Category: Tatalo Alamu

To the Olobeloloko Canteen of Shakirat, aka Iya Abolere, on the outskirts of  Ipaja Village for a rousing meal of grilled porcupine and pounded yam served with Elegede and woorowo vegetable marinated by crushed mushroom of an aromatic variety found in only that part of the country and at a particular time of the year. Gastronomic legend has it that the mushroom was brought by Egbado or Yewa people fleeing from the ravages of the brutal King Gezo of Dahomey in the mid-nineteenth century.

A day after the historic Senate vote, a leglessly drunk Baba Lekki was sighted in the neighbourhood distributing leaflets announcing the arrival of a new political movement named MRN. When the old contrarian was accosted by undercover police agents to tell them the meaning of MRN, he went berserk with rage and insolence.

“Oga shine una Zombie eye well well. MRN na Movement for the Recall of Nigeria. Abi when dem vehicle get factory fault no be say you go recall am make dem factory fit am or finish am?” the old crook demanded from the security agents who strangely asked him to carry on.

It was such a delight to escape the political bedlam through the suburban backdoor to the Lagos country side and its amazing beauty of a landscape and soothing vegetation. Strange things are happening in the country. Some other groups are distributing leaflets about an e-country. Snooper is familiar with e-passport, e-ticket and e-visa. But what does e-country mean? We put the question to Okon who made a short shrift of his boss.

“Oga as I no sabi book, how I go know?” the mad boy taunted. “But how come you no know say e-country mean exit country?”

“And what does that mean?” snooper growled.

“He mean say country don exit, which mean say he no dey exist again, obodo don kaput”, Okon retorted with malicious gusto. For once the mad boy seems to be making a whole lot of sense. But people of his ilk are also part of the problem. With his incessant demand for a pay hike and paternity leave, Okon had become a nuisance and a source of domestic terror. When snooper asked the mad boy how he proposed to cater for the children he was siring, he had shot back that since nobody catered for him, everybody must find their way.

“Oga as dem Yoruba people dey say, when cow no get tail, na Baba God dey help am fight flies”, the mad boy snorted as he tucked into a bowl of rice and beans.

But to think of leaving Okon behind is to find him in front of you. The previous day the crazy boy had arrived home nursing swollen eyes and phenomenally inflated lips. When snooper asked him about the source of his injuries, he replied that he had just escaped kidnappers. Unknown to snooper Okon occasionally visits Ipaja to extort money from Shakirat under the guise of providing protection from kidnappers.

Snooper had hardly settled down to the wondrous meal when Iya  Abolore, a big bosomy lady with elephantine girth, trundled towards us beaming her usual conspiratorial smile.

“ Ha oga dat your boy Okon, na real olosha, He come yesterday with them e-boys. I give am food and money but him say I never give am real food. As him dey look me one kind, I come hit am with dem heavy spoon, but as dat one no do I come pound am with dem yam pestle naim him oga and dem exit boys come carry am go. When him reach heaven make him dey go do dat kind yeye nonsense with women who old pass him mama”, the woman chanted breathlessly.

It was then that snooper understood why Okon had been economical with the truth about his injuries. The shame of his misadventure would not allow him to come clean. A revolution is truly upon the land.

First published in 2017.

Elite politics, particularly in postcolonial Africa, is usually a complex and complicated affair. It is futile and foolish to judge what is actually going on by its surface manifestations. In the cloak and dagger world of African realpolitik, what is shaping up as a lethal sledgehammer may eventually end as a ritualised gesture of obeisance and capitulation.  But there are times when the signals of trouble and the smoke of imminent combustion are too strong to be ignored.

Make no mistake about this. The house of Oduduwa is on the boil. There is much commotion and caterwauling in the political space. The presidential sweepstakes has been reduced to an outlandish bazaar with a plethora of rival claimants shadow duelling before the main tournament. Even in traditional societies, the contest for the royal stool is usually marked by more dignity and decorum.

In a widely referenced Afenifere Inaugural Lecture held on March 15, 2004, this writer posed the troubling question: Why is it that after each successful mobilization of the Yoruba people by progressive forces, the wheels tend to come off the mobilising vehicle? Is this a reflection of a flaw in Yoruba historical and sociological conditioning as a result of a contradictory pull of the forces of political, economic and spiritual modernity?

Does it mean that the progressive tendency in Yorubaland cannot manage success? Are the lure of office and the spoils of victory usually too strong for the centre to hold? Or does it mean that despite all pretensions and appearances to the contrary, the progressive forces are not really different from the conservative phalanx they seek to supplant by bruising propaganda and intellectual razzmatazz?

It is to be noted that not even Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s much lionized Action Group was exempt from this political schizophrenia. Confronted by the conundrum of postcolonial modernity and its associated pathologies, the Action Group simply unravelled into its royalist, conservative and progressive components with Awolowo taking a sharp lurch to the left while Akintola and associates rallied the conservative pragmatic banner. It ended in disaster.

The same political drama came to the fore, or was about to during the Second Republic. The UPN was only saved by the bell of military intervention. The creaking noise of imminent disintegration could already be picked off by the discerning. Rumours were rife of a certain Awolowo arch-loyalist who was being lured away from the group by the wily feudal powerbrokers on the grounds of proven competence and correct religious affiliation.

After Abiola’s famous presidential victory, the same scenario repeated itself. While a section of the progressive forces that rallied to ensure Abiola’s victory decided to collaborate with the military/feudal complex, the true progressive forces were having none of that. They subsequently made life impossible for the military junta.

But after the comprehensive victory of progressive forces in the old west following the retreat of the military to the barracks in 1999, the surviving progressive component was rocked by a series of crises which led to the disintegration of their party with generous assistance from the federal authorities led by a Yoruba son. Chief Bola Ige was to lose his life in the fractious disputations and bitter infighting.

Now in 2022, we have arrived at a similar conjuncture. The unappeasable demon of Yoruba political self-annihilation has returned to demand its ritual appeasement once again. A people globally acknowledged for their culture and political sophistication have once again arrived at a point where the periodic tiff among their political elite has now mutated to a situation of civil war among the dominant progressive elite. And even after they have come to power at the centre for the first time in their history?

Is the historic handshake across the northern Niger now turning into a bone-crushing anaconda embrace? The master-puppeteers are laughing hysterically behind the wall of contrived silence. But it is going to be a very short laugh indeed. The merchant of expired merchandise has finally arrived at the supermarket of prohibited commodity. Those who believed that Nigeria’s salvation lies in a historic partnership of contrasting visions of society have been given a brutal short shrift.

The post-military Fourth Republic has brought out the worst in our political class. As this column never tires of reiterating, the spate of party crisscrossing and shameless defections is an indication of politics totally devoid of ideology or any ideals. It reminds one of Robert Musil’s famous novel, The Man Without qualities, a zombie-like cretin given to the pursuit of personal pleasures at the expense of societal wellbeing.

In the jungle of primitive political impulses, the organising principle is sheer lack of principles and the ruling authority is disordered reality. There is no paddy for jungle as they say. In this African political leprosarium, all fellow feelings of empathy and compassion are completely denuded. In the ethical wasteland, how anybody expects another person to be loyal to him is a matter of intellectual puzzlement.

But let us get this clear. After this alliance, the dominant Yoruba group will return to base more polarized and bitterly divided than at any point in the last seventy years. The infighting is likely to be more vicious because some of the emergent political warlords have acquired the means and capacity to keep and sustain private militias. The social media is already deeply embedded.

If it is of any comfort, however, it can be said that the north itself has not fared any better with the region politically, spiritually and economically prostrate and its elite bitterly factionalized, its vast landscape blitzed beyond recognition even as it continues to hold off rival claimants to the throne. The ethnic nationality question is embedded in the National Question. One cannot be resolved without the other.

In the past one week, this columnist has been inundated with requests by readers asking him to comment on the current political infighting and the jostling for the presidential ticket among the Yoruba political elite. A most concerned clergyman friend and great admirer informed the columnist that he was eagerly awaiting his judicious intervention.

These requests are made based on the belief that yours sincerely has his ears close to the ground in the Yoruba political terra firma or that one is close to the source of power. However, it must be noted that the role of the columnist is different from the role of the politically engaged. One must never be confused or conflated with the other. For the columnist comments are free as long as facts are sacred. But for the strategically savvy reticence is often of superior eloquence than drooling flippancy and mere verbal incontinence.

Of the virtues that separate humanity from the lower species, honour and loyalty to friendship occupy the apex position. This writer holds very dear the sacred principle of fidelity to friendship no matter the circumstances and no matter the abhorrent behaviour of the other party. What is important is to hold on to your personal values and stick to the standards you have established.

To stab a friend in the back in his hour of need is one of the most sacrilegious acts humans are capable of. But there are times when the code of honour comes into violent conflict with the code of loyalty to personal friendship, particularly where the fate of an important component of the Black race is concerned.

For example, every true Black intellectual of this perilous age must fight on the side of the people and pitch for progressive emancipatory politics. Where a political party promises progressive policies only to jettison such policies on the first crow of the cock, such a party must be severely sanctioned and considered unworthy of public trust.

But to sanction does not mean to abandon the original progressive platform, particularly in the absence of a viable Third Force and in a situation where the clear alternative is a pack of unprincipled and obviously unrepentant political jackals eager to resume the freeloading and feeding frenzy where they signed off.

Readers of this column must attest to the fact that in the past seven years, it has never hidden its disaffection and radical dissatisfaction with the policy somersaults of the ruling party and the conduct of its apex leadership, irrespective of their ethnic origin, creed or religion. But group cohesion and the collective viability of a people must not be sacrificed at the altar of hegemonic pranks.

This is why all the gladiators must be brought to a negotiating table where a honourable deal can be hammered out. No one can come out a triumphant winner in the looming fratricidal bloodletting.  The presumptive winner will be so badly weakened and compromised by the consuming contention that he will end up a Quisling to the cause of an emancipated Nigeria or a jaded overall loser that will be brought back home in a political body bag.

In the current delirium of treachery and the quicksand of personal perfidy, all the loose talks of betrayal will evaporate, all the frenzied and fanciful name calling will disappear, only to be replaced by the betrayal of a people and all the sufferings and trauma that have marked the struggle for the progressive emancipation of the Nigerian people from the clutches of medieval tyranny and a retrogressive worldview whose depredations and devastation of modern Nigeria can no longer be hidden from public view.

Unless this is the desired outcome, unless they have been reactionary moles all along in the service of the historic persecutors of their own people, this is the time for the principal combatants to sheath their swords and allow calm sober reasoning to supersede irrational sabre-rattling.

Unfortunately, one suspects that the horse might have bolted from the stable. It is impossible to adjudicate in a political dispute fought without higher principles and without any visionary template for the urgent transformation of a fallen nation. With the hitherto progressive components going in different directions in the pursuit of irreconcilable ambitions, there is likely to be a complete mutual evisceration before any reconfiguration of a new order can take place.

In the light of this overwhelming tragedy, can we still deny that the historic collaboration between the north and the west of the nation was a political error of unimaginable magnitude? This is a poser of such dialectical density that it cannot be answered in a simple yes or no format. The historic collaboration which resulted in the victory of the APC at the centre is not the result of a pan-Nigerian concert of all the contending power blocs.

Even if it is driven by consuming personal ambition, it is a product of a historic consensus between factions of the hegemonic power formations in the nation. It can be argued that in a multi-ethnic country fissured by various divisions such amity of all contending blocs is a political impossibility without a structured elite consensus.

The signal lesson to be learnt from all this is that forging a workable and viable nation from the colonial bedlam we have inherited is more important than consummating power alliances based on exclusion and marginalization. The excluders will also be excluded eventually. In postcolonial nations, elections and electoral victories cannot be regarded as prime instruments of nation-growing.

History will be measured in its praise of the driving proponents behind the alliance to the extent that it tried to break the historic deadlock between contending power-formations. As such, it is an imperfect harbinger of a more visionary reconstruction of the Nigerian political space based on inclusivity and the de-marginalisation of the constituent units.

This must come very soon if Nigeria were not to dissolve into unwieldy components. The glaring failures of the past seven years show just how dire the situation has become and the fact that Nigeria can no longer be sustained along the old unitary formula. General Buhari in all probability is the last ruler of old Nigeria.

As Easter festivities got underway, yours sincerely curled up in bed thinking of happier times when the mere thought of Easter approaching brought sweet expectations of merry-making and fresh mangoes; frejon and jollof rice; fanciful masquerades and eager pilgrims to designated Galilees.

And then all hell broke loose. After some thunderous raps on the door, an angry and frustrated-looking Mama Igosun charged in like a furious bull. Yours sincerely stirred uneasily in bed wondering what could have roused the devil in the old woman on such an occasion.

“Ah good morning mama. Hope all is well? And Good Friday to you”, snooper opened calmly, trying to sweet-talk the great amazon.

“Akanbi, whether Friday good or him no good, that one no concern me. That one na him papa palaver . Wetin concern me be say I wan go home today today. I don tire patapata for dis yeye nonsense. Make Gbabi take me to Igosun after I don drink palm wine for Yemetu Aladorin. Abi kilode gangan?” the old woman screamed.

The outburst took yours sincerely by surprise. One had thought that the old woman had stabilized and had reconciled herself to the possibility of spending the rest of her life in Lagos. Mama had been badly shaken by the Covid-19 scourge which took away all her surviving friends in Ibadan and environ.

Mama herself had barely survived the pandemic, often lapsing into long periods of death-like stillness and uncommunicative brooding. But she rallied heroically, her greatest disappointment being the failure of the Igboho uprising . Long after the boy fled into exile, the old woman could be heard in the dead of the night bemoaning her loss and lambasting the spirit of Yoruba ancestors for sleeping while on duty.

It must be noted that mama had been immensely helped on her way to recovery by the arrival of the new part-time driver, a gamey and entertaining crook with missing incisors known as Gbabi-magbabe. A recuperating NNDP thug form the First Republic, Gbabi-Magbabe had been inherited from the family stable of stalwarts and strongmen from that era, having seen action in all the celebrated flashpoints of muscular contentions: Itaasin, Itutaba, Labo, Mushin, Tonkere etc

Most mornings, he could be found washing snooper’s old reliable while listening to the ancient music of Ade Gator, a celebrated musician of Oke Ogun extraction, with a dog-eared amulet dangling ominously from his pocket if he was not running strange errands to procure stranger culinary condiments for the old woman.

“Ah mama, I think we have agreed that you will stay with us till the end”, snooper responded with a sweet mien trying to cajole the old contrarian.

“Which yeye nonsense be dat and whose end be dat? Wo, Akanbi let me tell you na interval be the end of all film for Scala at Sabo”, the old woman screamed.

“But mama, you have an appointment with the ear, nose and throat specialist at the hospital tomorrow”, snooper reminded the implacable matriarch.

“Leave me alone o jare. Na Igosun I wan go today today. I don hear enough. I don smell enough and I don long-throat enough for dis yeye kontri,” the old woman exploded. It was at this point that Gbabi-Magbabe returned with the day’s offering from Arepo market.

“Iya Agba, na only Olu Beje (Beje mushroom) dey market”, the old crook rumbled as he set the sack down with exaggerated caution. The old woman sniffed and frisked the content with suspicion.

“Wo Gbabi, I hope you have not brought the poison dem dey use to kill all dem Yoruba oba”, Mama shrieked at the poor fellow.

“Awusubillahi!!” the gap-toothed former street-fighter protested. Ironically, on a visit to the revered Oyo monarch penultimate Saturday, this subject of royal poisoning also came up. The celebrated scholar-monarch, arguably the greatest repository of Yoruba tradition around, plumped for a local species of opium. When yours sincerely asked him to expatiate, the great king responded with a devastating grin of complicity.

 (To be continued. Watch out for the encounter with Iku Baba yeye)   

Oh dear, oh dear, it is more matters for a May morning, as the clown in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night will facetiously observe. From time immemorial, the month of May is usually full of elemental surprises, not to talk of political mayhem and May Day signals from the sinking vessels of nautical notables. This current month of May is proving its mettle already. There is a political struggle unto death going on. One can smell the odour of chrysanthemum from a distance.

Last week a storm broke in MKO Abiola’s priceless platinum tea cup. At first glance, this may appear a wicked and indelicate choice of imagery. Given the storied circumstances of the great man’s stormy exit from this sinful world, putting Abiola and a tea cup in the same metaphorical bracket may appear a satanic joke from the pit of hell. But when it is discovered that a storm in a tea cup actually means mere piffle; a trite and inconsequential trifle, then all that is solid animus melts into thin air.

Readers of this column must bear it in mind that it rarely dwells on individual actors and their peccadilloes. On the few occasions that it does, it is to illuminate the larger political process. We have never written on Yahaya Bello before despite many temptations. Individual political actors are part of a wider spectrum on the historical canvass and whenever a political phenomenon is reduced to individual predilections, we can be sure that the explanation is faulty.

Hafsat Abiola-Costello, the adorable, gutsy and cerebral daughter of the late mogul and martyr, suddenly let it be known to whoever cared to listen that she has taken up the post of Director-General of the Yahaya Bello presidential campaign. All hell was let loose in the Yoruba political firmament. Many were those who took exception to what they consider an ill-judged and ill-considered gambit. Has it come to this, they chorused. If gold can rust, what will become of iron?

In the postcolonial coliseum that is contemporary Nigeria, the burden of expectations weighs heavily on the slender shoulders of the political survivors of the politically exceptional. They are expected to jealously guard and preserve the family name and reputation against all vicissitudes and against all odds. As Abiola himself would have put it, the bigger the head the bigger the headache.

In what many considered to be the unkindest cut of all, Hafsat is known to have declared that she could see many similarities between her illustrious father and the youthful and rambunctious Yahaya Bello. Some consider this an act of unpardonable filial betrayal and a terrible slap on the reputation and accomplishments of her great father.

Comparing Abiola who at the age of forty in 1977 was described as the most brilliant accountant in Africa with a fourth-rate political hustler and violence-prone charlatan is a great disservice to the family, the Yoruba race and the whole of humanity in general. What on earth could have happened to this young hitherto promising woman? There must be more to this than the lure of money and the promise of position.

Yet there are many who took umbrage who might have forgotten that Hafsat is a dead ringer for her late father in many respects: brilliance, guts and independent-mindedness. Abiola himself had a deep streak of iconoclasm, which is often a mark of the truly gifted.

Until he struck gold politically in a manner of speaking, Abiola was a political maverick and an off-message eccentric who could not be held down to any position. For a long time, this was a source of unease between him and quite a lot of his people who prefer their leaders to be as straight and straight shooting as a quivering arrow,

He was like a deep playing attacking midfielder until he became a star defender of democracy and prime symbol of the struggle against military autocracy having broken off from the NPN in 1982 and his military patrons and their feudal limpets exactly ten years after in a memorable tiff that has continued to shape the political contours of the nation three decades after.

Perhaps, then, part of the problem with Hafsat’s choice of political platform is the fact that it has to do with the Bello brand. The Kogi State governor has not always conducted himself with decorum and dignity in public. Neither has he ruled his Kogi fiefdom with vision, fairness and fiscal rectitude. If these are the golden virtues he is now transferring to the federal service, then God save everybody including Hafsat herself.

There may well be a deeper political subtext to the animus generated by Hafsat’s choice which speaks to the ethnic polarization of the nation at this moment. In many Yoruba political circles, Yahaya Bello is seen as a political interloper having been catapulted into office from the third position when it was legally, electorally and judicially obvious that a Yoruba-speaking candidate was on the verge of gubernatorial triumph.

But he was obviously a candidate from the wrong camp, the camp of the magic workers of the APC triumph of 2015 and the electoral benefactors of the current inquisitors. Yet rather than do something to ameliorate this dangerous and deliberate political malediction, Bello has been at his most aggravating and insolent best routinely subjecting the people of Kogi to a reign of electoral terror when not tormenting them with his brand of staccato fire democracy.

It is unfortunate but not entirely unexpected that Hafsat’s choice of political tutelage should cause a rumpus in a family already fraught with mutual misgiving and simmering discontent. In a viral spat, Tundun Abiola, public commentator cum lawyer daughter of the late tycoon, took serious exception to Hafsat’s unwarranted comparison of their late father to a run of the mill political jobber in the name of existential exigencies.

This is just as it should be. By standing up to defend the honour and memory of her martyred father, the young woman has shown herself to be a worthy inheritor of Abiola’s epochal legacy. As it is to be expected, public sentiments appear to be with her.

Yet there is also a substantial public opinion which fanatically believes that Hafsat, by her stirring and sterling rallies against her father’s tormentors and the nation’s persecutors during and after the NADECO years, remains the public face of the struggle against military despotism in Nigeria, a symbol of hope and affronted humanity at a trying period for the Yoruba people.

As far as this public is concerned, Hafsat has won her spurs and could do nothing wrong. Her current gaffe and ludicrous grandstanding can be accommodated as arising from a temporary lapse of judgement and struggle-fatigue which would be corrected in the fullness of time as she learns to master the rope of political skulduggery. After all in the postcolonial coliseum of countervailing contradictions, it is virtually impossible to be a hero all of the time.

If it however turns out that the postcolonial condition has claimed another worthy and heroic combatant, then let no one shed undue tears for the daughter of the martyred Kudirat Olayinka Abiola. It has been a lonely and traumatic odyssey.

To lose one parent to state execution at such an early age is traumatising enough. But to lose both parents to state-ordained elimination is too psychologically destabilising for words. Let the mourners direct their tears towards the blood-soaked plinth of the Nigerian postcolonial state and its surviving executioners. Thanks to the environment of liberalised evil, more and more of them are coming out of the woodworks, including the former Abacha honcho who has just found favour at the helm of affairs of the ruling party.

Snooper’s enduring image of Hafsat Abiola is from a memorable weekend spent together in Houston circa April, 1997 in company of a world famous musician of Nigerian extraction whom she introduced as her cousin. It was at the first World Congress of Free Nigerians presided over by the indefatigable  avatar of Nigeria’s independence struggle, Anthony Eromosele Enahoro, the much adored and beloved Adolor of Uromi.

It was arguably Nigeria’s darkest moment under the tyrannical clutches of Abacha. But despite the pervading atmosphere of gloom and depression, and despite her own consuming loss, the young woman demonstrated such empathy and compassion, such forbidding calm and grace under pressure that one began to wonder what stuff she was made of. Twenty five years after, the Nigerian condition has turned the daughter of Abiola into an object of public obloquy.

Perhaps this is a good moment to direct the attention of the coroner to the real culprit which is the failure of leadership recruitment in post-military Yorubaland, particularly among the hegemonic faction. Our leaders have been so consumed by internal wrangling, by petty squabbling and jostling for position that they have failed to recruit the right cadre of leadership for the onerous task ahead.

When they do pretend to recruit, it is either they are looking for abject yes men or pliant nonentities as foot soldiers for their wars of hegemony and the compulsory superimposition of jaded worldviews. The result is there for all to see. You cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam tubers.

Those who recruit political mercenaries to fight their cause should not be surprised when the same mercenaries turn against them when they get better offers. A political system which allows a treasured gift like Abiola’s daughter to be picked up by political hyenas rather than protecting and nurturing her to the pinnacle of politics is not fit for purpose no matter the grand propaganda.

We are faced with an organic crisis of nationhood which requires those who can think out of the box. Let us once again remind ourselves of what Professor Bates, the master theorist of organic crisis, has to say about this.

“An organic crisis involves the totality of society as well as its superstructure. An organic crisis is manifested as a crisis of hegemony, in which the people cease to believe the words of the nation’s leaders, and begin to abandon the traditional parties. The precipitating factor in such a crisis is frequently the failure of the ruling class in some large undertaking, such as war, for which it demanded the consent and sacrifice of the people”.

Those who believe that the Nigerian crisis is amenable to quick fixes will discover at the end of the day that they have been deceiving themselves and the nation. The Hafsat Abiola interlude is a mere storm in a tea cup.

Since Okon has been released on police bail to face trial for affray and battery and conduct prejudicial to public order, the house has been swarming with serial bootleggers from Jamestown, drunken well-wishers and other colourful crooks from the creeks.

One of these is a crazy old fellow clad in snow white suit who claimed to be a former officer of the Imperial Navy and who insisted that snooper must make him a good cup of Ceylonese tea every morning. When he was informed that snooper was actually Okon’s boss, the old bugger shrieked in Queen’s English: “Landlubber, get out of my mooring or I’ll torpedo your mother!!”

On the D-Day, the court was swarming with noisy wannabes and smelling of antique perfumes from a Portuguese shipwreck. Dressed like an old sailor, Okon was brimming with mischief and radiant with irreverent pluck. By some miracle, the mad boy had smuggled a giant disused battery from a cannibalised jet into the courtroom as a principal exhibit. The fireworks began immediately the charges were read to the crazy one.

“That you Okon Anthony Okon is committed for battery and affray and for conduct prejudicial to public order. On Thursday, the….”

“ Point of incorrection !!”, Okon screamed, pointing at the battery. “How you fit charge me for battery when I get dem  Ogbonge battery? Okon no dey steal battery at all at all. And I no dey afraid of nothing. Ten Yoruba wrestlers no fit challenge Okon. And I don tell una say I no be conductor. Okon be houseboy and him  Oga dey court.”

“ I see”, the lady magistrate began with demure elegance and bemusement. “I think I know this troublemaker. Mister man, have you ever been up before me?”.

“My sister, how I fit answer dat kind question when we no dey sleep together?” Okon demanded with an irreverent smile. “If to say we dey bed together, I fit sabi when una dey wake. But sha for Lagos I wake up for six and for Calabar I wake up for 2 p.m”.

“Stupid man”, the magistrate snapped, losing her cool. “I mean whether you have come before me”.

“Egweee!!! See man see trouble ooo”, Okon began with a subversive frown. “As I no dey hammer you, how I fit know dat one? I don ask una before whether you be dem Yoruba woman I dey see for Aguda”.

“Idiot”, the lady magistrate spat as she lost her cool and the entire court dissolved into laughter and wild cat calls. The shout of “order! order!” rent the entire court room.

“You see now, the last time dem say make we order like dat in court and I say make dem give me  Apu and 404 dem police say I be stupid man”, Okon lamented bitterly, fuelling more caterwauling in court.

The magistrate seemed to have had enough. She began packing her papers. “The accused person is hereby remanded in custody until the next hearing”, she shouted amidst the inglorious din.

“Haba wetin be dat one now?  So Okon no go home and Okon no go jail? Which kind acting palaver be dat? Na dem Jonathan Badluck be dat”, Okon protested.

“Just shut up”, the poor woman screamed.

“How about dem feeding arrangement?” Okon demanded as the lady retreated to her chambers.

“Idiot”.

“Wey dem Falana and dem woman rights lawyer now?” Okon snarled as he was being led away. “If to say Gani no kaput he for done scatter dem yeye court by now. Abi na becos Okon be Efik boy? Dem yeye Yoruba lawyers, wey dem dey now?”

First published in May 2010

As the APC held its much postponed party convention yesterday, many patriotic Nigerians waited with bated breath and muted expectations hoping that the party will cobble together a patchwork of compromise which will stay the executioner’s axe dangling over it and the Fourth Republic. The crisis of party formation is at the root of Nigeria’s inability to progress democratically or advance economically since independence.

There is a compelling nexus between shambolic parties and equally shambolic nations. Nations have the political parties they deserve and ultimately the fate that overtakes them. National character is national destiny. Twice in post-independence Nigeria, ambitious military rulers saw a chance to terminate wobbling civilian regimes. In the case of the aborted Third Republic, it was terminated in vitro by its own initiators. It was autogolpe or self-coup at its most bizarre.

If the Fourth Republic has so far survived the military’s asphyxiating bear hug, it is not because of the innate generosity of the institution.  Military rule has two major factors working against it in contemporary Nigeria. First is the fact that except in circumstances of widespread anarchy and general state collapse, military rule is historically passé. Second is the dismal and appalling record the military themselves left behind in Nigeria.

But there is a limit to which people can press their luck. As the Yoruba people will put it, just because a person is named Folorunso (May God protect this child) doesn’t mean he should go about climbing a palm tree with banana fronds.

Given the dire circumstances in which the nation has found itself, all hands must be on deck to save the Fourth Republic from going under in an apocalyptic meltdown. This is the time for efforts of a bipartisan nature to prevent the operators and managers of the polity from pressing the self-destruct button.

Politics is often defined as the authoritative allocation of values and resources, that is determining who gets what and at what time. The crisis of party formation in post-independence Nigeria is mainly precipitated by the iniquitous and inequitable allocation of resources either through forcible hijacking of the process by devious antidemocratic means or through the feudalization of the means of allocation by people without any concept of the nation-state.

In a multi-ethnic conglomeration of mutually hostile nationalities aspiring to organic nationhood and a democratic normalization of competing visions of the nation, the idea of an authoritarian rather than authoritative figure presiding over the allocation of values and resources is bound to come into violent collision with egalitarian forces ostensibly fighting for justice and equity.

This crisis is everywhere in the Fourth Republic. If it is muted and neutered at the sub-national levels of governance, it is because sub-ethnic contradictions are often less frontal and often more subsumable under the generalised framework of class conflict rather than homicidal tribal vengeance. In some extreme cases such as we witnessed in the old west in the Second Republic, sub-ethnic tensions arising from political disputations and feelings of alienation may boil over into full blown intra-ethnic warfare and violence.

Towards the end of 1983, in an atmosphere of deep gloom and despondency, Awolowo’s party, the Unity Party of Nigeria, (UPN) converged on Abeokuta for the last gathering of the clan.

The despair was all pervading. The UPN had just been taken to the cleaners in an egregiously rigged election masterminded by the hard men of NPN in collusion with the police and security forces. James Ajibola Idowu Ige, one of the most brilliant and colourful leaders of progressive forces ever thrown up in Nigeria, was nowhere to be found on the high table.

Ige had earlier been steamrolled in an electoral coup spearheaded by Ibadan supremacists, security forces and those who simply hated his guts. In the case of Pa Michael Ajasin, he had barely survived by the skin of his teeth, having been thoroughly roughed up by an electoral blitzkrieg ably assisted by men of the notorious and infamous “Verdict ‘83″. The old man sat on the high table ruffled but still sedate and forbearing.

The case of Bola Ige deserves particular emphasis. He had earlier been stripped of his title of Aare Alaasa by the reigning Ibadan monarch over what was regarded as his contumely to his Ibadan constituency. The title was given to a local poet and Ewi exponent who gladly accepted.

Barely a year earlier in what has come to be known as the Yola Night of Long Knives, Ige was granted a reprieve by Chief Awolowo after his opponents led by LKJ tabled a motion that he should be expelled from the party for inviting a known political adversary, General Olusegun Obasanjo, to adjudicate in a political rift involving him and his estranged former deputy, S M Afolabi.

Awolowo, ever the calm rational philosopher and master dialectician of opposing historical forces, refused to entertain the gloom and despondency that seemed to have consumed his loyal colleagues and hero-worshipping lieutenants. He had famously posited his theory of synthesis adopted from Hegelian dialectics of history. By this theory, the best parts of the contending forces would eventually fuse into one and the struggle must resume in earnest.

It was a parting shot from the great man to a nation undeserving of his visionary gifts. Earlier, and having been subject to a daylight electoral robbery, Awolowo had vowed never to take part in any electoral contest again in his lifetime. If the nation still needed his services, it knew where to find him, the old man added.

His jubilant foes never realised that this was a complete disavowal of the democratic trajectory of the nation and of the Second Republic by extension. His vision acutely angled,  Awolowo could have been reading from a horoscope of impending disaster. At the rational level, he had the weight of historical analysis on his side.

Awolowo knew that each time the progressive forces are forcibly side-lined and alienated by the security/ feudal complex, disaster always followed. This was what happed in the first and second republics and the aborted Third Republic which was eventually consumed by the annulment of Abiola’s presidential mandate. Needless to add that on the very last day of the year and having lost all legitimacy and authority, the civilian administration was sent packing by the soldiers. Nigeria had joined the league of abandoned toddlers in the orphanage of democracy once again.

Next year would be the fortieth anniversary of the UPN’s historic last gathering and Awo’s landmark intervention. Four years later Awo himself joined his ancestors. His initial comment on the new Buhari administration was as gnomic as it was brimming with oracular wisdom. “The omens are still not clear”, declared the Ikenne titan.

It was not clear whether the old sage was having a rethink about his theory of synthesis of the Nigerian political class. But with the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that the fusion had not happened the way the old man would have thought or anybody could have imagined. It was not entirely his fault. Reality is always more complex and disarming than elegant theoretical formulations.

Things have become more conceptually sophisticated. Advances in the study of dialectics suggest that contending realities do not fuse cleanly and clearly. Neither do they obey the Hegelian formula of cause and effect. Rather, it is a complexly interlocking procedure in which contending contradictions jostle for ascendancy in what is known as an overdetermined reality. What is right about what is left is what is left about what is right.

For example, it would have been entirely inconceivable for a right-wing recalcitrant like an Abiola to have emerged as a paradoxical hero of progressive forces and a martyr of democratic rule. Yet Abiola could only have emerged from the right and right-wing politics. Only conservative “business friendly” politics could have thrown up a man of his stupendous means, wealth of pan-Nigerian connections and sheer chutzpah.

But if anybody had thought that Abiola’s martyrdom was a divinely ordained sacrifice to lay the foundation of a progressive, genuinely democratic and egalitarian nation, such a person had better perish the thought.  What is playing out in the Fourth Republic, first through General Obasanjo and now through Major General Buhari, is the consolidation of right-wing conservative dominion in alliance with the new monied class in a project of perpetual domination of the nation.

If anything, the way and manner the old owners and founders of the PDP were muscled out of contention in textbook military fashion ought to have indicated in what direction the wind was blowing. Famously, Umaru Shinkafi was known to have asked the former military hierarchs absconding from his APP whether their new posting was out.

The overwhelming presence of retired military barons, their siblings and their paramilitary subalterns in the affairs of the post-military republic attests to this new class formation. It is a fusion of contrary forces quite right but in a way even a man of Awolowo’s famed political wizardry could not have envisaged.

Sometimes, it feels like a diarchy, but not in the way good old Zik also envisaged. In its classical formulation, diarchy is direct military rule bolstered and boosted by civilian accessories. In 1972, in a celebrated intervention, the great Owelle of Onitsha, worried by the virtual and seemingly irreversible domination of the military in Nigeria’s post-war political arrangement, had advocated diarchy as a solution to the political instability confronting the nation.

But as we can see, what has happened is not diarchy in its classical sense but a militarized polity dominated by retired military personnel and the new civilian subclass they have created in their own image. Yet brutal ironies and paradoxes subsist. One of the core military annulers of Abiola’s mandate who objected to his presidential ascendancy based on a business deal gone awry made a successful transition to right-wing politics and greater national prominence.

It was not a bridge too far. On the other hand, you have the tragic case of a Bola Ige who, having felt betrayed by his colleagues, had tried to cross from the opposite end of the ideological spectrum before realising the perils involved. It proved a bridge too far. He was summarily executed for his contretemps.

After twenty three years of this right-wing conservative political engineering, the true profile of the Fourth Republic now appears before us in all its ungainly severity. The nation has stalled both politically and economically.

There is a spiritual and ethical darkness everywhere which makes the polity very vulnerable to hitherto unimaginable crimes and the manifestation of horrendous depravities. As a result of hunger, poverty and deep-seated feelings of political exclusion and alienation, escalating insecurity has become the new normal.

As a result of the crisis of party formation, the country is confronted by the phenomenon of politics without principles, parties without ideology or discernible position. Serial decamping and party crisscrossing has become the norm. Things have become so hilarious that many decampees are reported to be hurrying back to their original parties for fear of being asked to vacate their seats by hostile judgement. It doesn’t get more politically promiscuous.

After twenty three years of civilian rule and with the idea of military rule receding into remote antiquity, it is a great irony that the abysmal conduct of the political class now constitutes the greatest threat to democracy and the survival of the Fourth Republic. Once major parties cease to lack deep convictions and foundational beliefs, they can no longer function as vehicles of popular aspirations. It is the death knell of democratic rule.

Awo himself would have marvelled at the paradox of politics without strong convictions and political parties without organizing principles which is the hallmark of political prostitution as a national ideology. Throughout his life, the man from Ikenne strove to prevent the homogenization of the Nigerian ruling class by a rigorous differentiation of political platform. That homogenization is now upon us. It is not the kind of fusion Awolowo was expecting. But history moves in a strange way.

To Papa Elelubo on the borders of Agbonrin village where Baba Lekki was threatening to set himself ablaze in a manner reminiscent of the Mongolian official who, having failed to meet his own target of delivery of housing units to his beloved compatriots, promptly detonated himself.  In the old contrarian’s case, he was paying the supreme sacrifice for his perennial failure to ignite a revolutionary apocalypse that would have made the Kymer Rouge of Cambodia a child’s play.

It was a hot and sweltering mid-March morning. The rains have refused to come as if divine retribution has been added to the secular punishment of outraged humanity. The caked and parched soil tells its own story. So does the foul fetid odour of stale sweat oozing from the armpits of rural hoi-polloi. But the agrarian folks remain as sweet and sunny tempered as ever. They have come to see off an impossible troublemaker, or so they think.

Clad in snow-white apparel like the devotee of a local deity, the old man cut the figure of otherworldly soberness as he fixed the crowd with an unnerving gaze. The fools have come to watch him die, but if he asked them to come out for the aluta to end all alutas , they will laugh him to scorn.

“The common man is an asshole”, the old crook mumbled to himself, as he beheld the pulsating crowd many of who were already impatiently asking him to do the needful and spare them the long rigmarole. A menacing-looking thug with missing incisors suddenly hauled out of his pocket a huge wrap of prohibited weeds and began chewing on it in neurotic boredom.

But it was the crazy boy Okon who bearded the old lion in his den. He had been sitting quietly in apparent remorse at the imminent departure of his old mentor when the mad boy jumped up as if stung by an insect.

“Baba, now dat you don dey go, dat Ikorodu woman I been dey see with you before before, make I begin dey knack am?” the boy demanded with a lewd stare.

“Okon, you are a counterrevolutionary petit-bourgeois scoundrel. May God punish your grandmother”, the old man screamed at his delinquent ward.  At this point as if on cue, a frail man with an unsteady gait stepped forward and in ancient Egba accent, accused Baba Lekki of having swindled him fifty years earlier by giving him a counterfeit coin.

“Alagba, owo ijosi, owo Ijebu renwa”, the frail man mooed, pursuing pre-colonial intra-ethnic hostilities.

“Ah Muda, but they say you died a long time ago!!” Baba Lekki retorted with a contorted grin. At this point, an impatient spare parts trader shouted. “When is this Baba going to die now? I no dey dis dem Yoruba Iberiberi show!!” Baba Lekki lost his cool at this point.

“Ah stupid man, you are waiting for your grandfather to die for Nigeria? Na other people’s child dem dey name Abegunde, abi no be so? Yeye people!!” the old man thundered as he detonated some foul-smelling, eye-stinging gas from an old cylinder which sent everybody scampering for safety.

“Chineke!!! I for don reach Alaba market but for dis yeye Yoruba crook”, the Ibo man said as he took to his heels.

In September 11, 1974 as the General Yakubu Gowon’s administration began a swift and irreversible descent into infamy, the time bomb of tragedy also began ticking away. It was on this day that Daily Times of Nigeria, under the leadership of the patrician, courteous but highly patriotic Alhaji Babatunde Jose, published a landmark editorial titled: Darkness Visible.

Magisterial and majestic and in the best tradition of the old Thunderer, its London ancestor and forebear, the editorial was unanswerable in most parts. It was a searing and penetrating rebuke of Gowon’s administration and its very notorious foibles. Bristling with candour and intransigent integrity, the editorial did not mince words in bemoaning the terrible plight of the country and the dark alley of despotism and intolerance it was headed under Gowon’s leadership. It concluded that darkness was quite visible.

Besmirched with corruption and sleaze and with several federal commissioners embroiled in scandals and allegations of graft, it was obvious that the administration had reached the end of its tether. Worse still, it has resorted to equivocations and lazy tergiversations about the destiny of the nation.

As if Daily Times was having a clairvoyant premonition, General Gowon,  in his Independence Day broadcast to the nation on October 1, 1974, promptly foreclosed the option of a honourable exit by reneging on his promise to hand over to a civilian administration by 1976. For those adept at reading the rustling tea leaves, it was the beginning of the end.

Even then, it was a calculated risk by Daily Times. The paper had been having a running battle with the military authorities over the state of the nation. Alhaji Jose and his crew could not have been expecting a warm and royal welcome to Dodan Barracks from the normally affable and sunny-tempered General Gowon.

The drama is memorably captured for posterity in Jose’s memoir titled, Walking A Tightrope: Power Play in Daily Times. Although like all insiders of power and substance, Jose cloaks his resistance in reticence and considerable punch-pulling, suffice it to add that barely a year after, Gowon was ousted in a palace coup by disaffected colleagues.

That editorial was forty eight years ago. Today, darkness is no longer visible. Darkness has become part of our integral national condition and the current darkness is pervasive and all-encompassing in the postcolonial hell that Nigeria has since transited to. This is because all rational human societies have their safety valves, their acute and accurate barometers for measuring and gauging the mood of the nation and for sensing the approach of a historic blackout.

Even traditional societies with their different cosmologies and modes of apprehending and making sense of their lived experience were not exempt from such social, economic and political instrumentalities. They simply took a different approach because of their different cultures and differing historical trajectories. And it worked for them until the colonial irruption which torpedoed their confidence and ability to believe in themselves.

Forty eight years after the Daily Times editorial and forty seven years after the advent of Gowon, darkness has become invisible with the entire country crouching in historic darkness and with everybody trying to feel their way out of the millennial void. In the plague-like still and the deathlike clam, it is impossible to see beyond one’s nose. All cats appear black in the dark metaphysical hour of retribution.

As it is said by Eugene Ionesco, the founding father of the Theatre of the Absurd, everybody must get on with it. It is your responsibility to lift yourself out of the serpentine pit of sightlessness by your own bootstraps. But this is impossible in the uterine darkness. Yet there appears to be no one in sight to beam a visionary searchlight to illuminate the passage of a confused and disoriented populace.

Forty eight years ago, it would have been impossible to imagine the entire nation thrown into three days of continuous darkness as a result of the collapse of the national grid. Yet in the last one and a half decades, this has happened with such amazing regularity that it has become regularized as an integral part of the national condition. It is certainly rich for the Minister of Mines and Power to inform the nation that the collapsed national grid has been recovered. Where was he for three days?

In civilized and rational countries, a national power outage of more than three minutes often provokes a state of emergency with widespread looting and rioting. In Nigeria it is so normal that it is protests against it that have become very abnormal. Yet it is impossible for acute observers not to feel that something is welling up which may eventuate in a nasty and totally unanticipated finale.

All ruling classes that have not reached historic superannuation would have developed inherent capacity for maintaining and sustaining the order of illusion on which the illusion of order which guarantees their rule is based. Hence, the need for social, economic, political and spiritual whistle blowers who raise the cautionary alarms when things are going awry beyond obtuse violence and clueless minatory intimidation.

The current Nigerian ruling class has not shown the capacity to maintain and sustain the order on which their suzerainty and hegemonic rule is anchored. Hence, the seething tensions and discontent gripping the entire country beyond the placid surface. But who will bell the cat in the torrid darkness and pervasive hopelessness?

Forty eight years ago, it would have been unthinkable for the national body of the university teachers to proceed on a month-long industrial action without provoking a national outrage. Students and their parents alike would have been out on the streets. Now, the compulsory holiday amidst compulsory darkness has been extended for another two months. Yet nobody appears willing to take the bull by the horn. Ignorance of darkness is a perfect complement for darkness imposed by ignorance.

While at home, the students will be doing their best without food on the table, without potable water and in an atmosphere of unremitting darkness compounded by escalating insecurity. The students will do well to evade the relentless traps laid by the barons of the novel industry of ritual killing for monetary purposes. Not even public transportation is safe anymore. Ritual killers and harvesters of human parts are on the prowl everywhere. They even murder their own parents.

While one was growing up, ritual sacrifice for economic enhancement was part of a traditional folklore of fear and trembling with known practitioners given a wide berth no matter their wealth and unexplainable prosperity. The rumour alone was enough to invite popular aspersions and obloquy.

That this scary development would have been unthinkable forty eight years ago is a grim reminder and a perplexing indication of the complete collapse of civilization as we know it. A new Dark Age, fashioned and franchised by arrogant people jinxed by an antediluvian worldview, has been slammed on the nation. The normal evolutionary process is for a grub to become a butterfly. But here, we are dealing with a butterfly that has turned into a grub. In the course of a traumatic transition to modernity, Nigeria has reverted to the status of a Stone Age society.

This is what happens to a society where all the great whistle blowers have shouted themselves hoarse and have lapsed into slumberous repose or transited to greater glory beaten down by struggle-fatigue and sheer enervation of the spirit.

Our great poets warned us ages ago about the dangers of toying with political earthquake; our great journalists like Jose cautioned us; Ayodele Awojobi screamed from the rooftop until he fatally collapsed and Gani Fawehinmi too before he succumbed to the cancer of perfidy and circuitous elimination.

Simeon Adebo and Adeoye Lambo went to their maker bemoaning the fate of the nation. In the case of Lambo, he had advocated a psychiatric evaluation for our prospective leaders as a befitting Parthian to a nation set on the path of self-destruction. As far back as 1982, Awolowo warned about the inevitable collapse of the economy.

The naira then was still a strong and competitive currency; its value backed by a strong productive base. Now, it is one of the weakest currencies on the continent. Yet many of those who put us in this mess are still beating their chest about in confounding self-justification and with a sense of entitlement to boot. Talk of a postcolonial culture without any sense of shame.

But as it has been famously observed, a person can make for himself a throne of bayonets, whether he will be able to sit on it is another matter entirely.  A sovereign who invites the smallpox epidemic to his coronation just to instil fear in his subjects has brought a plague on his family and the entire community. Hell, like a plague, is an equal opportunity terminator which does not distinguish between sovereign and subject. The only hierarchy it recognizes is the hierarchy of the dead and the dying and the only stratification possible is one between the quick and the wounded.

The ancient drum is only for the wise and the well-schooled to decode and decipher. Only the discerning can establish a nexus between the exit of our whistleblowing titans and the way and manner the EndSars upheaval crashed upon us seemingly without any warning or signal, just like the coronavirus pandemic and the on-going violent restructuring of the global order.

All happy nations are the same, with the same level of expectations. It is only unhappy nations that are unhappy nations that are unhappy in their own way. Nigeria is a uniquely unhappy nation. Any nation so shrouded in darkness to the point that it has lost the dynamic capacity and the internal mechanism to recognise imminent danger to itself is not fit for purpose and is a drag on the emerging World Order.

Consequently and in the light of what has been enumerated above, it should be obvious to all who can still see beyond their nose that we have gone beyond the point of mere palliatives and panel beating. This is a vehicle showing all the signs of metal fatigue.

In the circumstances, nothing short of a strategic re-envisioning of the nation; a visionary re-imagining of an organic community of equal stakeholders which moves the country away from the ruins of a blighted and devastated landscape will do. Anything short of that is empty grandstanding and mere political tomfoolery. May our ancient whistle blowers find blissful rest.