The suspended senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan is as inscrutable as they come. Until she broke into the national scene a few years ago, she was hidden in thorough anonymity. But once she turned her electoral contest against former Kogi State governor Yahaya Bello into a soap opera, there was no stopping her. Controversial, recalcitrant, and self-centred, she has also demonstrated a huge capacity to be exploitative and manipulative. Her current battle, however, is with senate president Godswill Akpabio. Yet, three times in her recent jousting with the man she had sensationally accused of sexual harassment, she was offered a way out of the bind in which she threw herself. Thrice she spurned the offers.
She had hoped the case would be resolved in her favour through local and international public agitation. Despite her best efforts, including shedding crocodile tears and manipulating top Nigerian women whom she described as ‘useful idiots’, she came a cropper. Now, she has cases in three courts. In one, after Justice Binta Nyako of the Federal High Court fined her N5m and asked her to apologise to the court for contempt, she has dragged her feet. In fact she has appealed, with the senate also embarking on a cross-appeal, thus tying up the case a few knots further. She seems to enjoy the reputation of being contentious, in addition to being naïve, pedantic and embroiled in completely needless battles and controversies. However, with each grueling case and controversy, she becomes less and less believable and credible.
The movement of transition
By Tatalo Alamu (PIX)
Last week, on Sunday to be precise, Nigeria lost two of her most famous sons. Even for a nation inured to endless mysteries and political perplexities, the astrological signals and significance of these departures could hardly be missed. It was like a double meteor falling off the skies in quick succession. Nigerians had hardly taken in the import of the passing of a former ruler of the country in faraway London where he had sought medical refuge only to be informed that a frontline traditional ruler had also joined his ancestors, this time in the privacy of the royal bedroom.
General Mohammadu Buhari was a notable soldier and civil war hero who became a military head of state and was removed by his colleagues for his strong-willed inflexibility and inability to transcend primordial and provincial proclivities. A man of adamantine resolve, he later became a civilian ruler of the country after three unsuccessful attempts. In the case of Oba Sikiru Kayode Adetona, he was a stellar and outstanding product of Nigeria’s durable and resilient traditional institution, becoming the Awujale at the youthful age of twenty six in 1960 and going on to rule over his people with courage and forthrightness for the next sixty five years. After some youthful indiscretions, he settled down to rule his people with much royal flair and firmness.
It was, as they say in this clime, the end of an era. But it is much more profound than that. It was a historic watershed for Nigeria. It was the culmination of the movement of transition in a particular direction which makes reversal in the former direction totally impossible having exhausted its historical and material possibilities. As enunciated by our former teacher Professor Oyin Ogunba, a liberal humanist and scholar of distinction, the movement of transition stresses the absolute contiguity between the world of the living and the world of the dead in the Yoruba cosmology. But it is a one-way traffic or as Amos Tutuola will put it in his colourful English: it is a journey to the land of the “unreturnable”. The dead have expended their visa and cannot return to the world of the living. This is why certain deaths are symbolic of a collective closure and the culmination of a particular phase of existence in a particular nation. It is the unforced and unhurried exit of certain historical forces and exceptional personalities that have dominated and determined the fortunes of their country for good or bad. They are what Charles de Gaulle, thinking of himself, called “sacred monsters”.
The case of the late Awujale is more straightforward and less complicated. The nasty posthumous spat with traditionalists who wanted to take control of the royal remains notwithstanding, he was a beneficiary of more benevolent historical forces and a benign conjuncture. His was a cohesive society with core values shaped by the history and culture of his industrious and enterprising people. Among the various sub-nations of the cultured and cosmopolitan Yoruba people, the Ijebu people stand out for the solidity of their worldview, the rigour of their traditional institutions and the breezy confidence with which they deal with existential and historical exigencies. They have been living in the same domain continuously for over a thousand years and they have never been militarily subdued except once when overconfidence and lack of discretion allowed vastly superior British artillery to overrun their ramparts ending in a humiliating rout at Imagbon in 1892. They quickly recovered the initiative after taking to heart the lesson that ancient amulets are no match for modern bullets.
There can be no doubt that Oba Sikiru Adetona left Ijebu-Ode a much better, more prosperous and culturally thriving place than he met it, with his people more united, more vibrant, more accomplished and forward-looking. Thanks to his cousin, Mike Adeniyi Adenuga the Globacom mogul, the annual Ojude Oba gathering has been transformed into a global cultural extravaganza which has brought world-wide fame and recognition to his domain. He had met Ijebu-Ode a rural municipality and had transformed it through sheer determination and the force of his towering personality to a thriving modern city with well-paved roads, majestic edifices, amenities, first class institutions and a slew of industries. Nothing that could add lustre and prestige to his beloved town escaped his attention and searching scrutiny. A personal example will suffice. After the burial of Toun Onabanjo in 2011, yours sincerely in the company of some notable Yoruba leaders, repaired to his palace.
It was our first and last meeting. After introduction, the Awujale concentrated his gaze and attention on the columnist bemoaning the fact that one was one of those Ijebu children lost to the diaspora. Even after Chief Segun Osoba had told him that one was from a village in Osun State, the revered monarch insisted on our departure that the columnist must return home to put something on ground. Such was his charismatic charm and the goodwill he radiated. By the time he joined his ancestors last Sunday, the late king had been transformed into a supranatural personage of transcendental courage and immanent integrity, a mighty oak and auroch among men. Little wonder that the entire Ijebuland had been thrown into deep mourning and depression.
Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said about the general from Daura who left his country far more bitterly divided, polarized and impoverished than when he met it as a self-professed born again democrat and civilian leader. In death as in life, General Mohammadu Buhari split his country and people centrally. While the Nigerian ruling class and its global cohorts showered effusive encomiums and fake testimonials on him, the teeming masses of Nigerians across ethnic and religious lines were not impressed. They jettisoned the cultural admonishment not to speak ill of the dead as nothing but feudal veto and autocratic overreach.
Angry callers jammed switchboards condemning him as an ineffectual political leader and his reign a massive rip-off and hypocritical scam. Never in living memory, except the passing of General Sani which was met with widespread celebrations and wild jubilation in some sections of the country, has a Nigerian leader met with such hostility and scarification in death. They accused him of not walking his talk on corruption, of leaving Nigeria with a worse security nightmare and of compounding the problems of ethnic, religious and cultural diversities in the country. Yet others hailed him for his infrastructural feats which are unequalled and unprecedented in the annals of the country and his massive empowerment schemes which turned out a classic instance of Stone Age economics compounded by a fiscal fiddling of the Exchequer.
These divergent and countervailing opinions point at something more fundamental: a deeper structural misalignment of the nation which Buhari was fundamentally incapable of perceiving. He was a systems man and not a system changer or disruptor. His was a narrow and circumscribed feudal worldview in which all the issues were already settled and in which everybody was supposed to know his place. Having such a man as a leader in a roiling postcolonial menagerie of combustible contradictions is a cruel set-up. But power hungry while being politically maladroit Buhari was a willing martyr and accomplice. He allowed himself to be set up while also setting up the country and its teeming expectant populace. Under the spreading colonial chestnut tree of political perfidy, you sold me and I sold you.
A man of more cultivated social habits, wider reading regimen and sharper political instincts would have seen through the fog from a mile off. Throughout his life, there was a lingering whiff of spite, resentment and scornful contempt as if he could not live down the haughty condescension of the blue-blood feudal Brahmins who looked down on him as belonging to an inferior caste of forest dwellers and the humiliation of having been toppled by his own junior colleagues. After he was elected the president of the country, a senior military colleague and former benefactor was known to have remonstrated with him that it was time to forget and forgive those who had wronged him in the past. He was said to have looked up in consternation at his former boss before exploding: “Including Ibrahim?” Yet it was the same Ibrahim whose magnanimity and generosity of spirit made sure no harm came his way on the night he was arrested and dethroned.
Nigeria is not a unified or homogeneous country. Its contradictions have not been simplified and unbundled to a simple confrontation between the haves and the have-nots. Those, including this writer, who invested unrealistic hopes in the general from Daura have not been fair to him or the country. We had unfairly surmised that with his populist mystique, his aura of authority and messianic infallibility he would be the avenging avatar that would drag the north by the scruff of the neck screaming and kicking into the portals of modernity. But General Buhari is not a Colonel Mustapha Kemal Ataturk; neither is he a Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser or even Colonel Muammar Ghaddafi for that matter. This is because Nigeria is neither Turkey nor Egypt or Libya. We must always modify our expectations based on the internal configuration and the state of nationhood of each country.
General Mohammadu Buhari has given it his very best shot. He was not a rebel or a radical but a former herd-boy made good. In an engrossing play of irony, his military superiors who in 1976 upon the assassination of Murtala Mohammed foreclosed his appointment as Chief of General Staff, Defense Headquarters on the patriotic grounds that based on his political clumsiness such an appointment might imperil a sterling military career merely opened a surer path to political preeminence for him. General Obasanjo and General Danjuma could not see far into the turbulent future. Both Buhari and Shehu Yar’Adua, the man who acceded to the post, were classmates in Katsina Provincial College but there is no evidence of deep friendship between the two. The two military brass hats ended up in partisan politics with Yar’Adua perishing in Abacha’s Gulag while Buhari went on to become a twice elected civilian president.
With the transition of General Buhari last Sunday, we have reached the end of an era; a critical threshold in the history of the nation and the culmination of events which began fifty years earlier with the overthrow of General Yakubu Gowon and the ascendance, military dominance and political hegemony of the civil war officers, those heady warriors who believed that because they fought for the unity and preservation of the country, they also had a right to control the political and economic destiny of the nation. They have left their deep marks on the tumultuous history of the nation. It has taken half a century for the nation to discharge its debt of obligation to them. But now, Nigeria has entered a new phase.
