The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

Presidency 2015: Neither religion nor ethnicity

Some February 2015, Nigerians would not be electing a bishop or an imam: we would be choosing a president. But you would not think so judging by the way religion is being manipulated to influence potential voting decisions.

As if that were not bad enough, the usual suspects are already at it pushing ethnicity for all it is worth to gain political advantage. None of this is strange because these issues have always been overt factors in Nigerian politics.

Indeed, it would be naïve and unrealistic to try to totally keep them out of politics. Even in the US which popularised the principle of separation of church and state, this is only observed in breach. They may not have a state religion but ‘In God We Trust’ is inscribed on their national currency.

Even in largely homogeneous societies like the US, religion in politics sometimes manifests in positions taken by candidates e.g. Do they want prayer in schools or are they pro or anti-abortion?

In multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies like ours you cannot run away from balancing. Giving people a sense of belonging is one thing, but when a person’s suitability for office becomes a function of what faith he follows, we need to ask hard questions.

What I find discomfiting is the virulence with which these factors are being deployed this election cycle – without a proper sense that we are playing with dynamite. From Lebanon to Iraq to Northern Ireland, the human suffering caused by the combustible mix of religion and politics isn’t something to recommend to an enemy.

In the past we somehow managed to step back from the brink. This time around, Boko Haram has poisoned the air with atrocities that have sharply polarised the ethnic and religious divides.

Things are not helped by the fact that the two major political parties are set to pick the candidates from the opposing geographical poles – reprising the age-long North-South contestation for power. It was only in 1999 that we were briefly spared the aggravation when the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the then All Peoples Party (APP) chose candidates from the South West.

The PDP pulled out the religious card quite early as it sought to define the nascent All Progressives Congress (APC) as an ‘Islamic party.’ The ruling party’s spokesman, Olisah Metuh, enthusiastically accused the opposition of propagating Janjaweed ideology. The basis of this accusation was that the party that was then in formation had a preponderance of Muslims in leadership positions.

After the APC’s first convention, a new hierarchy reflecting a better religious and ethnic balance emerged. But then suspicions that had been sown in the minds of the impressionable were reinforced with talk that the party was seriously considering selecting a Muslim-Muslim slate to challenge President Goodluck Jonathan.

As the opposition intensified their attacks against the government for its impotence in the face of rampaging insurgents who had graduated from just lobbing bombs to actually holding territory, an administration on the defensive felt the best way to fight back was to accuse APC of sponsoring and funding the insurgency.

Having made this astonishing claim, the government didn’t move to prosecute those it accused of such treasonable offences. By not taking that step it destroyed the credibility of the allegations. That has not stopped the administration from repeating the same meaningless claims in the face of new criticisms – and it leaves you wondering why.

Matters of faith don’t lend themselves to reason since they flow from our hearts and emotions. Each time Boko Haram – in the name of Islam – invade a village in the North East, burn down churches and murder Christians, it plays strongly into the ‘them-against-us’ narrative.

Just this last week at the meeting of the Nigeria Inter-Religious Council (NIREC) – a forum formed to promote better understanding between Nigeria’s two leading faiths, what made headlines were the exchanges between Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) President, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor and the Sultan of Sokoto, Abubakar Saad.

Oritsejafor had complained bitterly about the slaughter of innocent Christians in the North. He spoke of unjust treatment exemplified by the fact that in many parts of the region Christians cannot get land to build churches, and where they manage to get land they are denied Certificate of Occupancy (C of O) for no just cause.

He then challenged the Sultan to direct the same letter he had written to ISIS to Boko Haram. The suggestion was that major Muslim leaders had not bent the ears of the insurgents sufficiently to turn them from their evil ways. Naturally, his views were not well received by the other side.

I sympathise with Oritsejafor because much of what he said is the true experience of many Christians in the far North. Even before the coming of Boko Haram, sectarian clashes in which scores lost their lives were common occurrences in the last few decades.

However, the CAN President’s comments don’t capture the total picture. If Christians have been victims of the insurgency, Muslims have also suffered terribly. Boko Haram has murdered thousands of nameless people who share the same faith they claim to be propagating across the Northern states.

On Friday, at least 120 worshipper were killed when suicide bombers attacked the Emir of Kano’s mosque. Last week 45 innocent souls were blown to bits in a Maiduguri market after two female suicide bombers detonated their deadly cargo. A few days after in Adamawa, a roadside IED believed to have been planted by the sect claimed another 35 lives. I doubt whether these explosives were primed with instructions to slay adherents of a particular religion.

There are serious unresolved issues in Nigeria revolving around ethnicity, indigene status and religion that we need to sit down and discuss frankly. A situation where the constitution talks of not adopting a state religion, while some Northern states openly do so undermines coherence and trust in the federation.

That said, we must accept that Boko Haram has gone beyond the ‘them-versus-us’ stage. Those being murdered in places like Gwoza, Damboa, Bama etc are not all Christians. This is something that requires everyone pulling together. It is something that has defeated everything the current administration has thrown at it. Even with outside help, we now have a pseudo-caliphate on our doorstep.

That is why I find it truly reprehensible that politicians are trying to fight the 2015 elections by manipulating religion and ethnicity – rather than focusing on their record and manifesto.

When you hang the tag of an ‘Islamic party’ on your opponents, are you not suggesting that yours is the ‘Christian party’? The president has not helped with his subliminal religious campaigning involving church-hopping. To decide whether he was going to run or not, we were subjected to a primetime ‘pilgrimage’ to Jerusalem flanked by two of the country’s most prominent pastors. Are their flock supposed to read between the lines and fall in line?

Christians who try to paint Jonathan as the candidate for their religion need to pause and reflect. Voting for the incumbent president won’t take anyone to heaven, just as voting for his likely Muslim opponent will not open the gates of Paradise to anyone.

How has Jonathan being a Christian furthered the Christian cause in Nigeria? Under his watch thousands of Christians are being slaughtered across the North and the butchering continues.

I recollect that over two years ago when the US first toyed with the idea of designating Boko Haram a Foreign Terrorist Organisation (FTO), agents of the Jonathan government in collaboration with the American State Department then led by Hillary Clinton argued strenuously at the Congress against it.

They painted a picture of the sect as a minor irritant that could be controlled with home-grown solutions. At that same hearing was a CAN delegation led by Pastor Oritsejafor. He and his team were thoroughly astonished that agents of a government ostensibly led by a Christian would be making such arguments. All they were after was anything that would check the sect. They left America bitterly disappointed.

Instead of demonising individuals and any particular religion, let us wake up as Nigerians and confront our demons. Since we have not agreed to dissolve our union, we must tell ourselves the truth and not allow political scam artists to take us for another ride in the same tattered religious cum ethnicity jalopy.

As things stand in this country today, no Muslim can win an election without Christian votes and vice versa. Nobody can impose any religion on us without having to deal with the National Assembly and the 36 state houses of assembly.

Voters must ask themselves if they are going to elect a president based on his piety or their performance. We are suffocated with religiousity and church/mosque-going at election time. Once the elections are won and lost, these supposedly pious politicians return to business as usual. How is it that with all our holy and prayerful politicians Nigeria is so messed up?

We remember religion when it helps us carve up the nation’s wealth. Our faith takes a back seat as we despoil the land and desecrate the offices that God in his mercies has allowed us to occupy; we abuse the powers we should hold in trust for the people.

We hoodwink the ignorant with ethnicity whereas the fact is voting for someone with whom you share tribal identity doesn’t change much if you’re not in his close circle.

Northern leaders governed Nigeria for close to 40 years and yet their region remains the poorest and most backward in the country. Chief Olusegun Obasanjo was in office for eight years as civilian president. By the time he left, most roads in Sango-Ota where he used to live were impassable. Jonathan has been in office for over five years and millions of people from the South-South zone are still living a hardscrabble life.

Instead of being scammed through sentiment Nigerians should realise that what we desperately need is a leader who will drag this blessed country out of backwardness.

When a Christian leader delivers 24-hour electricity it’s not only for Christians, when a Muslim provides tap water it will also run in the homes of members of the other faith.

Nigerian politicians playing the religion and ethnic card should remember the immortal words of our inimitable First Lady, Dame Patience Jonathan: ‘There is God oooooo!!!! And He’s a consuming fire.

November 30, 2014
Party Formations and State Crisis

The endemic crisis of party formations in Nigeria bears an organic relationship to the crisis of the post-colonial state in the nation. In other words, the originating crisis of the post-colonial state, its inability to manage and resolve contradictions arising from elite contestations for allocation of privileges and resources, finds an eloquent testimony in the inchoate and incoherent nature of party formations, particularly in the post-military polity. What was designed to resolve a conflict has in effect become an integral part of, and party to, the conflict.

Fifteen years into post-military civil rule, the democratic project in Nigeria is showing signs of deep stress and strains. There is democratic regression and the recession of civil rule everywhere. All the indices of the failure of the democratic process are here with us, thumbing at our face with impudence. From the failure of periodic elections to coincide with the real wish of the electorate, the abridgement of the right to free association, the curtailing of free movement during elections, the draconian imposition of the will of the minority on the wishes of the majority to the abrogation of the doctrine of the separation of authority.

But even more importantly, with the phenomenon of executive outlawry in which the state violates its own sacred authority by becoming a violent nuisance to the rest of the society, we are witnessing a new strain of state delinquency. Anarchy looms everywhere and the state itself, reeling from the hammer of a vicious armed critique, is better surveiled by non-state combatants than it is capable of the surveillance of society. The hunter has become the hunted.

Many optimists find this scary situation as consistent with the teething problems of democratic rule particularly after a long incubation in authoritarian rule. Whether the imminent death of a perpetual toddler is the same as its teething problems remains to be seen. There are those who take a less sanguine view, and who look at the current developments as the inevitable death throes of fledgling democracy. If we have achieved anything at all in the Fourth Republic, it is the fact that we have kept the military at bay, and for the longest period in our history.

But the absence of military rule does not equate to the presence of a truly democratic dispensation. This past week, a noted lawyer and civil rights campaigner, painted a dire picture of an impending collapse of civil rule in Nigeria. Judging by the responses from the internet and the social media, it was clear that the current democratic charade would not be missed.

To make things even more ominous, it was the same week that General Olusegun Obasanjo, the man who bequeathed Goodluck Jonathan to the nation and who could be held mainly responsible for the limited successes of the Fourth Republic as well as its hideous failures, opened what is in military parlance a multiple front against his own protégé. For the Jonathan administration, it is an endgame of some sorts.

Obasanjo is a brilliant past-master when it comes to strategic stripping of legitimacy, and the clouds are pregnant indeed. The turbulence and tempest suggest an abnormal gestation and birth. But in the end, nothing can come out of nothing. The post-colonial state, unlike the founding colonial imperium, is neither a creation nor an organic outgrowth of the post-colonial nation. The colonial state and the entire colonial project were not willed into existence to manage conflicts among elite factions but to suppress and brutalise them into compliance and conformity.

The organising principle of the post-colonial state is force and conquest and not elite conciliation and consensus. Every ascendant faction close off the state to their competitors and barricade themselves in. There is no attempt at compromise or conflict resolution. The arena of the state is a coliseum of contending gladiators; Androcles and lions in a Roman pit of industrial bloodletting.

In such circumstances, any African state-nation that must survive this originating curse of the colonial nation and its violence-prone state must witness a revolutionary rebirth or some radical surgery pioneered and spearheaded by a visionary political elite or a nationalist military officer-class. This is what has happened in Ghana through a lucky combination of both, in Tanzania, Senegal, Botswana and Zambia through messianic statesmanship and in South Africa and perhaps Benin Republic through a radicalised political class immensely aware of its historic mission.

Nigeria has not been lucky with such historic game-changers. Hence, its post-independence political culture has seen a grim oscillation between military despotism and civilian tyranny. It is a lineage of fascism and absolutism stretching back to colonial conquest. Rather than leading to genuine liberation and the exchange of colonial subjecthood with post-colonial citizenship, independence merely led to the Africanisation of the personnel of autocracy.

But this relay race between two or three varieties of tyranny cannot subsist forever. Civilians are not professional managers of violence. The ding-dong between contending autocracies can only eventuate in full blown military rule or a vicious armed critique of the state which may lead to dismemberment and dissolution such as we are witnessing with the Boko Haram insurrection.

It may be important to remind contending political gladiators irrespective of party affiliation or ideological inclination that since we are also dealing with a fundamental crisis of elite formation, what is required goes beyond the purview of partisanship and regular politics . The current elite formation in Nigeria ,whether at the national level or at the regional or local levels, faces grave pressures from the margins and from below. If the nation were to be overwhelmed by adversity or if the radical tremors were to become a full earthquake, it is the entire elite formation in Nigeria that will go under. This is why it is important for everyone to put on their thinking cap.

Central to the crisis of democratization in the post-colonial polity is the crisis of party formations. In a huge, chaotic and unwieldy political amalgam like Nigeria with its teeming spiritual, economic and cultural contraries, the crisis is bound to assume an urgent and critical dimension. From the run up to independence and thereafter, our parties have found it difficult to function as genuine agencies for the expansion of the democratic space or as popular platforms for advancing the political and economic empowerment of the populace.

The fault is not in their stars. You cannot plant maize and expect to harvest yam. Going by the constitutive logic of colonial conquest itself, their aim is to capture the state and share the booty of conquest. It is a harsh and merciless venture that leaves no room for political idealism or utopian fantasies. The sole object of power is power, as George Orwell will put it. The parties are organised cartels for the sole purpose of capturing power.

Whether you like it or not, it requires considerable financial outlay, political discipline and formidable psychological stamina. It can be very chummy and plumy when the going is good and the cards are stacked in your favour. Hence the absurd anomaly on the part of some followers screaming imposition in parties that are very much private liabilities companies entirely funded by individuals who put down men and material.

But going by the very same logic, the equally absurd anomaly on the part of leaders screaming betrayal and perfidy in parties that are not held together by deep ideological bonding or the umbilical cord of political kinship should be obvious. It is an engrossing game of double-digit deception. As Orwell again famously puts it, under the spreading chestnut tree, you sold me and I sold you. In the brutal casuistry of power calculus everything—and everybody—is game.

It is when the logic of certain developments is pushed to its ultimate possibility that it also becomes obvious why such developments cannot be sustained. Going by the Tambuwal affair and the obvious threat to both civil rule and national stability, the gale of defection, the epidemic of political infidelity and the open, porous nature of party borders have now reached a point where the system and the Fourth Republic are about to be overwhelmed. The crisis of party formation has become a major threat to the continued survival of the state as well as democratic experiment itself. We cannot proceed or progress without an urgent and radical reform.

Going forward, we may need to cast a retrospective glance at the past and to the origin of the crisis. If we view the First Republic and its iconic parties with a certain nostalgia, it is ironically because we are missing something about the dynamics of party formation in that fabled epoch. Virtually all the parties that were to play a major role in the post-independence politics of Nigeria began either as protest movements at the local and regional level or as cultural confraternities. In the case of the Northern People’s Congress before it transformed into the Nigerian People’s Congress, it began as a cultural platform for the protection of Arewa interests and never really wavered in its single-minded pursuit of Hausa-Fulani hegemony. In the case of NEPU, it was a protest movement of the talakawa against the northern feudal hegemony.

The Action Group had its origins in the cultural movement known as Egbe Omo Oduduwa which existed solely to advance and protect the interests of the Yoruba people. For the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons (NCNC) before it transformed into the National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) it was a bi-national movement, and after its transformation, an Igbo imprimatur was writ large on its modus operandi.

In the circumstance and precisely because of their cultural solidity, none of these parties was able to transform into a genuine platform of national aspiration at the centre. Hence their reliance on mutually destructive alliances which eventually proved very fatal to democracy, civil rule and the nation itself. After the trauma of the civil war, the military sought to correct this ruinous political legacy by encouraging the formation of huge pan-Nigerian parties which would accommodate the interests of a large swathe of the political elite. Both the NPN and the PDP are products of this military political laboratory.

In the case of General Babangida, he sought a clever and creative variation by creating two huge political monopolies, one a little to the left and the other a little to the right. But like all political magicians, he did not reckon with concrete contradictions. MKO Abiola, a well-known conservative, became the flag bearer of the progressive platform and by bringing the rightwing resources of opulent wealth and vital connections to bear on what is essentially a leftwing project of demilitarisation ended up upending military calculations and the rule of the uniformed.

If an Abiola, a product of the military oligarchy, ended up being their nemesis, Jonathan, a product of civilianised military plutocracy, is proving to be their nemesis too. Like all people who seek to play god in the affairs of men, Obasanjo never reckoned with concrete contradictions. As a human with a limited knowledge of contending possibilities, there are many things you can never factor into these power games.

However that may be and despite some brilliant isolated performances against the run of play, it is now clear that these power cartels and political monopolies can only transit Nigeria back to the Stone Age of corruption and paralysed incompetence. Without a radical rebirth of the nation and its current party formations, the next few months will be trying indeed.

November 30, 2014
A generous, joyous and romantic eccentricity at the molten core of theatre and life

(For Dapo Adelugba, 1939-2014: egbon, teacher and mentor)

WHEN the text message came to me from Femi Osofisan informing me that we had lost him, I screamed back a response that carried the full weight of the devastating shock that I felt: : “WHEN and HOW did he die?” Femi replied simply: “check your email”. And I did and found not one, but two emails. One was from Siji, the late Emeritus Professor’s brother and a friend of more than half a century; his email stoically accepted the inevitable and gave thanks for a life that had been prodigious in service to the nation and humanity. The other email was from Jahman Anikulapo that had been forwarded to me by Femi himself; this email hinted at a death that could easily have been avoided by observance of the most elementary protocols of professionalism in medical practice in our country. I think I shall always and forever be caught between the inscriptions in these two emails. One: “gbese ni’ku; ko s’eni ti ko ni lo” (“death is a debt that we all owe and none shall leave this life alive”). Two: the terribly and monstrously backward state of medical practice in Nigeria has itself become the bedrock of the banal “inevitability” of death in our country. In many other parts of the contemporary world, while death’s “inevitability” has not been obliterated, it has been enormously constrained, almost to the point of redundancy.

The bitterness of these opening observations in this tribute has a very concrete and particular basis. Sometime late last year, I had had a series of conversations with Siji and Femi and others on how we might all work together to smoothen the relocation of Professor Adelugba to Ibadan. He had finally “retired” from his post-retirement contract with Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria. For a while he had stayed on in Zaria but had then moved to Lagos. But anyone who knows the slightest thing about him knows that Ibadan is his spiritual home. And it is the one place that has the largest concentration of those with whom he had experienced the happiest, most memorable and productive years of his professional and personal life. At any rate, it was with a great, optimistic expectation that I “conspired” with others late last year to welcome “Uncle D” back to Ibadan. I looked forward to resuming old, unfinished discussions with him; and I was excited by anticipation of new topics of discourse that we would almost certainly engage in. As recently as last week as I began to prepare for my annual seven-week visit home every December, this long-awaited anticipation of linking up again with “Uncle D” was high on the list of pleasures that my visit home would yield. This is the emotional context for that response that I screamed back to Femi when I received his email informing me of Professor Adelugba’s death: “WHEN and HOW did he die?”

In the death of Dapo Adelugba, the world of the arts, the humanities and, especially theatre in academia in our country and in Africa has lost one of its legendary pioneering figures. Absolutely, he was one of a kind. He was loved, he was revered by generations of his students with something approaching hero-worship. To those who were never directly his students, this always seemed mysterious. But nothing was as free of mystery as the foundation of the worshipful devotion of Uncle D’s hundreds, maybe thousands of students. For the simple but profoundly moving thing about this assertion is the fact that Adelugba made every single one of his students feel that she or he was important, was special. He gave equal attention, equal time and energy to every single student. Every paper that was ever written and submitted to him was read and graded with great care; and he made detailed commentary on every single paper submitted to him. As if that was not enough, he made himself available to every single student who wanted a personal one-on-one follow-up on top of the copious comments that he’d made on a paper. I testify that as a teacher myself, I have never met any teacher, any colleague that equaled Uncle D on this particular point.

Indeed, when I was one of his undergraduate students in the late 1960s, I often marveled at this generosity that in my personal experience was unequalled. Typically, we were relatively few in our classes at that period of the history of higher education in Nigeria. For instance, in one of the most formative classes that I took with him which was on dramatic criticism, there were only about eight of us in the class. Imagine my surprise then when many decades later I read glowing testimonies affirming this same generosity from Adelugba’s students from another period when class size had more than quadrupled beyond what we were used to in my time at U.I. Only a tiny minority of the most conscientious teachers ever aspires to reach every single one of their students; far more remarkable is the fact that among this order of the elect among teachers, it is very rare to have what it takes to fulfill that noble aspiration. Uncle D was a scion of this order of the elect among teachers. He gave an unquantifiably large chunk of his life to his students. Since he was only human, this took a great toll on him, but this is not the occasion to dwell on this particular matter.

Adelugba was of course not a saintly mentor who suffered fools and slackers among his students silently; he was not a guru presiding over an ashram of god-obsessed neophytes. He was a workaholic teacher and mentor who demanded from his students what he demanded of himself. He was quick to anger and he tended to express this anger tempestuously. Quite often, the cause of the anger was, to the offender, so slight, so inscrutable as to be quixotic. This was perhaps the basis of a reputation that over time he garnered as the chief exemplar of a defining eccentricity among U.I. Theatre Department professors and lecturers! But since he was the very embodiment of generosity, since he had a laughter that was unique in its affability and emotional resonance, no professor’s or lecturer’s “eccentricity” was more tolerable – and tolerated – than his.

The vocation of teaching is of course not a contentless abstraction; as a teacher you school, you mentor students in a particular subject, a particular academic discipline: Physics or Chemistry; Mathematics or Sociology; History or Geography. In the case of drama, theatre and the arts as a composite academic discipline and practice in our country, it was part of his destiny that Adelugba shared the pioneering spotlight with other legendary figures like Geoff Axworthy, Wole Soyinka, Joel Adedeji, Demas Nwoko, Dexter Lyndersay and Ola Rotimi. These men – among whom only Soyinka and Nwoko are still with us – were/are all without exception endowed with great talent and equally great egos. I make this assertion absolutely without any sarcasm, any irony, any criticism. It is in the very nature of pioneers in all fields of endeavor to be driven, to be single-minded, to be eccentric. To this, add the significant fact that in the period when drama and theatre were being established as a composite academic discipline at U.I., there was very little sympathy, talk less of understanding among the powers that be in the academic pecking order of the university. Many of the most eminent and powerful professors at the time could not bring themselves to understand and lend their support to the move to transform the old School of Drama to a Department of Theatre Arts. Even when the transition eventually took place, the old antagonism, the old philistine condescension towards the arts and theatre persisted. With his own peculiar brand of “eccentricity” that I am calling generous, joyous and romantic in this piece, Adelugba played one of the most central roles in these pioneering efforts to provide a valid and respected place for theatre and drama in the curriculum of Nigerian universities. What exactly does this assertion entail?

With the possible exception of Soyinka, Adelugba was the most self-assured in his knowledge of, and immersion in local and international currents of the world’s drama, theatre and the arts. He came to the profession of academic teaching with legendary feats as an actor and theatre director in his student days at the old U.C.I. and his teaching stint at the Ibadan Grammar School. As “Suberu” in That Scoundrel Suberu that he adapted from one of Moliere’s plays, as Murano in The Road, as Dawodu in Kongi’s Harvest, and as Old Man in Madmen and Specialists (my favorite among the many roles that he performed in Soyinka’s plays) he had regaled hundreds of secondary school and university students as the country’s uncontested leading actor in the then newly emergent Nigerian drama and theatre in English. As a theatre director whose charisma and enthusiasm were unparalleled, he gave much joy and enrichment to his actors and technical crew. As the School of Drama was transforming into the Department of Theatre Arts, he was the chief pedagogue of the central disciplines of acting and directing. More than perhaps any other person, he produced the largest crop of the most talented younger generation of theatre directors in the country. The times that I spent as an actor in his productions were unquestionably some of the happiest times in my undergraduate years at U.I. I know for a fact that most of my classmates who were in his productions felt the same way. And in his classes, we encountered texts of dramatic literature and criticism from virtually all the regions of the world that went far beyond the narrow British focus of the authors and texts that I encountered in my major in the English Department. In short and to summarize the essential point that I am making here, in Adelugba Nigeria’s and Africa’s pioneering theatre department found one of its most cosmopolitan, charismatic and self-assured voices in its hard fought struggle for legitimacy.

For good or ill, it also came to pass that Adelugba outstayed all the other pioneers of the great project of making drama and theatre a valid and respected discipline in Nigerian universities. Long after either death or other interests had diverted his fellow pioneers away from academia, he stayed on. He was thus the longest serving senior academic teacher and administrator of drama and theatre in our country. Today, his protégés constitute the single most pervasive and influential bloc of senior academics in theatre departments in universities in Nigeria and across the African continent. This is a monumental achievement. But it is not without its ambiguities.

I do not claim to fully comprehend exactly what happened but it seems that after legitimacy was won, after most of his fellow pioneers had departed, Adelugba turned his attention to mass production of Ph Ds, apparently as part of U.I.’s self-reinvention as primarily a research rather than a teaching university. With this paradigm shift, the U.I. Graduate School became big and the mass production of the next generation of Nigeria’s professoriate began in earnest. I am told that no department in the University has been more eager in fulfilling this new mission than the Theatre Arts Department and no professor in the entire University has produced more Ph Ds than Adelugba.

It is too soon to produce a final verdict on this particular aspect of Adelugba’s rich legacy. That will come long after all of us are gone. I sincerely hope that when that verdict comes, it will be kinder to his memory than the toll that the effort exacted on his life in the last two to three decades. Conscientious and generous to the last, as he mass produced these Ph Ds, he lived virtually in his office, poring over overlong tomes of doctoral dissertation. It was very injurious to his health. And he became reclusive, very reclusive. When he was still in Ibadan before relocating to Zaria, I sometimes visited him at his house on campus. For the most part the conversations went well on these visits. But it was his laughter that I always looked forward to and always cherished the most during the visits. In my experience, the only other person who had laughter to match his was the late Agbo Folarin. Adelugba’s laughter was fulsome, it came in gales or waves of a pure release of mirth that crested in an expressive summit at which, in my imagination, Adelugba could see all of life’s absurdities, challenges and promises with equanimity. But instead of ending on that summit, the laughter would start anew in gales and waves that would crest in still other summits, on and on and on. I can think of no better image for his life and career. He is gone now. But he was here, he was here.

Biodun Jeyifo

bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

November 30, 2014
Tambuwal on the Buni Yadi massacre

“…On February 25, 2014, the very day the House adjourned Plenary, Nigeria suffered a horrendous terrorist attack that struck a fatal blow at the heart and soul of the nation and desecrated values that decent peoples of all nations hold dear. On that night, about 59 students of the Federal Government College, Buni Yadi, Yobe State were killed in the most heinous manner. Some of our future national leaders were mowed down in gruesome circumstances in their sleep. Some were shot dead while many were burnt beyond recognition…

“When innocent, harmless and defenceless women and children become the targets of these heartless murderous bandits; when the lives of sleeping children are so callously snuffed out, it becomes clear that these agents of terror have murdered sleep and they henceforth deserve none.

“Whatever grievances the terrorists harbour against the government of Nigeria, Nigeria’s innocent children have nothing to do with it. Nigeria’s children bear no responsibility for either policy making or policy implementation in Nigeria. It is therefore an act of cowardice worthy of ringing condemnation to target the children, to strike at those who are not only innocent but are unable to strike back or defend themselves. There can be no reason, no justification and no acceptable excuse for this act of mindless brutality. Whatever message the terrorists set out to send to the Nigerian government has been drowned out by the cries for justice by the blood of these innocent martyrs.

“It is to remember these innocent children and other victims of violence in this country, that the House has declared today ‘A day of mourning’ to express our collective outrage on those killings that have gone on for far too long.

“My dear Colleagues, please travel with me on an imaginary journey to the Federal Government College, Buni Yadi.

“Picture the scene as the terrorists creep into the hostels and the children begin to wake up one after the other, with their eyes heavy with sleep, each of them convinced that this is some nightmare.

Picture the chaos in the rooms and the terror of the faces of the children as they watch the murderers attack the first set of students, the ones nearest to the entrance, and the students begin to realise that what is happening is not a nightmare but a reality far harsher that any nightmare the mind of a child can construct.

“Hear the panic in the voices of the children as they begin to scream for help, from God, their parents or security. But no help will come tonight.

“Feel the unbearable horror of this night and hear the fading cries of these children as they finally succumb to the murderous onslaught.

“Finally, my dear Colleagues, imagine that it is your own child in the hostels at Buni Yadi on this hellish night.

“I can hear the voice of the Father of Aliyu Yola, one of the victims of the school massacre crying, ‘Aliyu was scared to go back to school after the last holiday. I forced him to resume not knowing that he will never come back to me again.’

As Jodi Picoult writes in her book, “My Sister’s Keeper”, in the English Language, there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for a parent that loses a child…”

Excerpted from a speech by Hon Aminu Tambuwal on March 11 during a special session on the killing of 59 students of the Federal Government College, Buni Yadi, Yobe State.

November 30, 2014
Nigerian football is symptomatic of our famed corruption

Knowing now what we do about our football and its guardian angels, the crisis-ridden Football Federation, is it a surprise that Nigerians were treated to the macabre picture of a ‘scratch my back, I scratch yours’:

Writing under the title: ‘How Nigeria Destroys’, a distinguished columnist with The Nation, this past week set me thinking; running my mind over the entire Nigerian canvass to see if there were still any oasis of integrity left in this whirlpool of corruption. I knew quite well that the Jonathan government has taken corruption to a new high in our country, not just by its romanticisation of the corrupt, but more by the introduction of scientific rigging into our electoral process as we saw in the 21 June, 2014 election in Ekiti. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo had started that journey into the abyss when he superintended over elections that were worse than those in Myanmar and the student had merely emerged smarter and a lot more prolific. Obasanjo’s bastardisation of elections in Nigeria was such that a sitting president could not run away from confessing, shame-faced, that the election that brought him into office was rigged. It doesn’t get more bizarre. Nonetheless, I went searching. After all, a time was in this self same country when you could beat your chest and claim that our universities were nothing but citadels of learning and integrity. Both the columnist I am quoting and this writer were proud members of the Nigerian university system while that era lasted. Today, learning, yes, if you could take what now passes muster on those cult-infested campuses as impartation of knowledge, but integrity, certainly not, as no sane person would so affirm or bet a dime.

The referenced columnist wrote as follows: “The great danger of being part of Nigeria today is that Nigeria tends massively to corrupt everything and everybody. There is hardly anything to look up to in Nigeria. In most directions that one may look, the beckoning is perpetually and relentlessly towards the low, the ignoble and the graceless. Most of the privileged and influential seek nothing but their own. In the reckoning of the typical powerful and influential Nigerian, the masses of ordinary Nigerians are, at best, cannon fodder for the reaching of his warped goals – and at worst, just despicable beings deserving to be ignored in their poverty, their ignorance and their hopelessness”.

In affirmation of the above, not only the just retired Chief Justice of Nigeria, Hon. Justice Aloma Mariam Mukhtar, but legal luminaries like the late Justice Esho and others are on record as saying that the Nigerian judiciary is reeking of massive corruption. This past week, although he just might be the most inappropriate person to so allege, former President Olusegun Obasanjo only stopped short of calling the National Assembly a den of robbers although they have since angrily denied such claims, but to credulous Nigerians who, most probably, think worse of them and earnestly hope that they would turn patriotic for once and give up their immoral, absolutely unsustainable allowances in the wake of our new economic realities. I am sure Nigerians cannot wait to hear the Breaking News!

Of course, the least said about the executive branch the better and so we need not do a rehash of all the scams it has conveniently glossed over: the Pension and Oil subsidy scams, the unremitted oil funds, the Malabu oil scam in which a whooping U.S. $1.1 was allegedly shared, not forgetting the tens of billions burnt by a minister of the Federal Republic on luxury ‘air birds’. So all consuming is corruption in the executive branch that many have concluded that corruption is the lubricator of the Nigerian system.

It was at this point my mind went to sports, in particular the Nigerian football scene. And how fortuitous this turned out to be! Since I was writing this on a Wednesday, I naturally turned to the day’s edition of Mumuni Alao’s beautiful effort -Complete Sports – a copy of which I buy daily and, voila, Sunday Oliseh, about the most professionally (soccer-wise) educated Nigerian ex-international, who scored that wonderful goal that retired Andoni Zubizarreta , the incomparable Spanish goal keeper and captain at the 1998 FIFA World Cup, had an article culled from his Blog titled: THE SAD STATE OF NIGERIAN FOOTBALL. I have always enjoyed listening to Oliseh commentating on the Super Sports African football programme because you will never see him call a spade by any other name. And by the way, this is one Nigerian, I know, can take our football to where those of us Nigerians to whom football is no business, want it; not where these jesters have taken us.

For my purpose, Oliseh’s very first paragraph would suffice. He wrote” For some people in Nigeria, football is no longer a sport, but rather it is all about money, nepotism and politics. The state of Nigerian football today is unprecedented and the worst it has ever been. Forget that we won AFCON 2013, we mean the situations of the national teams, football federation and local league! When as defending champions you fail to qualify for the African Cup of Nations from a weak group, your football federation is in disarray, you have a disputed coaching and no quality coach is interested in applying for the job, then you have a great dilemma on your hands. Nigerian football structure is a joke and has been ridiculed for scandals unlike any other federation in the world. Officials are in and out of courts instead of carrying out their duties of football development”. He continues: “I wish to God there was a situation where there was no free flowing unaccountable money involved with the federation. That would take away the fanatical interest it attracts to some today…”

That is the Football Federation TAN was eagerly waiting to profit from had the team qualified for AFCON 2015.

The quintessential patriot Oliseh is, he did not permit his utter disappointment to debar him from suggesting ways out of our corruption-ridden inefficiency. He therefore proffered as follows: “The government has to privatise club sides but own the infrastructure they play on in return for a rental fee that is just cosmetic. This, he says, will provoke investment, creativity, competition and renew the development of the local league. The government, he went on, should sponsor real technical education of the coaches as opposed to three-week coaching seminars”. And because he knows the level of corruption in the system, he was not particularly optimistic these suggestions would see the light of day. He therefore concluded: ‘I expect some people won’t agree with my point of view mainly because such progressive changes might affect their ‘pocket’ but if things don’t change, fanatical football-loving Nigerians will continue to stay glued to the English Premier League and other European leagues instead of our local league and national team”.

Knowing now what we do about our football and its guardian angels, the crisis-ridden Football Federation, is it a surprise that Nigerians were treated to the macabre picture of a ‘scratch my back, I scratch yours’: of a newly appointed interim coach pleading that the sacked be reinstated? Or are we stupefied that the ubiquitous TAN was out there waiting to profit from a most unlikely qualification for AFCON 2015? This is how low, in all ramifications, the PDP has taken Nigeria in its unholy 16-year strangulation of an otherwise blessed country.

So where do Nigerians turn for integrity and transparency? The Church? Perish the thought.

November 30, 2014
Time to remember: the powerful elixir of Kasagoff, Aloe Vera, Cocoa, Moringa, etc.

Some things are really not worth remembering, such as the taste of bad food, Nigerians’ bad manners, selfish politicians, and the exact figure of my age.

I have watched, in fascinated horror, as Nigerians have moved their tastes and obsessions from one product to another claiming to hold the secret to long life. The list is endless: try Kasagoff to Aloe Vera to GNLD to Forever Products to Garlic to Cocoa, and now to Moringa! If I have not spelt any well or forgotten some, please forgive me but I am no less struck by the very powerful effect they have on Nigerians. I have seen them all quake and swoon in real, unfeigned ecstasy as they have sworn with finger put to mouth and then pointed upwards on the total efficacy and life extending capability of each of these products. They have sworn on each one in turn. And I have sometimes joined them.

Once, a long time ago, after newly moving into my house, I was anxious to show a guest the fascinating points and contours of the house. As he stepped into my compound, however, I lost him. Oh no, he did not disappear before my eyes, no; but as soon as he laid his eyes on the Aloe Vera plant reluctantly growing close to the gate of the house, he lost his reason. Oh my God, he screamed, you have this plant?! You have this plant?! Somebody recommended it to me to treat my hypertension and I have been looking all over for it. So you have it? Can I take some of it with me, please can I? I had never seen such loss of control over a plant, so who was I to stand in the way of that worship?! Of course, he could take the whole thing, for in all honesty, I could then no longer remember why I had planted it. I think that amnesia occurred as soon as I experienced the bitter taste of the Aloe Vera. I never have tried it again.

I think that’s it. I was looking for a cure for my penchant for forgetfulness; it was not even much then, now of course it is even stronger. Then, I really thought the earth was going to fall when I would go to the market and remember only half my shopping list, loan people money (there is no amount of pentothal truth serum you give me that will make me talk: I will not name names) and forget to collect it back, fail to remember the right figure of my age, find the right word to describe the rambunctious behaviour of the urchins in my care, or worse, cook and forget to eat. The last one was the most worrisome and I felt it needed some drastic action. So I discreetly made enquiries because you cannot go around bragging ‘Look people, I find that I am now growing forgetful, what’s the remedy?’ God help you if your students overhear you.

Anyway, I made enquiries about the best way to tackle forgetfulness and someone recommended the plant Aloe Vera. What is that? I asked. It is a wonder plant, I was told. It can cure everything. Seriously, I laughed, everything? Oh yes, it is even better than Kasagoff, I was told. Now, what is that? I think at that point, my respondent got tired, of my ignorance that is, not of me. Get Aloe Vera, she said. And that is how I came to plant it.

As soon as I did, like the inexperienced farmer I was, I expected the blessed plant to sprout but I had to be patient awhile. After being tardy on the job during which my memory continued to decline to the point that I perpetually had to be looking for my slip-ons, it eventually brought something out for me to try. That was when I discovered that its bitter taste could probably induce more forgetfulness. Promptly, I went back to my source. Are you sure this plant works because all I can remember is its bitter taste. Perhaps, my source irreverently suggested, your forgetfulness is too strong for the plant. Try GNLD or Forever products. Maybe those ones can assist a chronic case like yours. Now what on earth are those? Well, my source patiently explained, they are also elixirs for regenerating youthfulness in every way, including even your memory. It regains lost youth better than King David’s fresh blood.

No, someone else firmly countered, let her try garlic. Seriously, again I laughed, garlic? Yes, I was told. Garlic is the cure-all product. No wonder, I thought I could perceive a pungent odour coming from the direction of the speaker but I could not place my nose on it exactly. So, I nodded, that is the secret to long life and the foul smell. I declined; I felt there was just no way any life constantly exposed to that smell could be around for too long.

Then I heard about Cocoa. Straight I went to make enquiries. Cocoa, claimed the marketers, could fulfil just about any wish you placed before it. In short, it could stand in the way of a failing memory. So, feeling coins loose and fancy free, I purchased me a packet, took a swig and found myself nursing the mother of a headache. Could that be my memory flooding back? I took another swig and experienced a repeat performance. I was sure I had not forgotten that much, so, once again, I found myself in the market. That was when I heard about Moringa.

Moringa, I was told, has the capability to do so many things in the body the scientists are still out on the list. I was concerned about memory. All you have to do, I was told, is eat the leaves. Feeling much like a goat, I set to work. That was when I discovered that there is an association of Moringa growers, there are conferences on the intricacies of the plant, and there are regular meetings of the growers. I wondered if I needed to ask if there is an association of Moringa eaters so I could ask them some questions.

Anyway, after being tossed to and fro fruitlessly seeking the elixir of youth and youthful memory, I have been constrained to asking myself: whatever happened to eating right and doing right by one’s neighbours? I hesitate to conclude that Nigerians are gullible; indeed I would not go so far as to say that. I would simply say that Nigerians are too anxious to find quick fixes or solutions to their health problems. While many amongst us are educated and even lettered, I have been forced to conclude that in many of us, that education ‘don’t mean a thing’. In some cases, the more educated we are the more perverse we are in our thinking. This is why it is possible for even a professor to be defrauded into thinking that some special teas or trado-medical brews or passing fads in drinks or plants can cure diabetes. It is also why it is possible for someone to believe that one can stay young forever on these products. Sadly, it is also the reason why people continue to lose a great deal of money that could otherwise be put to better use.

Truth is, dissipated living has its costs, and there are no quick fixes to regaining it. Lost youth can only be regained by regular exercises, eating right and thinking right, such as how to serve other Nigerians better. As for me, I have decided that my memory will work better when I don’t accost it with too much worry. In any case, some things are really not worth remembering, such as the taste of bad food, Nigerians’ bad manners, selfish politicians, and the exact figure of my age.

This piece was first published in November 2012

November 30, 2014
Two nights in Asaba as Omu Ahaba goes home

o the pleasantly provincial state capital of Asaba and its lush and leafy suburbia for the final burial rites of its late illustrious Queen Bee, Obi Maria Ejima Obielua-Chizea, Omu Ahaba, beloved mother of our friend and NYSC Third Corps buddy, Claire Afulenu and also of Dora Obiajulu Chizea MD (enyi Nnejika), Dr Ezenwa Chizea, the old Loyolan, and of course Isioma, beloved wife of our late kinsman, Niyi Ige, a nobleman of Edun Abon. The life of this extraordinary woman who was granted a miraculous reprieve from certain death after being thrown into the bush as a female twin is the stuff of magical fiction and is better told by her own son.

And so for two whole days a fortnight ago, the entire town stood still to bid its late Queen mother a befitting farewell. All markets were closed in honour of the great woman. For the impatiently industrious Igbo people, this was quite a great sacrifice. It was a colourful carnival and a moveable feast of cultural display as fearsome Egwugwus jostled with fierce warlike dancers. It was as if one was transported back to Things Fall Apart. Nestling on the western bank of the famous River Niger, Asaba combines old rustic charms with accelerating modernity which can be pleasantly unnerving. The new airport was a clever, entrepreneurial coup.

You knew you were in for some great adventure as the Arik plane came to land, banking steeply as the chaotic towers of Onitsha came into view in all their anarchic tribute to mercantilist dynamism gone haywire. The muddy and murky waters of the Niger churn its way towards the Delta with the languid grace of an old mermaid. In between the culinary extravaganza, Snooper slipped across the bridge and into Onitsha.

The last time one was here, the whole place reminded one of the feral zoo of downtown Kinshasa as men with formidable biceps wrestled with rickety contraptions, tempers flaring and furious fists flying in all directions. It was an anarchic bedlam; a tribute to misbegotten enterprise. This time around, the chaos had miraculously disappeared. It has taken the atypical calm and moderating mellowness of Peter Obi to achieve this. The masquerade without a mask is the master of all masquerades. It has been very pleasant in Asaba and Snooper will be back. May the Omu Ahaba rest in peace.

November 30, 2014
Today at 1:33 PM Bombing unlimited

At the rate at which the Boko Haram bombers are carrying out their dastardly acts, it is difficult to know how many people have so far been killed in attacks in some states in northern parts of the country.

Just when we were beginning to believe the dummy sold to us by the federal government about a possible ceasefire by the insurgents,it turned out that we were no where near the end of unending attacks in which many innocent persons have been killed, others injured and properties destroyed.

Just last Friday, the terrorists struck again with a deadly triple explosion at the a central Mosque in Kano midway into the Jumat prayers. Not less than 120 persons were reported dead and numerous others injured. The casualty figure is said to be the highest in any single attack by the terrorists in the country.

A similar attack by the same sect was thankfully averted in Maiduguri, Borno State after vigilante youths alerted the police about two Improvised Explosive Devices planted at the popular Custom market.

As usual, President Goodluck Jonathan has offered his condolences over the attack and promised to ensure that the culprits are apprehended. While the family of those killed are mourning and the injured are battling to get treatment, life goes on in Kano and in other parts of the country until the terrorists strike again.

Gradually, the terrorist attacks have become so regular in the county that the casualty figures no longer seem to mean much.

Even for the media, Boko Harram attacks is no longer a major story. Readers according to feedbacks from marketing staff are tired of reading about the killings that newspapers cannot risk giving too much prominence to the repeated frequent attacks.

So many unknown persons have been killed and injured in past incidents that it will probably take some prominent personalities or officials becoming victims for everybody concerned to wake up to the reality of the killing field which the affected states have become.

The Kano attack would have been more devastating if the Emir of Kano who was not in the country was killed in the incident, but every life matters and we cannot wait till a ‘VIP’ dies till an all out war is launched against the insurgents.

Even the state governments of the victims have become overwhelmed of the situation that they have been unable to meet the medical needs of those injured, talk less of compensating families of those killed.

I have no doubt that the federal government is concerned about the deteriorating security situation in the country, but more than ever before, we need more than assurances and promises that have not stemmed the wave of attacks.

Too many people are being killed and injured in the senseless attacks while many others are living in fear, not sure when the next attack will be. Even for those of us who supposedly live far away from the targeted areas, only time will tell if we will not become as endangered as those who are presently caught in the crossfire.

Time is running out and an urgent solution must be found before we are all consumed. This is not the time for any blame game or name calling.

The federal government should admit whatever error of judgement it could have made in tackling the the crisis before now and be open to options that can halt the endless killings.

If the soldiers deployed to combat the insurgents are not as adequately armed as claimed, they need to be provided what they need to defend the country against the ceaseless onslaught of the terrorists. Their welfare and that of the their families have to be taken care of if they must risk their life at the battle front.

It is a shame that our soldiers have to flee to Cameroon once in a while when they are confronted by superior firepower by the insurgents.

The government needs all the support it can get from everyone concerned about the unity of this country irrespective of political, religious and tribal affiliations.

The recent meeting of Christian and Muslim religious leaders in Abuja is timely.

Hopefully, some concrete decisions were taken at the meeting concerning the religious dimension of the insurgency and necessary steps would be taken over the matter.

We are all in this together until a permanent solution is found. Divided we stand, united we will fall.

November 30, 2014
Jonathan a hair’s breadth away from dictatorship

For those who think democracy is alive and well under President Goodluck Jonathan, who believe that organising elections is about the long and short of democracy, Thursday’s combined security forces’ assault upon the National Assembly to bar Speaker of the House of Representatives, Aminu Tambuwal, from presiding over the affairs of the lower chamber should open their eyes. And for those who entertain the fanciful idea that Dr Jonathan is as honest with his protestations of being a democrat as his dramatic gestures and verbal flailing suggest, I offer to dreamy analysts his vengeful attacks against the opposition, governors who irritate him and his wife, the press which he loathes, and a host of other politicians and institutions that dare to sneeze near his majesty. It is doubtful whether we can find a president like Dr Jonathan, not even Olusegun Obasanjo, who effortlessly unites in himself such contradictory passions that pretend to speak to liberalism as they rhapsodise totalitarianism.

Doyin Okupe, Dr Jonathan’s impetuous spokesman on public affairs, has struggled to dissociate the presidency from the police attack on the lawmakers. But there can be no justification for the horrendous attacks, the tear gas, the intolerable affront to the number four citizen, the display of ignorance of the police who continue to defend their atrocious behaviour, subvert the constitution, and see themselves as the private security organisation of the president and the ruling party. And there can be no hiding the fact that the attacks were inspired by the presidency and executed by presidential aides who have managed to convince themselves that their interpretation of the role and powers of the Nigerian president allow for the sickening brutality they exhibited before the whole world last week.

The Inspector-General of Police, Suleiman Abba, it is clear, does not have the strength of character to resist the presidency’s unconstitutional behaviour, nor it seems does he even have the disposition and knowledge to draw a line between the president’s interest and national interest. And though he cannot claim ignorance of the limitations imposed on his office by the Police Act and the constitution, he is precisely the sort of official whose eagerness to please his employer is his lifeblood, as his withdrawal of Hon Tambuwal’s security aides showed shortly before he suddenly merited confirmation as the substantive IGP.

It is inconceivable that Mr Abba acted independently in planning and executing the disgraceful assault on the National Assembly. The police claimed they received intelligence reports of plans by miscreants to cause mayhem at the legislature; but shouldn’t they have taken the leadership of the legislature into confidence and joined them in thwarting the efforts of the hoodlums and protecting the number four citizen? It is embarrassing the egregious and childish lies the police often tell. However, it has emerged that the real reasons for Thursday’s madness were connected with impeachment moves, one by pro-Tambuwal forces against the president, and the other by pro-presidency forces against Hon Tambuwal over his October defection to the All Progressives Congress (APC). It would have been foolish of the pro-Tambuwal forces to tamely give in to the police lockout, as some legal and political purists wanted, and then perhaps later resort futilely to litigation.

The police were doubtless encouraged to desecrate the Speaker’s office and person because they knew the presidency was both remorselessly opposed to Hon Tambuwal and was willing to seize on any excuse to humiliate him. In June, at Hotel 17 in Kaduna, venue of a conference to which the Speaker was invited, soldiers subjected him to an embarrassing and provocative search. That was one of the earliest signals that the Speaker’s independence would not be countenanced by Dr Jonathan’s imperial presidency. The Senate did not see that humiliation as a dangerous precedent, let alone join hands to fight it. The harassments have since continued, culminating in the physical attack against him by the police and hooded secret service agents on Thursday. Since his defection to the APC, and notwithstanding the support he gets from his fellow lawmakers and the constitution, the presidency has been obsessed with unhorsing Hon Tambuwal using the security forces. Unknown to them, such attacks and subversion of the constitution in turn undermine their own legitimacy. They also misread the times, unable to appreciate how dangerously unstable the world has suddenly become, where revolutions and anarchy are precipitated by the tiniest of provocations. The mood in Nigeria is super tense and fragile. Does the rampaging Dr Jonathan know this?

Though Hon Tambuwal survived the attack planned mainly to unseat him last Thursday, he should rest assured it will not be the last, for the Jonathan presidency will get increasingly desperate in its plans to get rid of the Speaker by any means, fair or foul. The president’s understanding of leadership, like Governor Ayo Fayose’s, is completely distorted by traditional and monarchical influences and a poor appreciation of the concept of multi-party democracy. In spite of his constant expostulation about democratic tenets, much of it lacking in depth and coherence, Dr Jonathan has behaved more frequently like an autocrat. After managing to subvert the Senate and co-opting it as an appendage of the presidency, he has sought to similarly castrate the House of Representatives. He would have succeeded had the Speaker lacked the character to stand up to the anti-democratic tendencies of the Jonathan presidency.

However, Dr Jonathan’s limited success in stultifying democratic practices in the legislature has not discouraged him from trying over and over again. He is satisfied that the heads of the security services lack the character to draw the line between presidential orders and the provisions of the constitution. In addition, his aides grovel before him, desperate to keep their jobs no matter what principles they are forced to disavow. The Council of State is too polite and soulless to caution the president. Some geopolitical zones, especially the Southeast and the South-South, have also completely surrendered to the president’s whims, eager to dine with him and massage his ego. As a sign of final humiliation, Nigerians have uncritically allowed Dr Jonathan to exploit religious sensibilities, thereby dividing the country largely along Christian and Muslim lines. Even the usually questioning Southwest has embraced Dr Jonathan’s hypocrisies, hypnotised by a barren national conference designed principally to hoodwink and deceive.

With the entire country taking leave of its senses and metamorphosing into a parched land of sterile thinkers, the House of Representatives quickly became, in addition to a small section of the media, the champion of democracy and liberalism. The situation required the president to seek for imaginative ways of working with the critical House of Representatives, and harnessing the opinions and suggestions of the opposition and diverse critics for the country’s betterment. Instead, he chose not to understand the utility of dissent, and prefers to either compel support or destroy the opposition. Sadly, the president himself is surrounded by aides, security advisers and military chiefs who find it much satisfying and rewarding to tell the president what he wants to hear, indulging in the practiced buffoonery that has laid many African countries waste.

It is unlikely Dr Jonathan will caution either himself or his overzealous police over the Tambuwal affair. He is also unlikely to find intelligent ways of getting his hostage presidency to relate with critics and opponents in a democratic manner. Thursday’s attack on the Speaker and other lawmakers, the feverish intrigues to undermine opponents, the lack of imagination in the fight against Boko Haram, the reliance on hunters to fight wars, like Sierra Leone’s Kamajors (hunters) were made to do during that West African country’s implosion, and the subversion of opposition states and governors who disagree with the Jonathan presidency, seem all designed to produce perhaps the worst dictator Nigeria has ever had. By every consideration, we are in fact only a hair’s breadth away from dictatorship. If he is allowed, Dr Jonathan will talk wonderfully about the 2015 elections, but will surreptitiously devise means of subverting the polls with all the viciousness he can muster.

Our carelessness produced Dr Jonathan in 2011, a man so ill-suited to the demands of leadership in a modern and complex society. If he does not drive a permanent wedge between ethnic groups and religions before the next polls, we would be lucky to emerge unscathed should we have the apocalyptic misfortune of electing him into office next year. Should that happen, the first casualty will of course be democracy, followed by an exploding country no one can manage.

November 23, 2014
President Jonathan bares his fangs: Events in Ekiti a mere foot note

And if the president had once claimed that 13 is greater than 16 in the governors’ forum affair, who is a governor not to uphold the harebrained action of seven where eighteen is stipulated?

This is more than serious…why must everything, from federal to state, be so much brigandage? Lord have mercy!’, wrote Professor Mobolaji Aluko on the ekitipanupo web portal, commenting on the sealing of the National Assembly by the Nigerian police as well as tear gassing its members on that unfortunate day when all of President Jonathan’s make-belief as to being a pacifist got completely blown up to smithereens as no Nigerian Inspector General of Police, born of woman, not to talk of a mere state Commissioner of Police, as is being claimed, would dare enact that horror movie without the express say so of the President.

Happily, if Professor Aluko was still wondering as to what has befallen the country under the Jonathan presidency, not so a perspicacious Tatalo who, in his column of Sunday, 17 Novembe, 2014 in The Nation had written, inter alia, as follows under the Title: Political War Games In Nigeria – “It would be politically foolish and obtuse to the bargain to ever imagine that Jonathan and his strategists are unwise enough not to realize his electoral limitations at this crucial moment. If that is so, it brings us to the central thesis of this piece. Jonathan and his handlers may very well not be preparing for an electoral competition but for a physical conquest in the guise of a democratic quest”. Evidence of that now abound as we would show in this article.

In the meantime, not knowing that what Ekiti people currently regard as the embarrassing dividends of their decision of 21 June, 2014 are nothing more than the dictates of a man dead set on contesting and winning an election, no matter what that entails for the nation, I am convinced that with what happened at the National Assembly this past week, they must by now have begun to see how exactly they have been badly had. For confirmation of that, simultaneously as the National Assembly members were being shut out from the House, the Ekiti state House of Assembly, in a most macabre undertaking, was deceiving itself into believing that 7 of its 26 members can impeach a speaker where the constitution prescribes two thirds, which is 18. I saw one of the seven on Channels television during the past week making what he considers a justification of their illogic and I saw perfectly why Ekiti has become the butt of jokes the world over as a visit to a Facebook account will more than confirm. However, the worst was to come when the state governor popped up claiming it is that illegal ‘speaker he was going to work with, emphasizing, repeatedly, that he had no apologies. What a land of honour gone awry! And if the President had once claimed that 13 is greater than 16 in the governors’ forum affair, who is a governor not to uphold the harebrained action of seven where eighteen is stipulated.

Nor did they stop there. As contained in a Press Release by Wole Olujobi, Press Adviser to the Speaker of the House of Assembly, the legal as distinct from the rabid impostor, “the Police and ?the Department of State Security have withdrawn their personnel from the security teams of the Speaker of Ekiti State House of Assembly, Dr Adewale Omirin, and the Deputy Speaker, Chief Adetunji Orisalade. This followed the invasion of the Speaker’s Lodge this evening by Mr Dele Olugbemi, the purported new Speaker, who led PDP members in a forceful occupation of the building’. Again it should be obvious to Nigerians from these events that Abuja is the falconer and that the state governor is nothing more than the President’s viceroy in Ado-Ekiti.

It certainly cannot get more scary but only a fool would claim not to have seen all these coming given President Jonathan’s single-minded ambition, after six years already spent on the post, not only to contest, but to be declared winner in the 2015 presidential election. Indeed, given the unequaled success of their newly fangled election rigging tactics which we saw deployed in Ekiti in June, arising from which the President asked some foreign Ambassadors in the country to inform their Heads of state that the 2015 elections would be a successful and seamless excise, even where he had not proposed a single effort at improving our chaotic and fraudulent electoral process inthos six years, it is obvious that Nigerians must be prepared for more of the same as these people are not preparing for an election in its true sense, but as Tatalo put it, a physical capture. I just hope the oposition isbeing properly warned as it will no longer be able totalk of a failure of intelligence. Both PP and the President have shown enough of their hands.

So successful was their scientific rigging in Ekiti on 21 June 2014 that because there was not a single reported case of ballot snatching or illegal thumb printing but rather, a calm and peaceful voting, Ekiti people believed they got what they voted on that day even where neither the PDP nor its candidate had done a single positive thing for the state and the people for the past four years apat from the emergency rice and beans which in no way compared with all that Fayemi had done in office to cater to the needs of both the needy and the general populace. I can understand, however, that that the 20,000 ghost workers he eliminated by his introduction of e-payment to the government’s financial system rankled amongst the rogues. But I tell them, what they are celebrating is science, miraculously, but clinically settling matters long before the voting proper. And since VANISHING INK, instead of the constitutionally prescribed INDELIBLE ink was what INEC provided voters, the deed was done, even without a whimper. For those in doubt, I once again ask them to Google: NIKUV and the Zimbabwean presidential elections as well as NASENI and its own findings on the 2013 Presidential election in Zimbabwe, another African country. So PDP was not inventing the wheel but merely catching in on the new fad in election rigging. As to those who question why there were no riots, I say, how could any sensible person react to an apparently ‘flawless’ election, even if the state was not completely militarily locked down. And by the way, were there any cries of anguish from the victims of atomic bombing in Hiroshima? Science is clinical enough to ensure that the victims could not react. Instead, where they are not dead, the victims are put in a permanent state of delirium; the very state Ekiti presently finds itself though unknown to many.

But all these are mere preparations for the big prize: the 2015 presidential election. And so Nigerians, not only in Ekiti but in all the Southwest states as well as others like Akwa Ibom and Rivers, where you see governors or Abuja sponsored contestants daring everybody, insisting it is their way or the high way; in Kwara, where they hate Bukola Saraki with a passion, Kano, because they still cannot imagine a triumphant Emir Sanusi Lamido, in spite of all the make belief and some other state must brace up for the Ekiti treatment. Photocromism, otherwise known as scientific rigging, in its various variants, will be deployed in these states by their rogue scientists who are mostly from a Middle East country whose national economy thrives most on the military industrial philosophy.

As things stand today, President Jonathan’s strategists have their plans for ‘pacifying’ each geo-political zone to ensure that zones with high voter populations are compromised and others leaning more towards the opposition APC are completely messed up. It is this that accounts for the shenanigans we are witnessing in the distribution of Permanent Voter Cards and the man to pity here is Chairman Jega who is not complicit since he is not even trusted. Instead, middling officers in the IT departments with, possibly a dedicated director, are in charge of all the schemes to add to or subtract from the number of voters in each zone as illicitly decreed by the men of power. The Northeast,, unfortunately, shot itself in the foot when the likes of Modu Sheriff deliberately encouraged illiteracy, and ended up as the birthplace of Boko Haram which authorities have done everything to ensure thrives until the 2015 election is over. In the huge Northwest and North Central, what used to be occasional bloodletting between the various tribes has taken a life of its own and in the Southwest, it is the turn of the MACHO MEN to rein in the Yoruba, a distinguished people with thousands of years behind them. As for the South South and the South East, they are already presumed safe and delivered.

November 23, 2014