Category: Tatalo Alamu

As Okon’s antics became more outlandish with each passing day, snooper devised a scheme for tempering the juvenile Calabar rogue’s waywardness. The mad boy has even added Governor General of Efik nation to his numerous titles. We decided to ask him to accompany snooper to the barber’s shop where we normally relax and enjoy a game of draughts with our childhood crony, Buhari a.k.a  Buhari Jogbojogbo. May be Okon can learn something from the ancient wit and wisdom of the Yoruba, and the humility with which they display their wisdom.

The day began with snooper trying to sharpen Okon’s rusty mind for the task ahead. He was also cautioned that Jogbojogbo was a dreaded chieftain of an outlawed confraternity and a Yoruba supremacist who believes that his people are the greatest thing that has happened to the world.

“Okon, what’s your take on this Kong-fu fight between Ribadu and Aondoakaa?”

“Oga, I like Ribadu well, well. Na me supply the carbide dem use come scatter dem Globacom man’s gate. I write dat one say make he give me dem journalist handset, dem come tell me say dem no sabi any journalist wey dey bear Okon.  Na im  I say if dem no sabi my pen dem go sabi my carbide”.

“Okon !!” I screamed in disbelief.

“Oga, leave me o jare. Wetin you say be the name of the man who dey fight Nuhu?”, Okon asked with a devilish smile.

“Aondoakaa”, I replied.

“God punish am. No be dem people wan kill me for Bauchi?” Okon growled.

“No, no Okon. He is not a Dandoka. He is a Tiv.” I corrected.

“Oga, if he be thief, why Nuhu no go fight am finis?”

“No, no no, he is Tivi, Tivi, wereeeee!” I screamed at the mad boy.

“Chei oga na wa for dis kontri. I no no say some people dem dey answer Television” Okon said and burst into a ringing laugh.

The fireworks started immediately as soon as we got to the barber’s shop with Jogbojogbo eyeing Okon with suppressed mirth as if he was a specimen from the zoo.

“Alamu, do you need this one to dress like Mungo Park to cook  egusi soup for you?” Jogbojogbo asked with wry bemusement.

“Buhari, leave the poor boy alone”. I said with a smile. Okon was not amused at all. After trouncing snooper in straight sets, Buhari became expansive and started taunting Okon again.

“Come oo, Etteh, what’s that your funny name again?”, he asked Okon.

“Oga, I no be Etteh, I be Okon Anthony Okon”, Okon snapped.

“Hen, hen, so when did your people start bearing name?” Buhari crooned.

“Oga, when my people dey go school for Hope Waddell your people dey fight for Kiriji” Okon submitted with a straight face.

“ Ha lenu e, Eko yi ti baje. Even Calabar cook dey talk back”, Buhari stammered in wounded self-regard. Sensing tragedy, I quickly rose to go, but Okon was not done.

“And make I tell you, na Calabar dem white people wan make capital, but dem come find say your people make better slaves”, Okon blasted.    On hearing this, Jogbojogbo flung out a huge amulet from his pocket. Okon scrambled away, screaming, “Yoruba people wan kill me again ooo”.

First published in 2008 but republished due to popular demand.

To the ancient town of Modakeke for the coronation of its oba, Kabiyesi, Olubiyi Joseph Toriola, Ajibise Ogo 1, the Ogunsua of Modakeke, this past Thursday, November 3rd, 2022. It was a great festival of reunion; a carnival of restitution and rejuvenation. For two days, the entire community knew neither rest nor respite. There was hope and optimism in the air.

Something was astir in the ancient community of fabled combatants. It was a spectacular fiesta of feeding and drinking which reminded one of the epic feast of pounded yam in Things Fall Apart where it took a whole day of leveling the mountain stomach infrastructure before those on one side could finally catch a glimpse of those on the other side.

Modakeke, named after the ancient storks at Iraye Quarters and their cacophonous cackling, is as historic as it is storied. Originally a haven for refugees fleeing the collapse of the old Oyo Empire, it soon developed a radical and revolutionary momentum of its own from the ashes of old empire. With its retinue of recuperating former warriors and rehabilitated foot soldiers famously known as Eso, they soon began cocking a snook at their hosts in fierce dispute over “isakole”, or tenancy holding.

There is an element of poetic justice about it all since they all originated from the same common ethnic stock. But poetic justice is one thing, pressing and urgent political justice and equity about contemporary holding, continuous occupation and unbroken possession is another. You cannot resolve modern disputes about land holding through a recourse to ancestral ties and bonds of consanguinity.

However, it must be said that a lot depends on skillful negotiation and visionary circumspect leadership. The late Ooni, Sir Adesoji Tadeniawo Aderemi, overcame this conundrum through strategic nuptial gaming which saw him take a wife from every nook and cranny of his domain and environs.

Several wars, skirmishes, sieges, sacking, deadly political intrigues later, a wary truce subsists between the two brotherly communities. One can only describe what has happened as akin to creative destruction. Both Ile-Ife and Modakeke now wear a new look.

The development in the two towns after two decades of unbroken peace is a little short of staggering: brand new modern hotels, schools, hospitals, places of worship, shopping malls, banks and gleaming estates have sprung up to replace the sites of apocalyptic carnage. One felt like a Rip van Winkle waking up from a slumber as one traverse the entire length and breadth of the two conjoined cities.

In a happy symmetry, many of the delighted denizens of the two communities have fingered the incumbent Ooni and the newly ennobled Ogunsua as the arrowheads of the furious and fast-paced drive for the modernization of the ancient metropolis that everyone is witnessing. Ife and Modakeke remind one of a sprawling construction site.

Just before the insignia of office was handed to the new Ogunsua, the Ooni, Enitan Ogunwusi, gave a brilliant speech which was a tour de force of extempore speechifying. Standing tall before the animated audience in the vast hall, the royal monarch proclaimed the dawn of a new era of peace and prosperity for the two communities. The entire place erupted in rapture and wild cheering.

The golden symbolism of the moment could not be overlooked. There was something eerily reminiscent of the cradle of Yoruba civilization in its golden era of yore. It was a grand show of affirmative faith in a new beginning for people of mutual ancestry and heritage who have been bitterly polarized by different historical trajectories and the resulting existential exigencies.

Royally resplendent with his demure and queenly Olori, the new Ogunsua and his wife sat sandwiched between the Asiwaju of Ife, the dignified and imperious looking octogenarian lawyer plutocrat, Chief Alex Duduyemi and the Asiwaju of Modakeke, Professor Anthony Oyewole , the nonagenarian scholar, notable political scientist  and product of one of America’s most prestigious universities.

This cool, pleasant morning of early November, all the weapons of intra-ethnic warfare and the booming cannons of violent contention have gone quiet. Peace reigned supreme in the land. If there was any smoke at all, it was probably the fumes from a nearby mining asphalt quarry. The old mine happened to have been part of one’s ancestral farmland.

On a rare visit to the farm as an impressionable youth, one’s father had taken him to the summit of the rocky escarpment after an arduous trek. The old man, a political gladiator with a permanent sense of apocalyptic foreboding, casually informed yours sincerely that deep inside the rock was an ancient boa constrictor that had lived for centuries. The day the mining blast reached its domain would be followed by a pestilential downpour which would put civilization in sharp perspective.

But if there was any boa constrictor around this beautiful morning, it was probably part of the royal cuisine. Oba Olubiyi Toriola is a man of rare and exemplary culinary and sartorial taste. Snooper can personally attest to that. Looking at a king’s mouth, as they say, no one would think he ever suckled at his mother’s breasts.

To get to his current dizzying royal heights, the Ogunsua has had to scale impossible and incredible adversities which he bore with characteristic equanimity. It has been a hard slog inching his way up the greasy pole of royal superstardom. It is a test of endurance and character. Like the fabled Ibadan kingship system which stretches the fabric of human durability to its utmost limit, the Modakeke royal stool is not the domain of callow and untested whizz-kids.

Kabiyesi took it all in the chin. It has taken him almost five decades to get to the pinnacle of royal power and part of this is owed to the intervention of good luck and the ineluctable logic of destiny. As it has been noted, the great man of destiny often carries within his capacious bosom, a convergence of destiny between him and the greater destiny of his society.

Yours sincerely met the future Ogunsua about four decades ago in the course of his arduous ascent up the ladder of royal destiny. He was a senior staffer at the then University of Ife while one was an up and coming lecturer. He was then the Ikolaba of Modakeke and it must be noted that this period coincided with the most turbulent era in the modern history of his people.  Oba Toriola acquitted himself brilliantly and people could notice even then that he was a man marked for higher responsibility.

There was something utterly disarming about his combination of playful seriousness and a sense of higher responsibility to his people. He had nerves of steel. He walked softly but carried a heavy stick. Despite a debonair and polite exterior, it would be extremely foolhardy for anybody to test his iron will and implacable resolve. The skull of an elephant is not a luggage for mere kids.

Quick-witted and forever thinking on his feet, Oba Toriola is a master of the witty repartee and verbal rapid response. Three and a half decades after one can still hear the thunderous artillery of heavy polemical exchanges and sharp ideological rebuff emanating from the iconic Staff Club of the university. It was a period marked by implacable political contention and heavy ideological contestation. The Staff Club was a mere extension of the gladiators’ coliseum, brimming with the scalps of political adversaries.

Despite his harmless mien and gentle exterior, Oba Ogunsua was often drawn into the melee by political necessity. A gifted professor of medicine who took delight in deriding the future Oba as being no more than an Ikolaba of Modakeke got the verbal roasting of his life when the future Oba Toriola retorted that the Ikolaba of Modakeke was actually superior to the royal sovereign of many people. (Ikolaba Modakeke t’oju oba ilu elomiran).

As the youthful Vice President of the Club and later as Chairman, the duty fell on yours sincerely to monitor proceedings and make sure that the verbal brawls did not degenerate into actual physical confrontation.

Even then, one recalls a particular moonlit night when two famous political pugilists, a celebrated Marxist lecturer and a die-hard Awo loyalist, having exhausted their stock of political arsenal, decided to try their luck in actual boxing. Only divine intervention saved the day as each man simply walked into their respective vehicle on reaching the car park where they had agreed to settle matters.

Given this intellectual lineage, it was perhaps appropriate to note that the coronation of the new Ogunsua was flagged off on Wednesday afternoon with a lavish party thrown in his honour by the Asiwaju of Modakeke, Professor Anthony Oyewole in his residence at highbrow Modakeke. It was a gathering of the great and the good. Long lost friends, colleagues and associates suddenly materialized as if one had been dragged into a compelling historical cameo.

The civilized ambience of Asiwaju Oyewole’s residence with its vast courtyard, its plush and verdant lawn, was particularly reminiscent of the old Staff Quarters at the university. Even the aroma of the place spoke to the just and tame taste of the old Nigerian middle class. Our host, the unfailingly polite and ever courteous retired professor, though now considerably slowed down by age and related infirmities, was obviously in good spirits and in his true elements.

It must be mentioned that they were originally three musketeers, inseparable in war and peace. The trio of Oyewole, Toriola and Olatunji were permanent fixtures of the social and political life in Modakeke and environs. They luxuriated in each other’s company like conjoined triplets.

Unfortunately and tragically, the third leg of the triumvirate was amputated during the Ife-Modakeke imbroglio. The ever jovial and amiable Dr Adebayo Olatunji was hacked to death as he made his way to his horticultural farm on the Ife-Ibadan road very close to the Ishasha Bridge.

But it is good to leave behind productive and prime fruits as Olatunji’s son, Yemi, gave a brilliant and rousing speech which brought tears to his eyes, and many people’s eyes, too. Also worthy of mentioning was the dramatic appearance on stage of Professor Omotoye Olorode, like an implacable ghost at a state banquet.

Now mellowed by age and the scars of a life devoted to the socialist emancipation of a bitterly polarized society of countervailing modes of political and economic production, the ever boyish-looking Ogbomosho indigene is not about to go under lightly. Easily one of the most consistent and principled  Marxist thinkers ever thrown up by the country, Olorode, a friend of Oba Toriola from their youthful days, let it be known that it was not over until it is over.

It has been a coronation as carnival and a moveable cultural feast at the historic town of Modakeke. Long live, Kabiyesi, the Ogunsua of Modakeke, Oba Olubiyi Joseph Toriola (Ajibise Ogo 1).

It has been an extraordinary week in British politics. It was remarked that a week is a long time in politics. Such are the unexpected and unpredictable twists and turns in human affairs. But this one has been a short week, and a thrilling one for that matter. It began with the dismissal of the ineffectual but quite personable Liz Truss, the daughter of a Leeds professor of Mathematics.

  By the time the rubble cleared, history has been made on all sides. Elizabeth Truss has become the shortest serving prime minister in British history. And Rishi Sunak, grandson of Punjabi immigrants from East Africa, the son of a doctor and a pharmacist, has become the first person of colour to rule the rump of the empire on which the sun never set and the youngest since 1812. The immovable has finally collided with the unavoidable. Britain will never be the same again.

  There is something about Mr Sunak’s quick, bouncy steps and elfin features which reminds one of a shaman of the orient. When he resigned from office a few weeks back as mounting scandals and indiscretions threatened to torpedo Boris Johnson, Sunak had vowed never to touch high office in the land again if it violated his principles. Despite the hint of boyish self-righteousness, there is something to be said for principled politics particularly in the wake of Boris Johnson’s freewheeling political amorality.

  This past week, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer reaped the handsome dividends of the politics of principles. Unlike what happened in the earlier leadership contest when he was piped at the last post by the surging popularity of Liz Truss among the wider body of Conservative members despite being the clear front runner among conservative members of parliament, this time around, Sunak was determined not to leave anything to chance. He had maintained a tight-lipped equanimity throughout the contest which did not go down well with some party members.

   In the event, it turned out to be a glorious coronation rather than the grueling contestation that everybody thought was in the offing. But it was not without its anxious moments. The lumbering figure of the inevitable rogue chancer and Rishi Sunak’s old bête noire, Boris Johnson, suddenly materialized out of the shadows, having cut short a vacation to the Dominican Republic.

  It must be said that because he represents the sum total of the strengths and weaknesses of the British political populace, the former prime minister remains hugely popular and widely lionized by a large section of conservative voters. Ever the chancer with his eagle eyes focused on the main opportunity, Johnson in a strange rendezvous had offered Sunak an opportunity to cooperate and move the nation forward, a proposal which the latter summarily dismissed having seen through the lethal ruse.

   But when he realized that his figures didn’t add up despite the bluff and bluster, Johnson flunked out of the race on Sunday evening, citing the reason that it was simply not the right thing to do in the interest of party unity. As usual, it was a combination of lying and dissembling. If that were to be the case, why did he cut short his vacation?                                                                                                                              

With Johnson out of the race, it remained the expansive, self-assuring figure of Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the house, to deal with. She had been hoping that in the cloak and dagger world of conservative politics, she would manage to reach the magical benchmark of a hundred conservative parliamentarians thus throwing the race open to the wider conservative public who would have been pleased to poleaxe Rishi Sunak for her just as they did for Liz Truss.

But the phalanx of conservative parliamentarians proved an impregnable fortress, forcing her to throw in the towel a few minutes to the deadline. Whatever anybody might say about the shortcomings of British politics, the system has worked seamlessly and perfectly, clearing the road for the coronation for the first British leader from the land of the ancient moguls and the biggest jewel in the crown.

Read Also: British PM Sunak vows to fix mistakes, restore economic stability

  Benjamin Disraeli, novelist, wit and rake, the first British prime minister of uncontestable Jewish extraction and the person who persuaded Queen Victoria to take the title of the Empress of India, would be chuckling in his grave with characteristic chutzpah. It was a moment of great historic irony.

What goes round also comes around and the road that leads to Delhi also leads back to 11 and 10 Downing Street. If Mr Sunak manages to rescue Britain from its economic quagmire, the paradox of the periphery rescuing the metropolitan centre will not be lost on keen watchers of global developments.

 Perhaps the relationship between colonizer and former colonies should not be posed in such a hostile and adversarial manner. In this collision of cultural shrines, there is always a play of signifiers across rigid, binary divisions. It must be said that of all the colonizing European powers, Britain, on the aggregate, has been the most welcoming and accommodating of immigrants from its former colonies.

  This is perhaps due to some deeply held notions of the sanctity and sacrosanct nature of human liberty and freedom developed over centuries of struggle against tyranny and autocracy. Even Karl Marx, fleeing from persecution in his native Germany, was finally able to write his seminal treatise in Britain after observing the seething and throbbing contradictions of a mature industrialized society.

  The result is the storied diffusion of the apex leadership of Britain with talents from other lands that we are all witnessing. All that is solid melts into thin air indeed and Britain is the better for it. The resistance to change in Britain persists at the level of the Brahmin caste of its politics and ironically in some sections of the hoi polloi. If it continues or mutates into extreme rightwing fascism, then in all likelihood Britain would feel like a Third World economy in a matter of decades.

  If what is unfolding in Britain were to be a film, what an epic blockbuster we would have had on our hand! The cast would have been varied and intensely multiracial and multicultural, bristling with the dead and the living. Please step forward, Robert Clive, later ennobled as the first Baron Clive of Plasey, who is credited with adding India to the British Empire in a victory dismissed by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru as steeped in “forgery and treason”.

   Step forward Vikram Seth, the author of the fictional blockbuster, A Suitable Boy, a great novel of strategic nuptial gaming with its Sunakian echoes; the entire cast of the epic film, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; VS Naipaul who was tormented and traumatised by his people’s docile and supine attitude to their colonial masters which allowed them to be transported as indentured slave-workers from India across half of the globe to the Caribbean coast of Trinidad and Tobago. Those who are nothing will always be nothing, the great novelist and Nobel laureate noted of his own people in equivalent words.

  Finally, step forward, Edward Said, the great American literary critic and public intellectual of Palestinian extraction. In his theory of orientalism for which he became justly famous, Said advanced the thesis that the British conquerors had to reinvent the Indian orient according to their own colonial imaginary in order to be able to handle and deal with the people of the Indian sub-continent.

  Yet the great historical irony is that when the affluent and plush people of the Indian subcontinent first encountered the doughty and hardy Europeans in number towards the end of the fifteenth century, they thought they were of a greatly inferior culture, scoffing and scorning at their rough and ready fabrics which they compared to their own finery and silky plumes. But they lacked the firepower and military wherewithal to sustain their assumptions of superiority.

   Over the next two centuries, their declining empires were overwhelmed and gradually subdued until there was only one Raj in India. When they rebelled against their tormentors in 1857, they found that they lacked the modernist ideology to sustain and valorize their rebellion beyond a feeble recourse to what Karl Marx dismissed as the “superstitious idiocies” of rural folks. Despite their overwhelming superiority in number, they were wiped out to the last man in a scene of biblical bloodletting.

 After that, all became eerily quiet on the eastern front. Perhaps until this past week when the clock of history turned full cycle and a British descendant of the old Indian empire —a practicing Hindu to boot—acceded to the most important seat of power in the land. Thus the whirligig of time has brought a sweet denouement.

   But it is not a done deal, at least not yet. Rishi Sunak’s path is strewn with banana peels, as they say in this clime. He faces a Conservative party close to implosion. Judging from the events of the past week, the old Thatcherite right-wing ensemble has had its sell-by date and is on the verge of historical superannuation. The British public is restive and if the economic woes persist, it will begin braying for blood very shortly.

   The new prime minister will need all the wiles, the guile and the political cujones he can summon. While holding his enemies on the extreme right and extreme left of the party at bay, constantly foiling the attempts of their principal mischief-makers to go rogue on him in a mortal struggle to own the soul of the party, he is required to clobber together a new right of the centre consensus and coalition that will see the disparate multitude he has on his hands to a new phase of modern British politics.   

 Rishi Sunak has all the natural smartness, the engaged braininess and the strategic intelligence to see him through the coming turbulence. But judging from his open face flowing with the milk of human innocence and the sheer naivety arising from preternatural preferment, it is not clear yet if he has the capacity to plumb the great irrational dynamics of modern British politics. The next few months will bear that out.

For about four days, Okon has been behaving very strangely. He had been spending too much time with himself in his room. When he emerged in the living area, he wore a funereal and gloomy look.  Stranger still is the fact that his entire head was covered by a flour sack which he tied grimly around the neck. When snooper asked him what the matter was, Okon would merely hiss only to return to his glum schedule.

    Snooper at first thought that this was Okon’s way of mourning the demise of the traditional ruler of his ancestral village. But no one can be sure of the mad Calabar boy’s latest stunt. By the fifth day, it was clear that the handshake was going beyond the elbow. It may well be that the rogue had contacted gonorrhea again. Snooper decided to do something about it.

While he was fast asleep, snooper tiptoed into the room and yanked off the nonsense from his head. The sight shook and shocked us to the marrow.  Okon’s head was completely shaven but for the thick shrub around the forehead. A barber’s clipper was entangled in the shrub as if it had been knitted in.

    “Okon what’s going on here?” I shouted trying not to laugh.

     “Oga, don’t mind that yeye Yoruba barber. I say make him give me Hogan Bassey cut, he come destroy my hair”.

 “What happened?” I asked with suppressed relish.

“ The yeye man from Ogbomosho with his zebra crossing he come put clipper for my head. Fiam, fiam, he come race through the thing like caterpillar. I say you this were man you well so?”

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 “What did he say?”

   “Him dey speak one kind language I know understand. Dem say na Hausa-Yoruba, him dey say locosin, locosin. So I say to hell with locosin I want my hair back!!”

“So what happened?” snooper demanded.

“Him oga come come, him come they scream, this one na Farioro, this one na Farioro, na only Hausa malam he dey shave. I come look mirror, I no like myself at all. I come give am one blow for him cheek he come spray me with the goro he dey eat,  I come give am another he come fall, I come dey beat everybody for the place. Na him your friend, Buhari Jogbojogbo and dem mad OPC come arrive . Na him I come jump from window with dem clipper for my head.”

     “So, why have you not removed the clipper?” I asked laughing wildly.

“Ha oga, he come use Yoruba juju to tie the thing for my head, I no fit at all. The thing wey dey pain me be say I get date with one UNILAG chick. If he come see me like this, I go faint”.

At this point, snooper moved closer and yanked the clipper off the knotted tangle of Okon’s shrubby hair with the rogue screaming and yelling like a mad chimpanzee.

“Now, you will take the clipper back to the owner before Jogbojogbo comes after you again”, snooper ordered.

 “Oga, dat one I no fit. You wan make the Ogbomosho man finish me?  As I dey run, I dey hear am they scream after me, ankali dankare, ankali dankare fa. Oga wetin be ankali dankare?”

 “Beware of dogs”, snooper replied smiling.

“Chei oga, this yeye Yoruba people. God go punish dem !!”

The forthcoming presidential election is so consequential that it can be regarded as a plebiscite on the future of Nigeria. Here are the reasons. Despite some negligible gains here and there, Nigeria’s political and economic cultures have reached a point of exhaustion, having evolved in a particular negative direction where growth and development are no longer feasible. Any further attempt to pursue this course is the path of self-destruction.

A plebiscite is an advisory referendum on whether a nation should jettison the past and chart an entirely new course. For such to take place means that the nation is still somehow holding together despite the tempest and nation-consuming circumstances. Invariably, a referendum takes place when a nation has virtually reached the point of no return; an ethnic cum religious census in which its fate and continued existence hang in the balance.

Every human society, in the course of its historical evolution, reaches a point when old answers will no longer do for fresh historical posers, and when emergent contradictions such as rapid urbanization arising from population explosion, demographic reconfiguration issuing from aging and dying off suddenly pose a serious challenge to the old order. In such circumstances, the wise people of society must put on their thinking cap.

Unfortunately for Nigeria, the demons of national demolition pursuing the nation are unrelenting in their determination to bring it to heel. A referendum does not steal upon a nation. It is usually the manifestation of the failure of elite consensus which would have been building up and playing out for quite some time.

As the presidential campaigns take off, many members of the political class do not seem to appreciate what is in the offing. When you combine widespread social unease arising from hunger, insecurity and mass unemployment, with the possibility of elite disruption of the electoral process, you have a classic recipe for terminal implosion.

With the mindboggling revelations of the scale of oil theft by both state and non-state actors in the riverine areas of the nation, the economic and political woes of the country seem to have assumed a novel and damning dimension.  A local wit summed up the development for yours sincerely with devastating pungency during the week. “You see, shark no dey hunt shark. Tompolo na government and government na Tompolo”.

Government Ekpemupolo, aka Tompolo, the new prince of the Niger Delta, is a hard-dying fellow indeed. Up till this moment, he seems to have lived a charmed life. As an outlaw and rugged denizen of the creeks and their labyrinthine waterways, he has survived years of hostile state surveillance and relentless artillery bombardment only to emerge from open hiding as a hero and model citizen.

In his current incarnation as a lawful agent of the state and supreme protector of oil facilities, the sparce, supremely self-assured fellow  has made a lot of startling revelations about state collusion with criminal elements and officially enabled diversions without as much as a rebuttal from the authorities. Meanwhile while Government and government are at it, Angola has already outpaced Nigeria in the oil production sector.

Gabon and Equatorial Guinea seem to be piling up all pressures. If they maintain their national stability under their authoritarian regimes, it is only a question of time. With revenues accruing to the federal authorities dramatically declining as a result of this siege, it should be clear that Nigeria is bleeding to death economically. It will take a drastic change of direction to reverse the trend.

As the criminalization of the postcolonial state proceeds apace, the entire nation-state is beginning to resemble a vast crime scene or a bazaar of medieval engorgement. In a recent profile of Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, a foreign magazine openly dismissed the country as a kleptocracy. With their war chest bulging with proceeds from the “Exclusive List”, it should not come as a surprise that the combined wealth of some non-state actors outstrips the sovereign wealth of the nation. It doesn’t get more scary.

Between state and non-state actors, there is a convergence of criminality in which the state has become a horrific joke. With the north already laid waste by banditry and kidnapping, nothing can be more destabilizing to a nation either politically, economically or even spiritually. The slow economic strangulation of the nation can only eventuate in anarchy and stateless anomie.

When the combined estimates of munitions and military grade weaponry in the arsenal of individuals and non-state organizations alike outstrip what the government can boast of, the stage is set for this lethal hardware to be deployed for general duties.

If it is the protection of the traditional state monopoly of the instrument of coercion that has led the federal authorities to consistently turn down the legitimate application of the Amotekun corps for military grade weaponry to guarantee the safety of life and property in its area of jurisdiction, it should be obvious that the horse has already bolted.

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What is actually unfolding is a fate worse than peaceable restructuring or even resource control. If this can be happening under the watch of a president with a military background, one must shudder at the grave responsibility accruing to the incoming government of “pure” civilians. If care is not taken, and if urgent steps are not put in place to recuperate the essence and raison d’etre of the state, nothing will stop the nation from an apocalyptic meltdown resulting in warlord enclaves and anarchic fiefdoms.

As many commentators have essayed, the disintegration of Nigeria will lead to a humanitarian catastrophe of world-historic magnitude. The entire West Africa corridor will be overwhelmed by the refugee crisis. Once it has been fundamentally scrambled by adverse circumstances, it will be extremely difficult to put Nigeria back as one single, unified unit.

The unitarist vision of Nigeria isn’t going anywhere. Not even after a thousand elections and stage-managed transitions. In this hour of distress and dire emergency, what Nigeria needs is a visionary statesman of uncommon mettle and courage and not somebody with the misbegotten mindset of hegemonic domination.  Nigeria does not need a tribal panjandrum but a heroic bridge-builder who can persuade the vital components to sheath their sword and see the bright possibilities.

As we have noted several times in this column, Nigeria is a wonderful tribute to the self-undermining genius of the colonial imaginary. If it did not exist in their imagination, the idea of a huge nation serving as a Mecca of self-actualization for the teeming population of the oppressed and marginalized Black people the world over would have had to be willed into actuality by existential necessity.

But Nigeria is taking too long to gel and come together. The human toll is becoming prohibitive. As an early colonial outpost and with its skilled emigrants on manumission from Brazil, its haul of modernized recaptives streaming in from Sierra Leone, its posse of enterprising indigenous people and the dash of Arab zeitgeist infiltrating from the Sahara Desert, Nigeria ought to prove a brilliant melting point; a wonderful conurbation of underprized and undervalued humanity.

So far so depressing and disappointing. The obvious strengths have proved to be the source of manifest weaknesses. Occasionally, the brilliant possibilities glimmer and shine through like a lone candle before being snuffed out by the combined forces of overwhelming darkness. Nigeria is proving the Black person’s Waterloo in the inability to nurture and grow a viable nation; a Pandora box of roiling and self-subverting contraries.

Like an impoverished bricklayer saddled with poor material, the political realist of the Nigerian condition must work with what is available rather than what ought to be available. It is a historical verity that people make history but not under the circumstances of their choice. Historical conditioning and structural contingencies often make it impossible even in better managed societies to throw up their best leadership materials. Only those with the means and the will to power often prevail.

This is why it is important to continue to struggle for a better society, whatever the glaring deficiencies and imperfections of the moment. Democracy is never given or granted on mere verbal request. The tree of democracy is watered by the blood of many martyrs, unsung, unknown and uncelebrated. They are like discarded pawns and sacrificed knights in a consuming game of chess.

Whatever its glaring imperfections and frank anomalies, the Fourth Republic has come a long way. From the abolition of the electorate, the jarring visibility of the selectorate, vote-snatching, candidate-garnishing and ballot box-switching, we have arrived at a point where votes are beginning to count and where increasing voters’ awareness and consciousness of civic responsibility have dramatically reduced such primitive anti-democratic practices.

The Nigerian electorate has arrived at the threshold of new possibilities. This has been made possible not because the Nigerian ruling classes at both the national and sub-national levels have suddenly become a Father Christmas dispensing electoral munificence to the people. The concession has been wrested at the cost of a vicious struggle in which many perished and several amputees of democracy litter the terrain.

Despite its massive militarization of governance procedures, its manifest imperfections and glaring contradictions and the antecedents of its helmsman as a military dictator, it will be said of this outgoing regime that it contributed immensely to this deepening of the democratic process.

Some will argue that this only happened after Genaral Buhari’s appetite for democratic conquest has sated. However that is, it can also be pointed out that after all some of his predecessors couldn’t care a hoot about whether the nation dissolved in an anti-democratic inferno.

This conditional pass mark will however depend on whether the administration passes the litmus test of conducting a free and fair election whose outcome is acceptable to the generality of Nigerians. The Nigerian multitude, with its hordes of disaffected déclassé and unemployed youth, appear to have sniffed blood. A wise ruler knows when the game is up for electoral gaming. General Buhari seems to have his instincts in the right place, except some hubristic fancy overtakes him on the home stretch.

All things considered, the coming presidential election will be so consequential that it will determine Nigeria’s future and whether it remains one entity or not. It is an opportunity to steer the nation in a different direction. Let those who are saddled with the responsibility take note.

In the darkest entrails of the sprawling megacity, a cannibal ethos prevails. You either kill or you get killed. It is as simple as that.  Autochthon savages from outlying primitive enclaves and the last redoubts of Early Man in Africa finally overran the famed metropolis. Despite the bravest efforts of the law enforcement agencies, they held sway in the swampy outreach of the beleaguered city from where they spread their reign of primitive terror via the inner ghettoes to the glittering landmarks of African modernity.

But help is finally on the way from traditional quarters. Where modern policing falters, African magic comes to the rescue. Snooper never gave a chance to General Obasanjo’s famed formula for dislodging apartheid from South Africa until recently. At this rate, it may well be the old magus from ancient Owu who may yet have the last laugh over this matter of pre-colonial hostilities.

As usual with the freeloading contrarian, Baba Lekki had boarded a mass transit “danfo” bus at Oshodi after an all- night carousal with the intention of linking up with Okon at Freedom Park. But the one chance boys had other ideas.

The old savant sensed major trouble once he entered the bus and was immediately hemmed in by two burly ruffians who looked like characters from the outer margins of hell. As soon as the rickety bus flew past the Ikorodu Road loop without making a detour, Baba Lekki knew that he was in for a hard time.

“Awusu billahi!!!” the old codger grunted in a gesture of false religious outrage. A lady who had been monitoring the awful developments with trepidation suddenly screamed.

“Driver, na Ojota I say I dey go!! I no dey go dem Oworo”, she wailed.

“Shut up. Whether na Ojota or na Oguta, you don reach Golgotha”, the driver jeered.

Read Also: Baba Lekki sings ARIWO lenu Vendor

“Bring out all your phones, money and ATM cards”, one of the thugs shouted. Everybody started complying in fright. When it came to Baba Lekki’s turn, the old rebel brought out an ancient pen and pre-historic reading glasses.

“Wetin be dis yeye nonsense? Stupid old man, if you dey joke, make you stop am”, the mad ruffian screamed as everybody cowered in terror.

“ I no get phone, but I get Kalamu and Molubi”—ancient Yoruba words for pen and glasses— the old contrarian whimpered .

“ Bad Fish, wetin the old Yoruba fool dey say? Giam one dirty slap for me.” The driver ordered. As the impudent fellow made to comply, Baba Lekki sprang with surprising agility and the hand froze in mid-air. “Eeeeewo! Aisiwo lu’mi. Igbe o l’egun sugbon enite gbodo tiro”, the old man burst into torrid incantation.

“Chairman, I no fit bring down dem hand again”, the foolish fellow whimpered. At this point, one of the burly ruffians hemming the old man attempted to twist his right hand from behind, but remembering the tricks he had learnt from  Alimi Yopayopa, the famed Ibadan magician, Baba Lekki puffed like an adder and the hand came off  clean from the shoulder joint.

“Oga, oga him hand dey my hand, him hand dey for my hand!!!”, the poor fellow cried and began pissing in his trousers.

“Idiot, give me back that hand now now”, Baba Lekki thundered, grabbed his hand and put it back without any effort. At this point, the driver who had been monitoring the weird drama through the mirror suddenly brought the bus to a screeching halt.

“Baba, we no dey go again”, the hooligan stammered, shivering with fright and premonition.

“But me I dey go!” Baba Lekki thundered.

“Where you dey go sir make we drop you?” the crook mumbled disjointedly.

“I dey go meet Oduduwa. I get meeting with dem Oranmiyan, dem Agboniregun, dem Ogedengbe, dem Lisabi Agbongbon, dem Basorun Ogunmola and dem Balogun Ogunsigi. This nonsense must stop immediately. Make you come chop no be say make you come chop off our head”, the old man growled. At this point, the driver and his criminal accomplices jumped out of the bus and fled in different directions.

First published in 2016

A few weeks back, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, arguably Nigeria’s most consequential post-independence military leader, turned eighty. Although the applause and celebrations have been muted on a national scale, his remaining core supporters and many of his compatriots who still hold the Minna-born past master of political dribbling in awe and admiration rolled out the drums in his honour.

Snooper wishes the general, an old foe from the battle of wits and will that ensued between the military and the wider society after the annulment of Abiola’s president mandate, very well. Now that another presidential election of consequence is upon the nation, it useful to deploy the occasion of the general’s birthday to reflect on the historical, sociological and political factors which predispose the nation to such self-disabling debacle.

In recent years, General Babangida’s national visibility has shrunken dramatically. Hobbled by domestic misfortunes and natural infirmities, he has been largely confined to his Minna Hill castle from where he continues to make occasional strategic forays and momentous interventions in the political process of his country.

It is a measure of his enduring strength of character and sheer psychological stamina that almost thirty years after leaving office in controversial circumstances, Babangida is still considered by many of his compatriots as a major player and games master in Nigeria’s turbulent and convoluted post-military politics. If anything, Babangida’s political ardour and appetite to dominate, or at least influence, the direction of his society remain unassuaged.

Although these days General Babangida is viewed with less hostility and his tenure more evenly appraised by his compatriots unlike in the immediate post-annulment period, the deliberate sabotage of the freest and fairest election in the electoral annals of the country is still regarded by historians, sociologists and political scientists alike as the most terrible democratic disaster to have befallen the nation in its postcolonial history.

The annulment led to the termination of a nascent democratic republic, re-militarization of the political process and a descent into untrammelled tyranny and a vicious military dictatorship which ended in a historic comeuppance and humiliation of the Nigerian military. When Nigerians finally emerged from the rubble, it was as if they have been to hell and back.

Given the ease and facility with which Nigeria’s harshly unitarist and congenitally deformed political structure must willy-nilly throw up autocrats in or out of uniform, one can understand why the passage of time has dulled the pains and trauma of the annulment despite its prohibitive human toll. But what must not be condoned is our seeming inability to internalize the lessons of the annulment and learn from its scary and scarifying legacies.

General Babangida left office almost thirty years ago. He might not have succeeded in imposing himself as a civilianized president. But his imprimatur could be found in Nigeria’s post-military imperial presidency in all its Ottoman complexities and contradictions. When in a moment of political epiphany, the general decided to assume the title of military president, he was already offering a template and organogram for Nigeria’s post-military rule, irrespective of whether he was there or not.

We may no longer have a military president. But we have a militarized presidency whose wide untrammelled powers loom so large that it predisposes the holder to despotic whims and caprices which fuel delusions of divine immunity and the impunity that cohabits with it.

One of Babangida’s military predecessors who became his civilian successor also tried his hand at self-succession while another was only recently thwarted by superior forces in his bid to impose his successor on his party. Yet these were the same people who had accused Babangida of playing politics with everything and of deficit of honour and integrity.

One of the lessons to be learnt from this is that annulment and its twin evil of self-succession either directly or by more oblique manipulation of the political process is as much a function of dominant personality and hegemonic politics as it is of extant political structure and environmental culture. Democracy is never given or granted on mere verbal request.

As the political landscape transforms, direct annulment is replaced by the abolition of the electorate, the centrality of the selectorate and the rise of the judiciary as the ultimate vote counter and electoral umpire until the nation is roused from its historic slumber.

Almost three decades after the historic annulment, the sky appears to be darkening once again and the auguries filled with fear and foreboding. Something nasty is hanging in the air. Despite the vast differences in circumstances and actors, there is something about this conjuncture eerily reminiscent of the period leading to democratic meltdown. The unruly political mob has arrived at the table once again.

As it ever so happens in human societies in the grip of a fundamental rupture, the formal outlet of politics can no longer contain its turbulent contents. The annulment was the ultimate outburst of the hegemonic politics of permanent domination which could no longer be bottled within the context of Babangida’s state-party parastatal politics of succession or self-succession.

Dear readers, the piece you are about to read was written about four weeks before the annulment. The stocky general from Minna was still standing and grandstanding. But it was obvious to the discerning that his transition programme had all but unravelled and what remained to be worked out were the terms of his own dismissal and how the nation would pick up the pieces from that point on. It was to lead to another five-year wild goose change which would consume Abacha and the entire military establishment.

When the piece was published, The News magazine was summarily proscribed and its staff hounded on the streets of Lagos. But shortly thereafter, General Babangida himself beat a hasty retreat from what would have been a violent denouement. The parade ground dismissal was a joyless and soulless affair; a state obituary disguised out as a pulling out parade.

It was a mournful anti-climax and Babangida had barely left the stadium for his Minna Hilltop redoubt before the fierce fireworks of real succession commenced. Eight years earlier, this writer had heralded General Babangida’s momentous arrival on the scene with the prologue, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (Published in Newswatch, October, 1985). Now, he was being quietly ushered out in the chilly solitude of the marathon runner who had finally outpaced himself.

Plotting, scheming, neutralizing and tirelessly manoeuvring, Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida, aka Maradona, is Nigeria’s most nimble and politically sophisticated ruler. No one can be said to have ruled the country with a firmer grasp of its confounding intricacies, or a steadier insight into its profound unsettling dynamics.

In a country of reluctant rulers, President Babangida appeared to have prepared himself for office with a calm deliberation and unflinching resolve. He is a man with an astonishing will to power. Yet to many of his countrymen, the general remains a perplexing enigma, an impossible bundle of contradictions. No one can claim that he really knows the Minna-born soldier, that they are privy to what really goes on in the dark recesses of his infinitely resourceful mind.

And here is a man who, by his own admission, has been kingmaker behind the scene and a king on the scene for a whopping twenty-seven years of our chequered history: like the celebrated Janus, the general is all manner of things to all manner of men. To his fawning band of adulators, he is a princely hero. To members of the charmed magical circle that surrounds him, he is the nearest thing to a secular saint.

To many of his military colleagues, he is the embodiment of patience and understanding. But to others not so well disposed, Babangida is a ruthless and vindictive schemer, a megalomaniac on an epic ego trip and the worst political pestilence to have been inflicted on the country. And yet there are others who see him as a misunderstood reformer, a much maligned patriot. One thing stands out in all these assessments, Babangida is a strong character that cannot be easily shoved aside.

Perhaps, then, the key to unlocking the Babangida mystery lies in the greater Nigerian mystery. If Babangida is a confounding paradox, Nigeria itself, as several commentators have noticed, is the ultimate paradox. Like Nigeria, Babangida is a combination of astonishing strengths as well as astonishing weaknesses. Nigeria is a richly talented country which perpetually runs in the opposite direction to greatness.

Like oil, a natural blessing that has turned out a source of profound embarrassment for the country, General Babangida’s own considerable natural endowments, his guile, his cunning, his breathtaking daring, his will to dominate, his penetrating insight into the seemingly defective constitution of his fellow countrymen may ultimately have proved an embarrassment of riches.

As a ruler, General Babangida is the most compelling embodiment of the Nigerian mystique. This perhaps is the key that unravels the riddle of the original romance. After an initial coolness, Nigeria suddenly warmed up to its new ruler in an unprecedented upsurge of affection and admiration. It was as if the country had suddenly discovered the hero it had been searching for.

The summer of 1985 was as unforgettable as it was memorable. Die-hard critics, age-long malcontents and the professional opposition began falling over each other to pay homage and pilgrimage to the new king. For those interested in the semiotic of official patriotism and of power with responsibility, the image of a rain-soaked Major General Babangida taking the national salute at that year’s independence celebrations remains a fetching symbol of national rejuvenation.

But if that was a dream honeymoon, the marriage itself cannot be said to have lasted much longer. The cosy association appeared to have disintegrated in a nightmare of recrimination and mutual disenchantment. As it happened in Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe’s celebrated classic, hero and society seemed to have parted ways, the falcon can no longer hear the falconer, anarchy looms.

Perhaps what is unfolding before our very eyes is one of those epic historical tragedies. And it is not an occasion for caustic virulence but an opportunity for sober reflection and a reassessment of what Aeschylus, in a moment of supreme insight, has called the fundamental unhappiness of the society in search of heroes. Not even his worst detractors could deny the fact that there was a time when Babangida had virtually the whole of Nigeria eating from his palms.

It is the task of sober historians of the future to determine what went wrong. All we can do is to hazard a few guesses. Perhaps there was really no foundation for the optimism, a case of a tired, despoiled nation ready to clutch at any straw. Or it may be that in the long run, the general might have been manipulated by his own manipulations. How else does one explain the elementary mistakes, the bizarre miscalculations and the penchant to self-destruct even when supreme glory seemed in sight?

The overarching vision was wrecked in a jungle of primitive struggle and murderous power play. After all, you can only execute your grand vision if you stay afloat—and alive in the shark-infested and turbulent ocean of the Nigerian polity. And as the pidgin wisdom has it, there is no paddy for jungle. In that case, history may return a verdict of brilliant tactician and poor strategist on the esteemed general.

For an orphan from a lonely outpost of the country who has lifted himself to the very pinnacle of power by the bootstrap, this may not be a damning verdict after all. Babangida’s career is a classic study in survivalist instincts honed to precision and a phenomenal will to dominate. Perhaps in more stable societies, he would have made a distinguished and world famous tank general. But even here, the analysis shipwrecks.

The greatest tank generals the world has known, from the illustrious George Patton through Lord Bernard Montgomery, Field Marshal Rommel and Marshal Zhukov were crusty, caustic eccentrics and apolitical rebels. The urbane and supremely political general from Minna does not quite fit the classic billing. In temperament and outlook, he is miles apart from these distinguished warriors. Where then do we place our man?

There are many Nigerians, in no mood for charity, who will argue that there has been no fundamental vision or strategy to the game all along. The whole thing had been one grand trick whose sole aim is to remain in power for a long time and at all cost.

If you point at such fundamental programmes as DFRRI, MAMSER, PEOPLE’S BANK, BETTER LIFE and even the uniquely baleful SAP, they are wont to retort that all these are ad hoc schemes hastily and clumsily grafted on as the occasion and opportunity demand.  In other words, rather than being well thought out initiatives, Babangida’s reforms are nothing but desperate responses to desperate political pressures.

A harsh verdict, no doubt and one that may yet be tempered by the passage of time. But in what looks definitely like the autumn of power, the grandmaster of power play must have come to realize the utter loneliness of the long distance runner.

As General Babangida, in the stupendous solitude of Aso Rock, calmly contemplates a grand architecture in virtual ruins, he might be inclined to conclude that there is after all some architecture in the ruins, as he himself said of the efforts of his predecessors.  But what many others see beyond the great chess board is a huge mausoleum of discarded pawns and sacrificed knights.

• First published on May 24th, 1993.