nigerian Civil War. Again whose command should it have been? Could he have woven the war tales of another general? Readers would have called him presumptuous. Yet, when his fellow combatants read his story, they called him presumptuous. They implied that the earthy man lied through his pen, the man who ran this country twice, once as civilian and the other as soldier, who claimed victory for the war, who affects the air of the soldier as statesman, who even tinkers with the toga of thinker, was not the soldier he claimed. To his credit though, Obasanjo might have claimed to be a soldier but not a gentleman.

Last week, in the presence of other generals, a new book was launched by a participant and witness. The book, titled The Tragedy of Victory, shot to attention through a series of interviews the author, General Alabi Isama, granted this newspaper.

At the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, the book, My Command, was ambushed, tackled, shot and killed. It was also buried without fanfare. The command was led by Isama, with a book as counter-narrative. The pictures and maps served as artilleries, the memories and other documents as bullets. But the witnesses who materialised on stage at the launch starred as the bombs. The grenadiers include the urbane General Alani Akinrinade, the fiery General Theophilus Danjuma, the genteel General Yakubu Gowon as well as General Mobolaji Johnson, General Sunday Tuoyo, Col. Oyinlade Iluyomade, aka Hitler, Major Salau. We also had the female testimonies from Mrs. Utuk and Senator Ita-Giwa.

The witnesses came one after the other to attest to the testimony of Isama. Two truths cannot inhabit one room, since one represents light and the other darkness. With the blast of illumination from Isama’s book, Obasanjo’s My Command slid into an obituary. So My Command, aged 32, was buried in a ceremony of witnesses. Kunle Ajibade, a master book reviewer, brought the book alive for the audience. For irony, a lady named Taiwo Obasanjo, the creator’s ex-wife, said the closing prayers.

When generals tell war stories they owe us truths. It is a point of view but it ought to be faithful to facts. Hence other generals have written stories like the legendary but brash George Patton who titled his memoirs War As I Knew It.

My Command told basic stories. One, that he was the true hero of the 3 Marine Commando. Two, all the other generals and subordinates stumbled. Three, that he crafted the strategy that ended the war. That the 3 Marine Commando women operated mainly as flesh comforts for the soldiers. Maps also told the stories. Isama called Obasanjo a blundering general. Obasanjo denied the claims. At the launch, he painted a picture of a fleeing Obasanjo in battle who suffered a bullet in the buttocks.

Isama’s account made better sense to me because of the authority of the pictures and maps and the consistency of the narrative. Nothing helped this position than the corroboration from Akinrinade and the others.

Isama’s book told important stories. One, that General Benjamin Adekunle, who commanded the division before Obasanjo took over, gave a good account of himself until the latter part of the hostilities when he became paranoid. According to Isama, and confirmed by Akinrinade, Adekunle plotted an ambush and murder of the two gentlemen. Adekunle, through his son, backed Isama’s accounts. The book also unveils the interconnectedness of the war, Igbo fighting for Nigeria and Nigerians fighting for Biafra. Isama shows pictures of Igbo caught in battle but they signed up to fight for Nigeria. It depicted the war as a meaningless bloodshed of brothers.

Gowon came across as a bumbling commander in chief who ran a war without a central command. Isama fought shy of that conclusion but it was obvious as General Madiebo affirms in his books. Akinrinade confirmed this in a recent interview with this newspaper. Gowon could not rein in his errant generals. He also has blood of thousands on his hands for not stopping General Murtala Muhammed from forcing his troops across the Niger Bridge. As Akinrinade and also Isama show, it threw soldiers into a suicide dive. Murtala, the erratic general who played hero in his short time as Nigeria’s ruler, gave account of himself as a strategic tragedy, bearing deaths and wounded. He could not escape the charge of genocide in the Igbo-speaking Midwest.

Also bumbling was General Shuwa, who commanded the First Division. He kept moving from village to village in the East, a thing that forced the Igbo into a rudderless life of impoverished wanderers. Nigeria did not design the war to kill Igbo but to defeat Biafra. His understanding of war, as Akinrinade himself confessed, could have taken the war another ten years. Those who call Shuwa a hero miss the point, and Gowon, the leader, played the politics of survival and let Shuwa and Murtala their tyrannous runs. Gowon became head of state as a Christian, non-Hausa-Fulani compromise in the aftermath of the pogrom that killed Igbo and other southerners who were not Yoruba. Historians should get the facts right. The pogrom was directed at Igbo but killed non-Igbo in huge numbers. That accounted for the preliminary neutrality of Midwest at the beginning of the conflict. No one has accounted for the number of Efiks, Annang and Ibibio slaughtered in the North. The phrase Igbo pogrom understates the fatalities of other ethnic groups.

Gowon wanted to entrench himself and so would not upset his applecart by expressing authority over two supposedly northern generals. Murtala was from the old Midwest, now Edo, by birth, although he lay claim to the North. Gowon was, therefore, too weak a soldier to craft a grand scheme and implement them. He was lucky Biafra did not pull through Ore. Thanks to soldiers like Iluyomade who held off the numerically superior Biafran troops.

In Isama’s narrative, the Biafran army blew important opportunities to win the war early. Why did Ojukwu, another bumbler, ask his army to undertake a long trek to Lagos? Why did the army not restrict itself to defend the East, which was the seceding entity? It was Ojukwu’s ego, his rivalry with Gowon but also, ironically, his divided selves as a Biafran who also was instinctively Nigerian all the same. Frederick Forsyth, who worked for Ojukwu, wrote recently that Victor Banjo lost the war. Banjo was an opportunist who hoodwinked Ojukwu but wanted to take over the country in the so-called Third Force. The Ija Ore that resulted led to a disorganised Biafran retreat to the Midwest. Why again did Biafra want to pass through Ibadan? Other routes of surprise existed? Say, for instance, Ilorin. The Ore narrative is still not fully told as yet.

Why did Biafra recruit many Midwest Igbo officers of sterling records and abilities, and why, according to Isama, were all of them either locked up or killed for being saboteurs? The story begs for details how a whole corps of officers, who exhibited Biafran elan at the outset, became enemies? Was Ojukwu, like Adekunle, not paranoid? Isama said Adekunle wanted to conquer Aba, Owerri and Umuahia (OAU) to make a meeting of the Organisation of African Unity meeting in 1969. He neglected counsels of caution from Isama and Akinrinade about taking Owerri head on.

Isama argued that Obasanjo took over and wanted to continue Adekunle’s follies. Obasanjo’s first foray was a disaster. He also remained in Port Harcourt and did not know how Akinrinade finished the war but used subterfuge to ensure that other generals like Shuwa, Muhammed, Adekunle did appear at the Biafran surrender ceremony.

Was it not a statement of Ojukwu’s naivety that he had the best officers but failed because of strategic errors? As Tolstoy shows in his book of love and generals, War and Peace, a war is won not by those who shoot the gunpowder but those who devise the strategy. Ojukwu assumed that his army alone could win the war. Shuwa thought so too. Germany had the strongest army in the world when World War Two began; so did Napoleon in his wars. Weather, more than American prowess or Russian doggedness, humiliated Hitler. Snowed crippled the “little” generals machine.

From Isama’s account, Biafra succeeded in propaganda to the outside world, but did not win the hearts of the minorities in the present Rivers, Cross River, Akwa Ibom, Delta, Edo and Bayelsa states. They easily signed on to fight for 3 Marine Commando.

Isama’s book raises many more issues. It is a book written with decency and candour but shows that war never solves anything. Germany rules Europe now without a shot, and all the battles have turned out to be a waste of lives. Isama did not want the fire of hate but healing power of truth. That is what My Command lost. We gained a better story from Isama

July 22, 2013
Feeding the monster

The recent news of uproar in the creeks of Delta State reminds me of my days in secondary school. I often looked forward to my holidays with my grandmother in my village in the Niger Delta. I preferred it to Lagos. We had no light, no cars, no pipe-borne water, no paved roads. I thrived on the predictable staple of eba and starch and yam. Lagos offered the glitzy contrast. I bustled with what Americans call jungle fever. My only trepidation as a teenage boy was the prospect of wild beasts, especially snakes. Against them, I had no skill. But I loved the enchantment of the terrain: the arboreal beauty of the forest, the limpid glow of the rivers and the mysterious destiny of streams. They deleted any phobia. In vain, I craved the naïve facility of the country bumpkin. But I shivered with the joy of what South African novelist Peter Abraham called a dumb townie, a city boy out of sync with the primitive sweetness and sensuous peace of the village.

The city like Lagos where my parents domiciled belonged to the wild impulses of civilisation: armed robbers, political corruption, teenage delinquency, the pull of filthy lucre. In the village, wild meant simple: honesty, unadorned clothing, innocence of lucre. The other wild of the village belonged to the animals that imposed a rhythm of noise and silence to the forests, the pops and serenities of streams, the stir and stillness of the foliage.

When I taught journalism in the United States, critics of editors often cited a naivety among newspapers that stereotyped rural residents as innocents and the city dwellers as the poison tree of modernity. The rumble of Delta State between the Itsekiri and Ijaw spilled blood on the quiet streams and statuesque beauty of the forests in the region at the time. I cited the far-flung example to my students to show the other side of prejudice. Innocence does not always drape the simple.

That thought came to me when the news broke of the fight between the two ethnic groups around the Warri North Local Government in Delta State. I must state, as it is obvious from my name, that I am an Itsekiri man, and if that betrays any bias, I take responsibility. But I will state my point as my conscience propels me.

The reports show that a group known as Egbema Radical Group had been jockeying for some elective positions in the local government, and that matter brewed even as advertisement in newspapers. In the midst of this, some radicals first launched an attack on the house of an Ijaw man. The culprits did not secure the attention they desired. They stepped up the ante, and attacked Itsekiri villages. This gave the incident the flavour of inter-ethnic feud. Newspaper reports also fed this motif, and all over the region and the country, men and women in high and low places worried. They saw the return of the incubus of the old conflict. The mermaid of blood and death had risen out of the waters.

This writer imbibed that impression until I probed. It became clear from some more critical reporting like the one from our Southsouth regional editor, Shola O’Neil, and conversations with some insiders. It became clear that this was conflict as intimidation. Some boys who had been left out of the amnesty largesse had fought back with a vengeance. These young men wanted to take advantage of the flimsy agitations of the Egbema Radical Group’s call for representation by stoking up a conflict. The ERG wanted to feed off that tragedy to advance its positions.

Shola O’Neil’s report showed how brutal the killings defaced the villages that had enjoyed peace for close to a decade when the crisis ended. Whole families were wiped out, and ironically the Itsekiri were not the only victims. Some Ijaw also fell. Bullets spill blood but recognise no kin.

The perpetrators attacked for intimidation. They wanted to railroad the state government and the Federal Government for attention. Hence Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan warned that he would not concede to them and would not act under duress. He noted that the positions the ERG wanted were elective positions and if an Itsekiri won, it was not his doing. The Governor noted he was an Itsekiri man and he understood the sensitivity of the issue. Sources say the boys want to have their own opportunity to bunker oil. They are learning from the futility of the amnesty programme, and they are trying to take advantage of a subdued tension between the two ethnic groups. They betray envy of the big boys fattening on contracts from the president.

The perpetrators want to follow an old script: levitate selfish and parochial interest by exploiting familiar grudges. This is dangerous, and Governor Uduaghan understands this and he has shown why caving in would amount to feeding a monster. The irony is not lost for most of the beneficiaries of the amnesty programme are Ijaw. We have seen how the Jonathan administration has lifted these former brigands to be caretakers of our patrimony. Now, he should see that the same ethnic group is insatiable. It is a parable of the failure of the amnesty programme. It is the President’s action that made a group to call for an Ijaw region to cover other ethnic groups like Urhobo, Itsekiri, Isoko, etc. This is because, increasingly, Jonathan cannot distinguish his role as an Ijaw man and his position as President of Nigeria.

He has not addressed why the problem of violence persists. Bayelsa State has witnessed bursts of violence and Governor Seriake Dickson, his son governor, has been weeping impotently in public over the menace. The same groups are terrorising Rivers State to the extent of lobbing teargas into the Government House.

We all know the bloodletting that the Itsekiri-Ijaw conflict wrought in the region. It changed the landscape, wiped out the ambition of some of the youths for a generation, decimated families, destroyed businesses, and the state, in spite of the long spell of peace, still bears scars of that sanguinary era. Governor Uduaghan ensured peace in the state even before the so-called amnesty. In his new book Transatlantic, Irish author Colum McCann noted that peace is harder than war. Those who want to rekindle the inter-ethnic war are obsessed with “half-remembered fragments of some enormous receding and impossible dream,” apologies to Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby. But the Federal Government owes it a task to the country to address the source of the problem. We must replace greed with work and opportunities. We cannot continue to feed the monster, or the Niger Delta will default to its old theatre of blood thirsty goons with flamboyant lifestyles.

Mimiko: Whitlow of west

Newspaper correspondents and labour leaders in Ondo State must love Governor Segun Mimiko very much, so much so that they would not report that the man they so gleefully serenaded in the last election has been owing salaries of the civil servants and local government workers for months. Where is the people’s money? In the five fingers that represent five state governors, Mimiko has earned his place as the whitlow of the west. He cannot say his master Jonathan is not paying him allocations, because good lackeys and lapdogs deserve sweet bones. The Iroko should not fatten at the expense of those who give it nutrients.

July 15, 2013
From revolution with love

Not many Nigerians eyed with enthusiasm the rumbles in Tahrir Square in Egypt last week. Not many are glued to it even now, in spite of the earthquake significance for the Nigerian political earth. It is not a revolution for the young alone. Its rage dissolves hierarchies. About the French revolution, the poet William Wordsworth crooned that “bliss it was that dawn to be alive/ to be young was very heaven.” Wordsworth wrote bliss that did not belong to the French Revolution. Not after the guillotine of paranoia that saw head after head fly out of bodies as hysteric crowds cheered with the glee of hyenas.

As I write, the revolution has nothing of the neatness of theory, about one order going for the anointing of the new. Revolutions are not sacraments. Often they carry the mournful halo of butcheries. Don’t forget the other ones, including the Russian and Chinese revolutions. They woke up their societies, teased them with dreams of a promised land and, through waves of blood, anger and destruction, returned them to their default pennies and penuries, to their inequities and inequalities.

That is why this writer is wary of revolutions. The best revolutions are reforms that over long periods become revolutions. So we can talk of the American Revolution not in terms of the result of the war that ousted England, but the country that resulted over 50 years later and became the model for other nations. The non-political ones like the industrial or scientific revolutions did not appear so until late in the day.

So while many call for revolution Egypt style, I applaud their passion for Nigeria. Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal, called for it last week. I love a revolution for Nigeria. But unlike many, I think we wax romantic about this subject. We are not close to a revolution.

Nigerians are too happy for a revolution. We love our tribes too much for a revolution. We love God too much for a revolution. We love our suffering, as master masochists, so we prefer the pain now to paradise tomorrow. We sniff crude oil every day, and the greatest tragedy is that we love oil too much to contemplate a revolution.

We have never in our history manifested, in any collective way, a revolutionary ferment. We have only pretended it. We have only romanticised it, like in the June 12 struggles and the charade of a labour standoff we had about a year ago. We lack the spirit of endurance and the sense of sacrifice that embroiled Egypt last week and compelled an elected officer who was president to make an apology of a broadcast after dealing a high hand in the fashion of a pharaoh.

The point though is not that Nigeria is not ripe for a revolution. We are. The problem is that we are too ripe for a revolution. The translation is that we have passed a situation that could have driven other societies to the streets. But we escaped every chance for a revolution. I think three reasons account for this.

One, tribe. I try not to use the stylised word ethnicism, because what assails us in Nigeria is tribal. The hate in the air that divides us is savage. It is like the loss of innocence dramatised in the Nobel Prize-winning novel, Lord of the Flies. Hatred is no longer hatred if the other group does not fall and die. I recall the old national anthem, “though tribes and tongues may differ/ in brotherhood we stand.” We sang that anthem before we killed each other in a fratricidal war. We see this now in the Niger Delta, in Plateau State, and in the blood fest of Boko Haram around the North. We see it all the time in election cycles.

The second is religion. I am a Christian, but I see Pentecostalism and the Islamic fundamentalism as twin villains of the day. We are compelled to see Nigeria as the kingdom of God, and we place emphasis on individual redemption as against collective liberation. This contradicts Bible injunctions, but individual salvation should not counter collective bliss. We should be our brother’s keepers. But the religious leaders key into the capitalist ethos to profit from the misery of the day. The consequence is a lack of insistence on change but in finding individual escape routes. It is always “my God, or my Allah.” As Max Weber wrote, capitalism preys on individual piety. The religions as they are practised endorse the status quo.

The third is oil. Oil reminds me of a story in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. In the centre of a town near Paris before the city quakes under a revolution, a big vat of wine cracks on a rock. It leaks in furious temptation. Everyone scurries to have a share. Those with cups come. Those with buckets come. Ditto those with handkerchiefs. Everyone has their share of the drink. They thrill to this inebriate heaven. Mothers dance with their children. They make circles; and men, women and children rejoice in the liquid spell. But drink comes to an end, the alcohol clears and the whole society regains sobriety. Farmer goes back to farm, mother remembers where she leaves the child, seamstress defaults to her tools, etc. The party is over, and sadly they embrace the repressed reality again. That is what oil means to us. In one way or another, oil defers our engagement with our misery.

Today we have to face it. Nigerians have not suffered enough. You would think the depredations of Boko Haram would trigger something. Nope. You would think that the stealing of treasuries everywhere would awaken us to integrity. No way. Somebody said recently that the kidnappings indicate our closeness as the poor are sending signals to the rich. But I believe the kidnappers are not thinking about ruffling the rich but want to be rich too. They don’t detest the rich and their corruption. They just want to be like them. That is not revolutionary.

I think the thieves should steal more. The roads should decay more. The hospitals should be worse than consulting clinics but chambers of death, although they already are. The schools should churn out more illiterates and the bridges should collapse everywhere. Tribal strife should descend to deeper atavistic savagery. The Americans and Europeans should ban us from living in their countries but they won’t. They want our money. We should have a government that gambles all our oil to another country or firm in the West or China. We shall wake up one morning to see that our country is in a shipwreck and all of us are sinking together and there is no one with a God to pray to and a fat bank account to latch on to. We become dependent on our collective salvation.

Then by our actions, we will begin a meaningful conversation about revolution. Meanwhile, we have a party in which some have wines costing a million naira and others are staggering on paraga, a local brew, or apetesi. Make your choice.

I despair at this scenario. We are too adept at creating illusory heavens out of hell. So, let us just dream. A dream can be an end in itself. So let us just dream about it, and see Egypt on television.

July 8, 2013
God’s graffiti

If you saw the Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, in 2007, just before he ascended the throne, you need to see him today. Then he was a sprightly young man. Today, he looks like a sprightly young man, if you don’t look higher than his forehead. If you dare into that higher territory, into the forbidden region of his hair, you encounter age.

Once your eyes fall on the grey hair, you contemplate the contradiction. The hair belongs to another person, a comparative Methuselah, hoary, wizened, frail, going. Not to a 50-year-old, not to his eyes that light up his face like an audacious candle. Not his tongue that weaves through legalese, that cuts through policy like a wonk, that insists on good roads, on rule of law, on the revamped schools, on the Eko oni baje sing song. Not his feet, sometimes too martial for its lankiness, walking though city projects. Not his smile that belies the grit within.

With eyes dreamy, tongue razor sharp, his feet martial, the governor of example can live with his one handicap: the disappearing youth of the hair. But wait a minute. What does a disappearing hair tell us? That age has happened prematurely? That the eye however dreamy, mind however agile, tongue however sharp and feet however swift, the hair is a signature that the rest of the body is undergoing the same siege. We on the outside may never know.

But we only have the spirit to tell us. And the spirit, as we all know, is master of the flesh. And that is why, even if the hair tells us that Governor Fashola, is not the 50-year-old he looks, his works reflect the genius of the 50-year-old we expect. Or shall we say, his works are the grey hair. So when we see the massive infrastructure work he has done, the housing projects, the Trojan work on the rule of law, the work on education, it is the hair that tells us of the toll. The eyes lie, the tongues deceive, the feet walk astray, but the hair, in its luminous boldness, tells us that the man Fashola is the toiling governor we see every day.

His spirit, bubbly as ever, tells that matter is nothing. He works and he works and the body can tell its own story. The work is his spirit, the exertion, the exercise of the power within. It is like the words of Jimmy Carter in his autobiography when he defines old age as when “despair replaces hope.” So the grey hair may well be the liar here. Not the feet, or skin, imperious eyes or leaping feet. Since he hopes all the time, in works and deed, for a better Lagos, the hair is the loser, not him, not Lagosians, not history. Just the hair. When the hair fails, no despair.

The Bible says “the grey hair is the crown of glory,” but I doubt if it had the age 50 in mind. But if you see it as the crowning glory of a task, then Governor Fashola should feel blessed. His eyes, dreamy and triumphal, are cast on history. He wants it, even if he is coy about talking legacy, to be glorious and kind.

Winston Churchill, never one to shy from his stature in life, said in his famous growl, “history will be kind to me for I will write it.” Churchill actually put pen to paper and wrote chapter after chapter about his stewardships and others as well. But it is not what Churchill has written that has placed him in the front rank of all statesmen in history, it was what he did. He rejigged pride in his island nation against the superior behemoth of Hitler’s army. He marshaled arms, diplomacy and the English language.

Fashola has been writing his legacy, and he still is. All over Lagos today, we see the handwriting in motion, in road work, in the trains undergoing tests to decongest commuting. We see it in his search for a decent society. The restriction of Okada was an instance of courage. Many thought it was heartless. Many thought it was elitist. Many thought it would raze down the city. No one countered the view that it saved lives and advanced the stride to a decent society. Governor Fashola, as Professor Itse Sagay noted, is not always about what we see, but the imponderables. What we see can perish, but what we don’t see will endure: rule of law, decency, education standards, simple values like lack of ostentation in office. Roads decay just as integrity decays. Both are called corruption. But the decay of the latter is more damaging. Hence his emphasis on the latter.

A leader will not bother about his grey hair when his name is becoming an idea rather than a reference to person. So Fashola has become, not only to ACN, but to other parties an instance of what you can do when given an opportunity to serve. He turned 50 to great eclat not because he turned 50 but because he has turned the benefit of his half a century on earth to an eminent account. So his grey hair should be seen as “God’s graffiti,” apologies to Bill Cosby. If that is the story, then we can go back to the Proverbs assertion that it is the “crowning splendour.”

July 1, 2013
Fayemi’s Ikogosi School

For two weeks, 50 graduate students gathered at the scenic Ikogosi warm springs to learn. That in itself was counterintuitive for Nigeria. We usually see such resorts as ambience of vanity. But there is room for that. Kayode Fayemi, the governor who knows, made it sublime. He brought bright Nigerian professors from Europe, South Africa and the United States to tutor Nigerian graduate students of Ekiti State origin in a wide variety of subjects. This was a tour de force for graduate schools in the country.

I learned that there was a huge contrast between what the students learned in the summer school and the daily digests from their local teachers. The students also privately admitted that. This is the tragedy of brain drain, and the summer school is designed to teach them how to keep abreast of the latest in research, thinking, debate and access to the higher reaches of knowledge in contemporary world.

Graduate school is about rigour, and they got loads of that at the summer school from our local imports. We cannot keep them here, so the summer school is the smartest to eat our cake and have it, to let the professors teach abroad and also teach here.

If we have this in the most elite of education, we can wonder what we have at the foundational levels. Education in Nigeria is our greatest tragedy today, and unless we tackle the quality of mind of the young in their malleable stage. That is why we must support moves like the summer school.

July 1, 2013
Our artificial class

Nothing explains the primitive profile of our capitalist system more than the chasm between the rich and poor. This is a cliché, but that is why it is a tragedy. I see this tragedy more in the furtive rise of a new cadre of the young in the society.

I refer to the children of the very rich among us. They are disconnected from the soul of the society. Or shall I say they are engrafting a new soul on our society. I call it furtive because we see it and we seem not to see it.

They are those kids who attend the very elite schools in our midst. Those schools, especially those in Lagos and Abuja, cost a fortune per year. Parents spend millions of Naira per ward just to ensure that they enjoy the most rarified and snobbish of classrooms. The classrooms are different. They are five star in quality, in facilities, ambience, in the accents of the English, even in the trajectory of their curriculum. They feed better at school, are chauffeured to and from school, and know no circle of friends except the vortex of snobbery that such an exclusive club offers.

On graduation, the parents cannot see any secondary school good enough for them except in the United Kingdom or the United States. They spend top dollars. When they are done with high school, the next step is to secure a place for them in some of American or British universities. But these children are still not British, neither are they American. They are Nigerian. They spend their holidays here and circulate within the same circle of friends in the primary school in Ikoyi or Victoria Island.

But the father, a well-heeled man in the business and political high tower of society, knows that the son or daughter will return home. He has a job waiting, and the job is a tony one, in the banks, telecoms or oil sectors. Others enjoy the privilege of high political apprenticeships.

When they come they lord it over those who have sweated in the innards of Nigeria. They understand what it means to suffer and to enjoy in Nigeria. They know what it means to be without electricity, to jump on danfo, to hunger, to hope against hope for school fee to be paid by a struggling uncle. If they are female, they understand the alienation of their bodies from their souls as they have to compromise their pride for lucre just to get by. Those who live in Mushin or in the creeks or on the crowded suburbs of the North understand the fears of living in the life of the average Nigerian.

But the new cadre of the young have no such experience. Yet they are placed in a position to rule over those who know the society. How will they decide what best product the average Nigerian should consume, what are the emergencies in education or in infrastructure or the heres and nows of political agitation?

While the kids are enjoying the high-profile education in the upscale suburbs and in the Western world, the young here are educating themselves in the crucible of underdevelopment. But the new cadre has now spawned another cadre. These are the ones who go through the normal school system from primary to secondary school and even to the university but think they want to belong. So they eke out the funds to secure a master’s degree abroad.

Others pursue their first degrees abroad. But they know, too, that they don’t belong there. They belong here. But their parents are not so rich and connected. When they come back, they do not get any jobs. They are alienated from the society they left behind. They are immiserated. They are like the character in one of J.P. Clark’s poems who cannot go forward and cannot go back.

What created this class dilemma? It is our educational system. The parents do not want their children to suffer the inadequacies of the Nigerian education. But the same elite class impoverished and devastated that education system. Now they have left the education system to rot and decay.

I have had a chance to interact with some of the products from “abroad” and I find them so synthetic. I also see that they love Nigeria but different from the way a Mushin man loves Nigeria. These synthetic Nigerians live and breathe only in the tony part of the land, and when they travel it is either to Europe, Dubai or the United States. They don’t see Nigeria as a nation to save but a place to exploit. They see it as a place to tap and enjoy because that was how they were raised. Those who rise genuinely can understand the life of privilege from the context of the life of the deprived. Those are better able to handle our anomies.

When they organise events, they see only the world they know, the world of the privileged. Those who have lived in the United States know this experience, especially in the relations between the whites and blacks. The whites tend not to understand the peculiar sufferings and needs of the blacks, partly because those in power tend not to have experienced it except in the abstract. The whites go to white schools, worship in white churches and shop in the high-end stores. Over a decade ago when Jeff Bush, brother of President George W. Bush, was asked what he would do for the blacks, he said he had no plans for them. It generated firestorms of attacks and recriminations. I recall being asked by a white woman to have dinner with her family in Colorado. She had two sons. She was happy I came because, according to her, her sons who were in their early twenties had never sat before at dinner with a black man.

But the society is making efforts to address this divide even among the rich like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. The Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action should factor in admissions into American top universities. The reason was that if the whites and blacks schooled together and lived as roommates, they will understand the society better.

The best way we can attack this is by reviving our education. Indications show that the fruits are beginning to show, if slowly. The work going on in Lagos State public schools with standards rising is a potential antidote against the toxic trend of the emerging artificial class. The governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN, is doing this with a blend of standards, testing, facilities and training. On the other end, the elimination of the house boy and house girl syndrome in Akwa Ibom State by Governor Godswill Akpabio are good signs. Some will take time to seed and flower like the leveling of classes with the tablet of revolution from Osun State and Ekiti State’s insistence on standards.

Our rich do not know the value of money other than personal comfort. They think like the privileged that are lampooned in Thorstein Veblen’s masterpiece of social x-ray, The Theory of the Leisure Class. He coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” to mock the avoidable waste of resources for their egos. It is the attitude of throwing weddings and birthdays in Dubai and Spain that we have also transferred to education. Nothing is worth rescuing at home. We plunder the home front and take refuge abroad. The result is to alienate the many and plant the seed for a potential social unrest. The trend must stop as the bomb ticks.

Red, amber or green?

I learned recently that Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan has enshrined a new template to monitor to progress of Delta State’s project and commissioners. They are used to know on a quarterly basis who is working and who is behind. If you score red, it means you are not performing, and your job is in danger. If you are amber, you are in a precarious position. If green, you are doing well. This is a simple way to work. I think other governors should follow this or create their own templates. It simplifies governance. It is the traffic light of performance.

June 24, 2013
Old man and the sea

The Peoples Democratic Party wallows in disarray, and the party leaders strut as though it is juice rather than poison. And the major culprit is the chairman of the party, Bamanga Tukur, who is gaining notoriety like other oldies like the ex-military officer Jonah Jang of Plateau State and the peacock without glory from the Niger Delta, E.K. Clark. These men have wizened but are not wise. Age has become an obstacle rather than leapfrog to sagacity. They make old age look like the plague.

The latest firestorm involves Governor Aliyu Wammako of Sokoto, and how the party leadership under Tukur decided to flush out the man from party “honour” because he played a role of conscience during the recently concluded Governors Forum election. He is accused, like his fellow traveller Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State, of anti-party activity.

Tukur on the surface has a stellar resume. He was a governor in the Second Republic of the old Gongola State. Prior to that, he was the helmsman of the Nigeria Ports Authority during the infamous Cement Armada scandal where he acquitted himself well when he decongested the ports in the Gowon era. He heads and is a member of many boards both locally and internationally. Without bagging a first degree with the toil and sweat of lucubration, he parades himself as a doctor that he acquired in the now common Nigerian fashion.

If after all these, he decided to take a bow from public service after clocking the hoary tapestry of 70 years, he would have escaped scrutiny and soared to his maker as a man of immense stature and nobility. But he reminds one of the tragicomic protagonist in the novel Being There by Jerzy Kosinski. It is about a man who knew not much, witnessed not much, attended not much school, spoke little. Suddenly by the accident of history, he was, by wide acclaim, being touted for the presidency of the United States. It is a cautionary tale about the empty grandeur of fame and fortune, and the dizzy deceptions of democracy and capitalism.

The climb to party leadership has brought Tukur to a pitiful pass. Two developments have led to his demystification. One, the stories of his sons, Auwal and Mahmud. The second is the crisis that has alienated the majority of governors from his own region from the party he shepherds. In the case of his sons, he exposed his lack of grace. When his son, Mahmud, became charged with involvement in a N1.2 billion rip-off of the Petroleum Support Fund Scheme, attentions turned to him. His son, many believed, benefitted from his high connections. On his own, Mahmud could not have enjoyed the high place in the world, and so when Mahmud suffered, the father also suffered. Some say he manipulated his high connection to plume his son and, vicariously, himself with oil fortune.

This may not be fair, but that is life. But he commented later that he was not involved in his son’s story with the alleged oil subsidy scam. I thought that it was tactless. All he needed to do was stay quiet on the matter. We cannot visit the sins of the son on the father. We may say though that the blessings of the father may have foisted dubious gifts on the son.

As for his other son, Auwal, the man wants his son to be governor. He wants to visit his blessings of many years ago on his son. He is the party chairman and that provides a conflict of interest. Why should a father want to impose his son and use the instruments of the centre that is at his beck and call to create his own dynastic fiefdom? He charges back by saying his son, Auwal, had been in politics before he ascended the party chair, and the son has a right on his own to do what is right. What is right is not always honourable. His son has a right to run for office whatever the father’s fortune. It is when honour meets right that we attain what poet John Keats goal of truth meeting beauty.

The father should have played his role without interfering in the affairs or seeming to marshal his high office in the slugfest. We all know that he loathes the incumbent Governor, Murtala Nyaka, another clueless oldie in politics, who wants to create a dynasty by imposing his son Abdul-Aziz. On the surface again, we can say Tukur is right for wanting to challenge Nyako for trying to impose a nepotistic tyranny in the governor sweepstakes. Let the son do it and let us not see traces of your power looming from the centre. That is where again I saw that the man has wizened but is not wise. He is playing dubious messiah as though he wants to save Adamawa State from a tyrant. But he just wants to take it for himself. He is no hero.

The affairs of his son have unveiled his iniquities like the story of the grand priest of the Bible known as Eli whose sons led him to spiritual limbo. All these acts prepared Tukur for his present malady with the governors.

He is doing all of these because he needs the backing of the president for his special prize: governorship for his son Mahmud. The president since Obasanjo has always imposed the party candidate from the centre. He expects to play serf to Jonathan for a presidential quid pro quo in Adamawa State government House. That is the opportunism of Tukur and his lack of grace.

His is an old man who wants to have peace even if it means his party is at sea. We all know the story of Hemingway’s classic where an old man struggles after forlorn attempts to catch a fish. After his success, he spends his last ounce of energy to drag the prey to shore. Much of the fish is gone, but he has honour and dignity – a spiritual satisfaction. The novel Old Man and the Sea has become a testament to literature and the sublimity of the human spirit.

It is not to Tukur’s credit that he should wreck his party in order to build his own joy. It is cynical politics at best, but it exposes the worst in Nigerian politics. He is using his power in a way that reminds one of 19 the century Prussia before it became Germany and historians described it as an army with a state rather than a state with an army. It may be Tukur’s Hobbesian peace but it is PDP’s and Nigerian nightmare.

June 17, 2013
The new slate

It was a slate then. It is a slate now. Back in the day, we carried the miniature blackboard and wielded our chalks. We could only write on it. It had no memory, and whatever passed for memory we wiped off with our hands or what we called duster. It contained only what the learner or the teacher put on it at the moment. We call it primitive now. At that time, it was the grand way to learn, a miracle of erudition.

Today, the story is different. Kids wield the cell phone, and through it borders collapse, time and space intertwine into a blur. The internet, cell phone, iPad, and the dizzy traffic are what Al Gore designated as the information superhighway. We are fulfilling what Daniel said in the Bible, that “men will go to and fro and knowledge shall increase.”

In that rustic state of Osun, the grand old state of learning is about to get rusty. From its success, others will take a bow, and emulate what is potentially the most audacious move for education since Obafemi Awolowo, with free education, shed light into the brains of his compatriots in the 1950’s.

The Yoruba call it Opon Imo, and it is translated as the tablet of knowledge. The launching last week was a consummation of about two years of soldiering. I hinted in this column two years ago when the idea was mooted that it was an extraordinary innovation. It was an example in idealism. Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, with his trademark goatee, optimistic eyes and boyish zeal, took on the challenge.

Over the past two years, I had waited for the moment last week. Often I would ask him, “what’s up with Opon Imo?” but his answers varied.

At the beginning, his eyes glazed over when he boasted it would be a revolution. After over six months and I saw nothing, I wondered what was going on with it. His answer was more sober, without the glint of the sanguine. His answer, if I can recall properly, gave a hint that the work was on. But he had no enthusiasm to speak further on the subject. He, however, understood my agitation when I said that, for all his vision for the state, the project that impressed me the most was the tablet of revolution. He reassured me it would be done. I could see that he was a little embarrassed that the project did not move at the speed he wanted.

I decided not to mention the subject for some time, but when the silence appeared to me like capitulation, I raised the issue about late last year. He was more spirited that time. The software was giving some problems but some experts had been hired and they were optimistic that they would get it done. The light had resurrected in his eyes, and his body language resumed to the path of boyish glee.

That was the way of technology. It is thorny with frustration. Biographers of Thomas Edison, who invented so many modern marvels, tell the story of his constant frustrations, near misses, surrenders, and the stage that playwright Samuel Becket described as to “fail better” than previous failures. The governor referred to this in his speech at the launching. In the end, courage and spirit triumphed over pain.

The tablet is like the iPad in size but it contains multimedia content, 56 tutorials and e-textbooks covering 17 subjects, over 40,000 practice questions and answers and seven extra-curricular books. It gives the student the ability to learn on the go, and the teacher to track the student’s performance. It is not only an innovation in learning, but also creativity in economics as it saves the state N8.4 billion annually to procure textbooks for its students. It also domesticates learning, tapping from local culture and lore. Solar power plants have been located in the schools to allow them charge the device as counterfoil to power failure.

This boost will play on the already breakneck rise in the number of enrollments across the state. The tablet cannot be seen in isolation but in the context of a programme that includes feeding of students in schools with protein-rich food, supply of other tools as well as the erection of a model schools all over the state in what is billed to be the biggest budgetary allocation ever to the sector to the tune of N40 billion. It is a programme of light for the future whose fruits the governor may not see until his hoary days. It is an endowment for posterity.

It is also a paean to technology. It reminds one of the phrase, a brave new world, which was popularised by the novelist, Aldous Huxley, by giving that name to his inventive novel. He borrowed the phrase from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Other writers like Wells, Leibniz and Voltaire have been fascinated by the concept of technology. Technology helps us tackle the future. The world does not change without it. We remain where we are unless we invent. Alan Kay said the best way to predict the future is to invent it. We have had such things in our past, like the introduction of the television by Awolowo, the opening up of spectrum of mobile communication in the Obasanjo era and the use of software to account for and save revenue by former Governor Bola Tinubu.

But technology often disrupts, and the word disrupts is always a good thing when scientists use it. When Gutenberg gave us the printing machine, it democratised learning. One of the beneficiaries was the lay man who could not access the Bible. He depended on the priest. But Gutenberg, who democratised learning, touched off the protestant revolution as a consequence. The steamroller, the car, the airplane, radio, etc, changed the world. Great leaders think about inventing. The Egyptian leader Mohammed Ali was so enamoured of change that a historian said that if they suggested to him to build a castle in the air, he would ask them to try it. Only those who dream, dare.

Opon Imo is a testament to dreaming. Technology has not always done us good. But we need it. “The world is very different now,” intoned, John F. Kennedy, “for man holds the power to abolish all forms of poverty and all forms of life.” But that is only possible when “men have become tools of their own tools,” according Henry Thoreau.

Opon Imo may hit some hiccups along the way, and I might say it is inevitable. But the destiny is inescapable. All others have to join him and adapt and even improve on it, so we can make education cheap for all across the country. It is time to move from the old form, by revising what we meet on the ground. That is merely mending. And as Huxley himself said, “ending is better than mending.” This is a surefire way to end illiteracy in land.

June 10, 2013
A coroner’s inquest

The issue is less partisan because it is more so. I am referring to the election of the chairman of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum that held a little over a week ago. It is easy to tag it as an opposition versus establishment saga, a grudge match between President Goodluck Jonathan and Governor Rotimi Amaechi, or a signal of the impending battle to the death between the APC and PDP.

It is all that. Who would deny that the opposition did not gloat at Jonathan’s frustration when his candidate, the ex-military officer Jonah Jang, fell dismally in front of his colleagues? This is so especially when they anticipated a coronation but had a coroner for their ambition to take over the governors’ forum. They did not yield ambition to grace.

The first plot was to ask Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi to step down as chairman before the election. That would have brought a vacuum. Then they would have said, let us appoint a caretaker, and one of the 16 who voted for Jang could have taken charge. Then like the last meeting when they did not have the numbers to oust Governor Amaechi in a fair contest, they could have declared that an election should hold at a later date. By that move, they would have accomplished what President Jonathan mandated: oust Amaechi for anyone else.

But Amaechi knew this and said he would not step down but asked the director general of the forum, Asissana Okauru, to conduct the election. Do the governors or president step down because of election?

That was the first indication that the anti-Amaechi forces were nervous. Election is a ritual. They did not want to yield shenanigan to the ritual of democracy. That was the first instance of failure.

The second was when Ondo State Governor Olusegun Mimiko turned himself into an adversary of secret ballot and an evangelist of open ballot. The man, who is unraveling as the quisling of the west to his Ondo State people, knew that he could not trust the so-called 19 whose names were fraudulently listed on an advert in the media. He was clearly one of the 16. The so-called 19 is what I call apocrypha. It was a false document by a false people.

Well, Mimiko failed and the election took place. That was failure number two. The third instance was that they relied on hearsay, since they did not expect the world outside to know what happened in the entrails of the room. They could paint white black and black white, and it would be one person’s word against another.

But the grassroots governor, Rauf Aregbesola, had a joker. It was camera. He captured the story as Okaura first counted all 35 ballots and separated the votes for Jang and Amaechi. The returning officer showed the ballot to the governors to see as he counted.

When he finished, the votes favoured Amaechi. The pro-Jonathan forces were stunned. This was failure number three for the anti-Amaechi forces. Mimiko and company wanted open ballot but secrecy from the outside world, a philosophical contradiction. With his phone, Ogbeni struck a triumph of technology over the luddites.

Those who cannot anticipate technology cannot anticipate the future. The camera phone blindsided them. They are still playing the Luddite. For those who don’t know, luddites were those who opposed new technology at the height of the industrial revolution. Chief among them is the quisling Mimiko who said the tape was manipulated because he was not featured. Only megalomaniacs want to see themselves in every picture.

If they failed in technology, they also failed in mathematics. Suddenly, 16 was 19 and 19 was 16. It reminds one of Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s classic, A man from the Underground, who marveled at how mathematics had been turned on its head by the civilisation. He noted that one plus one was no longer two but the beginning of death. That was what the anti-Amaechi people tried to do. They said because they had 19 endorsements then it meant they had 19 votes. They lost a sense of sequence. Voting is not about a past but the moment.

When Barack Obama trailed John McCain ahead of the polls, Americans knew that it did not count until the day of counting. The pro-Jang men counted their chickens before they were hatched. On hatching day, they brooded over the roost and saw that they were sorely routed. They hurriedly ran an advertisement that showed that some governors who were out of town, like Gaidam of Yobe State, had become spirits that materialised to vote in Abuja. That was failure number five. They failed mathematics. They failed English because they did not understand the simple rules of the game. They failed communications because they lied after it happened, and they failed technology for acting like luddites. So, they failed the exam.

What is NGF? It is actually a pressure group of governors. Other than that, it is nothing. Mimiko said its election in the past was based on consensus. Can he explain how they allowed a former colleague who is now president to throw cat among their pigeons? Was it against their rule for Amaechi to earn a second term? Did Mimiko himself not play quisling to get a second term as governor? When did it become a sin? Yoruba say K’e j’obi gbua gbua. (say it as it is.) Would there have been a tiff if President Jonathan was at peace with Governor Amaechi? Is this not petty politics? The irony is that Jonathan climbed its back to power, and he does not care, in his Machiavellian way, to destroy it now. That is not statesmanship.

As for Jang, he was a sad tool. He capped it by thanking God for giving him a fraud. God of Old Testament would have made him regret. “Because sentence against an evil act is not executed speedily, therefore the hearts of the sons of men are full set in them to do evil.” Ecclesiastes 8:11.

The reason this is less partisan because it is more so is this: it is less partisan because it reveals the maggoty underside of our politics, especially electoral politics, whatever the party. When 35 people in a small room cannot agree on an election that was so transparent, are we not wasting our time with elections involving millions in a wide swath of land? It is because it is so partisan that we saw all of this.

So we know that it is not about NGF but about the man at the top. It is about a man who said he would retain the integrity of governance in Rivers State and not be dictated to from the centre. Was that not the reason Mimiko gave for his so-called principle? Why is he playing slave to a new master?

It is about Amaechi’s stance about Okrika, and his position that the waterside must not remain a slum even if an unconstitutional first lady hectors inelegantly at him. It is about his pursuit of what he sees as his right to defend the oil wells of his state when the president forgets that he is the leader of all of Nigeria and not Bayelsa State. It is about a man who says he must assert his dignity as a man. It reminds one of the classic by Primo Levi titled If This Is A Man, meditating on how he asserted his humanity in the dark, barbarous furnace of the Nazi concentration camp.

But more telling is the story of Sir Thomas More, who stuck to principle when the Tudor King Henry V111, wanted him to renounce his belief because he wanted to change the law to marry a woman. More became a martyr that historian Hugh Trevor Roper described as the “most saintly of humanists and the most human of all saints.” Amaechi is not More, but he acts like a man for all seasons, understands the principle of asserting his manhood without capitulating. That is how to nourish democracy.

June 3, 2013