The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sam Omatseye

  • Redeeming Ibadan

    Redeeming Ibadan

    A city is a people. More than the village that encases a monolithic world view, a city embraces the world. That is why the village has collapsed as a barometer of a civilisation, especially since the city began its rise on the back of that great idea called capitalism.

    But the city has also become a cynosure of disgrace, the repository of filth and psychic decay, where the criminal rumbles and the politician cons and the businessman profiteers and the child expires on the cheap.

    The city of London today is celebrated for its order and even beauty, but it once groveled under Hitler’s bombardments. However, it was that same tragedy that threw up the genius of the great Winston Churchill with his speeches of inspirational growl.

    Before that, Charles Dickens expended his gifts to depict the squalour of that city, with novels like Oliver Twist and The Great Expectation. The British Prime minister at the time decided to work the city to glory after reading of the terrible want and desperation of the character Oliver Twist.

    No city in the world, whether it is London, New York, Tokyo or Paris that did not pass through the foul rhythm of grime and crime before surging to a place of envy.

    All of them were inspired by leaders, just like the case of London. New York is on the rise again after a decade of decline.

    Lagos fell to such a bad place in the military era. It is a different story today. On this page, I lamented the city of Ibadan where Obafemi Awolowo patented his genius, where the old west preened.

    It fell, like unfortunate cities do, on the hands of a bumbler. The man, Alao-Akala, preferred the vanity of his sartorial splendour to the environment. Leaders inspire cities. Alao-Akala committed the extraordinary act of narcissism. He loved himself so much that there was not much love left for the city he governed.

    What I lamented was the filth of Ibadan, where at every turn you saw heaps of refuse intimidating traffic into paralysis. Rather than inspire Ibadan, he inspired filth. So bad was the situation that it was declared in 2008 one of the dirtiest cities on God’s green earth. The man did not understand the meaning of green.

    In the past year, I have had reasons to visit the city, and it is clear that the city is in the hands of a man who has the wherewithal to inspire it. The evidence abounds of Ibadan as a city on the rebound.

    All those places where dirt compounded like natural habitats are gone, and they used to swagger in different colours of green, blue, red, brown. But they were not good green, or colourful brown, or bewitching red. They were mock colours. They were the colours of stench rising with impunity to you, even if you were ensconced in an air-conditioned car.

    There is a strategy to Governor Abiola Ajimobi’s approach to the filth and decay of the city. One of his first preoccupations was to keep the flood at bay. This meant attacking the drainage challenges. Ibadan has been a graveyard as floods after floods pummeled during rainy seasons. Homes caved in as lives drowned.

    He has built a number of bridges, cleared many a water path so that no stagnant pool accumulates so much dirt that the rains can unleash flood. This is the way to attack the root of the problem. It is still work in progress. They call him the bridge builder.

    This is accompanied with regular work by refuse disposal units that cart away bags and drums of refuse. I could have gone with the impression that the people of Ibadan loved filth. But that is not the case. I grew up in Ibadan and recall the images of the city, even during the imperial days of the army. I lived in Oke-Ado.

    Ibadan was not what it became under the bejeweled, half-literate chief executive that steered it into the age of unclean.

    The third leg of the strategy is the beautification. We cannot appreciate what is clean until we develop what is beautiful inside. To beautify is a painful exercise always, but it is a thing that ought to be done.

    Entering Ibadan from Lagos invites you to work already going on beautifying the Iwo Road. The work is not done yet, and for it to be appreciated Governor Ajimobi has promised to expand the road. It is still experiencing traffic discomfort, which though has reduced. It will entail massive demolitions, which he plans to do. But the work has to be done. Beauty cannot be enjoyed when traffic snarls.

    But around Ibadan in such places as Ring Road, Dugbe, Bere, Oje roads, the beauty of the city is coming to view in picturesque green projects.

    When a city is clean, the people are creative. That was why novelist Dostoyevsky proclaimed that beauty will save the world.

    Ajimobi has shown himself equal to the task. We can recall that just a few years ago, Ibadan was a hotbed of violence and insecurity. Partisans of the road workers union terrorised citizens, robbers prowled and the general sense was that of unfathomable devilry.

    Things have changed and it is taken for granted. Just as it was taken for granted in Lagos State until a spasm of robbery a few months ago reminded us of what good times had fallen on the country’s most populous city.

    The first task of a government is the security of the people. Oyo State has eased out of the vice grip of inept men, and Governor Ajimobi epitomises that liberation with his clever, methodical touch.

    With a city vastly more secure and cleaner with better aesthetic outlook, Ibadan and Oyo State can face the larger challenge of attracting more investment. This is an impressive showing in less than two years Ajimobi ascended the throne.

    He has also done well with roads, rehabilitating and constructing about 250 roads. He has streamlined the finance, raising the internally generated revenue and paying salary even in the 13th month and engaging 20,000 youths in creative jobs.

    In his play Coriolanus, Shakespeare quips, “what’s a city but the people?”

    That is the governor’s main task: to set the people away from fear and want. He is on the right track.

  • Democracy is not enough

    Democracy is not enough

    Few Nigerians know of a place called Providence, even though most citizens grapple with the idea of the word. Providence the idea fascinates us and not Providence the place.

    But last week, the providence of Africa was the subject of discussion in the city of Providence, in a state called Rhode Island in the United States. The man at the bottom of this is Chinua Achebe, Africa’s leading novelist, who incidentally touched off a tempest with his flawed new book, There was a Country.

    He is a professor at Brown University, a member of the American Ivy league and one of the best schools in the world. He started the Chinua Achebe Colloquium, a talk shop of the world’s top exponents on Africa to chart a new way out of the ennui and tragic turbulence of a people.

    It was my first attendance, and it was a feast of ideas, if the menu did not always flatter the mental palate. A wide range of persons spoke, from university professors from such upscale schools as Harvard to institutes like the Centre for Strategic and International Studies to a businessman like Mohammed Ibrahim to men of power like our own Babatunde Raji Fashola(SAN), the governor of example and chief executive of Lagos State.

    The presence of two speakers resonated throughout the event, and they were Mo Ibrahim and Governor Fashola, in earnest because of the positions they advanced. Achebe, aplomb in his wheelchair, never uttered a word throughout the conference, maintaining an avuncular aloofness from the friendly affray of the sessions. He did not only not convey what he felt, he did not want his enveloping silence ruffled with interaction. It was an irony of a convener, a magnet that attracted without being touched.

    Even when Fashola stirred the hall with incisive comments about his new book, the most Achebe did was the lofty mannerism of touching his eyeglass and a little tic of his face and movement of the head. It seemed, at the hoary age of 82, Achebe was only interested in vocalising through his most potent forte: the written word.

    Mo Ibrahim came across, in spite of his wealth and status, with a touching modesty, interacting with everyone as much as he could before he left. He spoke with great passion about the failing of his continent. He noted that for a continent with so much promise, it is failing in all the important indices of governance, which included the rule of law, economic performance, participation and transparency, and gender issues.

    His speech was, however, significant for a question he propounded. He wanted the audience to tell him the leaders of Cape Verde, Botswana and Mozambique. Few could answer. But everyone knew who Mobutu, Idi Amin, Abacha and Mugabe were. He lamented that we did not celebrate what good we interred in our African bones. These three countries had great indices.

    With due respect to the host, Achebe, Mo Ibrahim said this was no time for poetry, but for facts, for getting our hands dirty to save the continent from the jaws of poverty. He said the conflicts in Africa were about the poor fighting against the poor.

    Fashola’s speech was marked by two main positions. One was the workability of the idea of democracy for development. The second was on Achebe’s book, There was a Country. He took on the prose stylist for provoking a debate of old wounds belonging to a passing generation, and how his generation and the future generations should be left to grapple with challenges not fraught with the divisiveness of his book.

    He felt as a man brought up on Things Fall Apart as one of the diets of his education, he felt engaged with the author and that was why Achebe should allow ethnic disputes between the Igbo and Yoruba be at ease, so the falcon can hear the falconer.

    Going into history, he said both Awo and Ojukwu had moved on, and so should the rest of the country. He argued that some sapient harmonies had been ignored in the tempest. One, the Yoruba did not lay any proprietary claims to abandoned properties after the war. In fact, as somebody pointed out to me as the governor spoke, some Yoruba kept the full rent money for the landlords until the battle field fell silent. Two, that Ojukwu’s property was saved from the grasping lust of the Lagos State military government by the brilliance of a Yoruba lawyer, Tunji Braithwaite. Three, that a Yoruba general married off his daughter to an Igbo. He buttressed this with his family and his uncle who attended school the same day with Ojukwu. Four, that in Lagos State, some of the assets of his administration were Igbo, singling out Ben Akabueze and Joe Igbokwe for mention.

    On the value of democracy, he noted that Africans were not grappling with democracy alone but a series of existential distractions that made democracy to appear like an impediment.

    With insights into history and law, he argued that Africans had yet to come to terms with the anachronisms of kings and conquerors in a modern world of cooperative living. Yet we cannot ignore our past, and that is where his speech fascinates.

    African roots with the traditional obeisance, zest for divinities and the fear to experiment have often killed a greed for the future. Adam Smith had argued centuries ago that societies with big families under a patriarch would always abide with tyrannies.

    Our extended family system with the power of one man has reflected in the entire democratic experiments of our people. What complicates it is the inevitability of modernisation: the rise of the city, capitalism, the modern bureaucracy, the clash of culture at the linguistic and social levels. These are breaking down the family structure while we resist them. That is why in one breath we accept democracy and in another resist it.

    We cannot look beyond our ethnic cleavages or the big man syndrome in our politics. Democracy will not come a la carte. We must be ready for the sacrifices. So the problem is not that democracy will not work, but it is not enough. We see democracy only as election. It is beyond that. It is about a culture. A culture that is corrupt cannot produce a vibrant democracy.

    It is like administering a pill for malaria. You have to use it with the necessary nourishment of food, rest, hydration, room temperature, etc, before the quinine will work. Otherwise, you will keep blaming the drug instead of the man.

    “Except a corn of wheat fall to the ground and die, it abideth alone. But when it dies, it bringeth forth new fruits,” said Jesus Christ. What parts of our culture are we ready to let die in order to enjoy the fruits of democracy?

    As Mo Ibrahim said, countries like Cape Verde and Botswana are African and they are good models. Why not Nigeria? The fault is not in democracy, but in our culture. It takes leaders to save us from this fixation on kings and predators and fear of opposition when we win. Mo Ibrahim gave an example of a Cape Verde leader who, having no home or money, returned to his mother’s home after losing the election. He organised and won the next time. It is with such leaders that democracy delivers dividends.

  • Quench not the spirit

    Quench not the spirit

    You might have thought him a teenager, seeing him for the first time that night. Except for his sometimes seamed face, his white-flecked goatee and a pair of eyes deep in the cares and plays of this life. Otherwise, the febrile energy of his hands, eyes, feet and even the easy mobility of his face can pass him off as a partisan of that species still enraptured by the sweet oat of life: the teenager.

    But Rauf Aregbesola is no teenager. The Ogbeni only carries the strength of one. The night was last Friday when he engaged his fellow citizens in a programme called Ogbeni Till Daybreak. It was an interactive affair in which questions came from all walks of life: journalists, civil servants, farmers, the jobless, the elite. And the questions streamed forth from different agencies: direct from the variegated audience, through phone calls, Twitter, Facebook, emails, etc.

    The questions, propounded sometimes with probing defiance, sometimes with flattering fatuities and sometimes with superficial candour, reflected the range of the anxieties, hopes and befuddlements of the citizens. There were questions about roads not completed, jobs not offered, actions perceived to carry partisan mischief, etc. But at bottom was the sense, even from the most adversarial questioner, that the man fielding the questions was on a high pitch of performance.

    Those who asked about roads not completed acknowledged the many roads at work, in virtually all communities in the state. Those who asked about jobs not offered wanted to be part of the new élan of opportunities, especially with the engagement of the youth employment scheme that puts 20,000 young men and women out of the giddy despair of indolence.

    He answered with the gusto of a natural politician and the knowledge of a technocrat. He reeled out songs and wiggled with dance moves that infected the crowd, made up of party faithful, journalists, and wide range of citizens. It was a night that was simultaneously sombre and festive. At times so sombre as to be warlike, just like when he answered questions about his predecessors reign of terror and paralysis for seven and half years. He also celebrated when he compared the statistics of performance between them, dwarfing already in two years all that the Oyinlola offered in three quarters of a decade.

    He spoke with confidence, and you could not escape the infection. I attended having also gone around the state to see what his story has been about. I came off with a distinct impression of a man in constant wrestle with his dream. He is a man of great enthusiasm, and if it were possible to turn the dream into reality with a span of 24 hours, Ogbeni is a man who would want to accomplish that feat.

    That is why he has put in place a system of multipliers. Look at three distinct areas: infrastructure, agriculture and education. For instance, the pupils in class one to four feed every day all across the state. Caterers are employed to cook, and the farmers have to provide the farm produce for the caterer. The multiplier effect is inevitable. The farmer gets a market, the caterer gets employed and the student gets nutrition. Prosperity builds on prosperity. The instant benefits as testified to by the job of the caterer and the farmer. The future enjoys, witness the student who gets nourishment. The other instant benefit is the rush of parents to enroll their kids. Again, the major farms in the state have roads constructed, giving jobs to construction, encouragement to transportation. This is a seamless connection in governance.

    A tailor walked up to thank the Ogbeni for keeping his fellow tradesmen engaged. The same multiplier takes place with school uniforms, OYES cadets, etc. The local tailor works and feeds the seller of the threads, etc. It is a gain chain.

    His main love is food security as a driver of prosperity. The farms are offered free, for all who are serious from the small farmer to the large-scale entrepreneur.

    To set this in motion he followed the Lagos example: financial engineering. He met a mess and the state had to borrow one billion Naira every month just to pay civil servants salaries. He turned this financial desperation into advantage. Now Osun is not broke. By saving money over a period, he turned the fat purse to leverage development. That is the genius of financial stimulation. Having achieved that, he became Keynesian, throwing huge sums of money into developments in various parts of the state, giving jobs, stimulating demand and setting to work an energy that has not been matched in the state. So good was it that he even paid civil servants bonus at the end of the year.

    In my drive around, I saw some of the projects. One of them is the road that moves from Gbogan up to Ijebu-Igbo, and the idea is to provide an alternative to the Lagos-Ibadan expressway for those travelling to Osun, Ondo, and even to the Niger Delta and the Southeast. This is the power of thinking. I visited the road that some of the government officials call Hongye, which is the name of the Chinese firm working the 44 kilometre road. I drove about half of the road, which was originally intended as a farm road. It used to be a serpentine monster of a dirt road, dipping, rising, twisting like a reptilian booby trap, narrow with menace and lurking with death, dust-laden, besieged with bushes and imposing shortsightedness to a journey of many miles.

    That is what is being salvaged as alternative to a road – Lagos-Ibadan Expressway – that the Federal Government has somersaulted for years without putting it on an even keel of work. As I travelled the road, which has been expanded with shoulders and furniture for about 18 kilometres so far, I saw the work of a dreamer. I spoke to Hongye officials on site and they said they will be done by April next year. The contours and dips have been corrected, with earth work, stone work, etc, and it is wearing, in expanse, feel and ambience the atmosphere of an expressway. It is a great work. Another impressive activity is the road leading from the state to Kwara. In a mark of fortitude, setbacks have been drawn and many structures are coming down, showing a sense of an expressway of the future. One of the questions on Friday night. Compensation for the affected? Ogbeni: all those with documents shall be paid back.

    Some of his critics often peddle stories about his lack of restraint. When the people have suffered so poor and deprived for so long, how can a person of enthusiasm not show zeal when opportune to do it? His critics have a staid way of looking at development. To quote Epicurus, “do not spoil what you already have by desiring what you have not, remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.”

    That is a recipe for paralysis. That is the spirit of the conservative of the worst tradition. He just had a dream to change a state, he is going about it, and a few people are shaken out of their torpid lack of ideas. The shock crystalises into fearful, aggressive tirades of criticism.

    That is the way of the visionary. “A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of us,” noted the inimitable Oscar Wilde.

    They forget as playwright Goethe writes that “what is not started today is not finished tomorrow.” Civilisation as we know it today with cars, television, internet, cell phones did not come without what is called disruptive thinking. It is the sort that multiplies, and it is the multiplier effect that changed man from the hewer of wood and drawer of water to the prosperity of the highway and aircraft and brain surgeon. In his novella, Man from the Underground, Dostoyevsky caviled at a civilisation where one plus one equals one, and he says it is the beginning of death.

    That is not the civilisation that transformed the world. It is the multiplier one, the sort Ogbeni is pursuing with boyish zeal. He reminds me of the words of the Canadian musician who travelled West Africa by bicycle and wrote a book, Masked Rider. He noted, “A spirit with a vision is a dream with a mission.”

    So, I tell Ogbeni’s critics, quench not the spirit.

     

  • Six men

    Six men

    The deaths of six men recently concentrated one on the vapour of life, at once immense and fleeting. Chief Hope Harriman. General Shuwa. Olusola Saraki. Lam Adesina. Kayode Esho. May Nzeribe. When great men expire we wonder at the exaggeration of life. Life is not as substantial as we suppose when such personages end as victims of the tyranny of time. They seemed immortal before they were not.

    In his play, Richard 11, William Shakespeare, the immortal bard of death, mused over how death eventually overshadows all of human calamities. “Woe, destruction, ruin, and decay,” sang the playwright, “the worst is death, and death will have his day.” It also prosecutes its sting over all human joys.

    Death had its way with all of these men. Was it Harriman, the ebullient burly pace setter whose face always lit up with a cheerful glitter? Or Shuwa whose sullen years after the civil war did not dwarf his mythic soldiery? Or Saraki the party wheel horse who redefined dynasty? Or Lam Adesina, who stood like a Trojan when progressive politics was his Troy? Or Kayode Esho whose longevity was an insistent rebuke of the putrefaction of a judiciary? Or Nzeribe whose professional ardour pounded home the integrity of standards? East, Southwest, Southsouth, North, each with their own lugubrious gift as though death was doling out geographic favours. No thanks.

    But they all left without enough warning, as though warning often means anything to death. They vanished because everyone has a “dateless bargain” with death, to quote Shakespeare again in his Romeo and Juliet.

    These men represented a generation as well as anyone could. This was the generation that Wole Soyinka described as wasted. As an artist, we may excuse the Nigerian bard an access of exaggeration when we look at some of these men. We may not excuse him if we look at the big picture of a remorseless decline that has assailed the nation after independence. But they, all six of them, tell us the story of Nigeria, and how the rain began to beat us to drenching stupor.

    Harriman was a pace setter, who began as a real estate valuer and surveyor, and ended an investment omnivore. He represented what is lost in today’s businessman, a knack to bring something out of nothing, to create wealth. To be wealthy for him was to create. This is a contrast to the businessman as contractor today.

    To be wealthy for most of that class today is to be a carpet bagger. They wake up with mock sobriety in government house, leave with cheap contracts, party with cheap money at some fancy hotel and arrive home with the smell of alcohol as their John the Baptist.

    Harriman helped open some parts of Lagos to Nigerians as important areas in which to settle. He rose to become not only the first president of the association in the country, but was also recognised internationally. Can we produce a Harriman in this age, with his genius for opportunities, the bonhomie that disdains ethnic or religious fidelities, or an energy for work that took him to other areas: oil, rubber, banking, blasting rocks, etc. His foray into politics was not tainted by the desperation for filthy lucre that makes glorious men into public scoundrels. He stood for the progressive idea whether as a supporter of the Unity Party of Nigeria or as an elder espousing Southsouth as a force in a six-region democracy.

    Nzeribe came to personify standards in an industry that quickly succumbed to hustlers, opportunists and thieves. That was why he helped pursue it as head of the body guarding advertising in the country. So important was his role that he won international accolade and award, perhaps the highest laurel any Nigerian has acquired in that profession beyond these shores. His insistence on standards mocks what some Americans call the soft bigotry of low expectation common in Nigeria today. Whether it is medicine, law, journalism or teaching, we no longer abide by any sort of minimalism. Hence doctors misdiagnose, judges jail the innocent and teachers teach a lot of nonsense, apologies to Fela.

    Saraki’s story is, however, a mixed bag. He brought into politics the idea of the grandeur of family. But it was not democracy that ignited him but a nepotistic dream. We have seen families enrich the ideology. The Kennedys, the Bushes, the Ghandis, the Bhuttos, etc. The idea is to encapsulate in one family the noble array of a society’s virtues: industry, vision, character, a gregarious love of people.

    But Saraki subjected the whole state to the zeal of his own fiefdom, where sons and daughters became the princes and princesses of a democracy. Without a doubt, we still run a democracy of big men. The United States had founding founders as the big men, the avatars who turned their personal charms and gifts as sacrifices to foster institutions. George Washington had opportunities to be a Napoleon or king or president for life. But he preferred a great country to a big man. So he instituted and bowed to the rule of law. That is why he became a great man.

    They still had foibles then, but they had their eyes on the great prize. Hence John Adams asserted that the country was a “nation of laws and not of men.” This was Adams who had a fight to the literal death with Jefferson, who had to form his own party to confront his foe. We hope we can build institutions which some states are doing.

    Adesina fought for democracy, and when he died he was more like victim who had a sort of last hurrah with the enthronement of Abiola Ajimobi, the cool-headed remoulder of Oyo State. Adesina was at the barricade in the struggle for democracy when Abacha’s jackboot crunched about the country. He became governor but also fell prey to a democratic parody when Obasanjo hoodwinked the progressive out of their own pies. But he departed in peace because his eyes beheld the return of the progressives before his last breath. He stood for a counterfoil to the domineering principle that Saraki embodied.

    Shuwa was a general, fearless, focused, ruthless. He did not draw any panegyric from Chinua Achebe in his tempestuous book, There was a country. Shuwa led the first army division that pulverised Biafra, his men accused of rape and rapine, and violations of the Geneva Convention. Those who know him call him honourable. He inspired fear and respect from his fellow soldiers, and the story is told of how, armless, he subdued a mutinous army in Kano in the throes of the civil war.

    But the exploits of his army cannot but remind us of the locust years of the military in Nigeria, with scores of impunity that our civilian democrats apply without reserve. All the false show of power witnessed at every level comes from the disdain for order and process the army foisted on the Nigerian soul. Our failure to resolve outstanding issues of the war led to the crisis of today.

    Esho departs when the nation grapples with the absence of justice at every level, from the classroom to the presidency. He stood as a matador of good versus evil in the psyche of a nation conquered by what Joseph Conrad described as shortsighted in matters of good and evil. He stands against the corruptible legion of judges accused openly of beggarly bribes and surrender to the supine folly of a political class dining voraciously with the devil.

    In spite of the prevalence of evil over good in today’s Nigeria, we cannot accuse these men of standing idle. Some patriots would have preferred some of them to redirect their energies. In his novel, Les Miserables, Victor Hugo writes, “it is nothing to die; it is frightful not to live.” They lived according to their own lights. On that note, good night to them all.

  • Remembering the poor

    Remembering the poor

    I have always wondered why wealth faints easily in this country. The custodians, who we call wealthy, come alive, flaunt, swagger and plume themselves in the sunlight of the day. But, like a plant that runs out of its supply of the riches of photosynthesis, they faint and expire.

    In this country, prosperity lives and dies just like the poor. They both have a short lifespan. The rich may endure to their hoary years, but not their riches. We have had many who grew rich, soared to fame and glamour. But where are they now? Those who reigned in the 1960’s bowed out with a sigh in the 1970’s. Those who purred with leonine pride in the 1970’s lost their manes of honour the decade after. So it has been, a story of rises and falls, glamour and dolour, plum and prune, acclaim and silence.

    The reason is that they make money for themselves because they work only for themselves and their families. They do not work for the society where they blossomed, that gave them both chance and fulfillment. This thought overwhelmed me recently as I contemplated the fundraiser held November 8 in Abuja, where man of means Aliko Dangote spearheaded the drive to help all the lowly and helpless who were tossed out of their homes and heaths by the recent flood.

    Many of the rich were there, but not enough of them. What struck me was that Dangote had to go out of his way to persuade the very rich, including the bank chiefs, to consider the poor. The bank heads came off with the excuse that they had to consult their boards first in order to give to the poor. At least, the bank leaders were there, some of them.

    But where were the telecoms leaders, who fleece us by the seconds with services? Where were the oil servicing companies? Shell was reported to have donated hefty millions. But where are the others?

    Dangote had announced his hefty donations early. But the other companies have swathed themselves in the excuse of officialdom. What boards did they need to consult? The flood did not consult anybody before it swamped on the vulnerable, lapping up their homes and flushing away their memories in tides of tyranny. They huddled up in camps, falling ill, birthing and bearing babies, weeping, lost in the dry ecstasy of sorrow and bemoaning the former simple life they never cherished enough until the cruel epiphany of nature’s visit.

    So if the floods had swept many of their branches, would the banks not have held an extraordinary board meeting? Of course, it is because it is a conflict or tragedy of low intensity for the banks that they decided to wait till whenever the next scheduled board meeting to table the matter of hundreds of thousands of Nigerians dislocated by nature’s insensate moment.

    This is because the banks were not formed to serve except for the profit of the owners. Their vaults are full of money but empty of love. They contradict what writer Steve Maraboli asserted, that “The bank of love is never bankrupt.”

    A fundamental problem is that we do not know the value of money. In the secondary school, one of the cardinal lessons of economics classes was that money was a standard OF VALUE. We were never taught what value was in relation to money, except as a nexus in the exchange of goods and services. That was what the banks have exhibited over the flood victims. Not the banks alone but corporate Nigeria. They have placed a mercantile soul over the somber throbbing of neighbourly love, patriotic giving or even the much-ballyhooed virtue of corporate responsibility.

    Let us go over the seas to the United States where a fiercer storm surged. Hurricane Sandy might have taken the country by storm, but not the tender spirit of giving by its companies. I tracked the donations of American companies in the wake of the disaster. Tons of companies had already pledged and donated over $100 million barely a week after it happened. They did not need to consult boards because giving was an integral part of their fount of being.

    Nigerian companies do not consider giving of the charitable sort as a defining quality of their existence. They have enough to sponsor sports, Nollywood vanities and other cultural dissipations. Nothing evil in those. But what of the ones you do without the fare of self-aggrandisement where the companies’ billboards will not loom in the background? Francis of Assisi noted that “it is in giving that we receive.” The companies abuse this credo because they see the giving as a cynical indoor, as investment for profit but not for the improvement of lives.

    They rather should take in the spirit of Queen Elizabeth’s words that “blessed are those who can give without remembering and take without forgetting.” Sometimes we forget that the ordinary folks are the great givers. A good percentage of the victims come from oil-producing areas that nest the golden egg of Nigeria. It is the paradox of the giver desiring giving.

    The tragedy though is not that we don’t give, but that we don’t know the value of giving. At long last, some of the banks and oil firms and telecom giants may buckle and surrender some funds from their corpulent savings. What we lack is a sense of philanthropy.

    There is some charity in this society, but what we need is philanthropy. “Much corporate giving is charitable in nature rather than philanthropic,” noted David Rockefeller. Philanthropy is the habit of giving. Charity is a fleeting show of love. In spite of the billionaire’s quote, America is a great example revealed in all the recent tragedies from Katrina to Sandy.

    We have abandoned the African culture. We come from a communal stock. An age ago, we cared for our neighbour’s son when he was not even in danger. Today we look the other way when he is in the throes of death. How did we fall from that grace? Some have cited ethnic differences, but that accounts for little because in the big firms we have persons whose kinsmen were swept off by the floods. It is the fissures of capitalism, with its emphasis on self over others. Individualism emboldens coldhearted indifference to the fortunes of others. Also, the birth of cities breaks down a sense of community. Three, the colonialism created a false centre called government with its bureaucracies and laws and commerce. But the ordinary person does not yet relate to it as part of his own. So when tragedies happen like the flood, it is an “other,” not us. As Jean Paul Sartre wrote, “hell is other people.”

    It is the job of leadership to knit this system so that we own it. Even President Jonathan, who should inspire, was ensconced in America without a sense of urgency while water bred tragedy at home. Delta State Governor Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan promptly cut short his trip and returned. Jonathan had more “important” things to do.

    Part of the problem with lack of philanthropy is that this is a poor society and those who grow rich still think poor and do not remember the real poor. It means the rich are “poor” in spirit, to parody Christ. “One must be poor to know the luxury of living,” wrote novelist George Elliot. The striking point is that the rich are too busy enjoying the luxury to remember the poverty of others. Dangote is bucking that patrician trend. It is not for nothing that we have the Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford foundations. These were created by men who transferred wealth from generation to generation favouring the poor.

    It is the job of the elite to snap out of their self-absorption and create by example and self-nurturing the tradition of giving. Winston Churchill struck the right note when he said, “we make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”

    To make giving a part of Nigerian life, the rich must remember the poor as a habit

  • The decent society

    The decent society

    The one was an infighting within the peacock class. The other was a fury from below. In both instances, we saw a mirror of a people lost from the call of dignity.

    The second one happened first, but the first reflected the deeper underbelly of the greed and indecencies of our people.

    The second one was a drama in the glare of Goodluck Jonathan. It involved Malam Nuhu Ribadu and Stephen Oronsaye, and the issue was the report of how the oil business has soiled the haughty fingers of the rich and crooked.

    The first one was the story of the restriction of motorcycles (okada) riders away from the major arteries of the city of Lagos.

    At stake in both cases was the concept of the decent society, the society that sets before itself the ground rules of engagement, the laws, the courtesies, discipline and fiery obedience to the logic of legal retribution to the breach. That inculcates a social contract, a tension of law and punishment, with the capacity to lure the bad to the bosom of the best among us.

    Ribadu attracted flak from many, even within the inner sanctum of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), for taking a job under the man he reviled during the presidential campaign. A feisty, stubborn, if at times turbulent soul lurks in his fragile frame. It was an understated physical quality that rattled the seedy elite when he downed one peacock after another as the boss of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). He did not do this job with the flawless temperament of a Rabbi or a Christ or Alfa. With provable charges of selectiveness, his tenure as EFCC boss has remained controversial.

    Hence some saw his acceptance of the Jonathan job as a bounty for a loser and the loser gladly accepted. Maybe it was. Maybe Ribadu had a reflex of integrity and turned the bounty from a material gift to a crusading moment by saving his name. So his report unveiled the sleaze of the oil world under the stewardship of Jonathan. To rebuff the bounty, Ribadu probably damned the giver, the President with his report, and became an avenging angel. If that was what Ribadu did, he had his critics to thank for his image rebirth. Ribadu probably had the mischievous grace from the beginning to spite Jonathan before the criticisms raged. But only he knows the truth.

    The agony was the spectacle of the older Oronsaye, who played a puppet in a presidential oil game. The man condemned a report even though he was missing in action while Ribadu worked without sitting allowance. He had the shameless boldness to play righteous before the camera and the world. The point has been suggested that Orosanye, once a technocrat with tranquil grandeur and former head of service, became a rhetorical boxer defending a system as decrepit as it was dirty. Before the incident in front of the President, many did not know he had the gallery touch, the air of the bureaucratic impresario.

    Jonathan was quietly gloating over this public jousting. The President, in his serpentine style, came to the fore again. Why was Oronsaye doing another engagement that took him away from this all-important task? Why did Jonathan sign up to such distraction? Did Jonathan not see that Oronsaye’s rebellion against the report was capable of suggesting that the man was planted in the committee to cast sufficient doubt on its probity? A classical divide-and-rule tactic. Once that was done, then the government can exercise a right to whittle down the weight of Ribadu’s work and assign the document, after all the hoopla of protest, to the cynical silence that other reports on oil have suffered.

    This is a report about corruption, about billions of Naira fleeced without regards to law, bonuses appropriated with brazen fare, about the oil that immiserates the teeming poor in our society, about the lifestyle that furnishes outlandish holiday resorts abroad, cocky boats, soaring soirees, in private jets and palaces as homes.

    The Presidency has latched on to the Oronsaye indiscretion to question the report. Ribadu had noted that there was some imperfection in the work, but that did not detract from the basic premise of its conclusion. Why did the President not say, well, we shall extend your time, finish the work? Oil is our wealth, not a partisan matter. It is about our patrimony and prosperity. It is about the future of our children, of our infrastructure and education.

    The handling of the matter, above all, reveals our disregard for the basic decencies of civilisation. It is what Conrad calls “the nightmarish parody of administration without justice, without law, without order.”

    In Lagos, we saw okada riders take laws into their hands. The law said they should stay off certain areas. They defied the basic meaning of the law. Where in the world do we have bike riders as major transporters? So bad were they that they caused many a death, maimed many too, and impoverished the artisan sector with everyone from plumber to mechanic viewing the trade as a source of quick money. If the people at the top have no regard for law and decency, how do we expect the folks in the plebeian bracket to do same? The National Assembly has looked into many issues, but none has been resolved. No convictions although we all know there were crimes. The power sector is just an example.

    The okada question has raised the question of replacement taxis and buses. That did not happen today, and their organisation only paid lip service to the project so long as they could still scoot about legally. With the restriction, they can now settle to the ultimate model for development: a private-public relationship that we have seen with the phasing out of the molue.

    Let us not forget the Makoko incident. The floating slum dwellers agreed not to cross a line, but they did. When they were given a 72-hour ultimatum to leave, they turned it into emotional blackmail. The shantytown on stilts is an anomaly, but even at that they want to extend all the filth and danger to environment and health of the entire city by polluting the lagoon.

    All of this is corruption. But the root of the problem is far deeper. At an event last week, Professor Wole Soyinka argued that corruption is the cause of the decay around us. Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN) saw it differently. Ribadu as EFCC boss noted with statistical dismay how corruption was the source of our bane. The governor, for example, argued that we should look deeper into our culture and our history. He saw corruption as a symptom. I agree. It is the society that creates corruption and not vice versa. As Jesus Christ said: “An evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth evil things.” The tragedy though is that we created corruption, but it festered so powerfully that it is recreating us.

    I blame all our founding fathers who did not set a ground rule for the nation. Rather, they travelled on ethnic tangents.

    We have not created a nation of laws. When the United States started, there was a conflict between President George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who accused the leader of abandoning the revolutionary ideals. Jefferson dreamed of America as a rural paradise. Washington dreamed of a country of big cities and wealth. He hired Alexander Hamilton who crafted the rules by which American civil society operates, centering on the rule of law. Patent protection, the rise of the financial system, stock exchange, the prosperity of the world today derives from the genius of the immigrant trusted by a president who never attended university.

    I believe it is our lack of ground rules that has led us to the path of corruption. When men like Oronsaye and the okada riders ignore law and decency personified by a man like Ribadu in the report, we shall continue to plummet in standards of living, have students who cannot read and write well and an ominous future beckons us.

    What will rescue us is the shock wisdom that illumines Shylock’s eyes in Shakespeare’s classic, Merchant of Venice. When his impunity is exposed in court, he asks, “is that the law?” Rather, we mock the law.

    Until we allow the law nourish order, we shall never have a decent society.

  • The fog of war

    The fog of war

    A few years back when I ran a column on 40 years of Biafra, my cell phone crashed from invectives of malicious fury. The overwhelming line from the rage was that I exercised the temerity to address a matter that I should have left in the grove of silence. I had tackled the Nigerian civil war and the opportunities missed for peace instead of the headlong rush to hostilities and I fingered Odumegwu Ojukwu and the genocidal bigots of the North for blame.

    Ironically, when Chinua Achebe published his now tempestuous work, There Was A Country, the Yoruba intelligentsia and political elite were up in arms, clobbering him for not keeping silent on issues like his charge of genocide on Obafemi Awolowo.

    I welcome this debate. Achebe brought his grand image as role model and Africa’s preeminent novelist to bear in his book. After reading, I discovered a wasted opportunity. His haunting style and limpid prose fell prey to a tendentious logic. Mostly, the book is marked by what he did not say than what he said. For a book that generated storm for its boldness, its lack of virtue derives from well-calibrated silences. For instance, he condemned the absence of the civil war from school curriculums. But he did confront some fundamental issues of the Nigerian crisis of the 1960s.

    The first was the pogrom. Igbo died in droves but the circumstances of that dark cloud of our history still loom over us. Nothing even Aburi, where Yakubu Gowon and Ojukwu parleyed like adversaries, tackled them. If important numbers of an ethnic group dissolved in the genocidal savagery from another ethnic group, how did anyone expect the nation to go on without justice being visited on those involved? It was a mercurial moment as Igbo ran away from what they thought was home. Tears, blood with carion flesh was Igbo in their own country. Relatives saw relatives expire just before they too vanished under the prejudice of knives, daggers and guns.

    Ojukwu was urged to ask Igbo to return to their various towns and businesses outside Igboland when no one had prosecuted the murderers. They wanted a nation built on a lie. The Igbo decision to go to war was difficult to fault. When the civil war came, there were stories of insensate killings. Federal generals lined up men, women and children and executed them in cold blood. All of these were well-documented. Rape, beatings, arson and other manifestations of abuse became routine parts of the story in eastern Nigeria.

    When the war ended, Gowon did not address these issues. He was only interested in bringing Ojukwu to trial, which reinforced the suspicions by historians that the egos of Ojukwu and Gowon overwhelmed any sense of propriety on the eve of the war. Gowon denied ever knowing of the barbarous cruelties of his generals who even defended their actions openly. Why were they never brought to trial? If Ojukwu and his men on the Biafrain side committed offences against the Geneva Convention, why was he also not brought to book on his own show of ruthless hubris?

    The militancy in the Niger Delta, the ethno-sectarian blisters in Jos as well as the eruptions of Boko Haram come from a nation that failed to address the fundamental issues that ruptured the nation in the 1960s.

    Up till today, all those who committed war crimes or genocide in the Second World War are being tracked around the world and tried. The Balkan crisis of over a decade ago still makes headlines today with the trials of generals like Karadzic. After the Rwandan earth clotted with brotherly blood, the nation could not be reborn without cleansing the past with trials and prosecutions. South Africa had its truth and reconciliation moments.

    If Ojukwu’s goal was secession, why did he occupy the neutral Midwest with all the tales of rape, harassment, curfew? Achebe wrote as though he had no evidence. It seemed Ojukwu wanted the Midwest oil? Why was he heading for Lagos?

    Achebe’s book has presented us with an opportunity. Too much malice festers in the Nigerian blood for us to look across ethnic aisles as a fraternal brood. We still evince what novelist Sembene Ousmane calls the “perfidy of lies and hypocrisy of rivals.”

    It is out of that tainted blood that Achebe churns out what should have been another masterpiece from the storied author. We cannot also address the pogrom without addressing some of the issues that triggered it. Did the Hausa-Fulani fear the ascendancy of the Igbo, and was that the reason for the thirst for Igbo blood? Was the Nzeogwu-led coup an Igbo agenda or the coincidence of more Igbo officers at the prime? Achebe failed to address the issue comprehensively. He did not drop an ink on why it failed in the east.

    On Ironsi, he argued that the general repulsed his attackers. But he did not even tackle the other suspicion as to whether the man had a tip-off or was spared by the majors. He merely painted Ironsi as reconciliator. On Decree 34, Achebe did not address the possibility that the law gave the Igbo advantage over other ethnic groups and some saw the decree as anointing that move. Some scholars wondered if Ironsi enacted the law out of hegemonic hubris or naivety. We shall never know. But Achebe feigned ignorance of this naunced perspective.

    Columnist Mohammed Haruna recalled a writing of a former New Nigerian head who was confronted after the Nzeogwu-led coup by writer Cyprian Ekwensi and other Igbo who claimed they had come to “take over.” There was no doubt of Igbo dominance of the civil service. If the Hausa-Fulani preened over their dominance, why should another group not try for power? It is the story everywhere. Only in the U.S. today is there a conscious effort to restrain such hegemonic pride. At the time of the Nigerian crisis, America resented voting rights for blacks. It was the extraordinary statecraft of President Lyndon Johnson that compelled Congress to enact the Civil Rights Act against the majority impulses. His Democratic Party has lost the South since.

    Even today, Ijaw openly flaunt their position because Jonathan is president. The point is not that a group cannot win, but that everything has to be done by rules agreed upon by all. The Igbo, including Achebe, have shied from admitting the obvious. Achebe claims Igbo are the most progressive people in Nigeria but falls shy of admitting that the Igbo seek to dominate. I would have loved him also to address the issue of Igbo political class that continues to play a game of mercantilist subservience and selling out the whole group for a mess of contracts and sinecure positions.

    On genocide, we cannot deny that many Igbo died of starvation. We cannot also deny that Awolowo saw “starvation as a legitimate weapon of war.” His singular move to change currency was, from the federal side, a policy of genius. It was death knell to Biafra. Achebe argued that Awolowo did that to foster his ambition and he wanted to kill many Igbo in order to ensure that. Awolowo’s assertion about starvation and war would have nailed him forever as a sadist of war. But history documents his visit to Biafra, even at the risk of dying in the hands of Adekunle. He returned wondering what happened to all the food sent to Biafra. He discovered that the food probably went to the soldiers. Sad as it was, you cannot feed your enemy soldiers.

    Achebe did not tell the story of the economic divide of Biafra. The soldiers and bureaucrats did not starve. This was well-delineated in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half Of The Yellow Sun and other books. Achebe suffers serial dislocations and one’s heart goes out to him as he tells the story of how his family escapes death from a bombing just when his mother reels in her death bed. But the writer does not show he and his family crave for food. He actually has two cars while ordinary Biafrans survive on desperate vegetables and lizards.

    Achebe will be veering into psycho-history to show that Awolowo intended to starve ordinary civilians with the currency policy and not to win the war. War policy has consequences. In the war against Iraq, General Colin Powell said: “Our strategy in this war is very simple: first we are going to cut them off, and then we are going to kill them.” Civilians tragically suffered deprivation. In such consequences, we cannot forget the slogan during the American civil war: “Richman’s war, poor man’s fight.” Awolowo wanted to win the war. What ambition did Awo want with Gowon when he was already second in command in the government? If he wanted to be president anointed by Gowon, would he not want the love of Igbo to win the election? Achebe was not clear with prose.

    Why did Ojukwu not open the food corridor, a thing that forced an expatriate adviser to resign? Ojukwu was believed by some to have allowed the starvation because it served as a potent propaganda tool? Was that true? Was it true that Awolowo saved all allocations to eastern Nigeria and gave them after the war? Why then did we not see massive rehabilitation in the east after the war? What did Asika do with the money? Was it even enough after all the depredations of war?

    The Igbo have remonstrated against the indigenisation decree and have accused Gowon and Awolowo as targeting them. The more this matter is examined, the more one is convinced that the Igbo suffered unfairly from that law. They had lost everything. That law put them at a disadvantage. But it is a credit to the genius of the race that they have bounced back in spite of such disadvantage.

    Why did the issue of abandoned properties not go through vigorous trials? That was one of the most vicious parts of the after-war imbecilities of the Gowon administration. Clearly Gowon’s reconciliation efforts were half-hearted.

    We did not address many issues and that is why they reincarnate. We can still look back, not in anger but for truth. We have done so without equity or truth. History continues to mean different things to different Nigerians. And we act according to our past. What one group sees in history, another denies. “I met history, but it didn’t recognise me,” wrote poet Derek Walcott. What history recognises the Igbo does not recognise the Yoruba. It is only if we have the courage to convene a body of truth and reconciliation, with the culprits named and victims vindicated, that we can avoid the replay of past eruptions. In future plotters will know that evil has official penalties. It is only then that we can fulfill Elie Wiesel’s words that “for the dead and the living we bear witness.” Or else the dead will continue to haunt the living in the Boko Haram, militants and the human infernos of Jos.

    Historian Cornelius Tacitus wrote in The Histories about the civil war that wracked Rome after Nero and how the tissues of its imperial splendour suffered from egos, greed, plunder, malice and lies. One of his epochal lines was, “conversation increases with hope.” Rome lacked that gift of hope. For us, we need conversation with the past. Without it, we cannot guarantee a future without rancour. That is the gift of Achebe’s book.

     

  • Beneath and above water

    Beneath and above water

    We read it in the newspapers and magazines. We saw the spectacles of nightmare on television. We followed the ominous buzz on the internet. We knew a tragedy was upon us. It was not the sort that humans made, but humans had to save.

    We could not live down the horrors of the story. Floods came in savage majesty, water levels levitated with the arrogance of height, lapping highways, humbling roofs, topping and toppling trees. Villages succumbed, towns shrank to the size of puny hamlets. Lush vistas ruined by rush of water. People fled, but not always fast enough. Nature is no friend of surrenders, not partial to escapes. Many died in the swash of its cruel journeys. It invaded homes, swept out privacies, pulverised memories.

    Memorabilia of ancient remembrances were gone, hostages to the pitiless appetites of watery graves. Water, water everywhere but not a home to save.

    Suddenly boundaries shattered. Water did not keep its contracts. River and land collapsed into each other. Where cars glided, canoes tumbled. Where children frolicked, fishes flourished. Where humans slept and sat at dinner, crocodiles and hippos swaggered with jaws. It was the definition of chaos, and an omen for the end of life. Homes of high and low fell. No bodyguard or military hardware could guarantee the integrity of the first private home in Otuoke, nor that of the subaltern farmer in Anambra State. It was a democracy of plunder, the equality of tragedy, the impotence of hierarchy.

    Who would not have contemplated apocalypse, when all of a sudden water rushed from its appointed place and came, sheets after sheets, roars after roars, threatening, shattering in endless arrays of conquests. Within 24 hours, we had refugees. This was not the aftermath of the Jos bloodsheds nor the Boko Haram rampages. It was nature, in its unthinking might, coming in incarnations of human disarray. It came not with guns or bombs, not with nozzle to aim or eyes to gloat, but with a malice of its own.

    When all of these happened, in as many as 24 states, I had a feeling of surrender. Much has been written about President Goodluck Jonathan’s late response, how he was in New York selling investment to Nigerians who followed him from home.

    But the story of flood is that of a failure of Nigerians as a people. We lamented privately, but on the whole we have done too little. As I write, many people cannot go home. Even when the water dries or returns to its natural course, home will not be the old home. Existentialist philosopher Heidegger wrote about home as the ultimate sum of all human effort. These people were dislocated. When they return, they will begin a new search. But this is not the time for philosophy, for abstract sympathy.

    African society is noted for its sense of communal empathy. But we have little of that now. Where are the rich among us? Other than Aliko Dangote who rolled out a huge sum of money, I have not seen much from private citizens. This is the time for corporations to show their responsibility to society. In spite of the huge profits of the banks, oil firms, and telecom giants, we see tokenism. They are quick to spend money on Nollywood impresarios, social conceits and concerts of vanity.

    Where is all that money politicians pay to help their ambitions and acolytes? It is time to turn the loot to charity. Where are the churches? I observed that they reacted to the refugees from Boko Haram torments with great mobilised materials and money. Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) worked up the brotherly love of members. But the flood had no sectarian friend. The foe was humanity. The churches have done little. They can expend billions in expensive schools built with the poor’s tithes, but they have not risen to the needs of neighbours in various camps and schools in Delta, Anambra, Rivers, Bayelsa, Kogi, etc. A few churches have given some help in the affected areas. But what did their mega pastors in Lagos do, in spite of the massive resources at their command? The Muslim brothers too have not shown any better love.

    When hurricane sacked Louisiana in the United States less than a decade ago, America rose up in a flush of cooperative help. Churches, nonprofits, individuals poured into the area. They bore materials and haloes of hope. Our state governments not affected by the tragedies have acted as though grateful for the beneficence of nature for not enlisting them for these apparitions of torture.

    The Red Cross and a few other groups have helped. In my conversation with the head of publicity, Nwakpa O. Nwakpa, I learned of the limitations of the body. Of the over 130,000 Nigerians displaced, they have resources to help a small percentage in 10 of the 24 states. The Red Cross needs to be commended for their work of love. Of states affected, two governors have stood out in the work. They include Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan of Delta State and Peter Obi of Anambra State. They have been mobilising people to bring relief to the displaced. If for its symbolic value, Gov. Uduaghan paddled a canoe. I thought it was quite an amount of risk. In the ambience of crocodiles, I wonder what the presence of guards around him could have mustered if the scaly beast lurked. They operate with stealth and could have surprised from under a canoe. So Uduaghan’s effort was not only symbolic but an exercise in understated gallantry.

    When the Bible tells us the story of the first great flood, God provided the ark for Noah. We don’t need a physical ark today. The ark is the love we can give. Why are people not flooding the places with the little they have, a widow’s mite mentality? We don’t have to be wealthy to give, we only need to empathise. Why can’t our musicians mobilise and do concerts in affected camps for free? Americans did the We Are The World concert for the starving children in the Horn of Africa. As Chinua Achebe records in his controversial There was A Country, a concert kindled sympathy for the starving children in Biafra. It is not that we don’t have it. Good leadership can light the quiet candles in our souls.

    In a recent visit to Ekiti State, I witnessed the efforts of first lady Bisi Fayemi who extends the Governor Fayemi’s social security programme with a food bank project. You want to see the joy in the faces of the poor as they took possessions of their bags containing food items. I wondered how the trickster would not replace the needy. Mrs. Fayemi assured me that a system of supervision guaranteed its integrity. Fountain of Life Church provides free lunch in a part of Lagos.

    Cash nexus and the individual ethos of the city have robbed us of the Noah’s Ark. We need to return to the compassionate society, to revive the village ethic and cooperative élan of our forefathers. We don’t need a flood to remind us. If we are faithful in little things, the national reflex will rise up to big occasions like the present disaster.

  • Mimic day

    Mimic day

    The anticipation of the governorship election of last Saturday was frenetic, and it was billed by this columnist as the battle of the intellect. I also billed it as a battle of integrity. This is because these are the cardinal impulses at play in the unveiling of the history of the state and that of the Southwest.

    As the voting process took place, I began to receive gloating text messages by partisans who thought that a victory for Olusegun Mimiko is a loss for Sam Omatseye. This sort of reading of an event of such far-reaching significance told me that the impulse of the savagely parochial had overtaken the more urbane mentality of the thinker.

    From the result released by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on Sunday, the numbers clearly lofted Mimiko as the winner of the poll. And, according to many text messages of those who celebrated, it was the triumph of the people. If the figures are not wrong, it all points out one thing about democracy.

    It is the system of the majority, but not always the ideology of the wise. From the currents of all those who communicated to me, they said they were voting against invasion from the outside, and that Mimiko had performed in the past four years.

    I billed the election as the platform for intellectual supremacy in the sense that I expected the people to vote for their own welfare, for the rise in education, for urban renewal and infrastructure development, for the promotion of integrity in office.

    If what INEC reported yesterday reflected the spirit of the Ondo people, it shows that the election was not a contest of the mind, but a contest of a sentimentality, of looking the other way when the fundamental outrages of the past term of Mimiko mocked them openly. Is it true that this man did not commission a major road as part of his stewardship? If it is true then my position is right. Is it true that in his four years in office, he only boasted a mother and child hospital, while other humbler states like Lagos and Delta have this phenomenon as routine? Only last week, Governor Babatunde Fashola, (SAN) the governor of example, unveiled eight of such hospitals.

    Is it true that he is spending over N600 million on a mega school, and boasted during his outing on the hustings that he would build mega schools in every local government, and the people believed such egregious folly? Is it true that thousands of Caesarian operations took place in his hospital? Does it not bespeak a failed system that such a stunning number of Caesarian surgeries will take place in a system?

    So if they say he performed, what are the tangible signatures of this performance? It has been demonstrated in the history of democracy that perception, not performance, is the potent force in democratic elections. It is the power of the spin. The people can be suffering, and be told that their lots are actually blissful. If the right figures are cleverly calibrated and the diction forceful, they would achieve a Goebels-like score, hoodwinking the people with a narrative of their own heroism when, in actual fact, the facts paint a contradictory picture.

    Looking at the issue of invasion seems to me more than a little unfair. Is it invasion in Ekiti State, where Governor Kayode Fayemi, in a brief two years, has had impact on poverty alleviation and infrastructure development of both roads and education than Mimiko can imagine in his self-glorification? Or are I am to refer to Rauf Aregbesola’s compassionate state where the education is reborn in a tale that only harks back to the time of Awolowo in terms of fervency of enrollment. Mimiko threw a gratuitous salvo over the thousands of people he has employed in his poverty alleviation programme. Those are 20,000 people removed from the streets of crime and indolence. How many of such can Mimiko boast of? Does he have a comparable figure of human rescue? Shall we refer to the doings of Ibikunle Amosun, with roads he has unveiled with deft measures in tertiary education and efforts to energise for industrial development? What of Abiola Ajimobi’s valiant work in Ibadan already, rescuing the city from the grubby propensity of his bejeweled predecessor as well as the first real efforts to save the state from the tragic routines of floods? Is this what they saw as invasion? If that is invasion, it should have been the invasion of liberation rather than internal servitude.

    In terms of integrity, I recalled in this column a few weeks ago when I characterised Mimiko as a pariah in the story of brotherly love. I itemised his serial acts of betrayal and that tells us that integrity should be seen as a factor in leadership. Apparently, that did not matter.

    The great thing about democracy is that the people can live to see the consequences of their ill judgment. I recall in my days teaching in the university in the United States, and I warned my students about the portentous errors of George W. Bush, and that he had deceived the majority of Americans, including marquee media establishments like the New York Times. Some of my students thought I was probably supping with the enemy. By the time they knew the effect of their actions, Bush was winding down his second term in office. And one of the students accosted me on campus with a slobbering apologia.

    The New York Times published its mea culpa for being complicit in a wave of deception in the country. The media is not always innocent in matters of mass deception. It even happened in Hitler’s Germany, where only the Munich Post stood as the corrective voice in a whirlpool lies.

    I only hope that we do not wake up one day to learn that, true to type, Mimiko has dumped his Labour Party and found a new rhythm in a new or familiar crowd of politicians. He should realise that if he did not perform in the first term and got away with it, history that outlives the presentistic follies of newspapers will be less kind if he fails to perform in the second.

  • Dancing with the people

    Dancing with the people

    As the Ondo governorship polls loom, I am sad at the humour of the hour. The irony of comedy is that it accepts the malady of our civilisation more than its triumph. Comedy emerges from the imperfections around us – a stumble, a misspeak, an act of naivety, an inefficient regime, etc. They often, on a higher level, point out the darkness of great vices: murder, betrayal, lies, hypocrisy, theft.

    That is why some of the great writers from Shakespeare to Soyinka have deployed humour to squeeze out laughter. After that, we scowl. When Chinua Achebe writes A Man of the People, he drapes his tale with a satiric robe so that when we laugh, we end it with a grimace. That was why playwright Bertolt Bretcht inaugurated a new form of theatre to moderate laughter and tears because, sometimes, we are carried away with the giddy sway of the laugh.

    So, if you look at the Southwest today, you will realise how much laughter we have lost. From Ogun State to Ekiti, we have gradually lost that belly laugh that often reminds us of the grotesque. We no longer have the Ibadan episodes with a man who tormented us to mock his beaded vainglory and party flourishes. Nor are we risible at the other governor with a perpetual sad-happy mien who brandished occultism as a brand of political coercion, or the Gestapo man who broke our ribs with his compulsive dalliance with the gulag. Of course, we cannot forget the delusion of grandeur from the one with the phony Awo cap. They all gave a sort of absurd humour. But the humour was not because they made our roads or empowered the feeble or fed the hungry or healed the sick, but because they celebrated a world of impotence in which their feathery bowers and ungainly steps recalled the reign of peacocks without beauty.

    The humour came out of sadness, because their kingdoms were founts of oppression. Where things go well, we see few examples of humour. “There is no humour in heaven,” quips Mark Twain, perhaps the foremost satirist in the world of letters.

    Ondo’s Mimiko belches out humour because his basic crust is betrayal at every level of a people, the Southwest Yorubas, who are on a train of togetherness based not just on kinship but on the high road of collective empowerment.

    It was to support the agenda of togetherness that Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet extraordinaire, noted “That every part to every part may shine/ distributing the light… from race to race, from one blood to another/ beyond resistance to human wisdom.” Dante writes his epic about heaven and hell, and he lists the names of people, great and small, who will find themselves where they belong based on their deeds or misdeeds.

    The verse called Divine Comedy is a sad story, emphasising Twain’s reference to humourless heaven. So whether you are governor or senator or president, stewardship is important, and when you fail, you find yourself in hell. Dante is not concerned with Biblical heaven or hell but the judgment of history. Those who misrule go to hell. Abacha, for instance, goes to hell.

    One governor who does not want a part of Dante’s poetic inquisition is Dr. Kayode Fayemi, the governor of Ekiti State, who is marking his second year in office. His road to the throne overflowed with thorns. He set out on a battle to win a mandate and turn the state into a model. When he was sworn in two years ago, I noted in this column what an uphill task lay ahead. He had a pedigree not only of a man who had dripped with promises, but who had staked out his personal integrity as an activist. As I left town that evening with a few other journalists, I wondered how he was going to make a difference. Ado Ekiti lay prostrate, dust heralded us from street to street, the houses looked forlorn but the people slobbered with hope. Under Governor Oni, they had the sort of look and life that Dante painted: “without hope, we live in desire.” To have desire for food, good education, infrastructure and jobs without visible prospects of fruition maligns the soul. Hope encourages desire, or else blind desire leads to crimes of fraud and violence that Seneca describes as the sources of all human injuries.

    The next day, I spoke to him on phone and he said in his baritone: “I have no choice. We have to fight poverty and eradicate it.”

    I visited at his first anniversary, and he had set the tempo. The next time I visited was during his mother’s burial and entered Ado-Ekiti with a friend from the United States. We had problem navigating the city. It was dusk, and everywhere work was going on. “This looks like a construction site,” was the comment of my friend, and that was before we entered the entrails of the city. That was when we knew the extent of work going.

    The city was a massive construction site, and I learned in a subsequent visit that it was even more elaborate than I thought, and he had spread the tentacles of development far. I noted in this column that in a phone-in radio programme, some callers wondered why he took on many roads simultaneously. They were afraid he would not complete any. To mark his two years in office, he inaugurated 10 roads of 103 kilometres about the distance between Lagos and Ibadan. This is with the accompaniment of drainage, setbacks and greenery. Those who feared for him did so because they were not used to a furious pace of development. He also commissioned five water treatment plants, one of which I had seen.

    He has complained about the frustrations of the elements. Rains have stood in the way, and he has quite some more work going on. But his heart is in the right place.

    The Ekiti people have been known for their love of education, and the challenge should be to encourage the people to see education not as an end in itself. They love their books and their PHDs, but that is not the way to go. In the United States, states with the higher levels of education like New York, California, Colorado, North Carolina have the highest levels of prosperity. The problem with us as a people is lack of productivity. That was why Fayemi has fought a few battles. One of them is the battle over teacher tests. He was resisted, but he has stuck to the principle that those who teach must know. And he is winning that battle. Another challenge to education is standards. A private school pupil received a scowl from his teacher the other day in Lagos when he corrected her (the teacher’s) English. That is why Fayemi’s stand is in the right place.

    His Ikogosi project is in advanced stage and I visited the place with all the chalets and the warm springs and the business potential. It reminded me of the poet Dryden’s phrase, “Here’s God’s plenty.” It was when we walked down from one set of chalets that we met a group of women, dressed as if from some social event of joy, singing in gratitude for his social security programme. The governor danced with them. The intellectual governor, as some have caricatured him, was in sync with dance and song with the old women.

    With such performance, he can dance. Just as Fayemi is dancing, can Mimiko boast such gyrations based on performance? That is the humour of the hour we seek.