The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • Barack the broken

    Barack the broken

    A leader estranged from his people is as a broken clock. His position is rarely correct and then only by accident

    For the past several weeks, I have written about geopolitical hotspots in or near the throes of war. I return to America this week to underscore an important theme: the decline of Black leadership. I labor on this theme because what has transpired in America is but the dismal vanguard of what will occur in almost every Black nation that neglects to stand against the subtle onslaught. The same political economic forces that take Black America low also clip the development of Black Africa. In the past, slavery and colonialism were the twin yokes we wore. Fifty years ago, both populations helped and applauded each other as they gained a fleeting respite. In America, it was called the Civil Rights Movement. In Africa, it was the age of national independence.

    Now, we return to being adrift because Black leadership has lost its morality compass. No longer committed to helping the poor and broken, no longer worried about justice for all because they have tasted the privileges and riches of the few, they have lost all but the vaguest sense of racial unity and purpose. For them, their black skin is no longer a corporeal anthem calling them to a higher level of duty in order to overcome dreadful past. Instead, their blackness is a burden to be figuratively shed as the price of admission into the theatre of wealth and power.

    Nowhere is this diminution in leadership more acute than in Black America.  For several years, President Obama and those politicians like him have been lauded by the mainstream media as the future of Black politics. While we have been told to applaud, the reality is that it is a rather odd dance he has danced. To be Black by not being so is a waltz that has become increasingly popular in high political circles during the past few years. It is one the steps of which I do not know nor am I fan of the irksome tune that accompanies it.

    Over the past several years, I have waded against the tide of popular opinion to present what I hold as objective analyses of the flaws in the Obama leadership model. I have done so not from any personal animus. I know not the man but my lack of any personal connection does not blind my appreciation of the danger inherent in his particular rise to power. His ascendance has been a racial intoxicant, causing many Blacks to take leave of their better senses to ascribe to him many transcendental qualities that, unfortunately, were never there.

    My writings about Obama precipitated much commentary, most of it emotive, most of it negative. Some have even accused me of being a White racist who sees nothing decent in Black People. Notwithstanding these reactions and often because of them, I write on. I know many comments were the unthinking eruptions of people who have invested too much hope in a false hope. I sympathise with them.

    Yet, I lend not my pen to fake comfort by writing what is popular.  In the end, whether a reader accepts or rejects my analyses is immaterial to me. I do my humble best to proffer timely warning and information that you may understand the challenges and dangers that approach. My goal is not to soothe you. It is to awaken you that may arise and seek higher ground before the unforgiving tide arrives. I write to equip you with a perspective that just might help you avert the pratfall of believing in policies or positions which do not believe in you.  Even if you find what I write to be uncomfortable and you do not care for it, I shall continue because I care for you. If we shall fall, let it be because superior power has pushed us down and not because we thrust ourselves into the open ditch.

    This near adoration of President Obama is tinged with a strange hybrid of racial pride and inferiority. There naturally is pride to see a Black man surmount, by attaining the White House, what so recently was considered an insuperable obstacle. This pride I too felt. However, there is also a bit of inferiority in that we have placed someone else’s standard of legitimacy above our self interests. Thus, because a large chunk of America voted for him, we assumed he must be excellent indeed. That is where our collective analysis began and ended.  It was superficial in the extreme, and costly so. We forgot to dig deeper. We forgot to ask if the powerful establishment could back him as their man, perhaps he was not going to be our man. Black people were so elated to see a Black man in the seat of power that we forgot to even question if the man had sold his soul to get there. After all, what good is Black man who lacks soul? He is as salt without its savor.

    He beckoned to us with a change that we can believe in.  After six years, let’s see what this change has wrought. In global affairs, his signature achievement has been the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Toss in the killings of other high-profile terrorists and alleged ones. He promised this would make the world a better place. Except for those who profit from war and the making of wars, his promise has been a false one.

    The world is more dangerous now than when he took office. He led the assault against Gaddafi, the consequence of which has been to spread war materiel far and wide, augmenting the destructive power of Malian separatists and of Boko Haram in northern Nigeria. He has promoted war in Syria, the spillover of which has predictably incited renewed conflict in Iraq. Obama’s government now goads Russia’s Putin toward war in Ukraine. President Obama has made himself a willing utensil of a foreign policy that seeks undisputed American dominance over the Eurasian land mass.  The will and desires of other proud and independent nations are to take a long hike down a dark path. If they balk, it means war.  If this means one war, that is fine. If it means multiple wars, even better yet.  It serves the purposes of a voracious war industry whose unspoken motto is “the more we kill, the more we live.” In Asia, America and China leer at each other, with hardliners itching to engage in a war that will plunge the planet into darkness not suffered since the Middle Ages.

    Without remorse or a second’s hesitation, President Obama broadened America’s killer drone program. President Bush gave the program its start. President Obama has given himself a blank check to make this program the haunting symbol of American national security strategy. Unmanned death planes now dot the skies over a massive area spanning Central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, the Maghreb and the Horn of Africa.

    After one particularly nasty drone airstrike, confirmed reports reveal President Obama quipping to his subordinates that he had become quite expert in the long-distance killing business.  The man had just ordered the deaths of numerous people, some of who likely were guilty of nothing weightier than being in the wrong place at the deadliest of times. Yet, he could be dismissive with their lives as if he had just swatted a fly.  These are the words and this is the flippant attitude of a man who holds the Nobel Peace Prize. If this is the way of a peacemaker, I dare not contemplate the way of war. If there were a touch of humility in the man, he would pack and mail that prize back to Oslo from whence it came.

    On domestic policy, he has fared little better. True his efforts staved the economy from depression during the worst of the 2009 recession. But those efforts were primarily aimed at saving the banking system from suicide. That other parts of the economy were not pulled down was a collateral benefit, a secondary consequence. When subsequently he could have fought to give assistance to the poor and the beleaguered middle classes, he spoke of offering help but never made a concerted effort to do so. It was all sweet-sounding bells and chimes. He used high rhetoric to disguise his policy of retreat on these humane matters.

    Even his signature achievement, health insurance reform, is less than it seems. The provision that insurers can no longer deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions is obviously condign. However, that advance has been counterbalanced by the fact that policy rates have increased for many people.  Additionally, the low-cost policies purchased by the poor are replete with such caveats and conditions written in indecipherable sentences that the policies are good only to the extent they are not put to use. When the poor reach out to use them, the insurers will posit a flood a reasons why the particular treatment in question is not covered.  Millions have been insured but only nominally so.  President Obama should have fought the fight for broader health care reform; but, the big insurers and pharmaceutical companies said “no,” and he sheepishly said “yes” to them.

    President Obama is not the only Black politician who has turned coat on the reformist tradition of black leadership.  Through the years, the Congressional Black Caucus has been one of the most liberal, sometimes even progressive, forces in American politics. It has championed legislation for the poor, working class and for minorities. It has fought for economic and social justice, waging unpopular, sometimes quixotic, battles in the process. They may not always been the most politically adept actors, but the commitment to the people was a solid one.  Not anymore.

    Five CBC members representing urban districts blighted by the financial crisis actually had the gall to sponsor legislation weakening post-crisis regulation imposed on the banking industry. The regulations are already porous and will not do the needed. Now this mercenary quintet seeks to squash the scant regulations almost completely. That these regulations were enacted to deter the predatory lending of banks in poor, mostly minority communities seems not to worry these lawmakers. The regulations were made to protect their constituents from the sub-prime lenders who helped devour Black wealth and neighborhoods in the financial crisis. Instead of championing their people, these congresspersons have tossed their own folks to the wolves in exchange for a small pocket full of campaign donations from Money Power. Other Black congresspersons have joined the assault to whittle publicly-funded education although they know an overly privatised system will deprive even more Black children of a meaningful education. They do this because the privatization movement has money. Some of its coins have been doled to their campaigns. They sell out the children to buy their continuation in office.

    Twenty years ago, such abdications of moral responsibility by Black lawmakers would have been unthinkable. Now, betrayal has become business as usual. These acts undermine the interests of the people and of the reformist tradition of black leadership. These politicians praise Martin Luther King on his holiday and tell the electorate that they seek to govern in the spirit of the man. Yet, they trample his grave and memory with their meretricious conduct the rest of the year. He would not understand their ways. If alive today, he would lead protests against what they have done and what they are set to do.

    I raise these matters because the influence on our lives of President Obama’s and these others will not end when they leave office. The establishment plans to continue to use them. They will handsomely reward the president with a reward that smacks of our collective punishment. After hearing Obama for eight consecutive years rejecting the notion of having a special relationship with Black America, of rejecting the notion of “being the president of Black America,” that is precisely what they plan for him after office.

    They seek to give him the mantle of the unofficial president of Black America and, by extension, the Black race.  He has and will work hard for his paymasters, and they will give him the tools to do their bidding.  He will found organizations and traverse nations like Bill Clinton now does. This is the Clinton Black people so love because he talks so smoothly of great things. Yet, under cover of media blockade against revealing these escapades, he quietly leads the rapine exploitation of Black Haiti by Western business interests who fund a suppressive regime that has turned the island into a sweatshop of underpaid labor. To curry the favour of Money Power, this regime has sequestered the choicest parcels of land and beaches for expatriate wealth to enjoy. Clinton and cronies seek to turn Haiti into Cuba before Castro’s revolution upset the fun and games of the well-heeled.

    As Clinton does, Obama will do for, if Obama has done anything with determination while in office, it has been to adhere to the Clinton model of glittery but ersatz progressive politics. Like Clinton, once out of office he will talk grandly, offering us corporate establishment solutions to problems the corporate establishment caused. His task will be to lead us to where we already are. His mission will be to tire us by having us march fiercely in place.

    They are preparing him for this role and for us to accept him in it. This we must reject for he comes with an agenda that bodes nothing but harm for us.  True, we lack leadership and need it desperately at this stage. But he is not the one. He is constitutionally ill-equipped to help us because he has shown he is too committed to helping himself. His fundamental problem is that he believes he is superior to every Black person on this planet yet is often deferential to White people who deserve no deference. This man’s tenure has revealed that he had glaring blind spots in his knowledge of economics and geopolitics.  His ambition exceeded his knowledge and wisdom. He reached for something he was not qualified to hold.  To fill his knowledge in these areas, he surrounded himself with the very people who created so much of the crises and confusion.

    He has been found out. A recent poll in America shows his popularity has sunk to historic lows. Many people believe he is the worse president since World War II. Some of the opposition is racist. Much of it is objective reality. He has talked big but acted in miniature. He has done what his paymasters want and they have set him up to be the scapegoat of their own designs. After his tenure, they want to reward him by unleashing him on us. Let them keep him in their stable where they now have him. We need and seek Black leadership but we shall not find it one who is led by forces that would led us astray. This episode of which I now write will not unfold for another two years but a word in advance is worth more than ten thousand on the day of trouble.

    08060340825 (sms only)

  • Ajibola Ogunshola at 70

    Ajibola Ogunshola at 70

    The actuary who brought The Punch ‘back from the dead’ joins the septuagenarian club tomorrow

    If any diviner had told Chief Ajibola Ogunshola that he would end up renowned as a publisher rather than an actuary that he set out to be, he would have told the diviner to go consult his oracle again. But that, interestingly, is the story of the man who literally squeezed bread out of stone, by the way he turned around the fortunes of The Punch, a once popular tabloid that had gone comatose as at the time Ogunshola took over as Chairman of Punch Nigeria Ltd in February 1987. He held the position until his retirement in April, 2011, a period of over 24 glorious years. Ogunshola joins the septuagenarian club tomorrow.

    Many people had thought that money was Punch’s main problem before the advent of Ogunshola. But he felt otherwise. Indeed, he said from the outset that he had no money to pump into the business. That was obvious, though. So, the idea of throwing money at problems did not arise. But Ogunshola diagnosed the problem correctly. The company had all that it required to reverse its fortunes. It had dedicated members of staff, a good press and the The Punch logo which he described as ‘saleable’ then.

    Something that has endeared Ogunshola to me was his promise when he became chairman, that he would make Punch “one of the highest, if not the highest paying newspapers (salary wise) in the country”. As a union leader in the Punch Chapel of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) in those trying times, I recollect many of my members saying “what was this man saying. Let him just pay the peanut that we were being paid regularly; who is asking him to pay fabulous salaries?” You cannot blame them. What was on ground then did not inspire any hope that the dry bone that Punch then was could ever live again.  Ogunshola said then that we should bake the cake first, and thereafter share. Many other people in his shoes would feel reluctant to share when the cake was eventually ready. But he kept to that promise.

    One of the results is that today, Punch Place (the company’s new office complex) is sitting majestically on a wide expanse of land at Magboro, Ogun State, from its modest place of birth at Onipetesi area of Ikeja, Lagos. The complex and its state-of-the-art facilities worth billions of naira were all achieved in the Ogunshola era as chairman, without borrowing from any bank.

    For me, the word ‘transformation’ has meaning when applied in the context of the success story that The Punch has become, from nothing; as against the connotation that the word has acquired as political propaganda in the country. And The Punch story can only be understood and better told by people that witnessed it, especially when things were really hard and payment of salaries was a major headache, being in arrears, sometimes for about four months. Those now seeing The Punch success would not be wrong to regard the narration of the company’s hard times as some fairy tale. Again, you cannot blame them, because it is rare for most companies to bounce back the way Punch did. I joined the company during those trying moments in September, 1985. But I learnt it was not so in the beginning. As with most organisations, that happened to be the company’s trying times. But it has overcome it, thanks to the indefatigability, doggedness, hard work and dedication of Ajibola Ogunshola.

    Many of the decisions taken during his time as chairman were implemented with mathematical precision and clinical efficiency. Much as he believes in workers being well remunerated, he abhors profligacy and extravagant lifestyle. Ogunshola is meticulous about little matters of details that many people in his position would regard as too small to bother about, including telephone bills from his house when he was chairman. I had the privilege of scrutinising those bills for payment as editor of The Punch then and I remember there were occasions when he had to query some international call charges on some of his telephone bills when he knew he never made such calls. Definitely, these little drops of water were to form part of the mighty ocean (by way of fortune) that became the lot of the company under his chairmanship.

    Chief Ogunshola, reputed to be the first actuary in Africa, sure has his own weaknesses; we all do. In doing the magnificent job such as he did at The Punch, some of such weaknesses must have manifested, whether at the level of decision-making or during implementation. In some cases, toes were inevitably stepped on. I guess the most strident of the criticisms of his era was his alleged high-handedness. In some cases this could be true; but if the end justifies the means, all those must have paled into insignificance with the remarkable result of his fortuitous intervention at The Punch.

    It was in recognition of his sterling achievements that Chief Ogunshola was honoured with the Special Media Industry Achievement Award by the Nigeria Media Merit Award (NMMA), alongside the soul mate of Chief James Olubunmi Aboderin, the founding Chairman of Punch Nigeria Ltd., Mr Sam Amuka, publisher of The Vanguard. NMMA Chairman, Board of Trustees, Mr. Vincent Maduka lauded specifically Ogunshola’s contribution: “For Chief Ogunshola, we recognise the great contribution he made to The Punch and the Nigerian media industry in general.”

    Quite characteristically, Ogunshola, even though was the driving force behind the exponential growth witnessed by The Punch dedicated the award “… to all the people I worked with when I was the Chairman of Punch Nigeria Limited.  I dedicate the award to members of the board, especially Dr. Lolu Forsythe, Chief Lekan Are, Ms. Lola Ibi-Aboderin and to all the top management of the company, especially the Managing Director, Mr. Ademola Osinubi. He also acknowledged the role played by his wife and children, especially his wife, “who had to do all she could to make me sleep in the middle of the night when I woke up to solve particular problems.”

    Born on July 14, 1944, Ogunshola attended the famous Government College, Ibadan, located on the hills of Apata Ganga, Ibadan. He graduated in Mathematics from the University of Ibadan in 1967. He travelled to the United Kingdom for some professional training and had served in both private and public capacities, including Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer, Niger Insurance Plc.He later established his own firm, Ajibola Ogunshola and Co., a renowned actuarial consulting firm.

    Chief Ogunshola is a fellow of the Institute of Actuaries of England. He was also Chairman, Presidential Committee on Civil Service Pension Review in 1988 as well as Chairman, Committee of Actuaries of the United Nations Pension Fund. Ogunshola was also Chairman, Committee on the Harmonisation of the Private and Public Sector Retirement/Pension Schemes for Greater Efficiency, and Chairman of Alexander Forbes Consulting Actuaries Nigeria Limited.

    He served as President of the Newspaper Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN) and is currently a representative of the south west states at the ongoing National Conference in Abuja, where he made or backed some radical proposals, including restoration of local, state or zonal policing; devolution of power to the federating units as well as making law-making at all levels part-time to save cost and, in his own words, “encourage wider talents into law-making”. Perhaps the other point he did not mention is that this would also reduce the ‘do-or-die’ battle that attends elections in the country, unfortunately not because of the urge to serve, but because of the money- spinning capabilities of political offices.

    Concerning Chief Ogunshola, a colleague made a profound statement that any leader, whether at the local government, state or Federal Government level could make positive impact exactly the same way Ogunshola has transformed The Punch. Unfortunately, what do we have across the country: power seekers who have no idea of what to do with the power after acquiring it! Providence thrust a great responsibility on Ogunshola’s laps and he made a good use of the opportunity.

    At this juncture, it is pertinent to acknowledge the role of Olola Moyosore Aboderin, Chief Ogunshola’s predecessor because if Olola Aboderin had not held the company together until Ogunshola’s time, the latter might have had nothing to revive. It is gratifying to note too that Olu Aboderin’s first child, Wale, has kept the flag flying since April 2011 when he took over from Chief Ogunshola.

    If only the dead can see, Chief Ogushola’s maternal elder brother, Chief Olu Aboderin, must in his grave be full of gratitude to this man who brought back his (Olu Aboderin’s) legacy from the valley of the shadow of death. Not many companies have the privilege of the second chance that The Punch had.  Many that did could not convert it.

    Happy birthday, Chief Ajibola Ogunshola.

  • For WS @ 80: Baroka and the long road to and beyond his age

    For WS @ 80: Baroka and the long road to and beyond his age

    Last semester, I taught Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel for the first time in about thirty years. Though I do like the play a lot, it is not one of my favourite Soyinka plays, not one of his dramatic writings that I regard as some of the best plays ever written. I believe that the last time that I actually read The Lion and the Jewel was around the late 1990s when I was completing the first draft of what would eventually become my full-length book on all the writings of Soyinka titled Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, Postcolonialism. At any rate, when I re-read and taught the play recently, I was in no small measure tantalised by the fact that though I had long reached and passed the age of 60, I was startled by the realisation that I am much older than Baroka, the quintessential “old man” of all of Soyinka’s plays! To be exact, I felt at one and the same time shocked and elated: shocked that I am now and have been for a long time Baroka’s elder; elated by the rather deeply personal and existential proof of the old, hallowed Latin proverb concerning the relationship between art and life, “ars longa, vita brevis”. The phrase literally means “art is long, life is short”. The central meaning that has traditionally been ascribed to is the view that while life, lived human life, is short, art lasts for ever. Additionally, the phrase also implies that that the life of the artist and the epoch in which he or she lived is preserved permanently in his or her great works. In other words, let life be as short as it usually biologically is; great art makes life imperishable. More on these later in this short tribute to WS at 80; for now, back to my disbelief that I m now the “elder” of Baroka.

    Definitely, speaking for myself and those of my generation of writers, critics, actors, artistes and “groupies” who have been close to WS, from now on, any time that a discussion of the characters of Soyinka’s plays comes to a conversation about the crafty “lion’ of Ilujinle, some self-referential vibes will go through us when he is, yet again, identified as an “old man”! WS, why didn’t you make Baroka 80? A futile, perhaps even fatuous wish! For the fact is that Baroka will always be 60 anytime he is performed or read in the play. If Soyinka had made him 70 in 1963 when the play was published (it had been performed many years earlier before its formal publication) he would still be 70 today. He will always be, now and forever, any age that Soyinka had given him when he wrote the play – 70, 80 or 90, any age he was given at his imaginative “birthing” by WS.

    Perhaps the most astonishing thing of all in what I am here catachrestically calling Baroka’s “birthing” by WS is that Soyinka was a young man in his early 20s when he wrote the play and yet he wrote compellingly, memorably about an old man of 60. Let us set aside the fact that he wrote a self-serving craftiness with not a small amount of conservative power lust into Baroka’s captivating senescence. The point remains as indisputable as it is also astonishing that in his early 20s WS could enter so completely into the emotional, psychic world of an old man. To this we should counterpoise the fact that Lakunle, the young man who at that stage in Soyinka’ career was much closer in age to WS was made the butt of the jokes of all the other characters of the play and the hapless victim of Baroka’s wily stratagems. WS will have to both believe and forgive me for saying this, but since my very first reading of The Lion and the Jewel I have always thought that Soyinka took sides with Baroka against Lakunle not only because the foppish and naive village schoolteacher was everything WS did not want truly radical and progressive members of his generation to be but also because WS was looking well into the future and seeing himself in those aspects of Baroka that defy age when it comes to matters concerning members of the opposite sex! As a teacher of literature for five decades now, I know that characters should not be confused, not be conflated with their authors, but I am giving my honest opinion here. [If a libel suit is served on me for making this “aspersion”, I will have Femi Falana tie up the lawsuit in an endless, irresolvable knot in the law courts!]

    More seriously, it strikes me now – and only now – that some of the greatest and most memorable characters of Soyinka’s plays are all old men whom the playwright wrote into imperishable imaginative existence when he was a young man well under the age 40. Some of these are Forest Head of A Dance of the Forests; Professor of The Road; Oba Danlola of Kongi’s Harvest; Old Man of Madmen and Specialists; and Elesin Oba of Death and the King’s Horseman. Parenthetically, I might add here that there are two and only two old women in all of Soyinka’s plays that match the towering presence of the old men in the plays in which they appear and these are Iya Agba in Madmen and Specialists and Iyaloja in Death and the King’s Horseman. But maleness as such is not part of the essence of the old men of Soyinka’s great plays, with the exception perhaps of only Elesin Oba in Death and the King’s Horseman. Neither is age in and of itself the thing that stands out in the characterisation of the old, senescent protagonists of Soyinka’s great plays. It is something very tragic and at the same time very exhilarating, something in fact deeply aporetic: they all bear the burden of ironic truths and a dazzling wisdom which neither saves them personally nor those who surround them in the expectation that they will fulfill the messianic hopes they inspire.

    Now I first read all these plays and came across these characters when I was myself a young man, at a time when the formless, apolitical and post-adolescent, non-conformism of my teenage years was being gradually supplanted by a lifelong devotion to socialism in our country, our continent and our world. In that context, these characters of Soyinka’s great plays confused but also endlessly fascinated me. On the one hand, the characters all stood for or in the end inscribed a radical anti-messianism in social contexts that had a surfeit of evil, cruelty and suffering and therefore had a great, overwhelming need to be changed for the better. But on the other hand, the characters each took an unsparing and savagely corrosive look at the evil in themselves and in their world and refused totally to be “saviors”, even at the cost of being destroyed themselves.

    In a way, Soyinka can be described as a consistently non- or anti-didactic playwright but he does have some plays and many poems that can be described as quasi-didactic, plays like the “Jero” plays, The Beatification of an Area Boy and the sketches and revues of the “Before the Blackout” series. But the thing that confounded me when I first read and/or watched Soyinka’s plays in performance was the fact that it was the group of radically non-messianic and anti-didactic plays that far more fascinated me than the other group. Which is why, in the years of my young intellectual and political adulthood, when, without exactly knowing it, I was on my way to achieving a complex understanding of the role of contradiction and aporia in life, art and politics, those great plays of Soyinka and their larger-than-life “old men” characters were of immense help.

    WS is now biologically 80. But vicariously, through a life in art of ferocious and stunning imaginative power, he had already been 80 and older for many decades now, while all the time he retained a youthful energy and drive that were all the more amazing in that he combined many lives into his one single and exceptional life. His appetite for life is vast, like that of an okanjua, a glutton whose capacity for life and living is matched only by the vastness of his capacity for work and self-renewal. By the law of averages, he should have departed this life a long time ago. Sani Abacha was not the only dictator who sought mightily to terminate his life, Idi Dada Amin of Uganda having also been one who sought to end what he regarded as his torments at the hands of WS by plotting to have his life cut short. And the accounts are fully documented that Soyinka was not supposed to have survived his detention by Gowon’s regime during the Nigeria-Biafra war. But Abacha went further than any other megalomaniacal user of the weapon of killing implacable foes by having told confidantes that he would like to be the first ruler in history to have the satisfaction of hanging a Nobel Laureate. Abacha it is that died; WS is 80. And ko tii si iku lo ju e, Ahusubitrue!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • As Kongi grows riper

    As Kongi grows riper

    Soyinka consistently writes and acts in a way to show that he does not separate the words he uses from the actions he takes with respect to accountable governance

    It was Pablo Picasso that once said that a person grows riper rather than older. As the world celebrates Wole Soyinka’s 80th birthday for different reasons, all of which pertain to the sterling contributions he had made to human civilisation in general principally through his literary genius, some readers of this column have emailed to find out what I think Professor Soyinka means to the average Nigerian, as distinct from the impact he has made on the intelligentsia through his high art. There is no better way to answer this query than to summarise the significance of the acts of secular humanism of Nigeria’s 80-year-old Nobel laureate to the project of transforming post-colonial Africa in general and Nigeria in particular, from a world of fear and failure to one of faith in freedom and justice for all.

    Although I have many other things I would have liked to say about Kongi in this column on this special occasion of his 80th birthday, despite my belief that he does not really like being talked about in any tone that is reminiscent of praise poetry. But I will focus today’s piece on the simplest and yet profound of the three requests I received from my readers: “how has Prof Soyinka made his high-brow literature and living relevant to the experience of the masses of our people?”

    Soyinka has consistently in the past 60 years made his writings and his actions speak to the experience of the masses, not only in Nigeria or Africa, but all over the world. On account of space, we will focus on how he has made efforts to improve the dignity of the average person. But first, his literature—now referring just to his fiction, drama, and poetry— is not all high-brow. There is nothing elitist in The Trials of Brother Jero, The Lion and the Jewel, The Swamp Dwellers, From Zia with Love, and King Baabu, to name a few.Of course, there are many others written in less accessible language than those mentioned above: Madmen and Specialists, A Dance of the Forests, The Road, Death and the King’s Horseman. But every piece in his corpus responds to the complexity of the subject or idea at issue. As various communities across the globe celebrate Kongi for what they see as the Nobel laureate’s contribution to their understanding of life, let us focus here on how his writings and actions have addressed the masses of our people.

    Starting philosophically as he does from the principle that every person deserves that his or her human dignity is enhanced in private and in public at all times, he promotes one recurrent theme in all his writings: the non-negotiability of the freedom of every individual and the need to join or lead in the resistance of any form of injustice that threatens individual freedom and dignity. Of course, Soyinka consistently writes and acts in a way to show that he does not separate the words he uses from the actions he takes with respect to accountable governance. Even long before becoming an international celebrity, he is on record as intervening in a bold way to challenge election rigging in Western Nigeria in the mid-sixties. By disabling announcement of a radio message from a government with democratic deficit and enabling one that calls for honesty in electoral democracy, Soyinka acted out in Ibadan a theme that has become second nature in all his writings and speeches: recognition of a contest between power and freedom as an abiding aspect of the human society and the duty of the man or woman of conscience to be on the side of freedom and against any form of power that threatens freedom.

    It is the preoccupation with freedom and justice that was evident in the activities of Soyinka during the civil war. For visiting the Biafran leader, Odumegwu Ojuku, and for writing to call for a cease fire, he was incarcerated for 27 months, after which he went into his first exile. His famous quote in The Man Died, one of two literary products that resulted from months of total confinement: “The Man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny” captures what Soyinka sees as one of the central goals of the human intellect.He puts the same principle differently when he says that “the greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.”

    During Soyinka’s second exile at the instance of Gen Abacha’s rule of terror and after Soyinka had been sentenced to death for treason in absentia by Abacha, a highly-placed female chairman of a federal bank was sent from Nigeria through its embassy in Washington to meet some of us in the NALICON-NADECO-Abroad group. After a mendacious assessment of efforts by Yoruba in diaspora “in support of Egbon Abiola’s presidential mandate,” the honey-voiced woman asked if we could help to assist her to meet Prof. Soyinka and General Akinrinade. We acted as if we did not know her pedigree and that if there was any of the three of us in the room who should have direct access to Soyinka that she should be the person. We asked her why anyone would want to talk to Soyinka on behalf of a government that had already sentenced him to death, she replied: “Forget about death sentence that is neither here nor there. Prof. Soyinka’s criticism of government is distracting the leader from governing properly.” We reminded her of the most famous quote from The Man Died. Of course, she had not read the book, and the rest is history.

    Still on the Abacha-induced exile, Soyinka put his money where his mouth was during the NALICON-NADECO struggle. He himself would not acknowledge this in his own writings, as it would smack of self-celebration. But not only did he use his social capital in different parts of the world to source for funds to keep the secretariat and activities going, he also donated resources from earnings from his writings and speeches to the pro-democracy movement. I still recall one day when he was going over some layman’s accounting that I took to him at the Washington airport on his way to Europe. He flipped through the papers and ran his eyes from left to right of each page and vice versa. He looked up at me and said, “RS, I cannot see anything for wine or hospitality in your account.” I looked straight into his eyes and said “Prof, there was no hospitality done.” He smiled and said that it is not that wine itself is a bad thing but these are hard times that almost make drinking wine too much luxury and assured me that there would be plenty of time for wine. I insisted that he should order for one bottle for us to share before his flight, considering my long trip from Pennsylvania to Washington. He laughed, ordered what was asked for and told me to go and file the financial report with the Department of Justice, as required by law.  The point of this digression is that it was not only words and actions that Soyinka gave to the cause of justice and freedom, he also gave his own resources, thus illustrating the principle in another statement by him: “I think that if one believed absolutely in any cause, then one must have the confidence, the self-certainty, to go through with that particular course of action.”

    Most of our local politicians also, like the informal ambassador plenipotentiary of Abacha referred to earlier, fail to take advantage of Soyinka’s writings and speeches that are not designed for intellectual elites. Otherwise, the many meetings about what position the Yoruba should take to Jonathan’s national conference would have been unnecessary, if Yoruba delegates had paid attention to a speech Soyinka gave to South-South Economic Summit:

    “Let each regional grouping with compatible ideas of the ultimate mission—the future of the humanity for which they are responsible—begin to call the shots, and relegate the centre to its rightful dimensions in any functioning federated democracy…. Each regional grouping should by its policies, declare an uncompromising developmental autonomy—I repeat Autonomy—leaving the centre only with its competence provenance—foreign policy, national security, and inter-state affairs—including peace advocacy but minus its propensity for inflicting heart seizure on productive human concourse.”

    This column wishes Kongi, the man who believes that no government or individuals should create fear for another human being at any time and for any reason diminish the freedom of each person, more happy years of ripening.

  • The calm before the storm

    The calm before the storm

    An iniquitous Jonathan government is fighting a rolling, uneven war against every sector of the Nigerian economy which they reckon is not with them

    In its most recent opinion on Nigeria, The Times made a staggering  mistake by suggesting that  President Jonathan could , sooner than later, ‘wake up to find he has lost his country’, like he did the Chibok girls, thereby implying that our dear president has been sleeping on duty. Rather than being soporific, our president has never been more active, busy in the map room, overlooking, strategising and, of course, commanding his demolition squad; a squad so busy and efficient, it is multi tasking in Adamawa, Nasarawa is to come, Edo, recently demolished Ekiti and now awaiting Wike’s mother-of-all mayhem in Rivers State now that Shekarau has taken over those massive duties as Coordinating Minister of Education. Had the president given a quarter of the time he devotes to  vanquishing  the opposition to nation-building, neither  the ‘Protectors of Nigerian Prosperity’, nor its cousin, ‘The Transformation Ambassadors’, would have looked so funny, thinking Nigerians merely  laugh whenever their  meaningless adverts, which stand Nigerian realities on the head, pop up on television.  Nor would The Times have had the effrontery, to brand our president a bad news president. For instance, when these jesters claim, without a census, that more are with  President Jonathan than those against him, I hope to God they count among these Hallelujah chorus, the hundreds of Nigerians  who had become internal refugees in their own country, uprooted from their  homes as a result of the unprecedented insecurity  enveloping the country. I hope they count the families and relatives of those killed in mutual hatred in Plateau, the Northwest and other parts of North central as well as the living dead in those most unfortunate parts of President Jonathan’s country. Nor must these protectors exclude the millions of Nigerian youth who do not know where the next meal will come from in a rebased, huge economy of astounding growth  of  seven percent plus, but no jobs. I equally hope they counted on Jonathan’s side, parents of the Chibok girls who must have happily signed up to be counted. And as for their neighbours in that part of the country threatening to approach Ba Kii Moon, they had better be advised to sign up if they do not want the Jonathan train to leave them behind.

    Rather than be pre-occupied with such things as so highly recommend the likes of the Philippines President Aquino Jnr. as statesmen, our president had pro-actively gone ahead to have in place zonal commanders for his demolition squad and as 2015 approaches, there is a healthy competition between and amongst the various zones, represented by geo-political divisions. Indeed, so fierce is the competition that both the North Central and the Southwest zonal commands have completely overshadowed the rambunctious South-south zone under the lead of our former Co-coordinating Minister of Education who, very successfully, managed the Academic Staff Union of Polytechnic, ASUP, strike which, to his credit, has now lasted for a year without the Jonathan government caving in.

    The demolition has also been all-embracing: financial/economic and through a judicious militarisation of enemy territory at critical times.  By these means,  an iniquitous Jonathan government is fighting a rolling, uneven war against every sector of the Nigerian economy which they reckon is not with them as if Nigeria is no longer practicing multi party democracy.  My way or the highway has overtaken every tenet of democratic governance and as long as there is money to be made, tonnes of it, both recruits and cheer leaders will be handy as well as those trying to escape the jaws of EFCC and imminent jail.  First, it was the federation account, deliberately and tactically mal-nourished by the duo of our most important female ministers. Monthly allocation to the states plummeted, by some account, by up to 40 percent, but pronto, friendly states were singled out and generously assisted, from the Ecology Fund to the tune of billions of naira. On the economic development level, they erect every conceivable obstacle on the way of a state like Rivers to access much needed development funds while in Lagos State they deviously ensured that the Ayobo-Ipaja Road could not be completed by asking the contractor to pay a stupidly humongous amount of money to the NNPC for pipe lines, whereas in a less inequitable environment, a government having such vital assets in an area would have facilitated that road’s completion. The result is that commuters, many of who are on the road to work as early as 5 am daily, are made to suffer excruciating traffic gridlock. As you read this, presidency agents and ‘agents provocateurs’ are actively at work in Adamawa where every conceivable subterfuge has been dredged up to oust a governor who has less than a year to go out of eight. In Edo State, birds of a feather are actively at work, stopping at nothing and under the unwavering protection of the police, to disrupt legislative duties in spite of court rulings. We await the reaction of this lawless lot to the most recent decision of the Appeal Court.  If our feelers are correct, the northern gang will soon be deployed on Nasarawa State just so we can all be ‘apes obey’.

    These machinations are obviously advancements on the old PDP rigging methods, especially under then President Obasanjo when they used to wait patiently for elections proper to fix them. These ones are smarter and more proactive.  For instance, why go into the dangerous business of ballot box snatching when you are awash with cash, there are rogue scientists worldwide and you can procure photo-cromic ink, even on an industrial scale at the drop of a hat?

    And of course, there is the army and the police to mercilessly deploy especially when you had been strategic enough to hand them over to a certain genre of individuals, men who could, and will do anything for power and money. Below then, is a summary of what President Jonathan did to Ekiti in the recent governorship election: the entire state was locked down for 48 hours with soldiers and police manning all the entry points? Armoured tanks, helicopters and other military hardware were moved to the state in astonishing numbers. The Inspector-General of Police sent in hi-tech security equipments including surveillance helicopters, armoured personnel carriers, mobile police men, even, dogs. For what? If President Jonathan did this in a governorship election, what will he not do during the presidential? Must he fight to the death? And to imagine that with their clever deployment of spurious science, they did not need a single police man more than were already available in the Ekiti State command. It was all, therefore, a make-belief but since we are no wizards in Ekiti – nor are we half as hungry as being egregiously made out on several for a waiting-to –survive-forever on an expired 2.5 kg bag of Thai rice – there was no way we could have known that the ballot paper had been tampered with and pre-programmed to activate allocated number of party emblems. Nor could the poor Youth Corps members used in carrying out the peripheral parts of this totally novel rigging method in Nigeria, have known they were being used, writing down the last three digits of certain ballot papers in each polling unit.

    Since there is no honour or moderation among thieves, INEC/PDP will again, like to repeat the Ekiti magic in the Osun election. My advice, therefore, to everybody who wants to vote APC, is to ensure he/she holds on to the ballot paper for at least 20 minutes after putting his imprint and wait to see if it will not  transfer to somewhere else, though there might be slight  modifications to that used in the Ekiti election. As happened when INEC quickly reversed itself over the PVC Readable machines for Ekiti election, I expect an agitated INEC/federal government would come out, Monday morning, telling us a voter can only spend three or so minutes. Voters must know that no soldier or policeman is empowered to stop them from voting. Please hold on to your ballot paper for at least 20 minutes.

    And should INEC continue with these outrageous rigging of elections, the American prediction for Nigeria, come 2015, may turn out a self-fulfilling prophesy. Let those who have ears, hear.

  • Secret service on BringBackOurGirls ‘franchise’

    Secret service on BringBackOurGirls ‘franchise’

    Going by the reaction of the Department of State Services (DSS) to the BringBackOurGirls protests in Abuja, it is clear that the federal government continues to loath the gathering, perhaps because officials see it as an embarrassment to the government and a reminder of its impotence in the face of the abduction of 219 Chibok schoolgirls that has lasted for about three months. Addressing a press conference in Abuja last week, the DSS spokesperson, Marilyn Ogar, told a disbelieving country that the protests had become a franchise organised in a way that its aims and objectives could no longer be described as altruistic.

    According to Ms Ogar, “BringBackOurGirls movement has become a franchise and security forces know what they are up to. If it is an ordinary movement seeking to pile pressure on government or security agencies to free these girls, there will be no need for the group to begin to have tags and insist that you must be registered. Security forces also know that they have bank accounts. We also know that they want to simulate a protest march inside Asokoro Extension in Abuja and claim that they were doing so inside Sambisa Forest, to be reported in some foreign media. We also know that they brought in some experts from outside the country to teach them how to beat security when they are demonstrating; to withstand police teargas and security operations. We are waiting to see when these things would work…”

    If the secret service knows all these things about the protests and their organisers, it is surprising that it has not made any arrest. The accusations against the protest organisers are so weighty that the DSS seems to be saying they had become subversives. It will be recalled that in May, the Federal Capital City (FCT) police commissioner, the controversial Mbu Jospeh Mbu, had attempted to ban the protests by also suggesting its organisers had become anarchists and subversives. Higher police authorities had to wade in to countermand the ban and save the country a huge embarrassment at a time the whole world was still demonstrating in solidarity with Nigeria over the abductions.

    Mr Mbu’s embarrassing order itself came after presidency officials and the first lady tried unsuccessfully to persuade the country to doubt the abduction story, suggesting carelessly that the story was cooked up to dishonour the presidency and undermine it. In spite of reports from security agencies in Borno State where the abductions took place confirming the crime against the schoolgirls, the federal government had to set up another panel to confirm the abduction and the circumstances that surrounded it. Useful time was lost in rescuing the girls.

    Apart from the troubling fact that the Jonathan presidency is run along amateurish lines, as the world attests without equivocation, the DSS now gives the unsettling impression it has little respect for the constitution and seems unmindful  of the fact that its actions and words indicate the secret service is more pro-Jonathan and pro-PDP than it is pro-Nigeria and pro-constitution. After many years of gaining respect for its professionalism and impartiality, the Nigerian Army is also unfortunately suffering from the same malaise of seeing itself as an instrument in the hands of Dr Jonathan and the PDP.

    The present attitude of the DSS and the army suggests something even more sinister – that increasingly the leadership of both security organisations lack the character necessary to stand up to the president and resist all subterranean efforts to undermine the constitution and the law. Indeed, the army keeps reaffirming its support for and defence of democracy. But its actions demonstrate otherwise. It lends itself to brazenly partisan tasks in its eagerness to stifle the opposition, muzzle the press and carry itself generally above the law. The credibility of the DSS and the army will continue to be eroded if their commanders fail to embark on the deep soul-searching they need to unite their men behind the law and the constitution and retain the respect and admiration of the country. If they fail, the fault will lie squarely on their drooping shoulders.

  • What is the good in building up a population if you can’t use it to build the nation?

    Let us make Nigeria’s population count

    You know, when one ponders the matter, it becomes obvious that the reason we have not quite understood the point in this country is that we have all been talking at cross-purposes. You know what that is, don’t you? It is when two people have their wires crossed in their subject matters, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by a quirky calculation of pure chance. For instance, take the classical case of when a man wants to take a second wife. He begins by noting how hard it is for his wife to cope with the house-work and all, and even suggests getting someone to help her. Naturally, the wife eagerly throws herself into the conversation, nodding her agreement while believing the husband to be talking about the same kind of helper she is thinking of. Can a conversation be more crossed and entangled than when realization dawns? I always love the point when reality dawns and the fireworks begin to fly.

    In Nigeria, national discourse is often so entangled you can’t make out what anybody is saying. For instance, I read the other day that some assembly members, senators, and state governors somewhere in this vast expanse of a country had got their brains jammed and decided to fix a retirement sum for themselves that runs into a hundred million Naira. It is enough to make anyone who is not a governor go jump in the lake and drown. Now, that is coming right after the furore generated by the unfair heftiness of these people’s allowances and emoluments; unfair to the rest of us of course, not to them. Naturally, many of us are so enraged we want to puncture their swelled cheeks with our nails in the hope of reducing them. Sadly, some others don’t see things this right way. You can easily spot them: they have eyes behind their backs. They are wondering what the hullabaloo is all about, because they think that their excellences are not only deserving of the hundred million retirement sums, they wonder why we can’t spare more. Never mind that there are many Nigerians across the states who cannot feed well in any given day.

    So many promising national discourses have nosedived into the ground and have not yielded any fruit because of these crossed wires. For instance, some among us insist on defending what cannot possibly be of any good for the health of the nation. How can one defend someone charged with helping himself to billions of Naira using any argument on earth and in heaven? Yet, many of them regularly manage to be freed by the law courts and the people’s court, particularly when the people share the same ethnic background. The other day, I heard someone say that a bank chief accused of pocketing tens of billions of his bank’s money was only a victim of someone in the apex bank; in actual fact, he was innocent. I said, WOW! Now, I have heard everything. Next, they will tell us that the certain someone accused of pocketing funds from a pensions fund was actually the target of a functionary’s anger. What now, are we living in tents across the land where everyone runs to when they are accused of indecent behaviour?

    The thing about discourses is that they have ways of bringing out the best or worst or the dregs in the innermost recesses of our brains. The pity is that we all appear to be clothed in human skin, yet we are hosting so many incapacitating germs in our brains. This proves, according to a fable, what one animal said to another: there are many walking on two legs who should be using four. Many among us, dear reader, are really animals in animal skin, and many more are in human skin. When you consider that the world just celebrated the world population day, you want to pause a bit and reflect on these two important questions: what really makes up the Nigerian population; and what is the good in building up a population if you can’t use it to build the nation?

    Honestly, I cannot begin to think of telling you the answer to the first question, lest I be hanged in effigy by many a reader. The unfortunate thing is that nearly all, if not all of us, have brought some degree of impropriety into the sanctity of Nigeria’s population. We all really deserve to hang our heads downwards like brooding chickens, pluck at our chests like penitents and intone after me: we are sinners and are very proud of it. We are not worthy to be counted as members of the population of this country. If you think you are not affected just because you have never ‘swallowed’ millions or billions, raise your hand and I’ll show you an untruth-sayer. Please note, I have not called you a liar, just an untruth-sayer. Have you or have you never stopped in the middle of the road to greet your friend while traffic built up behind you? Well, have you not? Can you say, in any given day, that you do not regularly break any traffic, building, contracting, policing, soldering, doctoring, nursing, teaching, civil-servicing, studenting, or anything-you-do rule? Well, can you? And the most important question of all, can you say that you regularly or even averagely work for the pay you get?

    Nigeria has a population of people dwelling within her walls and occupying her space. Sadly, though, she has no builders, only sackers of treasuries, spoilers of lands and plunders of the nation. Everyone is so busy trying to get his/her itching hand on the ‘national cake’ it’s a wonder that there is still any left. Nigeria’s population right now is engrossed in ravaging the land like locusts, taking, taking, taking and giving little or nothing back. For them, there’s no such thing as ‘ask not what your country can do for you …’ and all that. For this population, it is what we can get from the country that counts. Yet normally, when a country has a population such as Nigeria’s, it is supposed to constitute a formidable workforce that should make and keep the machinery of state at world-top level. Perhaps, the future we saw yesterday will return tomorrow.

    However, here we are today, the about one hundred and sixty million of us, a population bred as a nation that cannot even keep its own laws. How then can we build a nation? Oh yes, failure to keep the law is failure to build the nation. Someone once said she was afraid to train her child to be obedient, law abiding, humble and all that because she was certain that many parents are allowing their children to grow up as wild, lawless beings. This would then mean that her children would be greatly disadvantaged. For answer, I did not answer.

    I guess World Population Day is the day we are supposed to gather round a table as a nation and talk about how to control it downwards or upwards, considering that the food resources are at the moment not at par with the users. So, we are supposed to discuss how best to match population with resources for the maximum development potential of every individual. However, I chose the road not normally trodden today for a good reason: that many of us do not sufficiently appreciate the connection between respecting the country and gaining access to the just and equitable utilisation of her resources. It is this connection which prevents humanity from being a useless population to a useful one. For what indeed, does it profit a country to gain so much population figures and lose its very essence? Let us make Nigeria’s population count in a way that matters. No pun intended.

  • Okon returns with a bang!

    It has been a long time since our boy and faithful man-Friday, Okon Anthony Okon, appeared on this page. There has been some nasty turbulence in the air. The country has been passing through some desperate times. As a result of the cruel abduction of the Chibok girls and what seems like the deliberate unfurling of armed personnel on the populace, it was decided that for his own safety, Okon  should be playing deep in his own eighteen. He was also expressly forbidden from publicly commenting on burning national issues, such as the Chibok abduction, the transformation of Boko Haram to a full blown insurgent outfit and Goodluck Jonathan’s reelection ploys.

    But there is no killing the beetle. A man who is destined for stardom is bound to achieve stardom no matter the circumstances. It was Okon’s latest “Brazilian” scam which attracted the attention of an irreverent and off-message television station owned by a Lagos billionaire. All formalities concluded, Okon, dressed like a Portuguese pirate and pole-hugging drunk, was carried shoulder-high into the premises by the usual suspects. The interviewers wasted no time with polite preambles.

    “Ha, welcome back from Afghanistan, Otunba Okon”, one of them, a sly-looking Lagos boy, opened with a knowing wink.

    “Point of incorrection!” Okon screamed at the fellow.” Number one, I no go any Afaganishan. Na oga say make I no talk because him dey fear dem sojas. Number two, I don tell una sotey say Okon no be Otunba. Otunba na yeye Yoruba title. Even dem tailor for Mafoluku dey bear Otunba. Okon be Etubom. So make dat one enter your yeye Yoruba yam head”.

    “All right, Etubong Okon. Welcome back from Brazil. I hope you didn’t return with empty hand”, the dandy Lagosian noted in smooth and sweet conciliation. But Okon was not done.

    “Dat one na Yoruba empty head talk. How man fit return from dem Brazil with empty hands after dem Germans come wire dem like dat? Even dem Abakaliki basket no fit carry all dem goals”, Okon snorted.

    “It was pure massacre”, one of the ladies, an obvious soccer fan, observed with a charm offensive. Okon immediately smelt an offside trap.

    “Ha, you see, dis na how dem Ibo ladies dey drag man for trouble. You wan make I talk about dem poor Chibok girls and wetin dem dey do to dem? Abi wetin concern massacra with dem football? Abi massacra no be dem ladies cream?” Okon sniggered as the poor woman squirmed in obvious embarrassment. Okon, lapsing into his customary bawdiness, pursued his quarry.

    “Bia, bia, my sister, wetin dem dey call dat medicine sef wey dey make man koboko very strong like dem iron rod? Sebi na Victoria abi na Niagra?  I know say dem dey call dem other one Cecilia, abi no be so?” Okon whined with devilish relish. The studio roared with laughter. Sensing that they have brought an ant-infested plank from the forest, the interviewers became very jittery.

    “All right, Chief Okon, have you learnt any lesson from the current tournament in Brazil?” the oldest man asked the increasingly excitable rogue.

    “Plenty, if you wan know. The first be say free  kick no be free. When dem Houtounji boy come finish our Onazi boy like dat, and dem award free kick, I think say dat one mean say make somebody kick dem fool freely, but no be so. Two, when dem say game don reach injury time, I think say na knife and broken bottles go settle matter. The third be say African football don kaput patapata”, Okon replied.

    “Okay, let us talk about the Ekiti election”, the other lady suggested.

    “Ha na dat one dem dey call ricesm”, Okon snorted.

    “Did you say racism?” the old man persisted.

    “I said ricesm” Okon insisted.

    “What is the philosophy?”

    “The infrastructure of philosophy is the philosophy of food infrastructure”.  It was at this point that Okon himself collapsed from drinking and philosophizing on an empty stomach.

  • History as Hubris

    History as Hubris

    (Looking back in amazement and amusement)

    With the electoral scalp of Ekiti still dripping blood from its infamous hunter’s bag, the PDP rigging guillotine is now turning its attention to Osun State. It may yet presage the end of the Fourth Republic. Osun state is the cosmopolitan jugular of the Yoruba nation. But as somebody famously observed of a Nigerian military despot, it does seem as if the rigging collective is not intelligent enough to know fear. The PDP is the modern equivalent of the Yoruba folklorist Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmole. (the brave hunter in the forest of mystery)

    Before our very eyes, Nigeria has become a forest of evil in which there is no paddy for jungle—as they say.  Yet one must marvel at the hubris of it all. As it was in the beginning so has it been at the end. Why is it that there is so much hubris in our history? Hubris, or pride and overweening self- regard , afflicts individuals, races, people, societies and nations. But it also seems to afflict certain historical epochs. Albert Einstein’s law of insanity—doing the same thing all over and expecting different results—seem to take over.

    As usual, the PDP political panzer division is led by renegade Yoruba children who do not care a hoot about the society and the nation as long as their personal ambition is fulfilled. It is not enough to say once again that they shall not pass. We need to ask far more fundamental questions. Is there something wrong and fundamentally rigged against rationality about the Yoruba leadership recruitment process, or is the Yoruba nationality gridlocked by fate to a fractious and eternally polarising political elite as decreed by Alafin Aole just before committing suicide?

    Ten years ago, on March 15, 2004, snooper laid the question bare to a distinguished audience of Yoruba elite and leading politicians at the inaugural Afenifere lecture. Why is it that each time the Yoruba nation achieves a significant degree of elite consensus and mass mobilization with grit and gruelling resolve, the wheels immediately begin to come off the armoured vehicle? The spoils of office and the politics of preferment and patronage begin to get in the way.

    As it was with Awolowo in 1962, 1979 and 1983, so it was with Abiola in 1993 and with Obasanjo’s doomed mainstream nonsense in 2003. Now in 2014 and with so many darts and poisoned arrows lobbing into Bourdillon, one is beginning to feel a sense of Déjà vu. Are the Yoruba too independent-minded for their own good, or too politically sophisticated to be locked into permanent romance and wedlock with a particular leadership formation?

    The old folks and usual suspects are restive again and anything might happen. As it is usually the case in Yoruba history, lucrative incentives from outside usually facilitate internal treachery. The Fulani conquest of their old empire was facilitated by internal perfidy. The ranking Yoruba warlord had become a law unto himself in a futile and ultimately suicidal bid for supremacy.

    According to Johnson, the fabled historian, even the fabled Prince Atiba, with an eye to his own future hegemony, deliberately allowed his flank to collapse in the decisive military confrontation. Now, conquest looms from another direction and mum is the word from those who are fixated on old battle formations. As they say in ancient Italian language, oggi a me, domani a te. (Today it is me, tomorrow it is you!)

    Sometimes, it is important to take a strategic gaze into the immediate past in order to unlock the dynamics of the immediate future. Ten years ago, when the issue of  endemic disunity among the Yoruba political elite was broached at that lecture at the Muson Centre in Lagos, there were at least three AD governors, Senator Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Aremo Olusegun Osoba and Otunba Niyi Adebayo, who bonded very well and were sworn to collective action.

    As at this moment, the trio of political musketeers have gone their different ways, and the falcon can no longer hear the falconer. One must shudder to imagine what would happen to the current ACN/APC governors in ten years time. Would they still be in the same political fold, or would they have been driven by political exigencies to bitter political enmity?

    Still looking at the ever widening Yoruba political gyre, it is useful to recall that ten years ago at the inaugural Afenifere lecture, the Publicity Secretary of the organization and one of the prime organisers of the lecture was none other than Prince Dayo Adeyeye. This very week, snooper looked on with ironic amusement as the same Ise Ekiti nobleman appeared before the senate nattily dressed and dandified  to be screened as a minister in the PDP government. Adeyeye, a former Assistant of Chief Olu Falae and two time senatorial candidate of AD/AC, left the fold as a result of the fallout of the gubernatorial dispute which led to the emergence of Kayode Fayemi as the flag bearer for Ekiti State.

    And there were others, particularly the stoic and decorous Dare Babarinsa, who left never to return. The three leading grenadiers of the current PDP onslaught on the Yoruba nation, Musliu Obanikoro, Iyiola Omisore and Jelili Adesiyan, all belonged at one time or the other to what is known as the progressive tendency. As it was at the beginning of the Action Group crisis, so it has been at the injury time of political football

    Given the current political configurations or reconfigurations as the case may be, and the ongoing deadly power struggle in the South West, one may not be surprised if Chief Olu Falae shows up at the coronation to wish his former boy a happy tenure, after all in politics the enemy of your enemy is a friend. It is all in the nature of these things.

    Last weekend in far way Santa Monica, yours sincerely was briskly roused from sleep at 2 A.M western coast time by a frantic call from Nigeria. It was from Wole Olanipekun, SAN, and one Nigeria’s leading legal luminaries. Wole is an outstanding Nigerian patriot and militant Yoruba nationalist with broad progressive tendencies. Like many of his Ekiti compatriots, he could also be brutally frank.

    It is a friendship that has lasted over forty years, dating back to our days together in the trenches against military dictatorship in Nigeria.  While Wole served as the Secretary General of the University of Lagos Student Union, yours sincerely was the elusive and mysterious chairman of the Unife Joint Action Committee with concurrent accreditation to four un-nameable campuses. We had met when snooper appeared at the Unilag campus as a non-executive member of the Ife students’ union executive which was then visiting.

    Wole’s beef was with how the fallout of the Fayose resurgence was being managed. He had obviously read this column. In his view, the Yoruba nation was poised at the edge of a precipice which has to be carefully managed to avert a calamitous endgame. Fayose was the proverbial fly perched precariously on the most sensitive part of the anatomy which requires considerable diplomatic exertion and engagement.

    With current developments in the old West, it is now even clearer that the Yoruba Question is an integral part of the National Question. There is no way out as long as everybody is boxed into this colonial cage of contraries. Despite the bold strides of its many outstanding and talented individuals to put Nigeria on the world map, it is obvious that Nigeria is dying from the kwashiorkor of failed leadership.

    The leadership lottery and the structural configuration of Nigeria are such that they will never allow the best and the brightest to step forward to rescue the nation. It is like going into competitive soccer with your tenth eleven. It is a hopeless mismatch. The lack of a visionary and integrative leadership and of a national consensus in critical areas of nation-building is telling, and it rears its head in profoundly ironic and totally unexpected ways..

    Political developments in Nigeria are often stranger than fiction, and they sometimes best the most imaginative efforts of the masters of magical realism. Had he been born a Nigerian, Gabriel Garcia Marquez would long have been driven out of business. Actual reality is so unrealistic that the budding novelist must not attempt to enter into any competition with it.

    Once again, the Nigerian nation is stumbling precariously on a steep political escarpment. The Yoruba nation is critically endangered. Huge conflagrations in Nigeria are usually preceded by civil war among the Yoruba political elite. Is history about to repeat itself? The next few weeks will answer that question. For the second time, and by popular demand, we bring you an article which took an early look at the fate of the post-colonial nation in West Africa. Written in 1961, it reads like the horoscope of disaster foretold.

  • Confab resolutions: impractical, idealistic, provocative

    Confab resolutions: impractical, idealistic, provocative

    I have always felt that in constituting the national conference, President Goodluck Jonathan was chasing a chimera. Given some of the resolutions of the national conference, Dr Jonathan is apparently not the only one chasing a chimera. The conference itself, true to its origins, and being a veritable chip off the old block, has made it its bounden duty to pursue chimera as assiduously as a hound hunts hare. Having dismissed the conference as a clever contrivance to keep the political class distracted, especially given the foggy circumstances of its birth and the convoluted framework of its legal standing, I had restrained myself from paying any close attention to their resolutions or giving those resolutions active and useful consideration. But last week, I could no longer forbear, for the conference gaily decided to spread a bizarre veneer on their work and shock analysts out of their wits.

    Among its many curious resolutions, the conference is recommending to us the creation of 19 more states: 18 in general, and one specifically and additionally for the Southeast to redress what conferees describe as a major wrong done the region since states were last created. They were clever enough, however, to hedge the recommendation with the proviso that no state could be created if it was not economically viable. At the moment, there are not more than five or so states really economically viable. And if about 30 states remain unviable, just where did the conference find the cagey optimism that any of their recommended 19 states could conceivably be viable?

    In the sentimental and impractical effort to create more states, the conference is deliberately provoking us and rendering that recommendation a mere academic exercise. Theoretically, Nigeria could fragment into a thousand states, and match that silly pastime with a thousand bureaucracies. The economic and social problems confronting Nigeria at the moment, not to say the country’s antecedents, do not however permit the luxury of impractical jokes. I thought the conference a huge joke; but the conferees themselves thought their deliberations a hugely serious exercise in constitution-making and country restructuring. Why could they not therefore lend their deliberations with the seriousness they pretend to muster?

    Not only are the recommended states unviable, the conference betrays a total lack of understanding of what the country’s problems are. The country may be in dire need of restructuring, but it is doubtful whether that restructuring should take the form of the miniaturisation the conference seems enamoured of. They are even toying with a curious admixture of ‘presidentialism’ and parliamentarianism, a gargoyle they provocatively describe as home grown, which only they can quite comprehend. In their inscrutable wisdom, the strange admixture is then festooned with scores of provisions including rotational presidency, rotational governorship, and rotational local government chairmanship. The various rotations contain other mini rotations, most of them simplistic and risible. In their frenzy to ensure peace and stability, they completely forget merit and competence. It would have been better to leave the issue of rotation to the political parties which already have it as an informal and expedient part of their systems.

    Earlier last week, the conference recommended that no one could offer himself for election into the presidency without being a university graduate. Why this nonsense did not occur to them as plain nonsense must be due to their inurement to the farcical things of life. Leadership may profit from some form of education, even a deep one, as many great leaders have shown. But a university degree is certainly not a sufficient, nor even a necessary, condition for leadership competence. Where does the conference place polytechnic education and certificates? Nigeria has had two university graduates in office, the late Umaru Yar’Adua and the current president, Dr Jonathan. Neither, it seems to me, can hold a candle to the restless and bucolic President Olusegun Obasanjo, a man of modest talents and accomplishments.

    In one week, the conference showed a massive, if not defining, lack of understanding of the ingredients of leadership, what conduce to political stability and the kind of state structure Nigeria needs. Before its task is done, what other dangerous brew will the conference have on tap? Perhaps it is fitting that the conference lacks legal basis, and its recommendations will unavoidably be passed on to the National Assembly, that patient fire-eating and fire-quenching mill that has become the graveyard of many great and not-so-great ideas. Were their recommendations to become law through a referendum, it is not certain what disaster the conference would concoct for us down the road.

    However, by far the most shocking resolution agreed by the conference is the constraints put on the position of vice president. The conference has made the vice president to be inextricably intertwined with the president. Having decided that the presidency should rotate among the country’s six geopolitical zones and along northern and southern lines, the conference then proceeded to recommend that in the case of death, impeachment or incapacitation of the president, the vice president could not automatically assume the highest office except in acting capacity. In other words, if the president is impeached for wrongdoing, the vice president must share equally in the punishment without the advantage of having benefited from the president’s impeachable offence. The conference hinges its strange, home grown, but hardly imaginative decision on the fact that nothing must interrupt the rotation between the north and south. By implication too, nothing guarantees that a vice president could succeed his boss except his zone is entitled to it by rotation.

    Should this nonsense be adopted by the country, it would be the most delicate piece of political contraption ever, far surpassing those of Labanon and Iraq, more convoluted than anything elsewhere, and of course more prone to abuse and massive disruption. That contraption, it must be stated forcefully, cannot work, no matter how delicately it imitates political engineering. Too many things are wrong with this conference, not the least the motive for setting it up. As it wounds up its activities, I half expect its deliberations and resolutions to peter out into contradictory and impractical conclusions. It is unlikely to disappoint us.