The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

And Baba Lekki agrees to disagree with Kongi

Dear readers what you have just read was actually published eight years ago. Last Thursday at the fiftieth anniversary of Punch newspaper group after Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, delivered his sledgehammer statement that it is nations impeding the progress humanity that should be destroyed so that the human race can survive, a swarm of reporters besieged Baba Lekki who was hiding in a disused facility adjacent to the lecture hall.

“ Baba, as dem Nobel Lawrence don say make dem kukuma kaput Kontri wetin you say to dat?” one of them demanded.

   “He didn’t say that. You see this is the problem with you illiterate journalists. One of you was even asking me whether I am Tosh Benson. God punish his mama for me. You see Kongi is my friend. But I will put it differently. Humanity has survived all the iron jackets and encumbrances we have been forced to wear in the name of progress and state engineering. Whenever these artificial constructs reach the limit of their possibility as vehicles of human emancipation and empowerment, they cease to have the right to exist. This is what has happened to old kingdoms, fiefdoms, empires, principalities and nations. The nation-state paradigm is six hundred years old and Nigeria only a century. When the decibel of human suffering and misery reaches a particular crescendo, not even the lame will need any persuasion to get up”, the old man rued tearfully as he began to walk away in sad, measured steps.

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“Baba, he come be as if nail don bend and hammer don scatter. So who killed dem Dele Giwa man?” one flustered journalist shouted at the old man.

   “Balance of forces”, the old man snapped in weary impatience. There was a tense silence. Then a dutiful journalist who has been chewing on his ball pen roused himself.

“Baba se na balance be him surname abi na forces?” he demanded.

“Abi na Bilisi (Devil in local parlance) force sef?”, a drunken, self-important stringer slurred.

“So why dem never catch him killer?” another demanded.

     “Balance of forces”, the old man insisted as he vanished among the crowd.

March 3, 2024
Slogging through adversity

Low hanging fruits on the road to recovery

Like an impertinent but confident and supremely self-assured youngster, Nigeria is wading through its latest round of crisis with sangfroid and considerable panache. Like most colonial African nations put together under controversial circumstances, crisis seems to have become second nature to the troubled West African giant. In a curious turn of events, it is those who express fear about the fortunes of the country who appear to be overwhelmed by fear rather than the country itself.

   However that may be, there are certain salient features of the latest round of crisis which speak to the magnitude and volatility of the current circumstances. While it is true that every crisis contains the seed of its own resolution, some of the issues have to be highlighted particularly where the low-hanging fruits are concerned so that they can be pressed into immediate and remedial national service.

   First, Nigeria is resoundingly broke. All the sins and errors of omission of previous administrations appear to have converged on the current administration. Second is the rise of food insecurity in a country equipped by nature and climatology to be a global food basket if all other variables fall in place.

   Third is the ascendancy of enemy nationals who for reasons best known to them are bent on bringing the country’s economy to heel through foreign exchange racketeering, smuggling, financial espionage, illegal mining and massive production of counterfeited goods. When you add this to the sharp upsurge in kidnapping, abductions, criminal extortion, amphibious piracy and trans-border heists, it is a perfect explosive cocktail.

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   Finally, there is the collapse of civility and with it the prospects of civilized discourse in the country. In its place there is bovine rudeness everywhere. You cannot hope to contribute to national discussion on any issue if you do not have a strong constitution and a stout capacity to withstand insults from social misfits and ethnic neurotics who can only view national issues from a psychologically damaged and prejudiced point of view.

    To be sure, quite a lot of these intemperate outbursts are miffed ripostes to our errant traditional rulers and misguided clerics who have done further damage to the national fabric by their insensitive observations on pressing national issues. However, the attempt to shut down frank and open dialogue which is the oxygen of free association in a modern society through sheer intimidation is a negation of paraded credentials as champions of true democracy.

   While this hysterical dismantling of authority and the demystification of traditional hierarchies may appear exhilarating and even potentially liberating to certain sections of the country, it sets off the alarm signals of imminent chaos and anarchy in other sections. This collision of worldviews may presage violent confrontations of an ethnic and religious hue particularly in situations of extreme economic adversity.

Given the dire economic circumstances in which the nation has found itself and the apparent inability of the political elite to agree on the best way to handle the political dystopia threatening to engulf the nation, it is beginning to look as if the nation is being pushed back to its 1966 default setting.

It is true that when confronted by a crisis of this magnitude and complexity, one must first seek the political kingdom. But there are times when the economic kingdom is equally important, particularly where economic delinquency threatens to snuff life out of a nation.

   In all this, it is a typical Nigerian irony that the lowest hanging fruits are also the ones that constitute the most immediate threat to the nation. That is the issue of food shortage. This is the apex of the hierarchy of human destitution. Nigeria is so blessed with arable land in all their varieties and variables that it amounts to a pedological scandal that the country cannot feed its citizens.

As we speak, at least eighty percent of the remaining arable land in the nation remains uncultivated and uncultured, that is after allowance has been made for ongoing armed conflicts and threats to sedentary farmers. This is simply unimaginable in a world in which land-strapped nations cultivate vegetables on their roofs and walls.

The federal authorities should begin a massive back-to-the-land programme with commensurate incentives to youths now roaming our cities to own their own allotments and get to work. It takes a while for an agrarian traditional society to become a fully mechanized community. The government must launch a discreet inquiry into why Obasanjo’s Operation Feed the Nation failed so catastrophically.

If it cannot replicate the whole scheme, government can borrow tropes from it. The image of the wily Owu general in his farmers’ apparel with a hoe in hand remains one of the most fetching symbols of patriotic identification with the land in Nigeria’s postcolonial history. The government must also partner with our various agricultural institutions to come up with higher yields mutants of existing crops.

It is not by accident that the Chinese scientist who developed the variant of high-yield rice grain that saved his nation from mass starvation became a highly decorated national hero. When he died a few years’ back, he was accorded a hero’s funeral. It is now a matter of national emergency that Nigeria must first confront the demon of mass hunger before it can proceed on the political front.

February 25, 2024
A case note of two African giants

(Why restructuring is a coded battle for modernity)

Excerpts

In medical science, comparisons of case notes often illuminate and enlighten. They throw up unusual and startling insights into the nature of human organism and how similar pathologies can drive dissimilar afflictions. They can also show how and why certain dreaded human afflictions can be largely absent in a particular race even as they become the dreadful scourge of some other races. For the ill and the ailing, comparison of ailment is a known and probably analgesic exertion.

     As it is with human beings, so it is with nations, particularly postcolonial nations suffering from the trauma of colonial gestation and induced labour. If this medical hypothesis is applied to the study of two African giant nations, Nigeria and the Congo Democratic Republic, we may begin to understand why in certain nations compound fractures never manage to heal simply because the external nourishment is not there and the internal organs are incapable of growing regenerative tissues.

   Mobutu finally took power in 1965 and remained in place until 1996 when he was deposed in a civil war, while Kabila ruled till 2001 when he was assassinated in a failed coup bid. His son has been at it ever since, managing to hang on to power through egregiously rigged elections and sheer authoritarian savagery when all else fail. Between Mobutu and the two Kabilas, fifty one years of the modern Congolese nation have evaporated in a bonfire of Equatorial despotism.

As this drama unfolded in the Congolese Republic, and as if a cruel and neat symmetry of shared post-colonial fate is at play, Nigeria also witnessed the revival of a fifty year old national festival of hate and mutual loathing. While the west was mourning the assassination fifty years earlier of one of their most illustrious sons ever, the east was grieving over the summary execution of their son and former head of state in the same momentous bloodbath.

Meanwhile the north was commemorating the anniversary of the leader who told the world that the rest of the country would hear from his people at the appropriate time. Fearsome rhetoric of ethnic exceptionalism echoed and reverberated throughout the length and breadth of the country. It was as if the country was on the verge of war and disintegration all over again. Unlike 1966 when the country was relatively prosperous and financially viable, the looming economic apocalypse has not helped matters. Once again, the idols of the tribes are on rampage.

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It goes to show how Nigeria is powered by a reverse nationalism in which the valorous myth of the nationality is more powerful and all-suffusing than the myth of the nation. It is as if nothing has been learnt or taught in the intervening five decades or half a century.

In a bitterly polarized nation, politics of remembrance can easily degenerate to the politicization of institutional memory as can be seen in the attempts by rival ethnic sections to call to question the very heroism and altruistic nobility of a man whose exemplary courage in the heat of savage battle against Congolese rebels had earned him a colonial medal just a tad short of the ultimate British honour for a soldier. It was the first ever awarded to a Nigerian combatant.

This desecration of sacred memory as a way of evading debts of gratitude and the burden of honorable obligation or as a strategy of demeaning the stellar import of heroic national sacrifice in order to obviate guilt and the shame of insensate revenge shows the diabolic imagination at work in the construction of mutually cancelling narratives of a nation in the context of permanent de-nationalization. It demonstrates why the Nigerian story will never be an authoritative narrative but a story of many stories in a conflicted atmosphere of polyphonic strife and tension.

Yet as the Americans will put it, stuff do really happen even as we seek to authorize and notarize them from the point of view of primordial sentiments and ethnic subjectivity. Perhaps the most significant event of 1966, apart from the two momentous coups, was the declaration of independence from Nigeria by a ragtag band of Ijaw militants led by Isaac Adaka Boro. It was a forlorn and doomed bid summarily degraded by force of superior arms. Last week, fifty years after, a predominantly Ijaw group known as The Adaka Boro Avengers (ABA) sought to declare a Niger Delta Republic. As we write, the entire region is crawling with military personnel hunting down the rogue secessionists.

As we have noted in this column once and appropriating the seminal insight of Leo Tolstoy, arguably the greatest novelist the world has seen, all happy nations are the same, every unhappy nation is unhappy in its own unique way. From different routes but similar debilities, both Nigeria and the Congo Republic, like so many African post-colonial nations, have arrived at a state of unadulterated unhappiness.

All happy nations, however they arrived at modernist rationality, be it through Western Enlightenment, Confucianism, Shintoism, Hinduism or even benign variants of Islamic modernization, look suspiciously alike. You may go to bed in Stockholm and wake up in New York. But you expect certain benefits of modernity to be in place: regular supply of electricity, potable water, public utilities that function with seamless efficiency, particularly public transportation that run on time and with clockwork precision, decent housing for most and adequate medical facilities even for visitors.

Local topography and native fauna notwithstanding, or the complexion of local politics not standing in the way, everything seems surreally alike. Indeed in some of these countries, you often develop an overpowering sense of Déjà vu. That is what we call the homogeneity of national feel-good or happiness. It comes with the territory.

    Conversely, because they exist in a whirlpool of political, economic and spiritual irrationality, a time-warp of stalled motion that derive their peculiar dynamics from specific internal disorganization, all unhappy countries are unhappy in their own unique way. Apart from the underlying solidarity of human aberration, they have absolutely nothing in common. To the unwary visitor, African countries, particularly Congo and Nigeria, may appear the same as iconic monuments to underdevelopment, but they come as special brands in the unwavering commitment of their respective political elite to national ruination. In the heterogeneity of national unhappiness, no two nations are alike.

The reason for this momentous paradox is simple. Whereas the achievements of scientific modernity is open, universal and for all time, all remaining human societies that seek to dominate nature and overcome political, spiritual and economic adversity through the sheer power of poetic or religious imagination become stranded in a peat bog of fetishes, risible rituals, superstitions and wild irrationalities that are localized, society-specific and time-bound. These are the last bastions of Early Man. Modernity solves problems for all human societies, while mythology deflects the specific problems of specific societies through the fabulous and imaginary resolution of pressing contradictions.

   We must now return to our case file in order to press conclusions. The chaotic colonial amalgams of Congo and Nigeria, despite seeming structural similarities such as vast landmass, mighty life-enhancing rivers in each country, improbable natural riches and a vibrant and indomitable populace are plagued by country-specific contradictions. Since independence, the Congo Republic has seen many civil wars, summary dismemberment, virtual excision of remote parts of the country and periodic descent into ungovernability.

   If Nigeria has been spared such horrific extremities, it is because the nation is powered along by a micro-pluralism of power in which competing and countervailing centres of power cancel out each other and make it impossible for any despot to stay put or for any group to lord it over the nation on a permanent basis. Potential potentates and regional power mafias should note that Nigeria is not the Congo.

    The obverse of the coin of the regionalization of power elite is the absence of a genuine national and nationalist elite group which makes it impossible for the Nigerian political elite to act with a pan-Nigerian concert when a pressing national conundrum surfaces. The engrossing historical irony is that it leads Nigeria to the same democratic and developmental impasse as the Congo Republic. Whereas in the Congo, national elections are a rarity, in Nigeria the electorate rouses itself once in every four years to do the needful before it is summarily disbanded by the selectorate until another electoral season in a political ecology of compulsory hibernation.

It is this absence of a truly functioning and viable electorate that has made it impossible for the Nigerian electorate to successfully recall a single erring lawmaker in seventeen years of post-military democracy. Once elected, the electors are summarily vaporized while the elected join the selectorate in a macabre enactment of the ritual of national immolation. Yet while the political tomfoolery goes on the nation sinks further in the abyss of societal anomie.

    Despite the fact that competing centres of power have managed to thwart despotism and the phenomenon of political overlordism in the country, what stares us in the face is the reality of uneven political consciousness among the competing power groups that has led to growing disillusionment and widespread disenchantment with the state of the nation. In a situation of stark economic decline, if the current muted cries of dismay and disappointment are allowed to reach their 1966 decibel, it has horrific portents for the continued viability of the country. The future may well be the past.

It can now be seen why the current shrill cries for the restructuring of the country are mere shorthand or coded battle signal for the swift and urgent modernization of the country’s economic and political parameters. All over the modern world, the trend is for a gradual devolution of power from a stifling and suffocating centre to other loci of potential and accelerated development.

The sterling and stellar example of contemporary Lagos state is a model that commends itself to other sections of the country. Unfortunately, while vital segments of the nation hunger and thirst for economic and political modernity, some other sections take a dim view of this as an invitation to a summary dismemberment of the country.

Had the country been blessed with visionary military modernizers, this conundrum would have been overcome. But you cannot give what you don’t have. Yet until that dawn when a truly modernizing political elite who will seize the nation by the scruff of the neck and drag it to modernity arrives, the more likely possibility is that impatient sections of the country will eventually resort to self-help to plot their way out of the iron cage of colonial contraries.

    First published in 2016

February 25, 2024
Reparation and repatriation
- Towards a new national ethos
After the binge comes the inevitable hangover. Nigeria is in a stupendous alcoholic haze, full of groaning and grieving, filled with bitter regrets and sick recrimination. As every certified alcoholic will testify, the purgatory that must follow overindulgence is marked by drowsiness and dizziness; an overwhelming stupor accompanied by acute discomfort.

So, what do we call this peculiar Nigerian affliction, an economic calamity of the greatest order which devastates everything in its wake? It may feel like it, but it is certainly not the Dutch Disease, an economic distortion which arises when a society is suddenly flush with huge revenues from a novel and unexpected source leading to a dramatic appreciation of the national currency but also the loss of a competitive edge in other critical sectors of national productivity.

The Dutch people, a proud race noted for their Calvinist restraint and rectitude, quickly reordered their national priorities. It is to be noted that sixty years after the Dutch liberated themselves from Spanish rule, the merchants of Amsterdam were already sending goods all over the world from their low-lying redoubts. Meanwhile, their former Spanish overlords had blitzed their way into irreversible national decline as a result of ruinous inflation driven by free gold from the evil mines of Potosi.

The Nigerian economic disorder can also not be equated with what came to be known as the Norwegian Paradox. For a long time, economists were puzzled and confounded to no end by the Norwegian economic miracle of a high-performing economy that was not known to be based on innovative technology and cutting edge developments in Science and AI.

The Norwegians, modest and averse to technological modishness, went on to surprise everybody by creating the Sovereign Wealth Fund made of the nation’s entire earnings from petroleum resources. The vast holding would have insulated the nation against poverty, austerity and the vagaries and volatility of the market for the next two generations. It is to be noted that the Nigerian parody of this fund was burglarized in no time, leaving the nation at the mercy of the elements.

Finally, it is not worth the intellectual effort to compare the Nigerian economic ailment with the Russian oligarchs’ dystopia. After the collapse of the Soviet Empire and under relentless pressure from the west for market reforms, the Russian economy went into a tailspin. The Russian oligarchs, a consortium of assorted crooks and con-men, had a field day plundering the immense resources of their nation with merciless rapacity.

But they did not reckon with Vladimir Putin, a former KGB apparatchik and pan-Slavic supremacist, emerging from the woodwork of Stalinist repression. Putin, who nurses a visceral hatred and contempt for western values, made sure the oligarchs paid for all their infractions against their fatherland either with their life or long jail sentences.

The Russian economy responded to Putin’s severe therapy and quickly became a major global player all over again. Just as it was said of Josef Stalin before him, Putin has driven economic barbarity out of Russia by sheer barbarity. National character is national destiny.

As it can be seen from the preceding passage, Nigeria is in the grip of a uniquely baleful economic disorder. It is a severe ailment that is not responding to conventional treatment. Expectedly, people are coming up with different solutions and from different perspectives. This past week, Afe Babalola, legal luminary and founder of the innovative and groundbreaking Afe Babalola University, pleaded with the international community for substantial debt forgiveness for the nation.

On the face of it, this noble and patriotic call reminds one of the mid-nineties and the reparation lobby mounted by MKO Abiola. It was a massive assault which lacerated the conscience of the west and sent its ideological storm troopers into a panic mode. Abiola was not known to do anything in half measures. Those who mattered in the global sanctuary of power took note.

This writer at that point in time took a strong exception to the reparation campaign and made sure that the objection was felt in the right place. In a well-syndicated piece titled, Reparation or Repatriation, we argued in details why Nigeria needed more repatriation of money stolen and salted away by the political elite as opposed to fiscal reparation for the historic crimes of colonization and international slavery, a crime against humanity which had continued in one guise or the other till date.

Our well-judged suspicion at that point in time was that the whole reparation boondoggle might well be a cynical ploy by the Nigerian plutocrat to draw attention away from the epic state banditry that was unfolding in Nigeria on the watch of his military friends. It will be recalled that Margaret Thatcher famously opined at that period that judging from the humongous size of their overseas holdings, one or two Nigerians could actually offset Nigeria’s foreign debts with change to spare.

Since then, only the blind will fail to notice that state larceny has deepened into an All comers’ buccaneers’ bazaar with international complicity. Nigeria has been stolen blind by its political elite. It has reached a point where even an MKO Abiola would weep in his grave at the plight of the nation. We have finally arrived at Ground Zero.

A Nigerian government official this past week has noted that despite every appearance to the contrary, Nigeria is a very poor country indeed. His statistics cannot be faulted. The problem with statistics is that they can be used to arrive at dissimilar conclusions. Nigeria is not a poor country but a poverty-stricken country. Poverty is not natural to the country but has been inflicted on it by a derelict political elite. It is induced poverty which has now seen the nation rightly inducted into the hall of infamy as the poverty capital of the world.

To be sure, countries with smaller and more competitive population often fare better than much bigger nations when it comes to feeling the impact of natural resources. This is why the Saudis, Qataris, Norwegians, Libyans, Kuwaitis etc. appear to do much better than countries with humongous populations with equal natural resources. A huge population without commensurate knowledge and without adequate educational empowerment cannot participate in the creation of wealth which is a sine qua non for the advancement of human societies.

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This is in fact when huge populations become a disadvantage. But it is not a natural disadvantage. A population teeming with the medically unfit, unlettered peasantry and barely literate artisans cannot be expected to have the mental resources and the economic savvy to contribute to the harmonious growth of the society. Instead, they are a ticking social time bomb.

This is why sane and sober countries devote considerable amount of resources to the development of human infrastructure and what Obafemi Awolowo has called the mental magnitude of their citizenry. No country has ever been richer than the sum total of its people.

The galloping growth of population ahead of human capacity-building and economic development puzzled and perplexed early economists to no end. In a celebrated treatise, Thomas Malthus, who is regarded as the father of modern Economics, advocated a winnowing of the population through population control or outright curling of the populace.

According to the great econometrician, it is war, famine, mass emigration and natural disasters that do the surgical operation for humanity at that point in time. Despite the clinical rigour of his analysis, Malthus has been berated for the misanthropic glee and putative violence inherent in his moody prognostications. In a satirical contribution titled A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift advocated the killing off and consumption of children in infancy.

In our modern world, the Chinese have demonstrated how huge populations can be turned into huge blessing through a combination of scientific birth control and a radical re-education of the populace as well as its economic empowerment. They have achieved in a generation what will take other societies a millennium to achieve. It must be admitted that the terror and revolutionary retribution that accompany this type of radical transformation is not feasible in fractious, multi-ethnic colonial nations without core values and a core identity. They will quickly dissolve into their anarchic components.

With the preceding observation we have reached the primal issue and the core of Nigeria’s ailment as a political and economic entity. With that we have also reached a dialectical modification of our own earlier position. Yes, reparation and some substantial debt relief have become imperative for Africa. But even better and more imperative is the repatriation Nigeria’s stolen money from abroad. There should be a national reprieve or amnesty for those who willingly let go.

The justifiable cynicism and reluctance of the west in tracking and repatriating looted funds is predicated on the belief that the proceeds will be looted once again. This is where the political and psychological conditioning of the people matter a lot.

It is obvious that all the nations we have been tracking are conditioned by core values and national character to withstand and overcome debilitating economic crises. The Dutch and Norwegians with their Calvinist prudence and restraint, the Russians with their Slavic sense of self-worth and implacable pride, and the Chinese with their hardihood, innate discipline and effortless sense of superiority.

Until Nigeria develops a strong national identity matched by core values which are in tune with the dictates of political and economic modernity, all will be in vain. What we have for now as a substitute is a pan-Nigerian hedonism common to all the dominant fractions of the political elites which privileges consumption of western luxury goods at the expense of local production.

Yet our forefathers were never like this. It shows that something fundamental has gone wrong. The problem is that the rampaging mobs are closer than we can ever imagine. We can either choose to watch the irreversible slide into decay and death or do something urgent about it.
February 18, 2024
A near occurrence at Third Mainland Bridge

In a world in which living and dying walk hand in hand like inseparable companions and like tested and testy comrades, it is sometimes impossible to separate living from dying, or in fact factual occurrence itself from fiction for that matter. Human society is full of strange and outlandish characters and even stranger and more outlandish occurrences.

   Can any of our readers remember reading a short story titled, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge? As a callow impressionable youth, yours sincerely remember reading the gripping stuff. But age and the passage of time have so denuded memory and the capacity for instant recall that one is no longer sure of what is actual fiction or sheer imaginative concoctions.

Fortunately, where human memory fails or falters, robotic intelligence takes over. A Goggle engine search has rendered further speculations nugatory. The fiction is for real. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge written by Ambrose Bierce is an outstanding work of fiction. Haunting and memorably crafted, it is the story of the American civil war and a plantation owner in the deep South who was hanged for impeding the movement of Union troops.

Farquhar thought he had escaped the hangman’s noose by jumping into the river. We follow him as he evaded the dragnet until he got home and was about to embrace his beloved wife. That was when the whole thing turned out to be a hoax, a piece of posthumous gallivanting. Farquhar was actually dead and his crumpled body lay by the side of the bridge.

   Last week, it felt very much like an Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge while yours sincerely was traversing The Third Mainland Bridge in the dead of the night after attending a reception in honour of our aburo, Arch Tayo Babalakin, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday.

As the vehicle approached the loneliest stretch of the elongated wonder which curls and slithers its way through the murky waters of the Lagos lagoon like a massive anaconda, a loud explosion was heard from the rear of the vehicle, shattering the stillness of the night. Perhaps afraid of the shadows and his own shadow, the driver refused to stop. The vehicle trundled on for another kilometre before one barked firm instruction for the driver to stop.

An eerie silence ensued. Marked by bumps and distending asphalt, it was a particularly nasty spot to stop. None of the speeding cars, out of a natural instinct for self-preservation, was willing to test fate and their luck. The driver was shivering. Our spouse was palpitating with premonition. Yours sincerely asked her to get out of the vehicle, but she firmly declined. As one jumped out of the car, one concluded that this might be a divine way of preserving one crucial leg of the family.

The sense of foreboding became overbearing. It was as if one was having an out of body experience. The rear tire had been blown to shreds and smithereens revealing the grim rim. It was only a question of time before men of the underworld or the underwater materialized. One remembered our friend, Ibrahim Babatunde Jose, who often joked with another friend that the pomp and aplomb with which one plies the Ife-Ibadan road, particularly around the Majeroku-Akiriboto perimeter, can only suggest that one was a kingly part of the kidnapping and extortionate ring on the route.

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The men of the underworld and under-bridge garrets duly materialized out of the shadows. Two completely crazed druggies wearing official overcoat of some state agencies. There was something intensely menacing and sinister even about their deferential manners.

One quizzed them whether they were government officials and they both shook their head in rebuttal. So, if they are not government officials what were they doing in that place in the dead of the night wearing government labels? They came to repair a vehicle, they both chorused. Meanwhile, there was no vehicle in the distance.

In a jiffy, the more purposeful of them had crawled under the vehicle after collecting the tool kit from the driver while his companion began controlling traffic by raising his overcoat. On the massive steel bulwark where one perched the waves swept pass underneath making some frightening noise like a monster owl. One had imagined being plucked by an unseen talon into the watery catacombs below. The real drama was just about to begin.

   “Baba e se owo wa ni fifty. (Make our money fifty thousand) ,“ the first one drawled after crawling out. Yours sincerely exploded in a make or mar psychological duel.

   “Are you both mad? Do you know that if I get into my vehicle without paying you a kobo, there is nothing either of you can do?” yours sincerely shouted as he made to enter the vehicle.

“Ha, alaiye baba, we are your children ooo!!!” they chanted.

    “Then behave yourself!” one growled as one pushed ten thousand naira on them and ordered the driver to speed off. It has been a near occurrence on the Third Mainland Bridge.

February 18, 2024
Issues in social and political engineering

On neoliberal economics and its discontents

Social and political transitions in postcolonial nations riddled by internal schisms are always a difficult affair to manage. It is like watching a slow-motion movie with its tormenting turns and tragic somersaults. But no force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. This is why Nigerians must thank God for small mercies.

An elite consensus seems to have coalesced around the imperative of restructuring the country away from its current unitary stasis and structural logjam. Experience, they say, is the hardest and harshest of teachers. Nigeria has taken a bad mauling from insecurity and generalized terror before the veil of smug comfort and complacency is torn off the illusions of centralized security and its dismal inefficiency.

It has been an epic slog. The debate has been intense and occasionally hurtful, exposing ancient prejudices and ancestral biases. As we write, there is a huge tome on our desk which chronicles the travails of restructuring in Nigeria. Written by Professor John Imonbhio Abhuere, an engaging public intellectual, researcher and pan-Nigerian patriot, it is a fascinating study in the challenges and management of leadership in post-independence Nigeria.

It must be admitted that what we have is a consensus at the level of intellectual elite and not a generalized consensus among the political elite. It is not a done deal yet. There are still some hegemonic formations in the nation whose political worldview can simply not comprehend what is meant by restructuring. There are others who see restructuring as a firm route to secession. Yet there are a few who are secretly thrilled about the prospects of restructuring as a firm exit clause out of the nation.

Under conventional expectations a government that is still grappling with the plague of a severe economic crisis that is the fallout of a sharp and sudden economic engineering cannot be expected to take on the additional burden of restructuring without threatening its own political foundation. Unconventional wisdom may however suggest that restructuring itself may be the solution to the crisis. It is a classic Catch 22 conundrum.

In fractious multi-ethnic nations seething with polarities and cultural tensions, it is only a democratic leader with exceptional courage and political guts who can grapple with the horns of restructuring without batting an eyelid. In the post-independence history of Nigeria, only the government of the First Republic has achieved this feat. Even then, that particularly exercise was distinguished more by malice, vindictiveness and an attempt to cut Awolowo down to size than by genuine patriotic zeal.

In Nigeria, the political lot has always fallen on undemocratic and authoritarian military rulers who have gathered all the reins of power around themselves to effect an administrative restructuring of the nation: Ironsi and his ill-fated provinces, Gowon, Mohammed, Babangida and Abacha.

Famously, while announcing the change in the internal configuration of Nigeria from twelve to nineteen states, the fiery and tempestuous General Murtala Mohammed warned his compatriots that neither jubilation nor condemnation would be tolerated on the occasion. About a week after, he was assassinated on his way to work.

It is in the light of the plague of crises, conflicts and contradictions that has marked the evolution of modern Nigeria that it has been broached in some quarters that if President Tinubu succeeds in bringing about an even-tempered and far-reaching reconfiguration of Nigeria, he would have gone on to become the most consequential democratically elected leader in the history of Nigeria.

But to make a dent on the issues involved, the Nigerian leader must first scale the hurdle erected by deepening misery and accelerating poverty in the land. There can be no doubt that the situation has been compounded by the sudden removal of the subsidy regime package without a well thought out, integrative and inclusive package of amelioratives. Steadily fuelling the rising tide of public anger is the perception that government is slow and tardy in combating the scourge of corruption.

We must not forget that these are symptoms of a more fundamental disorder. Traditional authoritarian societies forcing a transition to a market economy with its decentralization of power and dispersal of authority face a difficult, uphill task even when the society is in the grip of a military despot. Market economy turns tyrants into little men and little men into tyrants.

Despite its anti-people ravages when unleashed against vulnerable Third World societies, market economy, with its dismantling of traditional hierarchies and disruption of financial hegemonies, can be a radical and economically liberating force in advanced societies.

When he was asked why he always targeted weak and vulnerable traditional societies as prime objects of market reforms, Milton Friedman, the archpriest of monetarist fundamentalism, responded that no human society ever moves forward without huge social upheavals and political dislocation. The danger for a Third World country like Nigeria and many other African countries embracing market fundamentalism is the terrible devastation and colossal wastage of their most precious assets which is prodigious human resources.

The challenge for African thinkers is how to come up with an authentic and original synthesis of   countervailing economic orthodoxies without sacrificing the natural advantages of traditional African economies. Those who merely mouth received notions and the economic shibboleths of the Bretton Woods institutions in the face of the economic miracles of several nonwestern societies have a lot of mileage to cover.

In the light of the foregoing, can it be said that President Tinubu is wrongheaded in the brutal short shrift the Nigerian president made of the whole discredited notion of the subsidy regimen in his opening address to the nation? Could he not have done it the way of General Babangida by offering a debating sop to the chattering classes while concluding arrangement to impose a sweeping regimen of adjustment on the nation?

   It will be recalled that the Minna master-dribbler, while allowing an exhaustive debate on the issue, simply went ahead to do the needful just at the time the debaters thought they had seen off the last of the Washington lobby. Arrangement had already been concluded to take the IMF loan and all its grim conditionalities. The ensuing devaluation of the national currency and the liberalization of the banking sector unleashed a huge social and economic dislocation so impactful and consequential that the effects are still being felt more than three decades after.

The snag, however, is that the IBB regime itself never recovered from the trust, credibility and integrity deficit . As we have said, even the presence of a despotic regime with all its coercive apparatus and power of repression cannot stop an outraged and indignant people fearing extinction from rushing to the barricades.

    As the IBB regime crunched its way through several real and imagined enemy formations with the brutal and chilling efficiency of a master executioner, you always had a feeling that something nasty was in the air. After a failed coup, unsolved murder riddles, rumoured unrest in the military and ethnic turbulence, the chicks finally came home to roost in the momentous SAP riot of 1989. It was a seismic upheaval which devastated the entire landscape.

Despite its stranglehold on the military institution, the regime never regained the political initiative even if it was to last another four years. Several months after, even the regime’s chokehold on the military was badly shaken by a military uprising which shook the nation to its foundation. The savage retribution has been unequalled in the annals of military bloodletting in Nigeria.

   The social and political tempest continued to plague the country. So did the authoritarian intolerance and contempt for the populace which led IBB and his honchos to annul the freest and fairest election in the history of the nation. It proved a bridge too far for the military and the career of its arguably most gifted but misdirected general. It is instructive that few hours after rumours of an Abiola victory began circulating ahead of the peremptory annulment, the price of rice fell nation-wide.

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   We can now draw useful conclusions from all this, particularly in the light of efforts in some quarters to impose another IMF-inspired, right of centre, Chicago School, neoliberal social engineering on the nation in all its harsh and inhuman Darwinian triumphalism. The original data and conceptual framework for monetarist economics was a product of sustained local research and the application of prodigious intellect to empirical data.

Unfortunately, and in one more example of academic colonization, its conceptual formulations and refined products are henceforth applied as a one-size-fits-all-panacea without any regard for local culture and historical condition.

The circumstances and conjunctures cannot be more different. After the Second World War, the western victors under the agency of a visionary America embarked on a frenetic spending free to rebuild infrastructure and reflate the western economy.

In Britain, the scars of the war quickly healed as huge housing estates, low cost schools, health facilities and affordable public transportations became the norm. By 1958, thirteen years after the end of the war, the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, famously proclaimed that the British people had never had it so good.

Of course such a society in which people are over-pampered by an indulgent state, in which citizens have grown lazy and indolent from government largesse and in which government itself has become a huge economic almshouse freely dispensing subversive munificence to the populace is bound to develop some serious economic distortions which require the massive shock therapy of structural adjustment.

This is how advanced western economies correct structural anomalies in the system and stimulate further growth in contrast and contradistinction to backward African economies already hobbled by massive infrastructural deficits, accelerating de-industrialization, educational decay , mass immiseration and generalized poverty occasioned by a mono-cultural economy in which state larceny has become the norm.

   It was on this underwhelming economy that Nigerian coup victors and their IMF specialists sought to impose a western-style structural adjustment regimen barely fifteen years after a ruinous civil war and after four years of unremitting pillage by civilian kleptocrats. It was an economic death sentence by any other name. Almost forty years after, Nigerians are in a better position to judge whether their lot was better before they were herded into the military laboratory of economic vivisection.

This is why Nigerians demand fresh and better economic ideas from the current administration about how to figure their way out of the present all-pervading darkness. With Margaret Thatcher, the shrill cry was that there was no alternative to the SAP regime. It was a war-cry that earned the Iron Lady the sobriquet of TINA or more devastatingly Margaret the milk snatcher.

But when the question was put to the late Professor Sam Aluko, he retorted that there was always an alternative to death. Aluko, an anti-Marxist leftwing economist of the old Keynesian school who famously authored a pamphlet on why he was not a Marxist, was well-grounded in the local economy and its peculiar intricacies and could see much further than the IMF and its fanatics. For his pains, he was dismissed by the ideological sophisticates of the Bretton Wood lobby as an economic illiterate.

   The joke was on them. Aluko would later team up with Asuquo Tony Ani during the Abacha regime to give Nigeria an economic respite. Throughout General Abacha’s tenure, there was commendable growth and the stability of the national currency was never disrupted for one single minute, despite General Abacha’s state of the art burglary of the exchequer. After the initial petrol hike, the goggled one never went in that direction again till he died in mysterious circumstances.

Perhaps it all boils down to the fact that economy is too serious a calling to be left in the hands of professional economists. We must hope and pray that we may not find out the hard way once again.

February 11, 2024
Basorun J.K Randle pitches for Ogbeni Oja, his childhood friend

We must thank God for small mercies. It is heartwarming to find out that true friendship in all its ennobling and soul-purifying essence survives among Nigerians despite all the tribulations. A man must keep his friendship in a state of constant repairs, admonishes Oscar Wilde, the great Anglo-Irish wit, dramatist and essayist.

Genuine friendship requires constant cultivation and nurturing. It is not a transactional barter. Neither is it an enforced cohabitation for the purpose of seeking opportunistic advantages. This perhaps why it eludes many contemporary Nigerians, just like the gift for empathy or compassion. A British social rebel and implacable scourge of its literary establishment put things in extreme formulation when he insisted that if he were to choose between his friend and his nation, he would gladly choose his friend.

Basorun J.K Randle, notable accountant, gifted social diarist and enfant terrible of post-Victorian Lagos who recently turned eighty is no stranger to extreme formulations. Scion of the illustrious Randle lineage, the usually mild-mannered and urbane JK does not take hostages when it comes to protecting the Randle franchise which he believes has come under mortal threats from successive governments of the state. In the process of unrelenting altercations, a classic man of the establishment has become a local scourge of the establishment.

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Snooper once tried to intervene in the unseemly dispute. After some initial explorations, the whole thing ended in an uproarious fiasco in Akin Ambode’s office with the younger accountant going toe to toe with the more famous accountant until a testy silence fell. In his haste to leave, Snooper probably forgot his trademark cap in Governor Ambode’s office.

Despite this warrior side, Basorun JK Randle is a man with a remarkable appetite for making and maintaining friendship. He has just penned a riveting tribute to his childhood friend, Olorogun Sonny Folorunso Kuku, the new Ogbeni Oja of Ijebu Ode. It is as entertaining as it is hilarious, rippling with wit and bon mots and replete with rare historical vignettes. Ogbeni Oja is the highest title any freeborn Ijebu Ode indigene could aspire to and with that Sonny has reached the very pinnacle of the social hierarchy.

A friendship which began when two callow youths entered Kings College the same year in 1957, the association has matured with years. Without any hint of jealousy, envy or subservience, JK appeared occasionally dazzled and mesmerized by the extraordinary and legendary brilliance of his friend. It was a brilliance which shone through secondary school, medical school and post-graduate colleges.

But the new Ogbeni Oja was no jaded nerd or self-absorbed wonk. He participated fully in all college pranks and subversive activities. The jokes continued till their old age. Basorun Randle once approached his friend complaining about a rare condition known as spondylosis.

After listening patiently to his friend, Dr Kuku informed him that he had just mastered a new procedure which would involve cutting off his neck and stitching it back after operation. JK Randle quickly excused himself and flew downstairs whereupon he instructed his driver to make a dash for safety. Here is wishing the two jolly friends an unhurried stroll to the departure hall.

February 11, 2024
Elite consensus

Clarifications, modifications and amplifications

Perhaps the most important lifeline a serious columnist relies on is the feedback procedure . Without a commensurate feedback, the column is a self-sustaining monologue; a dialogue between the deaf and the dumb. Feedbacks ensure that columnists avail themselves of different or countervailing perspectives sometimes forcing a moderation or modification of views without surrendering to entrenched dogmas and jaded worldviews.

In the course of writing a column for different platforms continuously for forty years, including the underground Tempo magazine, and this particular incarnation in The Nation since January 2007, the columnist has interacted with various stakeholders either directly in face to face encounters or via e-mail and lately What’sAPP. Among them are blue-eyed royalists from the ancient north, Yoruba supremacists, Igbo nationalists, hegemonists of the minorities, middle belt flamethrowers and anti-establishment crusaders.

It has been a collision of altars on a colossal scale. A political, economic, intellectual and spiritual ferment is ongoing in Nigeria on a scale not witnessed since the run up to independence. The obverse of the coin is that there is often much heat without much light; much friction without much traction. It is only in Nigeria that a well-educated person can hold on to rigid and entrenched views more suitable to the age of medieval tyranny without batting an eyelid.

It is only in Nigeria that a well-travelled and cosmopolitan person can glorify and glamorize the travails of a normally forward-looking people trapped between the abyss of their compromised feudal antecedents and the throes of aborted modernity. It is only in this country that you find supremely endowed and accomplished individuals convulsed by hate-filled hysteria arising from ethnic overreach and unrelenting propaganda against other nationals as if they themselves are immaculate angels.

It must now be admitted that these crippling national contradictions, these idols of the tribe, make the notion of a critical mass or the possibility of elite consensus in Nigeria a forlorn romantic dream. In Nordic countries where the idea of consociational politics or elite consensus took root, the elites by virtue of racial and religious homogeneity are imbued with enough patriotic spirit which allows them to look beyond “pillarized” differences to arrive at a consensus about core values and the destiny of their various nations.

But in fractious, multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multicultural nations with different modes of production boxed together by the economic imperatives of colonialism, it is proving well-nigh impossible to achieve elite consensus on anything, particularly about the collective fate of a distressed country.

In the light of unfolding events in the country, the resurgence of abduction and kidnapping culminating in the gruesome assassination of three Yoruba obas and the shrill cries of marginalization and deliberate underdevelopment coming from significant northern stakeholders over the relocation of certain sections of the CBN, it is now important to modify what has become the hallowed mantra of this column about elite consensus.

This is what is known as reconciliation under duress. It is now obvious that in volatile and combustible multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural colonial nations, complete elite consensus is a virtual impossibility. What we should aim for is substantial elite compliance, a situation in which there is a substantial compliance among the majority of the elite factions about the destiny of the nation.

It is either this elite unification and moderation of countervailing notions of the nation is imposed from above by a reforming and modernizing elite group or we begin to think about the unthinkable. Given the dire emergency in which the nation has found itself with rampaging herdsmen on the match again, with insecurity plaguing everywhere and with the naira sabotaged to near extinction by the political class as well as enemy nationals bent on bringing the nation to heel, the unthinkable is the possibility of Nigeria becoming another Somali/Somaliland which has just ceded part of its territory to landlocked Ethiopia.

It doesn’t get messier and more nation-dissolving than that. This is not the time for ethnic sabre-rattling or the whipping up of tribal rage which may eventuate in a genocidal maelstrom. There has been too much bloodletting in this country over nothing except elite avarice and gluttonous greed. It will be recalled that in its earlier incarnation, the Boko Haram/herders’ marauders also killed off some emirs in the Gwoza corridor and defiled their thrones.

What is driving their rebellion is principally economic and not ethnic triumphalism or religious chauvinism. It is sheer economic destitution and class rage that led Boko Haram to active rebellion. The cankerworm has now spread to the rest of the country. The blame must be laid squarely at the door step of the northern feudal master-class which spawned them and which has failed to modernize unlike most other feudal formations on the continent and the world at large.

It could have been far worse had the mournful weariness and lifeless insipidity which seemed to have become the hallmark of the Buhari administration lasted for another six months, or if the Kangaroo presidential ticket its somnolent boss was trying to impose on the nation had prevailed. Nothing, however, in the Book of Auguries or in the annals of national propitiation of malignant gods could have prepared the nation for what is currently unfolding as the post-Buhari bouquet.

It is the peculiar burden of those who refuse to abide by the damning verdict that nothing beneficial can ever come out of a product of colonial malignancy. This is why this column will refrain from excoriating the distinguished Senator Ali Ndume. Ordinarily and despite his stern visage and fiery demeanor, Ali is a reasonable and well-comported gentleman of progressive antecedents who exudes the dictum that nobility must have its obligation.

The idols of the tribe and what is known as cultural habitat leavened by a sense of feudal entitlement must be very strong and overpowering indeed, otherwise why has Ali remained unfazed despite the revelation that his strident advocacy is motivated by the anticipated plight of his own children who work for the CBN rather than a concern for the welfare of workers from the region?

And this is coming from a highly placed principal officer of the ruling party and the president’s party? Nothing speaks more to the brittle nature of party politics in our contemporary polity and the ideological meltdown of party formation in the nation. As he manoeuvres his way through the banana peels and the dangerous landmines of the Nigerian polity, President Tinubu must be wary and worldly-wise. He must pitch for a bipartisan solution to our multifarious problems when and where it is imperative.

The current circumstances, fluid and flux as political allegiances are becoming, call for caution and considerable political cunning. During a heated debate in the Commons, the British Prime minister, Winston Spencer Churchill, was reprimanded by a young Conservative MP for revealing party secrets before the “enemy”, by which he meant members of the opposition parties who were lapping up everything the great man was saying and having the fun of their life.

Wearing a jocose frown, the great man retorted. “Oh no, my boy! That is not the enemy. That is Her Majesty’s loyal opposition”. Now redirecting the young MP’s gaze to the rear of the house where dyspeptic old Tory backbencher grumblers sat, Churchill growled. “Just look at your back and you will see the enemy. The enemy is behind you!”

The old Tory grandees never forgave Churchill for his dramatic ascendancy to the premiership in a time of dire emergency. The great wizard of Letters and political brinkmanship never forgot them, too. Given the apparent collapse of elite consensus, Nigeria is in a similar emergency. It will take a person of Churchillian courage and wisdom to navigate.

February 4, 2024
Capital before compassion? Some exemplary paradigms

This is the golden era of primitive accumulation in Nigerian politics. The Tinubu administration is caught in a difficult conundrum. Which comes first? Is it the accumulation of capital to ameliorate suffering or hoary compassion that does not feed empty stomach? As the economic tempest mounts and a frightening distemper takes firm hold in the land, even a well-known Tinubu acolyte like KWAM has mounted a stirring appeal to the president to take a second look at the plight of the poor and destitute of the land.

This is just as it should be. Wasiu Ayinde Marshal is not your run of the mill musician who is merely interested in where the next morsel of amala will come from or the next ijagudu free for all meal. A committed, indefatigable and unflappable partisan of the Tinubu brand, he has traversed many hotbeds and hostile terrains as the Tinubu franchise gathered strength and irreversible momentum. He cannot be dismissed as a fair-weather friend of the administration.

Despite the mounting economic travails of the nation, there are still quite a number of foul-weather well-wishers of the present administration. Despite the need for fine-tuning here and there, they believe that the government’s economic instincts are in the right place and should come together in the long run, despite the scourge of spellbinding corruption and malfeasance.

Last Monday as yours sincerely sat down for over four hours to dissect the state of the nation in a quiet remote corner of the famed Metropolitan Club with an older friend, industrial guru and scion of old monied class from the West’s old capital, the same issue cropped up. The chief, an unapologetic defender of the global capitalist enterprise, reaffirmed his unwavering thesis that Nigeria, like any other nation, is a permanent work in progress. When he was asked about the plight of the poor and destitute in all this paddy-paddy capitalism, he simply shrugged.

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The chief takes an immense delight in having a dig at snooper’s leftwing antics. He once ruefully noted how much he pitied the folks at the university shouting aluta because they are merely entrenching their family in poverty when they should be lifting their next generation out of biblical immiseration. If you are a professor and you have no car, I wonder how Aluta will come to your aid. If you are driving and you have a breakdown, Aluta certainly cannot be the name of your incorrigible mechanic.

It is a very brutal and brutish world out there where, as Eugene Ionesco famously noted, everybody has to lift himself up by the bootstraps or sink further in the morass of hopelessness and destitution. Two days later as the car taking one to Lagos Island for an evening function suddenly let forth a volcanic belch like an exhausted camel, the chief’s words came back to haunt in all their chilling premonition.

As the old Marina came into wondrous view this cool beautiful evening, one cannot but marvel and wonder at the dazzling and amazing transformation of the Lagos landscape. Before our very eyes, Lagos is witnessing an amazing transformation with its glittering and bewitching skyline which makes one feel as if you are in one of those emerging megalopolis of the new First World.

Ruthless and remorseless Capital has seized the old city of Portuguese pirates by the scruff of the neck and had driven it through the crash barriers of modernity. This is no longer the ancient city bombarded to ruins by the British frigate moored of the Marina in 1861. Captain Labulo Davies, a young Nigerian-British naval officer who took part in the bombardment wrote that after the rubble cleared, the whole city stank from the foul and fetid odor of fetishes and human sacrifices.

This evening as one sank into a comfortable chair on the seventh floor of the former IBM office complex, the leftwing demon returned plaguing and preying on one. One remembered the former denizens of the Maroko slum hurriedly chased away to make room for those who had the need and money for real estate. Louis Althusser had cautioned that we should not glorify and glamorize the glittering monuments to western capitalism but the thousands who perished in the name of putting up the glistening emporia.

As if monitoring the subversive train of thought, two of the Lagos big boys suddenly materialized out of the shadows to whisk one away to an adjoining bar oozing glamour and glitz. The more forceful of them, a successful entrepreneur and master of billboard advertising who has been at it since his Youth Service in 1988, wasted no time in opening proceedings.

“Sir, your column is a must read for the powers that be. You should be setting agenda. Please start a series on the need for a total educational revamping of this country. Our higher institutions are not up to scratch and they are caught in a time-warp with modern developments outflanking them. Without their total transformation everything will be in vain. You are the only one who can do this. Let them put a broadband in every community and our youths will transform the economy in no time”, he said and suddenly broke up as if waiting for one’s reaction.

“Don’t worry, his brain is recording everything you are saying”, the other chap noted as if reassuring the billboard entrepreneur who became even more forceful and emphatic.

“Egbon, you see, Babangida and Tinubu are the only truly transformational leaders we have had in this country in the last forty years. Babangida for transforming the banking industry and setting capital free and Tinubu for transforming Lagos through innovative thinking. Just open the window and look at the skyline. In about ten years, you will think you are in Manhattan.”

Then he added the clincher: “This is restructuring on the hoof. Those who think they can destroy us have only made us stronger and more resilient. They will never be able to hold a candle to our feet. In a few years, Lagos will be one of the three strongest economies in Africa and can cleanly decouple itself. Then those who have been stranded by choice will begin to agitate to leave”.

Not a word about the staggering human cost and the prohibitive toll on the people. This is the bane of neoliberal social engineering. Snooper quickly took his leave.

February 4, 2024
An afternoon in Ondo

To sedate and serene Ondo town, penultimate Saturday for the funeral of Madam Mojisola Agbeke Akintunde, nee Oyeneyin, and relic of late Pa Fredrick Olaleye Akintunde. Ondo is the home of the old monied class and proud aristocrats full of swank and swagger.

You can always tell a well-heeled Ondo aristo from his gait and the stolid mien of some ancient royalty. Given the way the praises are tumbling out perhaps one should declare some consanguineous interest from the onset. Our own paternal grandmother, Madam Rainat Eketunde, was a proud, regal-looking descendant of the Jomu family.

One has been in Ondo a few times in recent years. Once through the forbidding Ore route for the funeral of Madam Ose Fajemirokun, the mother of the man we call Odidimade, aka Baba Oba of Ifewara. The second time was via helicopter to dedicate a well-appointed Events Centre in memory of the late matriarch built by her children led by the selfsame Odidimade, a mysterious and reclusive billionaire magnate if you have ever seen one.

This afternoon, the normally alluring and lush landscape enveloping Ondo town wore a parched and famished look from feverish expectations of the early rains. The last time one journeyed through the old pristine forest that connects Ile-Ife to Ondo via Fagunwa’s fabled territory was for the funeral of Madam Ademulegun, relic of the iconic Brigadier Julius Ademulegun who fell during the mutiny of January 15, 1966.

Gbenga, the younger sibling, was our boy at Federal government College, Kaduna. But he has since transformed into a banking mogul and a Lagos big boy. As the funeral reception got underway, Kole, his elder brother, had drawn yours sincerely aside to inform that he was putting finishing touches to a book about the life and times of the late brigadier and would want one to be the reviewer at the event. He was told to consider it a done deal. Now, Kole himself has gone to join his illustrious father.

The funeral reception was well under way by the time one got to the hall. It was like a carnival. There was singing, drumming and dancing outside and inside the capacious hall. The entire Akintunde clan and their friends and well-wishers turned out in their resplendent best decked in gold-coloured fineries with sanyan caps and headgears to match. The lead mourner and oldest child of the deceased, Funmi Oluwole, expressed surprise that one had made it to Ondo even if a tad late. If only she had known that this was a journey that began in Lagos about ten hours earlier.

One had been ushered into a seat next to Professor Francis Oluwole, her husband. The normally placid features of the distinguished, globally celebrated physicist glowered with excitement at the prospects of some interesting intellectual exchanges which always mark our rare encounters. But it was not to be. The din was simply too much.

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Sitting next to the octogenarian scholar was his younger brother, Professor Soji Oluwole, the equally distinguished and acclaimed professor of Surgery at Columbia University, two winners of the highest national honours from the same loin. One had not seen him since our OAU days. Yours sincerely asked after his son in law, Omoyele Sowore, the fabled blogger and scourge of the Nigerian establishment, and was informed that he was around earlier but had since left.

The Oluwole brothers from Ijare are an exemplary model for younger Nigerians. It is hard and rare to see human distinction conduct and comport itself with such grace, such simplicity, such humility and amazing equanimity. It was a lesson in the stellar alloy of true greatness.

Snooper asked the younger Oluwole about an old woman of regal composure who had earlier dragged him out and who reminded this writer so much of his paternal grandmother, the ancient no-nonsense Dowager from the Jomu clan who had named him Mukaila and who passed almost seventy years ago in August 1956.

“Oh she is an auntie from Ijare”, the younger Oluwole replied with polite diffidence. It was time to leave. Without any further ado, yours sincerely vanished into the darkening horizon. It has been quite an afternoon in Ondo. May God grant mama eternal repose.

January 28, 2024