The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • The Economics of Good Hope

    The Economics of Good Hope

    • How the system corrects itself

    It is another Easter period. The columnist wishes our readers well as the nation journeys through unprecedented economic turbulence and adverse political weather. As distilled in human history and no matter by what name the season is called, this is the season of hope and renewal. Hope springs eternal in the human heart. Without hope and the possibility of renewal, humanity is lost.

    As exampled by the sterling life of Jesus Christ himself, Easter is also the season of charity and compassion and the empathy that goes with it. These are the higher virtues that distinguish humankind from the lower species. Without them, the human society becomes an unlivable animal conflatum with human beasts and other strange carnivores roaming freely and widely in search of their next victim.

      The economics of hope is predicated on the prodigious capacity of human beings as rational Homo Economicus to act in their own enlightened self- interest or to rouse in self-correction when the handshake has gone beyond the elbow. 

       For example, when startling technological advances and disruptive sciences bring about dramatic inequality of political power and its economic configurations across nations, races, classes, gender and religions, other contrary and countervailing forces rise to the occasion to claw back some of the lost ground or bring about some desired parity.

    This is why our contemporary world is in such turmoil as nations, races, classes, religions and even genders square it off in a struggle for equality and self-validation. Any wonder then when it is asserted that this age will be remembered as the epoch when humanity finally lost its idyllic innocence?

      In Gaza, Ukraine, Russia, Myanmar, normally sedate Canada, America, Australia and many postcolonial nations in Africa particularly Nigeria, an explosive mix of national, racial, religious and economic forces are up in arms against each other. As these forces link up in violent confrontation and multi-sector hostilities, it begins to feel as if a new type of global war without symmetry or synchrony is upon humanity. When the cloud has cleared, the world will be created anew.

       This is why in societies where people have been through the worst example of feudal bondage, where they have been subjected to political, economic and spiritual subordination, something always gives eventually no matter how long it takes.  The emancipation of subjugated people does not take forever.

      In some cases, it is visionary and farsighted members of the old oligarchy who lead the charge for reform which makes it far less contentious and conflict-ridden. But when and where the situation is allowed to deteriorate to a point where adversarial classes seize the momentum things can get very nasty and bloodcurdling indeed.

      The originating thesis and title of this piece is not original. It is taken from the December 2021 edition of Prospect, the agenda-setting and cerebral London-based magazine with the same cover title. Why it is being foregrounded in this column almost two and a half years later is as interesting and sobering. It is a story of renewal and hope and is worth retelling on its own merit.

      In December 2020 upon returning to London after a short trip to the US, yours sincerely had stopped over as usual at a famous news retailer at Heathrow Airport to buy the latest newsmagazines to tide one over during the Christmas period. Among these was the magazine, Prospect, a cogitative tavern for intellectual gourmets. It promised to be a big literary feast leavened by quiet meditation and introspection. But it was not to be. The columnist succumbed to the dreaded Covid-19 plague.

      It was quite an irony. At that point in time, the scourge of Covid-19 had significantly abated in many parts of the world except in America where it retained the status of a pandemic rather than an endemic. The dreaded plague still laid its icy claws on America. It was a severely cold early December in New York. With the streets entirely deserted, this magnificent conurbation of humanity felt dreary and eerily unwelcoming; a snow mausoleum of the dead and the dying.

      It was an appropriate punishment for heedless wanderlust, what is known in the northern parts of Nigeria as Sokugo or the wandering disease. One must have succumbed to the disease while aimlessly ambling about the precincts of the hotel in boredom and disorientation. But it did not manifest immediately since one was able to scale the compulsory medical hurdle of passing the Covid-19 test.

      Before then, one had thought of himself as an untouchable phenomenon having earlier in the year survived a grim four-month medical internment in England as the pandemic ravaged and razed the entire world. It was a scene out of the apocalypse, like the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Nothing seemed to be moving.

      London streets were empty and evacuated of humanity giving the impression of some post-human commune in all its grim surreality. It might have been due to hyperactive imagination, but one was convinced of a faint cadaverous smell about, like the sanitized stench of overwhelmed and overfilled morgues. The body froze as the daily news from Nigerian broke the story of luminaries who had succumbed at home. It began to feel like some endgame for the human species.

    It was a memorable moment for humanity which also showcased the human capacity for heroism and empathy. One watched in dreadful silence as television footage showed images of the serving British Prime minister, Boris Johnson, unconscious and fitfully breathing as he was wheeled in to the Emergency Ward.

       Yours sincerely believed he knew the precise moment the dreaded virus struck. It was while taking a stroll around the 153rd Street in Jamaica, Queens. One felt a clump suddenly fastened to the back of the skull like a blind bat in a dark alleyway. But one had shrugged it off as a product of fear and morbid imagining.

      Few days after arriving in London, it was clear that this was no longer something to be shrugged off as the virus kicked in and took strong hold. It was a phenomenal battle between human will and sheer mortality. It began with severe bodily ache and a feverish condition which soon deteriorated into a hallucinatory haze which made it impossible to even doze off. At this point, one began to experience what felt like out of body experiences. Despite all this, one insisted that all was well to all solicitous inquiries.

      The tie-breaker came about the sixth day. With the whole body palpitating and the hands shaking uncontrollably, one had attempted to make a cup of tea for himself. It ended in a fiasco with the whole cup spilling on the floor of the kitchen. While furtively trying to mop up without raising any alarm one felt an overpowering urge to lie peacefully on the floor and one succumbed.

      In what felt like an eternity later, one was roused by the loud cry of our host, our son, who always believed that his father was a cat with a thousand lives.

      “I see, you have been deceiving me about your real condition. I will now call for the ambulance!!” the affrighted young man yelled as he headed for the phone. In a spectacular burst of energy about this equivalent of a death sentence, one had leapt up almost hitting the ceiling of the kitchen.

       “I am not going to the hospital!! Don’t you ever call the ambulance!” I screamed. As every right thinking person knows, it is always the last call for a person over sixty five to be taken to the hospital as a Covid-19 patient in those days. The medical personnel will just put you aside and ply you with enough analgesics for ease of passage to the great beyond.

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      It is a medical tradition known as triage which owes its origins to a Napoleon era military surgeon of the same name. It is like a needs-tested mode of treatment, whereby in circumstances of huge and sudden casualties such as you find in wars, priority of medical attention must be given to younger soldiers who are able to make a quick recovery and return to the battle field rather than fretting over old people who are already on their way out anyway.

      Sounds very nice and comforting to old people, doesn’t it? We must thank the almighty for the surviving traits of communal and communitarian living in Africa which compel us to take care of our old people as well as the poor and needy.

      This may change over time as African postcolonial societies take on a more complex form. We must enjoy it while it lasts. One of the incontestable and unassailable cruelties of the modern capitalist societies is the way old age is faintly criminalized and old people regarded as surplus to requirement. They even steal their gratuities, gratuitously so to say.

      It is a great irony, but suffice it to add that the threat of being taken to hospital was the best treatment one had for covid-19. The balance of forces between human will and man-made adversities dramatically altered in the next few days. Recovery was so swift and irreversible that the following week one was able to stage a dramatic return to Lagos after finally passing the covid-19 test.

       In ending, and this being the season of renewal and regeneration, we must reaffirm our faith and hope in the Economics of good hope and the fact that human society has a capacity for renewal and self-revalidation as a result of the inherent capacity of humankind to make a rational evaluation of their circumstances. When this human capacity is so hobbled by adverse national circumstances such as make rational choices impossible, a society plumbs the depth self-annihilation until a new group emerges.  Happy Easter to all our readers.

  • The sonorous singing of the Senegalese

    The sonorous singing of the Senegalese

    Once again, the beautiful boulevards of Dakar have erupted in rapturous dancing and sonorous singing, the kind of enchanting soul-stirring music for which Senegalese musical prodigies are globally famous. There is cause and justification for the joyous din and national rapture. The people of Senegal have just elected their youngest president ever, a forty four year old former tax inspector who has been in the trenches against the increasingly authoritarian and power-besotted Macky Sall.

       This kind of open conviviality and camaraderie on the streets irrespective of age, gender, class and ethnic affiliations speak to the nature of truly organic nations. It is a humbling and ennobling sight of a nation for itself in motion and sterling action as opposed to a nation in itself hobbled by deep and fundamental contradictions.

      But it is necessary to sound a cautionary note of warning to starry-eyed idealists and our rudderless youths who believe in instant coffee revolutions and ersatz people’s power. The seeds of revolution do not grow on a barren landscape until the soil is fertilized accordingly. This is not the first time the people of Senegal have been involved in a battle of will and wits with recalcitrant rulers. They have been at it for quite some time. Each battle is memorialized in the national museum of remembering and form part of the nation’s heroic saga.

      Let us not race ahead of the narrative. You can rate a purposeful and determined people by the way they treat the great intellectuals of the nation. It is not by accident or sheer coincidence that the grandest and best-appointed boulevard in Dakar is named after Cheikh Anta Diop, one of Africa’s greatest sons ever. So, is their most prestigious university.

      In an epic doctoral dissertation submitted to his university in Paris the like of which has not been seen before or likely to be seen thereafter, Diop bravely and boldly advanced the postulation which was rare at that time that the fundament of western civilization and its scaffolding was none other than the Black civilization of Egypt.

        In the hypocrisy-ridden world of western scholarship and its otiose inanities, this was a sharp suicide note to push at that point in time particularly when the decolonizing movement had not gathered its final momentum. Despite its copious citations and heavy duty cross-referencing, the thesis was resoundingly rejected for its contumely and intellectual temerity .All they ever asked of this self-esteeming fellow from Senegal was to become an evolue or a French black person and every other thing would fall in place.

      In the event, excommunication, exclusion, alienation and stigmatization swiftly followed. But Cheikh Anta Diop was unfazed and undaunted, ready to defend and advance his postulations anywhere and at any time. It was perhaps as a result of the stress and great exertions that the great man succumbed to a massive heart attack at the age of sixty two in 1986.

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      But the Senegalese people never forgot or abandoned their own, honoring him at every turn and lionizing him at every available opportunity. It will be recalled that Leopold Sedar Senghor, the first post-independence president of Senegal and the revered founding father, is also a great African intellectual and philosopher.

      Despite being a minority Christian president in a predominantly Moslem country, Senghor is accorded the status of a secular divinity by his grateful compatriots for ruling them with much wisdom, humaneness and compassion. After leaving office, Senghor retired to a Paris suburb where he was often seen wheeling his own shopping cart with his wife. His successor, the tall, gangling Abdul Diouf, also retired to France after being electorally steamrolled in a popular revolt against the ruling oligarchy.

      In sum, the last three presidents of Senegal have been driven from power by popular protests and people’s power. Macky Sall who was part of the movement to remove Abdoulaye Wade from power received his own comeuppance last Sunday. No other African country has achieved this feat of popular self-assertion. The heroes are the Senegalese people.

  • The Grammar of Political Violence

    The Grammar of Political Violence

    Power struggle in the post-military Polity

    Violence, pure pristine violence, seems to have become the organizing imperative of Nigeria‘s contemporary political culture and the struggle for the allocation of resources.  It is a momentous irony that the departure of the military should be marked by such preposterous violence. But for those who understand the dynamics of history, civil violence often accompanies the subordination of state violence, just as some negativity is inevitable in eradicating negativity.

    There are analysts who contend that this development dates back to the First Republic itself, a storied epoch that they finger as the foundation and originating organogram of the culture of political violence in post-independence Nigeria. As examples, they cite the Tiv uprising against oppression and hegemonic domination and the violent manner by which it was suppressed and the wetie political insurrection in the old west which only ended with the military mutiny of the five majors.

      There was also the case of the mysterious deaths of the first children of leading political figures in the old West. Magistrate Adedapo Aderemi, Ms Omodele Akintola and the brilliant international lawyer, Segun Awolowo, all went to join their makers in mysterious circumstances. These tragic deaths cast a deep pall of gloom on a region already convulsed by violence and arson. There were all kinds of metaphysical insinuations, but we must leave it at that.

    Read Also: El-Rufai’s burdens

    To be sure, the politics of the modern era appears to be violence-suffused, but in a seemingly more structured manner. Both America and India, the two leading liberal democracies in the world in terms of quality and quantity, have suffered a spate of assassinations of their political leaders. Post-independence Pakistan suffered the same fate with the Bhutto politically dynasty bearing the brunt as father, daughter and son went under in a spiral of violence.

    In newly independent Bangladesh, the founding father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, having mentally prepared himself for execution in the hands of the Pakistani leadership, was miraculously reprieved only to be wiped out shortly after independence with almost his entire family by disaffected military officers. His surviving daughter, Sheikh Hasina, has ruled the nation with an iron grip for almost two decades.

    During one of the epic demonstrations which forced President Lyndon Baines Johnson into early retirement rather than reelection, a rogue protester was seen with a huge placard which read: Lee Harvey Oswald, where are you now that we need you? He was directly calling for John Kennedy’s successor to be given the same treatment as his idolized and much adored predecessor.

     In post-Soviet Russia after the era of Boris Yeltsin and his drunken buffooneries, Vladimir Putin, the former KGB apparatchik, has ruled the Russian rump with a combination of repression and wanton cruelty leveraged with prompt assassination. From the old oligarchs, democratic refuseniks up to the recently martyred Alexei Novalny, none of Putin’s fiercest critics has lived to tell the story.

     Ever since the ascendancy of the nation-state paradigm, arms and their bearers have been central to the sanctity and perpetuation of the modern state. Even the Treaty of Westphalia was a consecration and perpetuation of the right of state violence to determine territorial integrity and national identity. The Italian city-states soon found out to their chagrin after they were overwhelmed by superior French artillery.

      They discovered that in the emerging international order, the city-state has had its say and that it is better to hang together than to hang separately. This is why Putin has been able to cock a snook at western hegemony, knowing fully well that if the push comes to a shove, a nuclear confrontation will not determine who is right but who is left. It is also the reason behind Israel’s swashbuckling martial arrogance. Like a mad man, any nation ready to end the human race will always get the right of way.

    But it should also be obvious that too much arms in the hands of the wrong people and too many people bearing arms beyond the surveillance of the state can imperil the coercive capacity of the state and its ability to impose its will on the nation. A state that has lost its monopoly of the instrument of terror is in terminal decline and has lost its fundamental raison d’etre.

       Nigeria’s case is a unique and bizarre mélange of state impairment. You have violence consistently directed against the state and its lawful agents by non-state actors particularly after the demise of military rule. Unfortunately and tragically enough, this is the situation the nation has found itself once again with the murder of some gallant officers and men of the armed forces in the murky creeks of Okuama while on a peace mission.

    The amount of money and resources it takes to train an average lieutenant not to talk of a colonel is prohibitive. For some ragtag band of hoodlums to eliminate these brave officers after subjecting them to grisly torture is an unconscionable and dastardly act which cannot be condoned.

      It is useful to note that the armed forces have been travelling on the road to self-demystification for some time. We will return to this in our summation. Suffice it to note at this point that this is a problem that predates the Tinubu administration.  It is also to be noted that this kind of peace mission has also come under fire from many local commentators. The army should be known for stern professionalism and not quixotic peace missions.

    It is not within the remit of serious forces. An army even on a “peace mission” can only walk softly when it is carrying a heavy stick. Our colonial masters are past masters of this kind of pacification as the surviving natives learnt. Those who killed Captain Moloney in Keffi paid fully for it later in Sokoto in the hands of the no-nonsense Colonel Lugard. This kind of camaraderie with locals can only breed contempt and the collapse of state authority.

       The federal authorities need to move quickly to reassure the nation that the mysterious and almost spontaneous resurgence of mass abductions and kidnapping in the entire north and the recrudescence of banditry and generalized violence in the south after a lull is not a coordinated attempt by some sinister forces of hegemonic domination to undermine and bring to heel a fledgling administration.

     It all looks like a consuming game of political chess otherwise known as the politics of exhaustion or attrition. You wear your opponent down by relentlessly piling up pressure and through a combination of psychological destabilization and political disorientation. If it were to be true that the old landlords of Nigeria who are distressed by the current feeding arrangement are the ones testing Tinubu’s military mettle and capacity to contain engulfing insurgency, then the struggle for allocation of resources has reached an ominous conjuncture.

      Tinubu’s ascendancy represents a fundamental reset of Nigeria’s post-military politics and its old certainties and assumptions. How it plays out is another matter entirely. It is a radical rupture with the immediate past historically if not ideologically. It is the fundamental disruption the starry-eyed adherents of the “obedient” movement were hoping for except that it is not their man who is at the helm of affairs. That would have been a bridge too far.

    The reasons are not far-fetched. Tinubu is the first political thoroughbred to rule Nigeria after the departure of the military. He is not a retired military general. Neither is he related by blood to the old military aristocracy and oligarchy. He can also not be said to be a candidate of one of the dominant members of the old selectorate. He has risen to the presidency through his own steam and by sheer stubborn persistence despite the iron hurdles erected by his own party and its henchmen.

      One never knows what bruised egos and a battered sense of entitlement do to undermine human capacity for rational evaluation. Otherwise, it ought to be clear to the conservative oligarchs bent on subverting and undermining the new administration that Tinubu represents the best prospects of saving them from themselves. Broadly speaking, he is not fundamentally opposed to their economic interests. What he will not allow is for them to think they can bluff and bluster their way with him.

    Meanwhile, rumbling and grumbling in the background is the protocol of Elders who continue to insist that the only way forward is the immediate and wholesale adoption of the 2014 Jonathan Conference even when they know that this is like flagging a red flag before a dominant APC administration. Its core members not only cold-shouldered the conference but have held its resolutions in bitter contempt ever since.

    Unless there is a drastic reconfiguration of the subsisting balance of political forces, this is nothing but mischief-laden political tomfoolery which does not conduce to cobbling together the substantial consensus needed to drive the much needed constitutional makeover of the country.

    In a multi-ethnic country fractured along fundamental fault lines, realpolitik is not about who is right or wrong but who is sober and more adept at elite deal making. We must rediscover the spirit of the Westminster Conference which allowed our founding fathers to overcome their platform inflexibility in order to arrive at a tolerable consensus about the best form of federalism for the nation. 

      Let us get this clear. There can be only one president and Commander­­­- in- Chief at a time. But this is a double-edged sword. It also means that the buck stops at the president’s table. No one else will carry the can. For tactical respite and to ensure the overall success of his administration, the president may need to consult more widely and broadly even when it means a détente and reapproachment with known political adversaries.

    The president should not listen to those who are bent on perpetuating old enmities for the sake of personal advantages. The peremptory and rather desultory manner in which the Oronsaye report was adopted for implementation after lying in the cooler for decades does not show clarity of thought or a deep engagement with emergent realities. There is time for everything. The National Question is an amoebic formation which assumes different guises and disguises at different times.

      We must conclude by returning to the tragedy of the officers and men murdered in cold blood by hoodlums. Our security forces have been overwhelmed before by deranged misfits in possession of commensurate firepower. Nothing happened beyond the summary incineration and complete decimation of their ancestral homesteads. After that everything went back to business as usual. But the danger keeps creeping back.

    The current mishap provides the Tinubu administration the opportunity for a complete and wholesale revamping and reorganization of our armed forces to make them amenable to the emergent realities of asymmetrical warfare which calls for the deployment of fresh thinking and new technologies. The truth is that our armed forces are overexposed, a situation in which familiarity breeds utter contempt.

    In a chilling blast from the past, it will be recalled that one of the reasons cited by the mutinous majors that terminated the First Republic was the deployment of military personnel to quell civil uprising. It is alleged that both Colonel Pam and Colonel Abogo Largema were marked for elimination for their role in suppressing the Tiv uprising.

    There ought to be a buffer force which is well-equipped and technologically sophisticated enough to pick up the faintest adverse rumblings from anywhere in the country. Perhaps this is the time to revisit the idea of a National Guard mooted during the Babangida regime. After much preparation and much money disbursed, the project was summarily liquidated for obvious reasons by General Abacha upon coming to power. The goggled despot could not abide the idea of a rival strike force within the army.

       The putative commander of the National Guard and one of General Babangida’s blue-eyed boys has never recovered from the severe torture he received in the hands of Abacha’s Special Squad. Several decades later, it is both the nation and its armed forces that have been taken hostage.  

  • Feedback

    Feedback

    We have received some very interesting rejoinders to last week pieces on Haiti and Awolowo’s longest goodbye. We publish two of them this morning. The first one is from an elder statesman and icon of the surveying profession in Nigeria, Sir Solomon Jaiye Ojeikere, MFR. The other is from a former student of ours who is now a professor in New York. Happy reading.

    On Haiti and Awo

    The two pieces on Haiti and Awo were educative. Thank you.

    Haiti is a sad story which started in 1804 as brigandage and has apparently continued with perfunctory changes. The US and its halfhearted approach used in Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan will not do. Why has the Haitian problem not been passed on to the United Nations Trusteeship Council?

    Read Also: El-Rufai’s burdens

     On Nigeria and the renewed thinking of fashioning the country like the United States of America, did we not copy their constitution?  Look what the politicians have turned this country into. From the top down to the Local Government level, it is “Food is ready”. Also compare the salaries and allowances of US senators with those of their Nigerian counterparts. What hope do we have for Nigeria to survive?

    Sir Solomon Jaiye Ojeikere, MFR.

    On Haiti and the future of the Black person

    Thanks for this highly informative and insightful masterpiece linking the current misery of the ill-fated people of Haiti to their briefly glorious but essentially horrid history.

    I never thought of Haiti as a nation without a state but as a perpetually beleaguered dysfunctional state wallowing in unremitting woes and stuck in a quagmire of political strife, unutterable poverty, virulent violence, and execrable underdevelopment.

    As aptly described in your piece, things look so grim in Haiti right now. When a nation is in a constant state of flux—-with a thug like Barbecue now holding the desperate, pulverized and pauperized people to ransom—can Haiti ever become a functional state?

    Olatunde Olusesi, PhD. Adjunct Associate Professor, New York University.

  • Haiti and the future of the Black Person

    Haiti and the future of the Black Person

    For the umpteenth time in its chequered history, Haiti has descended into chaos and disorder, a smoldering inferno of confusion fuelled by hate and national disorientation. Port- au- Prince, its grossly misnamed capital, is a haunting scene out of some surreal and apocalyptic novel. In the horrific carnage, charred corpses compete with the incinerated carcasses of animals with people reduced to feral existence roaming listlessly about.

       The situation reminds one of the horrors of Gaza and the circumstances of some postcolonial nations in Africa. But Haiti’s dilemma is much more distressing and fear inducing.  Whereas postcolonial African nations retain a semblance of the colonial state put together by the colonial masters which often allows them to reassemble their scrambled wits and pick up the pieces, Haiti has never been able to boast of a properly functioning state ever since its proclamation as a nation in 1804 by a band of dare-devil former slaves. Haiti can be described as a nation without a state. The reason lies in its storied history.

       The presiding deity or demon of Haiti’s current House of Horrors is a man named Jimmy Cherizier, aka Barbecue, a former cop turned street strongman, who has about eighty percent of the capital under his unruly writ. With the well-armed thugs, Barbecue had already occupied the main airport which had prevented the embattled prime minister Ariel Henry from returning after a peace mission abroad. He became effectively stranded in Puerto Rico.

       Even before the hapless and heedless Ariel Henry announced his resignation during the week effectively handing over his beleaguered country to the international community, Barbecue already had his rifle sight trained on the Presidential Palace. The Haitian Armed Forces were nowhere to be found in all this. Talk of the state withering and evaporating before the might of non-state actors.

       But listen to the hate-filled rant of this former cop and drug-suffused rap and you cannot but conclude that he is on to something. In all likelihood, and any sham election without legitimacy or popular endorsement notwithstanding, Haiti faces another period of occupation by foreign forces which must first try to restore order and normalcy before statehood can be redeemed.  Ever since its proclamation, Haiti has practiced a strange system of fetish autocracy moderated by assassination and occupation.

      The occupation, particularly by the United States, sometimes lasting decades in a stretch, often takes on the hue of colonization by any other name. But since the Americans themselves often boast that they do not do nation-building or engage in state reconstruction, Haiti always reverts to its default setting of an anarchic and stateless anomaly. This is the root of the tragedy that has overtaken post-Saddam Iraq and the swift decapitation of American influence in Afghanistan by the resurgent Taliban after two decades of American occupation and trillions of dollars down the drain.

       It is the Americans themselves who put the economic motivation of their interventions in Haiti in striking perspective. It is immigration control at source, it was claimed. It was in America’s economic self-interest to prevent Haiti spiraling out of control, otherwise it could prove very difficult to prevent the hordes of Haitian refugees swarming and scrambling across the US border.

       The assassination that sparked off the current unrest in Haiti happened in 2021 when its president, Jovenel Moise, was killed by Colombian marauders who came in the dead of the night mainly from the sea. No one has been brought to justice for that dastardly murder. Interestingly enough, a recent report fingered both the outgoing prime-minister and the wife of the late president as being accomplices in the elimination of the president.

       It speaks volumes about the fragility and endemic infirmity of the Haitian state if a ragtag force could so easily overwhelm the presidential guard and eliminate the nation’s foremost citizen without any repercussions. The nation has not known any peace ever since as armed thugs and non-state social misfits rose to the occasion making the country ungovernable.

      Unable and unwilling to organize any proper election, Henry stalled and stonewalled hoping to profit from the misery of his people. As he did, Barbecue expanded his writ and dominion over the beleaguered nation by sacking the main prisons and making life impossible for everybody. The consequences of this contrived stalemate came when Ariel Henry discovered that he could not return to the country he had left in ruins.

      Haiti’s problem can be likened to the plight of the lame fellow who asked people not to judge him by the state of the misaligned luggage he was carrying but by the circumstances of his misshapen limbs. The problem is more fundamental. There is no foundation all the way down the line.  Toussaint L’Ouverture and his conspirators faced overwhelming odds.

    Despite their bravery and unusual courage, the military genius that saw them defeat their colonial oppressors in the first pitched confrontation between an army made of black people against their imperialist oppressors, was not nearly enough. They lacked the bureaucratic knowledge, the philosophical wherewithal and the scientific nous to run a modern government and its state apparatus.

       They could not have learnt this in the forest redoubt they fled to in order to escape the colonial noose. They would have been too preoccupied with how to ward off the encircling predators. But despite their tribulations, they managed to forge a common identity among the disparate groups of runaway slaves. It was an identity forged in suffering and uncommon struggle.

      It was the birth of a great African nation out of Africa. Haiti was without any doubt the first authentic Black nation. But without any commensurate state, it wasn’t going anywhere. Unable to master the rudiment of scientific modernity either in statecraft or societal development, the new nation quickly dissolved into a self-disabling compendium of sorcery, mumbo-jumbo and Black magic which has remained its organizing imperative till date.

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       This is not to talk of the naval blockade, the crippling war reparation imposed by France and the sheer hostility which forbade shared experiences. The new nation was cut adrift from birth unable to enjoy the economic and political freedom that ought to go with its military freedom. This is what Toussaint meant when he passionately pleaded with his French tormentors and subsequent abductors not to substitute the aristocracy of class they have just violently dismantled at home with the aristocracy of race abroad.

      But it fell on deaf ears. The new French revolutionary victors would have baulked at the thought and contumely of it all. How could former slaves demand equality from their masters? They had not even forgiven them for their old infractions of thinking they were free. The alarm bell started ringing in the new American Republic of Jefferson and co. If people they had classified as sub-humans without any right to vote could constitute themselves into a new nation, then all was not well with the new world.

       The Haitian tragedy can now be placed in its proper universal perspective. It is a colonial tragedy on a monumental scale. It is not a question of whether Africans can do the modern state or the modern nation but whether in the last six hundred years, they have been allowed to develop along their own steam and initiative. A modern and scientifically primed and inquisitive Haiti would have been a magnetizing hub, a rallying Mecca, for subsequent African nations created by colonial fiat.

    In the circumstances, it is now Haiti that is more in need of salvation and civilization than desperately ailing African nations. In a replay of the biblical paradox, Haiti, the first African nation, has become the last just as Portugal, the first truly modern nation-state, has become the least developed European nation.  Yet as the founding continent and originating home of all humanity, Africa has a profound capacity to produce regenerative genes which cannot be found anywhere else.

      This is why the lacklustre performance of some of the continent’s prodigiously endowed nations continues to be a catastrophe for the Black race. The wager is that a few of these countries are destined for global stardom once they get their act together. How and when that African renaissance will come about, whether it will be by peaceful evolution or after some epic transformative showdown, remains a subject of historical conjectures.

     As for the hapless Haitians, it is obvious that they have been victims of a double jeopardy. Having been abducted from their original African homestead, they were abandoned in the middle of nowhere like orphans for having the temerity to ask for freedom. The foul and fetid smell of the open sewers, the suppurating slums, the turgid hens, the fearsome cats and the wild goats that roam their anarchic capital right in the heart of western civilization will constitute an open sore of humanity for a long time to come.

  • Awo and the longest goodbye….

    Awo and the longest goodbye….

    While we are still on the plight of a historic and heroic people, it is meet to dwell on the plight of the greatest conglomeration of Black people. History is a cruel and unforgiving taskmaster and the more you try to ignore it, the more it refuses to ignore you.  Almost forty years after what was mortal of him was laid to rest, the man behind the horn-rimmed glasses continues to haunt the nation with his icy stare and the hint of sardonic bemusement.

    Exactly twenty years ago on March 15, 2004, yours sincerely journeyed from his base in America to deliver the inaugural Afenifere Lecture to an enraptured audience. It was titled, Awolowo and the Longest Goodbye. Penultimate Wednesday, it was obvious that the spirit of the old titan from Ikenne was still very much around as the Awolowo Foundation gave its prestigious Leadership prize to Akinwumi Adesina. It has been, and remains till date, the longest goodbye in postcolonial Africa.

      It will be recalled that in his last interview, the late sage, a man of occult and oracular wisdom with a very deep understanding of the mysteries and mysticisms of historical occurrences, had informed his interviewer that were he to come back in thirty years and Nigeria were still a cesspit of corruption and political malfeasance, he would be found at the head of a stone-throwing mob. 

    No one is sure whether Awolowo, thirty seven years after his heroic recall, has not berthed in Nigeria again. An ominous cloud is gathering in the horizon. Corruption and legislative larceny seem to have gathered a fresh and irreversible momentum. There is a foul and nasty distemper everywhere, accompanied by a resurgence of ethnic baiting and political gaming which feeds on the mismanagement of diversities.

    Once again spurred on by a delinquent political class, Nigeria is in danger of dissolving into its ethnic particularities as the north spirals out of control from mass abduction and radical predation. The hegemonic party appears lost and totally incapable of either providing stirring political leadership or reining in its openly errant members.

    The internal mechanisms for party coherence and for maintaining and instilling party discipline appear to have collapsed. To be certain, the major opposition parties are in an even worse shape, unable to provide the nation with quality alternative policies or conduct themselves with the honour and discipline required of serious political parties.

       What will Awo think of this radical devaluation of politics and ideological meltdown which according to sages and soothsayers are usually the harbingers of far more ominous developments? The answer could be found by decoding the mixed signals emanating from the banquet hall of the glitzy Intercontinental Hotel where Adesina’s investiture took place penultimate Wednesday.

     It was indeed a gathering of the best and brightest of the land; a moveable feast of class and political panache such as befitting the memory of the greatest African organizer of all time. Everything, including the sitting arrangement, was organized with precision and meticulous attention to details. The melodious music wafting unobtrusively in the background was as sober as it was soul-stirring, reminding one of happier and more benign times in this land.

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     Yours sincerely chuckled to himself as some bounders whose sense of unearned importance has become a social menace in this country, were put in their place either by a disobliging stare, a courteous frown or by more direct and brisk restraining. The Yoruba have a saying that it was only the God of yesteryears that could be slow in effecting retribution and swift restitution.

       Hesitant and a shade timorous in dumping their political and traditional leaders probably because of their social and emotional investment in them, the Yoruba political multitude can nevertheless be prompt and punitively proactive in their hostilities and disavowal of errant aspirants to political nobility. From the acerbic comments emanating from where one sat about so many men of yesterday struggling for recognition and relevance which never came, one can only shudder in premonition.

      There is nothing anybody or any society for that matter can do about an idea whose time has come. When Adesina mooted the idea during his lecture that the solution to Nigeria’s restructuring impasse might lie in reconfiguring the nation into a United States of Nigeria, the heart warmed up instantly. About twelve years ago when the idea was pushed in this column using exactly the same words, an irate reader shot back accusing the columnist of harbouring treasonable thoughts. It is the treason of ideas whose momentum can no longer be halted.

    Awo was made to pay a stiff price for his intellectual temerity. But that we are still discussing how to reconfigure Nigeria almost eighty years after the avatar wrote The Path to Nigeria’s Freedom shows why it will be impossible to shake off the man behind the horn-rimmed glasses until we do the needful. It is the longest goodbye indeed.

  • On the death of Alexei Navalny

    On the death of Alexei Navalny

    The struggle between the state and prominent dissidents valiantly trying to reset the code of humane conduct dates back to antiquity and beyond. Universal history is replete with this. More often than not, the struggle ends in disgrace, defeat and death for the protagonist. But in the process of this grisly ritual of noble self-sacrifice, a society manages to redefine and reimagine itself, if not immediately but eventually.

       When Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher, consented to drinking the hemlock as demanded by the Greek state, he was attempting to solve a universal riddle for humankind. By taking his own life when he knew that the charge of corrupting youths was at best laughable and indefensible, Socrates heroically reaffirmed his right to individual liberty.

     But by acceding to the right of the state over the life of the individual, Socrates, the quintessential Greek patriot, was also reaffirming the supremacy and superiority of the state over personal rights. The state can only be humanized and made amenable to the yearnings of the people who have surrendered their rights in exchange for security and protection from ever present danger. To do otherwise is to open the floodgate to anarchy and chaos.

      The death of Alexei Navalny in an icy Siberian prison last week was a globally expected event whose precise timing no one could divine. He had escaped once, with only prompt international attention saving his life after being massively poisoned. But it was obvious that as long as the globally admired and incredibly brave Russian oppositionist stuck to his gun about a Russia rid of Vladimir Putin and his repressive police state, something was bound to give.

       The end came in a rather unstoried manner but laced with poignant ironies. Although subsequently denied by the Russian authorities, Alexei Navalny was part of an international deal for a high level prisoner swap which would have seen the prominent dissident released into exile, most probably a western country. The deal was virtually concluded when the Russian authorities developed jitters. They quickly operationalized the final solution. Navalny paid with his life.

      Putin and his closet advisors must have come to the sudden realization that to have a Navalny who remained unyielding and unbreakable in a Soviet era slaughterhouse in Siberia roaming freely in the west and with superpower acquiescence was going to be a bridge too far. With massive western support, his mere presence could galvanize internal and external opposition to Putin’s reign of terror and put paid to the dominion of the old Soviet spymaster.

      It would have occurred to Putin who has mastered his history very well that revolutions and revolutionists have always been imported to Russia from abroad and from exile. Lenin, Trotsky and co descended on the home country at the appointed hour, and in a sealed train too. Anybody who has read Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station would appreciate what is meant.

         The most interesting and arguably the most ironic thing about liberal democracy is that protests and demonstrations on the streets are often more potent and successful in nudging nations towards changes rather than parliamentary proceedings or brisk exchanges on the capitol.

     In most cases, such protests serve as coded messages to the ruling classes that the balance of forces has been altered or about to be altered. They are like huge boulders of human resolve which gathers strength and momentum as time elapses. The unassailable strength of old-type liberal democracy lies in the fact the more visionary and forward-looking members of the ruling classes keep their ears close to the ground and are often at the vanguard of urgent reforms before the rumblings reach the hallowed sanctuary of power and privileges.

      The long-drawn campaigns for universal suffragette in Great Britain and the heroic civil rights movements in America to enforce the rights of minorities and repeal discriminations based on gender are classic examples of the streets dictating the pace of humanization for the state.

      This is not to talk of the iconic French Revolution or the seismic disruptions unleashed by the Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions which radically altered global power relations forever. All these momentous upheavals are instances of the ordinary people who bear the brunt of incompetence and cruel governance rising as one huge multitude to say enough is enough in an act of stunning defiance combining self-help with self-empowerment. 

       The tragedy of newer-type liberal democracy such as we find in postcolonial Africa is that rather than view independence as a new beginning away from the colonial mess they met on ground, the ascendant indigenous classes simply incorporated the old order into a new and more vicious form of autocratic and authoritarian misrule which makes tyranny and despotic rule very “natural”.

      When these countries are transiting from despotic military rule into a supposedly new order, the victorious groups simply transfer the infrastructure of receding tyranny into a civilian template of corrupt and unaccountable rule which sometimes as we find in contemporary Nigeria make the ignorant and disoriented masses yearn for a return of military rule in all its berserk obscenities.

      In twenty five years of post-military civil rule, Nigerians have not been able to recall a single lawmaker they thought they elected. The multi-ethnic and multi-cultural nature of this conglomeration of contraries combined with administrative malfeasance make it virtually impossible for the ruling elite to arrive at a consensus even on parliamentary errancy and misconduct.

      This is quite unlike what obtains in the older liberal democracies where retribution for parliamentary misconduct is swift and marked by a bipartisan urgency. A recent case in point is how Boris Johnson, the former British Premier, an amoral rogue if you ever saw one, was eased out of power and parliament despite his shambolic preening and prancing.

      Yet it should now be obvious even to the blind that an urgent consensus on political errancy and misdemeanor will have to be found by the Nigerian ruling class. Otherwise, the cataclysmic events rumbling all over suggest that a confederal arrangement will be imposed on the nation in order to save it from itself.

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      For the past twenty five years, Nigerians from all walks of life have been complaining, bitterly and loudly, about the 1999 Constitution which they dismissed as a sham and a fraud imposed on the nation by military fiat. It was a crassly unrepresentative document whose obtuse arrogance was revealed in the opening howler:” We the people”. Not even the succeeding civilian president knew anything about the eponymous “people”. The near unanimity of the protestations shows that all is not well.

      But for nations, it is always morning on creation day. A subsisting constitution is never a perfect document. It is always an accurate reflection of the forces at play. A constitution is as good as the constituents, particularly the hegemonic forces at play.

    The 1999 constitution is a reflection and product of an unspoken collaboration between an emergent pan-Nigerian coalition of old hegemonic forces and an opposition steamrolled into benign compliance by weariness and sheer struggle fatigue. There were no protests on the day Obasanjo took over power. All was quiet on the western front, as they say.

         Yet there were early warning signals. In a commissioned article for African Affairs, titled: Nigeria: A Restoration Drama, published in June 1999, this writer dismissed the new constitution among other things as “a patchwork of incoherent rambling; the raw material for future instability and national unease. The main concern of its authors–and doctors– seemed to have been how to indemnify the military against loss of face and ill-gotten gains and to prevent a constitutional backlash against several decades of repressive misrule. Obasanjo appears to have his work cut out for him.”

      In its storied existence, a nation must go through several phases. The constitution is the living proof of national existence. But it is not a once and for all time certification of good health. There are phases of national existence that are better quietly forgotten and forgiven. Nigerians will never forget military rule for its great infrastructural drive, its high minded struggle to keep the nation together and its failed attempt at a forcible homogenization of its elite as if a nation is a huge military cantonment.

       But the constitution they have bequeathed the nation is not fit for purpose, if it ever was. There is a horrid mismatch between their hoary authoritarian postulations and the roiling cauldron of ethnic and religious contraries on ground; between the yearnings of Nigerians for an organic and cohesive nation forged from manageable diversities and the rumbling volcano of countervailing forces that greet us everywhere nowadays. This is the time Nigeria needs its thinking First Eleven.

       In rounding up, let us see how things have fared in the Russia that Alexei Novalny has left behind. If Novalny had thought that his death and martyrdom would galvanize his country against Vladimir Putin’s repressive rule, it was a horrible mistake. But the capacity for visionary daydreaming is an integral part of the martyr’s mantra and messianic make-belief. In his grave, Novalny’s heart ought to have warmed at the sight of many brave women and young Russians daring the security forces to do their worst at his funeral. It was a heroic send forth for a noble hero.

       The fact remains however that despite their occasional chafing and baulking at his authoritarian cruelties, majority of Russians see the former KGB spymaster as a pan-Slavic hero who has rescued their nation from a western civilization they view with such visceral hatred and contempt.

      Strangely enough, and like Putin, many Russians hold the west responsible for the collapse of their two empires: the old Russian empire and the Soviet Union whose fall Putin has described as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe to have befallen his people in modern times. Some Russian hyper-nationalists have always held the belief that it is when the Russian leadership mimic and ape the west that they have courted the greatest disasters in their history.

      So much then for liberal democracy that has found a barren land in in Russia. Like all people, there is an antinomy in the heart of the modern Russian character. Like their ancient serfs and Oblomov forebears, they have a love-hate relation with authority. After the botched revolution of 1905, it was found that most of the people massacred by the secret police known as OGPU were carrying the emblematic totems of the same Tsar they were protesting against inside their pocket.

      It was a bizarre ritual of self-affirmation and surrender. In all likelihood, and given this background, Putin is likely to remain a hero of the Russian people after his despotic excesses have been dealt with. And so will Alexei Navalny whose heroic exertions and self-sacrifice will continue to resonate in the lore of all oppressed people. In this case, recognition abroad will come before rehabilitation at home.

  • And now the enfant terrible trumps l’Etat terrible

    And now the enfant terrible trumps l’Etat terrible

    Oh dear, oh dear, there can never be a dull moment in Nigeria, no matter the tragedies and tribulations. There is always room for some absurdist drama or some life sketches straight out of Eugene Ionesco’s Theatre of Chaos. This is perhaps what is responsible for the strange resilience of Nigerians and their baffling staying power, not to talk of the sheer psychological stamina. 

       Has anybody seen a video of newly minted lawyers, Barrister Omoyele Sowore and friend and comrade in arms, Barrister Deji Adeyanju, taking time off to exchange verbal howitzers with some delinquent staff of the EFCC as the duo casually strolled to the venue of their investiture?  Having taken the worse of the exchange and some memorable body blows, the EFCC retreated to their den with Sowore in hot pursuit. It is the crime buster that seemed to have gone bust.

       It is only in Nigeria that you can have this kind of bizarre entertainment, with the hunter rapidly becoming the hunted. It is not a reassuring sight to see EFCC officials whining like a toddler after some severe spanking. In a hint of unworthy melodrama,  one or two of the EFFC squad were even hinting of being subjected to persecution by Sowore and his accomplice.

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      This is as maudlin and mawkish as it can get. The organization ought to have known better than grasping at the tail of a bruised tiger like the veteran and battle-tested civil rights campaigner. Coming at a time when the public had almost lost total confidence in the capacity of the organization to effect its originating mandate but for the recent stirring performance of its new leadership, this can only be an exercise in further self de-marketing and demystification. If its officers are politically savvy and well-trained enough, they ought to have avoided a public brawl which could only have ended in utter tragedy had the situation deteriorated further.

       But there is some silver lining in every situation however terrible. First of all, congratulations are in order. It has taken a nasty spat to draw attention to the fact that while he was undergoing a deliberately convoluted trial for a treasonable offence, the irrepressible campaigner still had time and the concentration to finish his legal studies. This is a worthy tribute to the dogged and indomitable spirit of the average Nigeria. We urge Mr Sowore to take advantage of his status as a new member of the Nigerian bar. 

     Let us end with a parody of a famous song by an immortal Nigerian musical prodigy that Sowore himself holds in highest esteem. It was in honour of another irrepressible contrarian and prodigious gadfly, Kanmi Isola-Osobu, aka the guru.

    Luku lawyer, he no dey run ooo

    Luku lawyer, he no dey run ooo.

  • To the coy lady, go forth in peace

    To the coy lady, go forth in peace

    We take leave of the toxic and abrasive world of politics this morning to pay some unusual compliments. Constantly subjecting its customers to heavy-duty artillery bombardments, the column has little time left for niceties and polite anodyne.

      But the world is not about big issues alone. There are many “small” issues that are far more important than the “big” issues, particularly where a civilized and orderly society is concerned. And there are times when the small issue is actually the big issue. This is the whole point about The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy’s prize-winning novel.

      But then how do you begin to write a personal obituary about a stranger—in the fullest grammatical import of that word—and someone you never met? But we live in interesting and exciting times, a world in which only the thinnest strand separates living and dying. One moment someone is here and the next moment you hear they are gone, forever, never to be seen again on this side of the grim borderless continuum.

    The Yoruba put it with memorable urgency. The leg of the spectator is entangled with the masquerade’s limb and it is no longer possible to separate the residents of the earth from the denizens of the other world. How many times has one glimpsed in the crowd what looked like an old friend only to remember as one was about to shout the name that the person had long joined their ancestors?

     There is a cousin of this writer who joined the army at the onset of the civil war. He was known to have fallen during one of the early skirmishes around Obolo Eke. His bosom friend came home to report about his passing with unassailable evidence of his demise. He was deeply mourned while traditional rites to ease his passage were performed.

       A few days after the termination of the war, our man showed up one morning grinning with trademark mischief to the consternation of everybody who almost took to their heels. He had spent the entire war in Biafran captivity. Today, he lives in London and approaching eighty still retains the swag and gait of a field captain of the old Nigerian Army.

       Arguably the most surreal of these tales involved a cherished friend and a most accomplished Nigerian. Almost twenty years ago while the two of us where lounging and casually loitering about in a vast Houston supermall, my friend drew one’s attention to the fleeting image of a woman who just passed and wondered whether she didn’t look like his wife.

     One was absolutely nonplussed by this development. If they were living together, why was he asking the question? It turned out that as part of pre-divorce proceedings the house had been effectively partitioned and walled in. Our friend kept to his side of the Berlin Wall for fear of the law and had not sighted his wife in five years. Such is the surreal nature of the world we live in.

       The column takes it back that this obituary is about a complete stranger, or that the columnist never met the tragically departed, Mrs Yetunde Oladeinde, an accomplished journalist, senior staffer of this newspaper and mentor to many of the younger journalists who joined the Triumphant Procession in the early hours of Monday, 19th February.

      To exaggerate in order to clarify or simplify is a familiar literary stratagem. Our “unofficial” path must have crossed a few times in the hustle and bustle of the ever busy newspaper corridor. We would have bumped into each other in the busy hall or newsroom. But she was never formally introduced. One can faintly recall her at an expanded board meeting with the staff, sitting quietly at the back: demure, dignified and matronly with a hint of upper middle class background.

      One was shocked and devastated when news of her death filtered through late afternoon penultimate Monday. But due to the mad and manic pressures of the time, the news had found its way into the abyss of memory where active information burrow until they are reactivated. It was not until the early hours of last Monday after losing a deadly duel to insomnia that one finally got to the last two pages of The Nation on Sunday and Joke Kujenya’s moving tribute to her fallen friend that remembrance returned.

     It was a tragedy of cumulative errors. The particular series of events that took the late journalist’s life could have been avoided entirely or medically mitigated in a society with a functioning medical system or a minimally proactive health facility. We may think that all this do not matter and that in the long run, one death is just a mere statistic. But in all likelihood the accumulated trauma, the symptoms of collective barbarism, will return to demand their dues.

      From her friend’s record, it could be gleaned that the late journalist was a victim of a medical condition known as Hypoglycemia or Low Blood Glucose. Unlike its Siamese twin, which is the more common High Blood Sugar, Low Blood Glucose is more radically dangerous and life-threatening, leading swiftly to slurred speech, terminal disorientation and general organ collapse.

    Both conditions are not summary death sentences if well-managed through both medication and an amenable life-style. In this columnist’s life time, one has known of two famous professors of medicine who have succumbed to the dreadful ailment, the one a globally recognized medical genius who plied his trade at the old UCH and the other an accomplished and high-flying immensely personable physician at the old OAU, Ife. If our memory serves us well, both left before they turned fifty. What an epic waste!!

      But this was in the late seventies and early eighties. The ailment appears to be better managed nowadays. Nigerians are more health conscious. In this particular instance, adversity appears to be a better teacher than modern medical developments. There are well-known survivors. Many famous Nigerians have lived to tell the story. There is a former Nigerian ruler who has openly and a tad gleefully insisted that he has lived with the condition for almost fifty years.

    Unfortunately, Yetunde Oladeinde has now been added to the sinister statistics, leaving her immediate family of four children, including a medical doctor, and several adopted youngsters to carry on. Everything that could go wrong went wrong that night. She was already feeling unwell when she left for work that Sunday. The glucagon kit for measuring blood glucose packed up the previous Thursday.

      That alone ought to have triggered the alarm bell. By the time Mme Oladeinde returned from work, her condition had considerably deteriorated. Apparently, her sense of dignified suffering and stoic forbearance forbade any self-pitying drama or emotional incontinence. Instead of heading for the nearest health facility, she headed for her bedroom where her son later met her in a pitiable state with blood dripping from the corner of her mouth.

     By the time she was rushed to the nearest hospital in the early hours of the following morning, it was already too late and a bridge too far. Medical staff at the Ifako-Ijaiye General Hospital noted that her eyes had already dilated which suggested complete organ shutdown and clinical death. Valiant attempts at resuscitation came to naught. The woman known to everybody as grandma due to her well-travelled column under the same moniker but also because of her doting matriarchal nature was gone forever.

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      Yetunde left for posterity one enduring and touching irony. The woman everybody called grandma never lived to see any of her own biological grandchild. But through her love, kindness and exemplary sense of duty, she has bequeathed a lasting legacy of affection and devotion to everything that is noble. By dint of heroic perseverance in the face of persistent and unrelenting adversity, she has fired the imagination of many and lit the torch of charity for unborn generations.

      It needs to be added that the deceased was not a school drop-out come to journalism. Impeccably credentialed, she was given the best of education by her middle class parents in the best tradition of the old Nigerian middle class that came into its own at the tail end of colonial rule: elite primary school, famous secondary schools and the University of Lagos from where she graduated in 1989 in English and Literature.

       With this kind of elite background, it was clear from where Yetunde got her poise and matronly presence from. Her father, Cyprian Akinola Francis, was the first African Director of Elder Dempsters Shipping Agency while her mother, Esther Folashade, was a star retailer with the UTC departmental store who was Miss UTC for three consecutive years.

    In ending this tribute, perhaps it needs to be stressed that before our very eyes, the old Nigerian middle class is being decimated by a combination of medical adversities, societal atrocities against excellence and sheer fiscal brutalization in the hands of the Nigerian postcolonial state. Yet no nation or democracy can survive without a solid middle class that acts as a buffer between the filthy rich and the filthy poor. May Yetunde’s soul rest in peace.

  • Baba Lekki solves restructure riddle for the nation

    Baba Lekki solves restructure riddle for the nation

    Apropos of the saying that unhappy nations are not alike in their unhappiness, it is meet to report our finding that all unhappy cooks and drivers are alike. As the Air Force jets pounded the western creeks and impounded the crooks, Okon wore a sad and dejected mien. His illicit oil and “disel” business having evaporated in a fiery bonfire, Okon was a distraught and disconsolate sight to behold. Snooper pressed advantage.

      “Oga Okon how market now?” yours sincerely taunted the crazy boy.

      “Oga, monkey don go market and him never return, oil and gas don become yell and gasp”, the mad boy rejoined with a bitter grin.

       “Alagba, don’t mind the yeye boy. Arepo don become Aorepo. As dem Yoruba people dey say, Adegun don become Adeogun”, Baba Lekki intoned with malicious gusto.

     “Baba at your age, I don tell una make you no follow dem military monkey chop bush”, Okon countered with an irate frown.

     “Ah you see yeye boy? Dem thin wey drive monkey come climb palm tree, him still dey wait for monkey below”, Baba Lekki sneered.

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      “You see dem Yoruba people?” Okon screamed. “You dey steal our oil blocks and when we come do our own oil block for Arepo, katakata come burst. Dem plane come dey spit fire. No be dem reason why we say make dem restructure dem useless kontri be dis?” Okon bitterly lamented.

      “Ha Okon restructure ke? Wetin you dey restructure?  You don join dem foolish bukuru people? You see when dem Ibrahim Baba Igida say him wan do adjustment for economy structure, I come ask am wey dem structure him wan adjust. If structure no dey, so wetin you wan restructure?. Dat one na intellectual misnomer and dem vulcanizer’s hot air. Dem thing to do na to destructure, make dem remove dem no-structure nonsense and replace am patapata.” The old contrarian volunteered.

    “Baba, if una sabi dis much grammar, why you no dey practice dem law for court?” Okon snorted.

    “Foolish boy, I don tell you say dem deport me from dem London Inn for two fighting. I come trek to Las Palmas. Each time I go court and I tell dem say I get am for Inter BL with dem LL. B in view dem dey ask police make dem finish me….”

      It was at this point that some hooded men with the insignia of a dreaded local militia campaigning for self-determination came in looking for Okon. The crazy boy vamoosed like a walnut spirit.