The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Okon dazzles them in Akure

    When beggars die, there are no comets seen, but the heavens themselves blaze forth at the death of princes” The immortal William Shakespeare could not have been more perceptive. It was a carnival-like exit on Friday in Akure as the entire state capital rose to bid goodbye to one of Akure’s most illustrious sons ever, Chief Adewunmi Adegbonmire, a.k.a Omo Ekun, the late Asiwaju of Akureland. Ancient and folklored political gladiators, the new kids on the political block and the cream of Nigeria’s progressive politicians came to wave a final goodbye to a true political generalissimo.

    Snooper was there, and so was the impossible and impertinent Okon who was fronting as Domestic and Political Secretary with concurrent accreditation to the Kitchen Cabinet.. It is quite a mouthful but then Okon himself is quite a handful. Strangely enough, the crazy boy seems to know the social and cultural topography of Akure and environ very well claiming to have served as an apprentice journeyman— whatever that means in the area.

    After an initial weather scare, the journey got on to a smooth cruise until Okon began his demented antics to snooper’s acute regret. All of a sudden, the mad boy jumped up as if stung by a scorpion.

    “Oga, tell dem plane driver to park, as I wan pee,” the crazy boy yelled at me.

    “Okon, don’t be stupid. This is not a kabukabu bus.” Snooper screamed at the fool.

    “Even dem kabukabu dey park for pipul make dem pee” Okon shouted at me. Before snooper could comprehend what was going on, Okon yanked an empty bottle from a revered politician and rapidly began filling the bottle to his bladder’s content with the velocity of a consummate rapist even as he was neighing like a wild horse. After this his face became frozen by a deranged grin. Snooper avoided him for the rest of the flight.

    But the firework started again as soon as we reached the church premises, teeming and milling with a mammoth crowd which was unprecedented in colour and diversity. From the distance, snooper began counting professors and eggheads from the old University of Ife who had come to bid goodbye to the illustrious warrior, but this seemed to have drawn Okon’s juvenile ire.

    “Kai, kai, dis yeye Yoruba people and dem feferity. If to say na better person kaput now dem no go comout. But na animal dem dey worship. See how dem they cry for dem tiger im pikin. If to say na tiger himself come kaput nko?” the mad boy snorted and snooper immediately whipped him into line with a look full of daggers.

    But the testy truce lasted up to the church doorstep. As soon as snooper hailed his old friend and school chum, Bola Akingbade, a.k.a Skiddy, the retired MTN mogul who was part of the choir, Okon exploded, “So na here dis one come dey hide after dem done daburu dem MTN? Dem phone don become kalokalo,” Okon sneered as snooper deliberately stepped on his toes to shut him up.

    Then as if contrite and penitent the mad boy sidled up. “Oga, ask him whether him get recharge card,” Okon crowed as snooper quickly doubled his pace only to run almost headlong into retired General Alani Akinrinade. “And where is Okon?” the great and greatly civil soldier whispered to snooper not realising that the scourge was right behind him.

    “Oga, no be dem sakadeli Brigadier be dat?” Okon sniggered.

    “Okon, just shut up,” snooper screamed.

    “So how come him no sabi Okon again? Abi no be me dey…?” before he could finish his idle drooling, snooper pushed him through the crowd and ordered him to seat down. This particular treaty lasted only a few minutes as Okon suddenly jumped up amidst the din of thanksgiving.

    “Oga I don look inside dem coffin, I no see tiger him pikin, na old man I see oo” the mad man boy shouted. Then as the ecumenical finally caught up with the secular, the officiating priest announced Kayode Fayemi as the governor of the Ekiti Diocese to prolong and protracted laughter.

    “You see now, when dem Yisa Jaguda come say Nigeria be country of 150 million naira na dem Yoruba people dey yab am.” The crazy boy hollered. Fearing for the worst, it was at this point that snooper initiated the process which put Oko in a semi-conscious haze until we got back to Lagos. It has been a glorious day for progressives in Akure.

  • The return of Mlungu

    The return of Mlungu

    (Towards the recolonisation of sub-Saharan Africa)

    As he lay mortally wounded in the open field, with vultures circling overhead and hyenas braying in the distance, Chaka made one final superhuman effort to raise himself from the valley of the dying. The great Zulu emperor was no stranger to near death experiences. He had survived horrific wounds before and outlived savage mutilations unleashed by enemy spears. But the gaping eyesores inflicted by his own envious siblings proved too close to call.

    His eyes glazed over with imminent death. But before he gave up the ghost, the great African warrior who was often referred to as a black Napoleon roused himself to give his historic verdict on those who had betrayed him. The great Zulu empire would not pass on to his resentful siblings. Mlungu is coming, Chaka noted as his great frame finally toppled over. Mlungu is the South African native epithet for a white person, particularly from overseas. As predicted, the empire promptly dissolved before the Boer invaders after some momentous bloodletting.

    As it is with everything African where legend is inseparable from reality and where fact meshes with fiction and fantasy, nobody is sure whether the prophecy is true, or whether Thomas Mofolo, Chaka’s fictional biographer, was indulging his splendid imagination. Some have even gone as far as accusing the great South African novelist of Sotho nationalism.

    It was alleged that a resentful Mofolo never forgave Chaka for smashing up his people’s pre-colonial fiefdom.. On the historic scale of a testament-like dismissal and denouncement of a whole race for perfidy, this one is at par with Alafin Aole’s celebrated denouncement of the Yoruba race. Ironically, they both happened around the same time. It was death and the king’s horsemen again as two different African communities in different parts of Africa experienced the same stress and strain brought about by historical pressures on old African feudal formations.

    Almost three centuries on, the successor nation-states to the old African empires are experiencing the stress and strains brought about by new historical realities. All over Africa, particularly in its sub-Saharan region, the nation-state paradigm is in dire straits. It appears as if the colonial falcon no longer hearkens to the post-colonial falconer. As anarchy is let loose in the region, the old imperialist cartography of the continent is under siege.

    If the pictures coming out of Mali this past fortnight are to be believed, Mlungu is clearly back in Africa, that is if he ever left. A recolonisation of failing and failed states in Africa is underway. If in the past, the recolonisation was often purely ideological or predatory, this time around it is for reasons of self-preservation. Let the African political dinosaurs who have failed their people and their nations continue to strut and preen about the imperial metropole without any sense of shame or sobriety. The judgement hour is at hand, and it is going to be a messy and savage denouement indeed.

    An engrossing historical paradox is unfolding before our very eyes. The crowds of native Malians lustily cheering and hailing French troops as they swept through the historic cities of Gao, Timbuktu and Kildai are welcoming their old colonial conquerors as new post-colonial liberators! It doesn’t get more paradoxical than that. This is not some desert mirage, or a sandstorm-induced optical illusion. It will be the same if the scene were to be repeated in many African countries.

    As we have noted repeatedly in this column, a dead man will have to be buried, if not because of his relations but because his corpse constitutes a health hazard to the rest of the community. As at this moment, many African countries, particularly in the sub-Saharan region, constitute a health hazard to the international community. As it has been brilliantly formulated, globalisation is both the universalisation of the particular and the particularisation of the universal. In other words, except where it meets successful local particulars, western modernity will try to extend its domain to every nook and corner of the world.

    With the globalisation of the social media network and the universalisation of satellite communication, the native Malians even in their desert encroaches know what good governance is all about. They reject the incompetent and bankrupt government in the South and the savage species of prehistoric Islamic fundamentalism that was foisted on them by the al-queda militants in the north.

    The Islamic fanatics did nothing to endear themselves to the local populace while they were in charge, and it was clear they had nothing to offer except the wild and merciless cruelty of their Stone Age inquisition. The testimony of the natives who had suffered under the harsh misrule of the frowning jihadists is apt and compelling. “Cest ne pas bon!,” they chorused in broken French with near universal revulsion.

    It was clear that to the average Malian there was nothing to choose between the buffoonish incompetence of the political elite left behind by colonisation and the Stone Age barbarity of the Islamic fundamentalists who are the sadistic relics of an older Islamic civilisation masquerading as a new variant of modernity. They chose their old colonial masters instead.

    In the continent of Sekou Toure, Kwame Nkrumah, Herbert Macauley, Julius Nyerere, the former Benjamin Azikiwe and the former Jeremiah Awolowo and all the great titans of the decolonising project that seized the African imagination in the period leading to independence, this is like going back to one’s vomit. These great avatars of African consciousness must be turning in their grave at the plight of the continent.

    But let us be clear in our mind about one thing. The tragedy we are witnessing in Mali is not about a clash of two civilisations, that is western civilisation and its Islamic variant. Rather, it is the endgame of a dismal miscarriage of the two civilisations on the continent of Africa. This is about aborted western modernity and rationality as seen in the chaotic mess of sub-Saharan Africa and the debasement of the classical tenets of Islam as seen in the antics of the unenlightened jihadists that have seized the desert dunes of North Africa.

    With this in mind, the central question can now be posed and answered. Why is it that modern Mali, conceived as a true nation-state cannot solve the security challenges posed by corrupt and inefficient governance and the subsequent threat posed to its corporate existence by the Jihadists’ rebellion? And why is it that neighbouring countries in the West African community were so lax and laggard in coming to the aid of their sister-country until France seized the bull by the horns? The answer is that most of these colonial contraptions are not true nation-states in the classical sense of the paradigm. You cannot give what you don’t have..

    France is not in Mali on a naïve humanitarian mission. This is a security operation abroad for the purpose of maintaining internal security at home, such as happens with the periodic occupation of Haiti by the US in what is known as immigration control at source. With its large immigrant community of African extraction, a fundamentalist Islamic corridor straddling the desert fringes of northern Africa is a direct threat to metropolitan France.

    As the Islamic terrorists melt away into their desert redoubts wilting under the superior firepower of France, it is not yet Uhuru for Mali. They will be back as soon as French troops withdraw, to inflict momentous casualties on African peace keepers and the renegade Malian army. The jihadists already had a measure of Malian troops and they know they are not up to scratch. The Sahara Desert will be foaming with blood for a long time to come.

    After military expedition must come political expiation. It is not surprising that it is France that is showing utmost clarity in the confusion, calling on the Malian government to initiate negotiations with the more moderate elements in the north. This is the way forward not just for Mali but for other failed and failing states in sub-Saharan Africa. The political basis of these structural time-bombs will have to be re-negotiated clause by clause and phrase by phrase before their political elite bring the populace to further peril.

  • A grisly summons to enfield

    As snooper was landing in harsh and wintry London on Friday morning, we received a grisly summons to suburban Enfield to attend the funeral of Bimpe Ojerinola, nee Osibodu. A funereal gloom descended on yours sincerely which was compounded by the cold Arctic blast. Snooper had long been expecting a reunion with Bimpe, our late friend’s wife, but not a final farewell. Such is the ephemeral nature of life and the brutal contingency of human existence.

    Snooper was too overwhelmed and exhausted to make it to Enfield, but almost all the funeral eulogies painted a life of unblemished generosity and selfless love. Bimpe lived her life at the behest of others and was the nearest thing to a secular saint. A scion of the illustrious Osibodu family of Ilishan Remo, the departed was the wife of Segun Ojerinola, a Nigerian diplomat who fell in the course of duty to his fatherland in the Nigerian embassy at Belgrade in the late nineties where he was Head of Chancery.

    The ever swankily turned out and swaggering Segun Ojenrinola, a.k.a Jagger, was one of the rising stars of the Nigerian Diplomatic Corps until sudden death snatched him away in faraway Belgrade. Affable and clubbable to boot and full of witty pranks, Segun was a pure delight to be with. He was kind, courtly and courteously solicitous of the wellbeing of others. Now, he has been joined by his equally virtuous wife. May their worthy souls find eternal repose and may their orphaned children reap the fruits of the goodwill and kindness their parents have sown.

  • A stillness on the potomac

    A stillness on the potomac

    Like most events feverishly expected and anticipated, it turned out to be something of a dismal anticlimax. The second and final Obama inauguration has come and gone, and the world has quickly recovered its breath to face squarely the pressing problems of human existence. Even the inaugural ball was said to have been undersubscribed and the crowd scantier and less lustily cheering, unlike the surging, near-hysterical humanity of four years earlier.

    Unlike the scenes of wild jubilation and the tears of joy from historic Black personages four years earlier, the second coming of Obama has been a tame and less frenzied affair, marked by a polite rectitude and sober reticence even on the part of the victors. A stillness was evident on the Potomac. An arctic chill subsequently descended on the nation hugging and enveloping it with bearish resolve. There were icicles drooping from the outer armaments of the world’s principal palisade of power .

    But this was not a damp squib, as they say. In a sense, then, both the stillness on the Potomac and the arctic chill that descended on the nation were profoundly symbolic of a fundamental tectonic shift of power equations or what is known as a historic rupture of political praxis between the old American order and the new realities unfolding before our very eyes.

    With a demographic reconfiguration weighted heavily in favour of suppressed groups and marginalised minorities, America may be going through a fundamental re-invention. A tree does not begin to bear fruits the same day and it may take a while for the political dividends of these great geological irruptions to manifest. Before our very eyes and like a huge snake, America is casting off its mammoth slough in a symbolic ritual of renewal and regeneration .

    Whatever else happens, the Obama presidency will be seen as a forerunner of great changes in the American society. If the atmosphere was tame and muted, it is because the changes are real and irreversible. If there were no triumphalist hoopla and ululation, it is because the triumph this time was chilling in all its awesome finality. As such, Obama’s second coming was more like a consolidation and coronation rather than a mere inauguration.

    Like a heavyweight contest, somebody has been beaten big time and even the victor is stunned by the scope and magnitude of the victory into a humble reverence for the forward looking society that made this possible. Had this been some Third World jungle dominated by brutal and mentally unstable despots, the odds would have been stacked against Barack Obama. The victor could have been summarily impounded, subjected to humiliation, ritual torture and eventually put to death.

    As this column once noted, the audacity of hope is predicated on the hope of audacity that there will be a level playing ground and that a society will adhere to its own stated rules. To be sure, a trigger happy rightwing loony from the lunatic fringes of American society may yet end the party. But that is precisely why such felons emerge from the margins and fringes of society rather than its mainstream. Obama’s ascendancy is a tribute to a society which, whatever its manifest imperfections, is willing to adhere to its own stated rules and principles in the conduct of human affairs.

    In most human societies, it is only when electoral battles are close that there is room for manipulation and gerrymandering. It is an unstated rule of boxing that to dethrone a reigning heavyweight champion, you must not only beat him but beat him silly. The Republicans have taken a bad beat, as they say. On Monday night, they had slunk away from Washington. It was the silence of wolves that had turned into lambs.

    It is a pointer to the scale and scope of Obama’s victory and its extirpating possibilities as well as the nature of the unfolding political reconfiguration of American society that a blue-eyed Republican princeling could openly whine that Obama was trying to annihilate the Republican Party. Forty years ago such a cry of abject humiliation and victimhood would have been unthinkable, not to talk of coming from the Capitol of capital fellows. The Grand Old Party has been put through the meat grinder.

    In a cynical summation of developing politics, it has been suggested that it was not from any groundswell of generosity and altruism that Vice President Biden quickly reached for a Latino judge to swear him in. It was perhaps the first warning shots in the 2016 presidential campaigns. The savvy and streetsmart Biden is too mentally alert to miss the political symbolism of the whole ritual. Welcome to the new majority of suppressed minorities.

    In the event, Obama’s second inaugural speech was a classic instance of a mopping up operation. The man of the moment himself was a figure of dazzling oxymoron. Perfectly coiled like a factory assembled cobra, mysteriously focused and exuding superior self-control, Obama is man as the ultimate political machine and mathematically engineered perfection. If you are looking for what makes this son of an African immigrant and a mother of Nordic extraction tick, you will never find it. A child of destiny, Obama is also a centrally controlled canal of conflicts, contradictions and contraries.

    But contradictions are there to be exploited. Only a weak person allows contradictions and conflicts to deny or delay him. George Patton, America’s most famous tank commander and military hero, told youthful soldiers just before the commencement of the Battle of the Bulge. “If you are fired upon, advance!”. A famous French Marshal in the First World War also noted that since his flanks were collapsing, he had no alternative than to begin advancing.

    Obama’s second inaugural address spoke to the fundamental ideals underpinning America as a new type of nation and a new type of society. In the process, he spoke for a new America of orgiastic possibilities. By quoting the founding fathers’ most famous line against extant realities without ever saying so, Obama was fashioning out a subtle instrument of surrender after dramatic victory in the political battlefield.

    “We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal… and with inalienable rights”, the founding fathers of America famously thundered and with the moral certitude of Old Testament prophets. But if this truth was self-evident , why was it not so self-evident even in their own conduct? If the truth was self-evident why has it taken almost four hundred years after a civil war, decades of protests and series of social convulsions to get a Black person to the White House?

    It simply means that in the roiling conduct of human affairs, what is self-evident may not be so self-evident. The evidence has to be thrown and thrust into the face of the most obdurate and obtuse. Forty years ago, it would have been unthinkable for a man with the middle name of Hussein and the “un-American” sounding patronym of Obama to amount to anything of significance in American society, let alone to have become a two-term president. But there we are at the moment.

    In order to understand and appreciate the scope and scale of Barack Obama’s electoral achievement we need to further wind back the historic clock. Sirhan Bishara Sirhan was the son of a Palestinian- Jordanian immigrant father. Like Obama’s father, Bishara, Sirhan’s father, suddenly returned home angry and frustrated by the inequities of American society, leaving his son a roiling cauldron of resentments and seething malice. In 1968, Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy, dramatically halting the political advance of the great American liberal even as he halted his own chances in American society.

    So when we hail and appreciate America, it is not as if one is unmindful of its imperfections as a human society. There is as yet no perfect human society and there may never be one. Even the old organic societies that we rhapsodize were not so organic. These are just ideological cudgels for beating the present into submission. As Terry Eagleton famously noted, one sure thing about the organic society is that it is always gone.

    If there is no perfect human society, there is something to be said for a nation with a capacity for endless re-invention and ceaseless self-surpassing. This capacity for self-renewal and dramatic rejuvenation is for this writer the basis of what is known as American exceptionalism. America was not created as a martial empire. America was created as a land of dreamers and visionary intellectuals. While most nations are frigid and frozen in time and possibilities, America takes bold efforts to correct its mistakes of the past and present.

    In the end, it is important for human societies to have dreams so that human societies do not become a nightmare. It is these visionary dreams that nudge humanity to higher telos. They constitute the benchmark by which a society is ultimately judged against perennial digressions and convenient diversions. In order to achieve the possible a society must set for itself impossible dreams. This is the secret of all successful societies.

    But it is a self-evident truth from the Roman and Greek empires, the Andalusian Islamic renaissance, the Lockean and Hobbesian philosophic revolution in England, the French Revolution, the revolutionary intellectual decapitation of the old order in Germany, the American Declaration of Independence, to later-day wonders like Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore and the emerging miracles of Latin America that a nation requires an intellectual master class to furnish it with dreams and to front for these dreams. Without these visionary bulwarks, it is easy for a nation to become a mere toy in the hands of unhinged tyrants and unlettered despots.

    For now, not even the most jaundiced would deny that America has earned its spurs as a beacon of hope for a brave new world. There is still plenty of work to do, but it is morning yet on creation day. Presently, the stillness on the Potomac will reveal a brilliant thaw in the affairs of humanity and the cold blizzards of winter will soon retreat as the warm winds of Spring prevail. It was a glorious week to be in America.

  • And a glorious passage in Benin

    While we are still on the subject of death and its icy mischief, it is meet to report the glorious passage of the beloved mother of our friends, the late Madam Wuraola Eniye Alonge, relic of High Chief Joshua Alonge, the late industrialist and giant entrepreneur. She was laid to rest in Benin at the weekend after a Service of Songs on Thursday at St Peters Anglican Church, Lagos street.

    As we pray for mama’s blissful repose, here is wishing Chief Femi and Yemisi Akinrinade, Eunice Obaro, Ayo Alonge, Imaden Eze-Iyamu and Arese Alonge the strength to bear the loss of their mother-in –law and mother respectively. As mama joins her ancestors in eternal rest, here is wishing the living long life and more fruitful endeavours.

    It is obvious that it has been a celebration of life rather than mournful sorrowing. When snooper put a call through to Benin city on Thursday from faraway New York, it was obvious that Chief Femi Akinrinade, our look alike twin brother, was in high spirit and fine fettle. “Bros”, snooper began with his usual opening gambit for reluctant veterans. “Tani bros e, you this stupid upcountry boy?” the chief from the Yakoyo interior shot back. Snooper may be a country bumpkin, but it was not long ago when our man confided in snooper that as a youth he used to be sent from Yakoyo all the way to Ita Akogun in Ile-Ife to buy dele, a village delicacy, by the stern, no-nonsense father of all generals, the late Chief Akinrinade himself. May they all rest in peace.

  • Party deformation in perspective

    Party deformation in perspective

    Party formations in post-military Nigeria are in a serious crisis. But this much should be expected in a military assisted democracy and from societies in the throes of traumatic transition from despotic rule to a democratic empowerment of citizens. It is usually a tense and fraught process with the possibility of reversal and regression. Since there is no global roadmap for recovery and recuperation, every nation is a unique patient with its own unique pathologies .

    In such circumstances, even the fundamental principles of party formations in modern societies are called to question. However, in countries that have successfully weathered the inclement storm of autocratic and anti-democratic adversities, notably in Ghana, South Africa and Latin America, there has always been one cultural product which makes a signal and significant contribution. That is the quality of human capital at the apex of leadership.

    This is why it is unfortunate that while party formations in Nigeria are in serious crisis and the country itself is roiling in deep dysfunction, the ruling party, the PDP, the self-advertised largest party on the continent, should be openly squabbling about posts. For a party that has ruled Nigeria for all of 14 years since the departure of the military, the PDP is nothing short of a national tragedy after the opportunity cost to the nation has been factored in.

    The fixation of its ranking members on the politics of allocation of resources devalues politics as a struggle for the allocation of values. The degeneration of politics to a fierce struggle for state loot hobbles everything in its wake because it makes it impossible for political society to operate at a level compatible with the more refined ethos of a truly civilized polity. This subsistence politics with its violent and crude Hunter-gatherer code of conduct reduces everybody in its orbit to the level of primitive cave-dwellers.

    In the end, nothing probably could beat the brilliant description of the PDP by one of its founding fathers as a rally. Rallies are usually very riotous and sometimes have to be broken up when they degenerate to sheer anarchy. The political preferences of this column are very well known, but since we are talking about the crisis of party formation, we are talking about a crisis of the nation-state.

    A national crisis is not an opportunity for crude recrimination or insult-vending. But it must be noted for the benefit of analytical clarity that unlike some of its lesser competitors that can be held down to and measured against some professed ideals, the PDP, despite its array of organic intellectuals and free-floating technocrats, boasts of no ideology apart from a nebulous pan-Nigerianism which masks its true provenance as a mere power-grabbing machine.

    Yet it must also be stated that until the opposition groups transcend their own limitations, the PDP will remain rampart and rampaging and they will remain its mere dialectical mirror image. In an under-developing nation, power grabbing is a cogent manifesto because it puts food on the table and under the table as the case may be and until the ghosts also summon themselves to the banquet. In fact, until the opposition parties come up with the formula for a merger or mega-alliance, the next supper is not the Last Supper and the political gourmets will continue to dine in some style. The mind boggles not just at the culinary logistics of making a meal of a whole country and the crude arithmetic of the feeding frenzy.

    For the sake of objective analysis, and as it is at the moment, the Peoples’ Democratic Party is a prebendalist machine for scientific extortion and extraction; a perfect instrument of primitive accumulation based on industrial corruption. The savage oxymoron of this formulation is a perfect example of what happens when instances of old feudal formations take on the garb of modernity and its cutting edge technology. When prebendalism which is a throwback to old feudal Europe becomes a modern phenomenon and when corruption is industrialised, scientific precision is brought to bear on primitive extractive predation. The nation is frozen in a time-warp. Cavemen parade as statesmen.

    But we cannot complain too loudly about the sluggishness of a river in midstream without examining its source. It is only through this kind of holistic analysis that we can achieve true illumination of our precarious predicament. Like its old forebears, the PDP is a product of certain structural, political and economic configuration of Nigeria as engineered by the dominant faction of the old military and as designed by the original colonial conquerors of modern Nigeria.

    In the event, it is doubtful whether the two military transitions we have had so far are real transitions from military rule to genuine democracy or a mere transfer of power and personnel for the same predatory purposes. In business parlance, it was just a shuffling of Holdings. The same can be said for flag independence and the ceding of power to an indigenous political elite which did not represent a fundamental rupture of political praxis but a continuation of colonization by other means.

    In the case of colonial transition, power was ceded to a compliant and complacent political class superintended by a master-nationality which had demonstrated superior political organization and the military initiative required to hold down the country by feudal fiat or by force if and when it became inevitable. In the subsequent political order, only the Action Group, of all the major parties, showed signs of a discernible and coherent ideology and a master plan for national development but was regarded as the most dangerous customer by both the departing colonial masters and their local inheritors. The party was to suffer savage persecution.

    For Nigeria’s ancient and modern power-masters, ideology does not matter and neither does a master plan or even democracy. But as we have been taught in school, this is also an ideology and a default master plan , a modern manual for political and economic bankruptcy and a cover for anti-democratic gaming. Famously, General Obasanjo, the superintending military Caesar of the first transition, rumbled that it was not always the case that the best man would win a political contest.

    Up till that point, the relationship between Awo and the military establishment had been wary and cagey. Despite the admiration of many ranking officers for his sterling personal qualities, the dominant military establishment viewed the Ikenne titan as a dangerous customer and a threat to their collective aspiration which they equated with national stability and order.

    In fairness to Obasanjo, he had tried to help the old man broaden his national base and appeal by transferring him from the chancellorship of the then University of Ife to Ahmadu Bello University. But in all his political career, the late philosopher-politician had fought against the homogenization of the Nigerian ruling class which was not based on principles and shared ideals. It was a non-starter. An earlier warm and cosy relationship with the urbane and affable Governor Robert Adeyinka Adebayo had ended in a public spat over the Agbekoya uprising.

    Chief Awolowo repeatedly insisted during his epic campaigns that he was not interested in probing the military as an institution. It was the wise thing to say. But as the heat of political commotion got to him, the old man issued a tense clarification. While he was not interested in probing the military as an institution, any departing military officer who wandered into the murky waters of partisan politics would have his background subjected to “searching scrutiny”. It was the shortest and sharpest political suicide note in post-colonial history. It led to a frantic and messy exit for the military through a legal legerdemain of dubious mathematical provenance.

    With General Babangida’s permanent transition, we got to the realm of political football with neither fixed goalposts nor fixed time. Injury time began immediately after the referee’s whistle. The game ended abruptly after an angry crowd invaded the pitch. The umpire lost his empire and almost his life. Babangida had famously quipped that while he did not know who would succeed him, he knew who would not. It became a self-fulfilling anti-democratic prophesy. Babangida was forced to hand over as a holding device—or is it Holdings device?— to a colourless interim contraption. Three months after, the military dropped all pretences and swept back to power.

    It is this anti-democratic gaming that is the basis, genesis and nemesis of the Fourth Republic. In a supreme instance of irony, when General Obasanjo collected back power in !999 from General Abubakar, he was doing so from the parade ground commander who bade him farewell as a departing military head of state twenty years earlier. But no two historical conjunctures are similar. Obasanjo’s erstwhile military subordinates were ceding power to him based on a constitution he himself admitted he had not seen up till that moment.

    In the event, the “constitution” turned out as an explosive-laden device; a patchwork of incoherent rambling that vouches for the people without the people and with the sole aim of indemnifying the departing military against loss and loss of face. Fronting for this historic fraud as usual is a grand coalition of “big” people from all over the national spectrum, a coalition of contraries without any shared notions or beliefs except a shared obsession for capturing power for the sake of loot.

    But it must be obvious to even a political fool that you cannot continue to gourmandize on the national cake without baking something in return. Both the cake and the nation will disappear one day. In its classical incarnation, the nation-state paradigm was designed as a wealth and cake-creating machine meant to liberate humanity from the throes of feudal servitude and the realm of feral necessity where people are not better than foraging animals. As it is evident in Jonathan’s tragic presidency, the “turn by turn solution” is no solution because it is based on preferment without principles and eating without first sweating.

    As we can see, the PDP is a victim of its own provenance and genesis. Its implosion is almost inevitable. As it is today, it is like a sealed pool of barracudas that have sniffed blood. We must pity the poor man from Otueke who does not seem to comprehend the Leviathan nature of the forces ranged against him. If the PDP implodes without a clear alternative, then it is going to be a national catastrophe of unimaginable magnitude. Stateless Somali would be a child’s play.

    To our beleaguered compatriots, it should be clear that much as this is a crisis of party formation and democratization, it is also a fundamental crisis of nationhood. But if we get the crisis of party formation and democratization off our back, we may find ourselves in an advantageous position to resolve the crisis of nationhood. What is needed now is a broad-based national movement of all known agencies of peaceful change which will come up with a blueprint for national emancipation and act as a countervailing force to a failing and flailing PDP. If Jonathan wants to aid the process and retain a measure of the initiative, then he should urgently set in motion the mechanism for the convocation of an Emergency National Summit that will take a critical look at Nigeria since 1914.

  • Farmer Oaks versus Farmer Hoax

    Farmer Oaks versus Farmer Hoax

    It is far from the madding crowd of Wadata Plaza, the PDP’s intrigue-soaked headquarters. For the umpteenth time, it is meet to alert fellow countrymen —as they say about the ease with which superior reality trumps and trounces outlandish fiction in Nigeria. Even the most accomplished novelist must now shiver in reverence about how actual reality in the country often outstrips the most malarial of imaginative constructs. Nigeria is a great novel perpetually in progress.

    It has been reported that the youthful and bubbling Minister of Agriculture in the latest edition of OFN (Operation Fool Nigerians) has officially countermanded his own permanent secretary, Ibukun Odusote, to insist that there was no going back on spending 60 billion naira to procure mobile phones for farmers. Phew, what a phoney racket!!! How a supposedly tested technocrat could find himself embroiled in this seamy scam remains one of the great twists of an engrossing novel. In the past, it was fertilizers that fertilized unconscionable looting, now the World Bank wonk and policy whizz kid has introduced his own Mobile Banking. Farmer Hoax finally meets Farmer Oaks.

    Ever heard of Gabriel Oaks? If you haven’t you are not likely to have heard of Thomas Hardy. Hardy was one of the greatest novelists of all time. In the glorious sixties, his classic novels such as Far From the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure and The Mayor of Casterbridge constituted the staple fare of those tortuous O and A level exams. Farmer Oaks was the protagonist of Far From the Madding Crowd. It was a riveting tale of roiling passion and unrequited love. Oaks was a man of pious virtues, uncommon nobility and sturdy integrity. In a moment of trusting stupidity, he allowed a knave shepherd to run his entire flock over the cliff. Poverty and penury became his lot.

    We must watch how reality abuses fiction. In the nineteenth century, Honore de Balzac, the great French novelist, was so stunned by the outlandish and improbable reality of French society that he simply appointed himself a Social Secretary who would record happenings for posterity without any embellishment. In the end, Balzac himself could no longer distinguish between reality and fiction. On his deathbed, the great man called out for a certain Dr Banchioc as the only physician capable of saving him. “Call me Banchioc!! Only Banchioc can save me now!!” the novelist screamed.

    The great snag was that there was no such living doctor. Banchioc was one of Balzac’s own great fictional creations. And there the matter rested. But so too did the great novelist. As the Yoruba will say, a farmer who planted a hundred tubers but who claims to have planted two hundred must eat his fictional yam after consuming his real harvest. Can any rural farmer forward the telephone number of the honorable minister? Agrarian communication, my foot.

     

     

  • Victor Dolores

    Victor Dolores

    (How the Sad Tropics reclaimed their own)

    It was bound to come. The ultimate rebuff had a ring of inevitability about it. The first claim lacked scientific validity or empirical validation. It was a spoof, designed perhaps to absolve contemporary western consciousness of the blame for the monumental fiasco that Africa in general and Nigeria in particular had turned out to be.

    We are of course talking about the report a few years back which placed Nigerians as the happiest people on earth. Surely, something did not add up. This was probably a new phase of globalisation and its neo-colonial siege against the rest of humanity.

    And yet amidst all the doubts and disbelief, there was the nagging suspicion that there was some core truth to the claim. When you meet a truly happy and contented Nigerian, despite the historic debris of collapsed hopes and expectations around him, it was the happiness and heartfelt contentment based on sound philosophical conviction rather than the naïve imbecility traditionally associated with innocent humans just emerging from the Stone Age.

    Are these people perpetual gluttons for sadistic punishment? Are we simply incapable of the prodigious exertions of citizenship that is the hallmark of the truly modern society? Or are we products of a lost civilisation marked by innocence and sweet natured compliance with horrendous adversities? And yet, stories abound in the past of stirring and heroic revolts against emperors, tyrants and sundry tormentors of their people. Were those old folks truly our ancestors or some lost tribes of the Ark?

    We can now report that the claim about happy Nigerians has suffered a remarkable double sucker combination. Their swiftness and devastating import suggest that the bankrupt political elite that have ruled Nigeria since independence may be running short of mystical voodoo statistics to shore up their inglorious hegemony. Additionally, it may suggest a coming re-colonisation in some form and the fact that our ruling elite may no longer have some metropolitan shelters to run to after blitzing their own countries.

    While this may not totally absolve the west of its historic complicity in the African tragedy, it may go a long way in setting a template for the resolution of the crisis. If you do not bury a dead man because of his family, you will have to bury him for the health hazards his corpse constitute. Some nations are becoming a menace to global health. Unfortunately, most of them are in Africa and Asia.

    The first sign that the myth of the happy Nigerian was about to be clinically and scientifically exploded came a few weeks back. Using globally verifiable indices, the report of The Economist Intelligence Unit indicated that of eighty sampled societies, Nigeria was about the worst place to be born in the year of our lord 2013. Coming swiftly on its heels is the latest Forbes’ ranking which indicated that among global nation-states, Nigeria is the 20th saddest nation on earth.

    Despite its stupendous oil wealth, or perhaps because of it, Nigeria is roiling among other tropical laggards with the preponderance coming from what is known as sub-Saharan Africa. Nigeria is in excellent company among such hell-holes as Central African Republic which clinched the pride of place and the Republic of Congo (2nd), Afghanistan (3rd), Chad (4th), Burundi (6th) followed by Togo, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Angola, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Sudan, and Mozambique..

    Nigeria’s citation among these stricken human habitués is as compelling as it is riveting.” The best and worst, Nigeria ranks 123rd overall on the Legatum Prosperity Index. Decades of corruption have squandered great oil and gas wealth, while new concerns involve sectarian violence.”

    It can be seen from this dire survey that corruption and the Boko Haram scourge leveraged by social cannibalism in other parts of the nation have hobbled Nigeria and turned the nation into a living Hades on earth. The dreams of our founding fathers have turned into a catastrophic nightmare. Yet our rulers are busy squabbling over a dying nation, preoccupied with sham elections which bring neither solace or succour to the distraught and disoriented citizenry. If we deceive ourselves, the international community does not.

    It was said of Mohammed Ali that he used to romanticise and rhapsodize about Africa as the idyllic land of his abducted ancestors. But the infantile illusion fell apart during Ali’s epic slugfest with George Foreman in the old Zaire in 1974. As soon as the great man saw the chaotic zoo that was downtown Kinshasa with its feral denizens, he was said to have knelt down and thanked his maker that his ancestors did not miss the slave galleon.

    Let us get this clear. As we have noted once in this column, appropriating Leo Tolstoy, all happy nations are the same, every unhappy nation is unhappy in its own way. There is a confounding conformity about all happy modern societies. You expect electricity, you expect the transportation system to run smoothly, you expect justice and fair play, you expect your votes to count in periodic elections in which sovereignty returns to the people, you expect security of life and property, you expect adequate health care, decent shelter and good schools for your children. Above all, you expect the machinery of governance to function smoothly and transparently without the clog of corruption and graft.

    It is a wry understatement to assert that post-independence Nigeria has failed its citizens in every material particular. But let us not slander ourselves. There is some architecture in the ruins, as Shakespeare would say. In the old West, Obafemi Awolowo came very came close to the gold benchmark in modern governance, and in the current Republic, there have been some heroic and remarkable stirrings, particularly in the attempt to transform Lagos into a modern megalopolis and the construction boom we are witnessing in a few states.

    But despite these token twitches and in the face of the overwhelming structural failure of the nation which is accelerating into a comprehensive state failure, Nigeria remains a uniquely unhappy nation which must be uniquely tackled by concerned Nigerians. The fundamental problem is that having had Nigeria created for us by colonial interlocutors, the Nigerian political elite have failed to create true Nigerians. Rampart ethnic nationalism is the default product of this failure of visionary imagination and of our inability to forge an organic community from the contending and often mutually contradictory yearnings of pre-colonial nationalities.

    This is why since independence, every ascendant group at the federal level, whether military or civilian, soon degenerates into a tribal caucus or a berserk personality cult with sit-tight rulers who can only be removed after momentous national uprising. But unless Nigeria witnesses this fundamental reinvention which will turn it into a genuine nation rather than a post-colonial plantation for extractive predation, we may have to say a final goodbye to Lord Lugard’s iron cage very soon. It is going to be a messy and chaotic finale indeed.

  • The unbearable lightness of the Nigerian being

    I hate people being happy when they should be unhappy,” Bernard Shaw famously complained. The great Anglo-Irish dramatist would have found a lot that is revolting and distressing about the perpetual happiness of our compatriots. There is an unbearable lightness about contemporary Nigerians, a gushing gaiety of spirit, a light-heartedness that puts a brilliantine gloss on the most tragic of circumstances. You begin to wonder whether any other people on earth could be more custom-made for punishment.

    When a global survey found Nigerians among the happiest lot on earth, everyone thought the poll had been rigged to make us look ridiculous and pathetic. How can people be happy in a hell-hole of unimaginable privation, of idiotic dysfunction and biblical suffering? But it does seem as if the poor chaps knew what they were talking about. Nigerians are as happy as a lark.

    Everywhere you turn, you encounter this sunny and rosy disposition, this remarkable capacity to refine and redefine pain and turn tragedy into a ridiculous farce. There are parties everywhere and every week. The dead are sent off with rousing pomp and panache. The newborn are welcomed with equal pageantry and cynical aplomb. If you cannot stay in your mother’s dark womb, you are signed on to the historical eclipse with remarkable hilarity. Omo tuntun alejo aiye, kaabo ku ewu.

    You are advised to drink to your heart’s content in this world, just in case drinking is prohibited in the next world. You are admonished not to invest in prolonged and protracted gloom because life is too short to be wasted on distracting and unproductive emotions. How long does a man hope to live that will make him procure for himself a dress made of iron?

    Don’t worry about tomorrow because tomorrow will take care of itself and if tomorrow does not take care of itself to hell with tomorrow. What the bird eats, the bird flies with. In any case, if the elephant cannot graze to its heart’s content in the forest, it is a shame on the forest. It is a desiderata of epic self-indulgence.

    Since a fish normally rots from the head, this light-headed frivolity has also infected Nigerian leaders who make fun of the nation’s misery. It can be seen in their tonnage of verbiage and inanities, in their sadistic glee as they watch their victims writhe in epochal agony. Like a snake charmer tormenting and torturing his serpentine wards, Nigerian leaders watch their subjects reel from the disastrous effects of their harebrained policies with relish and a vindictive smirk.

    You ask yourself when enough will really be enough. But you discover that the limit you see is not really the limit. There is some extra-capacity in the fabric to test the science of elasticity. But we all know that when a person with a natural smile is drowning everybody thinks he is smiling. The flailing arms may even be mistaken for a victory sign. The hirsute monkey also sweats but the tangled foliage of follicles absorbs the salty grime.

    In grim despondency, I went in search of the old master. Mourning what he described as the ultimate electoral genocide, he had of late been wearing a black band around his withered wrist in solidarity with the people. I met him this time at Eti-Osa ensconced in an abandoned canoe amidst rotting planks and decaying wooden hovels built on stilts. He eyed me with contempt and weariness.

    “Bros, what are you doing here? Has it come to this?,” I asked him with a sneer.

    “Oh boy, na condition com make crayfish bend oo. This time he be like if say water com pass flour,” he replied with a bitter smile.

    “Are you waiting to receive Yar’Adua?” I asked, openly taunting him.

    “Iya adura ko, baba adura ni. If the boy turns up here, he will end up among the seaweeds over there,” the old man snarled. I started laughing uncontrollably, but the guru was in no mood for such jolly frivolity.

    “Let me tell you something. If this farce stands, if this sacrilege is allowed, then this nation is finished forever. There should be no quibbling about that. Your national anthem will become an anthem of shame and disgrace, generations unborn will curse your memory and this nation will be permanently dishonoured in the comity of civilised countries.”

    “But….” I protested.

    “Just let me finish,” he snapped. “As for me, I know it is over this time around. But if I am to come back to this world let nobody make the mistake of sending me back to you flunkies. I will rather come back a real ape.”

    “Oh bros, but why an ape?” I asked him as he flung out his massive pipe and began to load it with the usual array of prohibited weeds.

    “Because an ape is still within the evolutionary scheme of things and can make much progress, evolutionarily speaking. But in your case, you seem to be out of the evolutionary loop. You are stuck in the middle of nowhere. You seem incapable of making progress as human beings and yet you cannot revert to the original status, so tory com get k-leg, as they say.” He had calmed down considerably and had now recovered his poise and philosophical equanimity. I saw an opportunity to unburden my heart.

    “Bros, what do you think is wrong with us as a people? We seem incapable of progressing politically and socially and yet we are making merry all over the place as if each day is the last day,”I asked with humility and concern. The old man looked at me with sorrow and pity in his eyes. I could glimpse his deep humanity for once. He knocked the tip of his giant pipe against the hulk of the boat with such force that the boat sagged and rocked like an ill-tempered camel.

    “You see, it is the equatorial oven that is to blame. To start with, things grow too quickly and die too quickly here, so there is a sense in which there is the permanence of impermanence, and this spreads panic among the people who are looking forward to some order and stability. Since their excess food rots easily in the tropical heat, your ancestors eventually found a way of turning it into alcohol which in turn led into an orgy of drinking and fornicating. So, in order not to confront the demon of impermanence, in order not to come unhinged, they resort to compulsory and compulsive merry making. That is why there are parties every day and everywhere. Without these parties everybody would have gone mad snarling and raving at each other ,or they would have lapsed into stony depression. So, this is as much a crisis of geography as it is of social order,”the old man ruefully and profoundly noted.

    His bleary eyes had gone misty. There were tears in my own eyes , too. Nobody has put the crisis in such perspective for me before, and I thanked him profusely. The old man was touched and marked by genius despite his eccentricity and madness.

    “When do you think this will end?” I asked as I rose to go.

    “When the equator cools down. Unfortunately by then, this phase of human existence would also have ended.”

     

    (First published in 2007)

  • The life and times of Omo Ekun

    The life and times of Omo Ekun

    Snooper this morning mourns the death late last week of our older friend, elderly sparring partner and progressive provocateur par excellence, Chief Wumi Adegbonmire, a.k.a Omo Ekun, the Asiwaju of Akureland and immaculate disciple of Obafemi Awolowo. He did not suffer political fools lightly, and neither was he interested in the Geneva Convention of political warfare. He took no hostages or political prisoners. In his younger days, when all else failed, he reached for the fistic sledgehammer in rousing encounters which reminded one of Chinua Achebe’s famous Amalinze the cat.

    The cat this time was of the tiger sub-species in all its feline ferocity. Truly enough, this cat did not proclaim its tigritude. It pounced. An unwavering apostle of the Awolowo school of politics and a fanatical foot soldier of the Action Group modernization project, the late chief had no time for political shenanigans or sanctimonious equivocation. He talked straight and shot straight and with him you knew where you stood. This illustrious descendant of illustrious Oyemekun warriors loved the joyous din of political commotion and volcanic affrays. He was a happy warrior.

    With the passing of Chief Wumi Adegbonmire, the progressive camp has lost three illustrious avatars in quick succession towards the end of last year. They are: Adegbonmire, Lam Adesina and Professor Stephen Oladipo Arifalo who came to late and deserving prominence with an outstanding and meticulous history of the Egbe Omo Oduduwa. While Adegbonmire and Lam Adesina came to prominence through their political journalism, Arifalo, also from Akure, remained the quiet scholar supplying intellectual ammunition to the cause. The big, burly, amiable and eternally unflappable Arifalo was in many respects a perfect foil to Omo Ekun, his childhood friend and political soul mate.

    My generation owes a lot to both Lam Adesina and Omo Ekun for helping to define and refine the progressive cause, and for arriving at the political barricades against the feudal establishment very early in the day. Like their illustrious colonial era forbears who gave Lord Lugard and the Whitehall the roasting of their life, the duo were among those who turned journalism into a weapon of political combat against the Nigerian post-colonial state. Their popular columns in the old Nigerian Tribune speak volumes for their courage, tenacity of purpose and unflinching loyalty to a cause.

    No two individual temperaments could be more dissimilar. While Lam was calm and imperturbable, often masking his inner strengths with an inscrutable visage, Adegbonmire was as defiant and daring as they came. Like a supremely confident prizefighter, he often arrived in the ring ahead of the referee, that is if he could abide any. Like the famed Mississippi Mauler, he was not afraid of being hurt as long as he was able to deliver his own explosive packages. It was a classic instance of a dialectical synthesis of opposites. But in the subsequent political sweepstakes, it was the inscrutable Lam who leveraged his gnome-like reticence into a devastating weapon of mob mastery.

    It can be said that out of nobility or sheer indifference, Omo Ekun was more interested in policy formulation and the enunciation of general principles than in the politics of self-advancement so rampart these days. The typical Omo Ekun column was not a stuff for the faint-hearted or the lily-livered. It was brimming with venom and vitriol. But the masses loved this John Wayne journalism. Some unforgettable samplers are “Softly, Softly Gani” which virtually put an end to the iconic lawyer’s early romance with the UPN and “Rimi is a Snake” which tore into the late Kano maverick.

    The most unforgettable memory of Omo Ekun etched forever in snooper’s consciousness was at the eighty six posthumous memorial service for Chief Obafemi Awolowo held at Ikenne 1995. A bemused Chief Abraham Adesanya had accosted him with a beguiling smile. “Omo Ekun, o ma ye ki ire na ti di ekun bayi?” the late Afenifere leader quipped. (The cub of the tiger isn’t it time for you have become a tiger yourself?) Everybody within earshot laughed.

    The jovial atmosphere masked more serious matters. Anybody familiar with the deep and often ambiguous nuances of the Yoruba language and Chief Adesanya’s great mastery of these would know that this statement is both an expression of admiration and a subtle admonition in equal parts. A master of political hostilities himself, the great Afenifere leader would have noticed that a fretting and prancing Omo Ekun was stalking a big game in the political jungle. In this case, it was the arrival of a leading Yoruba traditional ruler at the occasion that had drawn the implacable ire of Omo Ekun. The great tiger got his leader’s gnomic message and all became quiet on the western front.

    But if Chief Adesanya was right in one respect, he was merely quibbling in another. There is as yet no genetic accident apart from early death that could prevent a tiger cub from transforming into a full-blown tiger. These things are set with iron certitude. At that point in time, Omo Ekun had become a full blown tiger who was not afraid of any beast in the political jungle. Yet as a tiger grows into full manhood, it is not its prowess that is in question but its wisdom and judgement.

    The transformation had been steady and relentless and they must form part of the Yoruba contemporary political folklore. In 1965 when the then government of Western Region of Nigeria banned and proscribed The Nigerian Tribune, a bearded and bearish Omo ekun, then an undergraduate of the University of Ibadan, could be seen on the streets of Ibadan openly hawking the banned newspaper with his right hand firmly gripping a glistening machete. It was a daring thing to do, but such was the heroic stuff of which Adegbonmire was made.

    But despite all the heroic exertions and the termination of that inglorious reign of terror, the more things have changed in Nigeria, the more they have remained the same. Every battle has to be painfully fought all over again and at prohibitive human cost. Every ground has to be reclaimed and every advance in national consciousness is swiftly pushed back by agents of retrogression and the uneven keel of national development.

    In early February, 1997, at Ife, snooper met an aging, sixty two year old Omo Ekun in perhaps the deepest trough of despair and despondency . It was a bleak moment. The entire country was reeling from Abacha’s despotic tyranny. And the man was obviously scheming to succeed himself. An underground man in his own fatherland, snooper had slipped from exile into the country to bid his dying mother a final goodbye.

    Snooper had met the great Awoist in drastically diminished circumstances, in a rusty dilapidated book store with its meagre and miserable stock of dog-eared titles. In the intervening thirty two years since his celebrated appearance as a celebrity newspaper vendor, Omo Ekun had graduated, had risen to become an iconic and successful university bookstore manager and a revered member of Awolowo’s inner circle. He had also taken active part in the 1983 uprising against electoral perfidy in his native Ondo state and had been rewarded with a firebombed country house. But this was as close to hell as it could get.

    In the badly ventilated bookshop, the old warrior’eyes lit up with warmth and enthusiasm after he had overcome the initial shock of my dramatic appearance. His defiant body language told me to forget any thought of commiserating with him over the equally dramatic reversal of fortune.

    “I told my children that I would take the bullet in the chest and not at the back, like a coward,” he thundered, the appetite and aptitude for political hostilities apparently undiminished.

    “Chief, kini yi ma rough ooo”, snooper sang, recalling our usual refrain in happier times.

    “Don’t worry. This too will pass. The fool will soon be history. How did you manage to evade the dragnet?” he inquired.

    “That is a story for another day,” snooper intoned.

    “You are a brave boy. Let’s go and eat pounded yam at Ipetumodu,” the great man ordered but snooper politely and firmly declined. A few minutes after, it was time to leave, after snooper had explained his mission in the country, and after the conversation had drifted to a young “progressive” senator who had suddenly decamped to the other side.

    “You see,” Omo Ekun began with a mixture of contempt and bemusement. “I am always suspicious of these young politicians who go about in three piece designer agbada. How can anybody be wearing agbada? What if it comes to immediate battle? Wont they be wrapped up with the nonsense?”

    As usual, the happy warrior was harking back to the sartorial ethos of the Action Group where the tight fitting buba and sokoto assumed the status of a universal uniform and Omo Ekun himself was a great exemplar of the civilian fatigues. With its superior organization and military-like discipline, the Action Group was a classic instance of vertical intellectual integration and horizontal mass-mobilization. The battle cry was permanent vigilance and no one did the “E stand by” war dance better than the late Ganiyu Olawale Dawodu. Watching the sprightly old Gregorian cantering back and forth was pure delight.

    Sadly towards the end, the old cohesion had disappeared and omo Ekun was no longer on the same page with most of his old comrade in arms. The falcon could no longer hear the falconer. The old Afenifere umbrella could no longer hide the deep divisions and schisms within Awolowo’s political household. All that was solid has melted into thin air.

    Their human failings notwithstanding, all these great men speak to the power of sterling leadership and the power of apostolic followership. But more importantly, they speak to the dynamic capacity of visionary ideas to move people and mountain. In the modern society, a person who has not intellectually transformed himself cannot be expected to transform others. This is the tragedy of post-colonial leadership in Africa in general and Nigeria in particular.

    As the crowd of these noble and illustrious men and women begin to rapidly thin out, this column salutes the few remaining titans. But as we yearn for another country, let us be clear in our mind that what Nigeria needs is a new intellectual master class such as was thrown up by the anti-colonial struggle who will furnish the nation with a new master plan. Let us end by quoting Louis Althusser. Only the production of new heroes keeps old heroes alive. May the noble souls of the departed rest in peace.