Category: Tatalo Alamu

Despite the fact that the federal authorities appear to have eaten the humble pie and have taken back their word on the ownership of the diamond-studded braziers, the public and an increasingly vocal bar were in no mood to let the matter pass just like that .It was a case of “trouble dey sleep and yanga go wake am” as the illustrious Abami Eda himself would put things.

A new organization with headquarters in the highbrow suburb of Victoria Island calling itself the International Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Politically Exposed Women (ISOPCPEW} has vowed to drag the Nigerian authorities before the International Court at The Hague for serial abuse of woman rights.

If you ask snooper, it was a case of shooting one’ self in the foot. It was badly cued and terribly misjudged. The public had long grown tired of outlandish tales of corruption and sleaze when it is obvious that the authorities themselves are not standing on ethically superior ground. Just get on with it and leave us alone. Besides, there is a local saying that if you are trying to remove a fallen log of wood and another falls on it, you must first remove the log on top.

As usual, Baba Lekki has been honing his legal skills to perfection in a series of mock trials held to uproarious legal adulation by the teeming hoi polloi of the land  at Jankara and Sand grouse markets. His contention is logical and simple. To establish ownership of the bra, government must first produce in court the said Diezani for measurement and chest examination to determine the veracity of the claims.

To buttress his claim, the old contrarian and lapsed disciple of Harold Laski, has called for the files of the celebrated Iron Butterfly of Manilla, Imelda Marcos, and the secret tapes on an ancient Chinese dowager who was known to own about a thousand colourful girdles. There were also unconfirmed reports that the old man had made away with secret cuttings of Queen Victoria wearing a bra studded with sapphires from the Indian expedition.

This morning, Baba Lekki had arrived at the Ilabere Police Station with a half-drunk Okon in tow. Okon had been reluctant to follow the old crook on what could be a suicide mission. “Baba, I no fit. Dem say dat Ondo woman DPO na crazy asinwin. She no dey carry last. She dey shoot people and dem say she dey whack dem”, the mad fellow cautioned. But the old man was having none of that.

The lady in question was a tough, no-nonsense, thick-set woman who looked like a moving mahogany tree. She was justly famous for her rough and ready reliance on brutal interrogation technique and for hurling colourful expletives in her native tongue at just about anybody who crossed her path. Her breath was reeking of Absinthe and illicit liquor.

“Baba, what can I do for you sir? It is too early in the morning to start causing trouble.” But the old man was not interested in police politeness and customary niceness.

“Madam, are these yours?” the old man opened in classic Nelson Mandela gambit as he hurled out some ragged pairs of bras from the tattered polythene bag he was carrying.

“ Kai, kai, mba baba, mba. How can I wear this yeye nonsense from Tejuoso? Wetin my eyes no go see for dis yeye job?” the poor woman shouted.

“Iya, dem dey ask wether na you get dem bra?” Okon intoned with a sly wink.

“Soponna la beri baba re! (May the God of smallpox behead your father) the woman screamed at the mad boy. By this time, the din was attracting the usual crowd of ruffians and ragamuffin.

“Kai, kai, dis one na Komu gbigbona( hot bra) one detainee injected.

“Baba, is this the oracle of the living jurisprudence?” one scholarly sounding crook injected.

“No, no it is the jurisprudence of dead oracles”, Baba sneered.

“Come ooooo. Dis woman look like dem lady I been dey see before before for Lawanson”, Okon croaked.

“ Eiye Ogbigbo la yoju yeye re!” (May the big bird gouge your mother’s eyes) the distraught woman screamed at Okon. “Armed robbers!!” she cried. Three shots rang out in rapid succession and everybody fled in different directions.

Nigeria is the ultimate nightmare of the political analyst. The chaotic and anarchic realities do not conform to any model anywhere in the world. Yet they keep getting in the way, making a fool of the most determined of analysts and political scientists.

Sometimes only deliberately unstructured thinking can match adamant reality in all its unstructured and contradictory manifestations. In his discourse on the essay as a discursive form, Theodor Adorno, the great German philosopher and master dialectician, came to virtually similar conclusions agreeing with Hegel that if reality is inconceivable, then we must forge concepts that are inconceivable.

Adorno, a celebrated and much lionized central figure of the Frankfurt School, had a very unhappy time in America as a refugee fleeing from Hitler’s historic pandemic. He thought the Americans were an unserious bunch lacking in any rigorous tradition of thinking that can be described as a national philosophy.

One of his more abrasive refugee colleagues actually dismissed American Idealism as the businessman’s variant of Empiricism. The Anglo-American world is normally suspicious of people who take themselves too seriously. If their country was that good, why were they in America as refugees, the Americans scoffed at the self-regarding Germans. Those who write the books are not as important as those who write the cheques. Adorno was to return to his native country a very sad and depressed fellow.

Nigeria manages to solve some of its problems through superior tardiness and occasionally providential intervention. Four months ago, you would have thought that the entire country was on the verge of collapse and total disintegration. There were secessionist catcalls and separatist clamours all over the place. The oligarchy was having none of that.

They have now managed to redirect and refocus national attention on elections. Happy times are here again. 2023 has become the only game in town. There is almost universal compliance with the grand hoax of electoralism. Even IPOB had to tactically retreat from what would have been a political catastrophe for the Igbo people.

Yet despite the manoeuvring, the nation’s fundamental problems remain and they pop up every now and then in the least expected and most unlikely of places. Occasionally, there are signs of contraindication, a case of ignorant and superstitious overmedication.

In medicine, contraindication occurs when medications in violent antipathy are administered on the same patient with occasionally fatal result if not immediately remedied. For example, when another blood-thinning medication is administered in conjunction with aspirin, there is bound to be contraindicative reaction.

There were four major occurrences in the country this past week which give the impression of contraindication at its most damning and revealing. Yet taken together, they also represent the abiding trauma of an embattled country groping for solution to an endemic crisis of political, economic and spiritual modernity.

Last week, the highbrow suburb of Ikoyi was shaken to its foundation by the noise of catastrophic collapse as the high rise luxury tower complex under construction in one of its prized addresses gave way. Such was the impact that seismic tremors were felt miles away. A friend who has his magnificent pile in the vicinity spoke of the entire building quaking and then absolute bedlam.

Buried under the heap were the owner and developer of the luxury tower, some of his friends, associates, workers on the site and some wayfarers. This consuming tragedy highlights once again the unending struggle between modernity and our traditional ways of doing things which extend to building design and city planning. It has been alleged that since the Egyptian pyramids, Africans no longer do sturdy and enduring skyscrapers except via imported expertise.

Advertised as the ultimate in opulent living; a seven star residential hotel, the tower could not have been conceived to fail and fall off the sky just like that by the talented and ambitious owner. But it is obvious that a habitual tendency to cut corners and resort to unorthodox self-help spurred by unhinged profit motive took over all other considerations resulting in a national tragedy. Prayer sessions became more important than scientific certitude about the strength of materials.

It is akin to the case of a person named Folorunso who decides to climb a palm tree with banana fronds. Fate and faith are being sorely tempted. It is curious that all the miracle workers, the spiritual sorcerers and their apprentice sorcerers could not see where this contradiction was leading. In any society where human conduct is not regulated and subject to impersonal laws, the uncontrolled hunger for wealth often leads to avoidable amplification of hunger and disaster for the multitude.

Described by many who knew him as sharp-witted, focused and immensely resourceful, a man with a touch of Midas and Croesus combined, the Femi Osibona story would have been a fabulous example of a rags to riches extravaganza. As a youth, he was said to have known penury and privation, selling ties and shirts, clawing his way up to become a master-builder of global acclaim.

Read Also: No underwriter has disclosed ties with Ikoyi collapsed building – Agency

Yet despite his business derring-do, a reputation for unsavoury deal-making and unethical practice dogged him all the way. There was something of the Great Gatsby about him. Famously described as a crook with the soul of a poet, this classic American wannabe was a man of mysterious wealth who delighted in throwing grand parties where he maintained his aloof mystique and puzzling personality. Until he lost his life in tragic circumstances, Gatsby thrived on perpetual magic and public mesmerisation before somebody decided to put a violent end to the confounding mystery.

Femi Osibona went down with his fascinating project of luxury in the skies taking many along. The opulent tower was intended to serve as the crowning glory of reaching for the sky and overreaching himself in the process. A throwback to the very beginning shows a gifted boy with a prodigious capacity for memory and memorizing.

Reciting off head Abe Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg address was a must for every student of Mayfair as prescribed by its iconic and pleasantly eccentric founder, Tai Solarin. But on his very first night of public entertainment at the school, the callow new entrant by the name Femi Osibona surprised and overwhelmed everybody present by reciting the entire address to uproarious applause.

This was the origin of the nickname “Four Score” which also became the veritable logo and insignia of his company. It was a tour de force and the boy could have gone on to become a professor of anything. But even here, the mystery deepens as somebody has obliquely hinted that it was not in fact the celebrated master-builder but an uncle who happens to bear the same name. It is not for humans to pass definitive judgement. The answer lies in the rubble of the Gerard Road apartment.

While one ambitious Nigerian project lies in ruins, another ambitious Nigerian project, this time a political project of self-emancipation, succeeded beyond belief in the same week. The people of Anambra succeeded in facing down the overwhelming and overweening might of the federal authorities by electing a candidate of their choice.

This was not the first time they have done so in the post-military Fourth Republic. But it is the first time they will be doing so in storied circumstances and in a condition of heroic vigilance and a minatory capacity to defend their vote even if heavens may fall. We must give credit and kudos to President Buhari and the federal authorities who wisely saw the handwriting on the wall. This was not the customary mind-set of the government at the centre.

But Nigeria has travelled quite some distance since 1999 when egregious rigging and massive vote-switching was the order of the day. There is a time for everything and anybody trying that in the current atmosphere of foul mood and national distemper has entered into a secret pact to terminate the Nigerian project.

It is a vote for self-determination and political autonomy in a stultifying unitary federation which will resonate and reverberate in the Nigerian political firmament as the countdown for 2023 commences. It must be stressed that it is also not a personal vote for Charles Soludo for all his credentials. If Soludo had stayed put in the PDP which is his natural habitat, he would have received a resounding shellacking at the polls.

How Soludo will now rule the state with the tempestuous and implacable IPOB breathing down his neck remains entirely his business. It is a pact with the devil. But we must single out for commendation the heroic resolve of the people not to be browbeaten by the federal might despite what is generally considered as the underwhelming performance of the outgoing state government.

Particularly noteworthy is what has come to be known as the heroic saga of the Ebenebe women who were said to have refused to be swayed or tempted by filthy lucre to do what is right for their people. They could have taken the humongous inducement from the carpetbaggers and still go ahead to vote for their choice. But they were having none of that nonsense on the day of the real owners of the electoral mandate.

Yet the triumph of the people of Anambra introduces a conundrum and utmost paradox to the contemporary political equation. By voting the way they did, the people of Anambra and to a larger extent the entire Igbo nation might have foreclosed the possibility of an Igbo presidency in the 2023 presidential election. Given Nigeria’s current skewed federation, it is only natural and logical to expect the two dominant state parties to choose their flag bearers from where they think the main votes will come from.

But this is small beer provided the contemporary Igbo leadership are ready to walk the talk of their own people. Despite the low turnout and in the absence of massive protest against the outcome of the election, the Anambra poll is a referendum on political autonomy and by extension the urgent restructuring of the country into a proper federation. Federal elections do not resolve the National Question, otherwise Ethiopia would not be on the verge of disintegration months after election.

This is why IPOB should sheath the sword of violent confrontation now that the moral and political momentum is with them. The struggle for justice and political equity in a country gradually emerging from the colonial debris is a multi-dimensional and multi-sector affair in which the use of force should only be the last option.

The battle for the soul of Nigeria and the inherent contradictions involved have now matured to a point where it is obvious that we cannot continue like this without a shattering implosion in the nearest future. Only the deaf and the dumb can continue to pretend not to see this.

When we factor in the two remaining contraindicative symptoms occurring around the same time, namely the jailing of Maina, the pension bogeyman, and the assent of the National Assembly to the electronic transmission of election results, we find that they are both important developments in the struggle to redeem Nigeria.

It is political immunity that breeds economic impunity. People get away with looting if they have it at the back of their mind that nothing will happen and nobody will ask them to answer for their contribution to the economic adversity of the nation. It is not as if attempts were not made to thwart the trial. But it is a long time ago when misappropriation of funds was officially substituted for misapplication of funds. Too much money has been stolen since then for the owners not to notice.

As for the electronic transmission of result, it is a huge blow to the Nigerian selectorate and electoral impunity. Manual transmission of election results allows secular authorities to tamper with and thwart the sacred will of the electorate. All these developments are products of relentless human struggles and the occasional miraculous intervention of unforeseen forces. It is not a done deal, but it is morning yet on the day of Nigeria’s reinvention.

Political magic has become a staple diet of governance in postcolonial Africa. Why tell a simple lie when a more complicated lie will suffice? Why remonstrate with the truth when you know that dispelling and dispersing it with a canister of lies is a more effective and direct solution?

When a whole Minister of Information, a man who is not always known for fidelity to the truth or loyalty to inconvenient facts, begins to moan and mutter about being bullied by the press, you begin to wonder whether the Oro-born master of dissimulation has taken the biggest flight of fancy from orotund reality. To be tormented by self-created fantasies is worse than being tormented by harsh facts.

Still, we need to be very careful about this business of Diezani’s bra. A woman’s bra often contains explosives carefully tucked away. African big men do not joke with their women or their bra for that matter. In 1975, the then Major Mathieu Kerekou murdered his deputy, a certain Captain Michel Aikpe , on the grounds that he was found frolicking with the First Lady. As Gbolabo Ogunsanwo was to put it in his celebrated column with unaccustomed indelicacy, the late Beninois captain rode to his death on the buttocks of Madame Kerekou.

Mobutu was even known to be more cruel and callous, often forcibly acquiring as concubines the wives of the men he had killed in a ghastly ritual of total subjugation. After butchering one of his wives on the grounds of infidelity, Idi Amin Dada opened the door for her children to view the grisly remains of their mother.

But it is not an entirely African phenomenon. In revolutionary Russia after Stalin beheld the wife of Nikolai Bukharin— his Politburo rival and intellectual superior— in all her rapturous beauty and chic sophistication, the cruel and wily Georgian cooed: “Comrade Nikolai, even here you managed to out-general me!!” It was the death sentence of one of the most gifted men thrown up by the Russian revolution.

Read Also: We’re working on Diezani’s extradition, EFCC tells court

After the collection of bra purportedly belonging to Diezani was unveiled by the federal authorities in all their sassy obscenities, Okon roused himself to vigorous action.

“Oga, I wan quickly reach Abuja make man bid for dem Diezani bra. Dem say if man dey smell dem, money go come out yafunyafun. As I no get money like dem Yoruba boys who dey whack am, na good chance be dis one”, the mad boy snorted.

“Just shut up. Is it a fool like you they want there?” snooper screamed at the mad boy.

“Oga no be like dat. Dis kontri no be for Yoruba people alone”, the mad boy retorted. It was at this point that Baba Lekki cut in.

“Okon, I smell a rat “, the old contrarian scoffed.

“Baba which kin rat be dat one? Na Yoruba women dey carry rat inside dem bra”, the crazy boy snorted.

“The bra na from Victoria Secret”, the old man crowed.

“Baba na lie be dat one. Victoria no get secret. Na everyone dey wire dat one”,  Okon shouted. It was at this point that snooper drove the mad duo out of the house.

 

To the magnificent marquee at Harbour’s Point penultimate Monday for the eighth day fidau for our great pal, Adewale Adeeyo. OON. The weather was bright and clear but the mood this mid-morning was dark and sullen until you began to listen to the brilliant exhortations of the Muslim preachers from the historic town of Ede, the ancestral homestead of the remarkable Adeeyo clan, famed for its traditional music and culture.

Nevertheless, this is one of the most difficult pieces ever written by your sincerely. How do you begin to write about the death of a friend and soul mate who had virtually become a brother? The piece had been started, abruptly terminated and then wilfully resumed about eight times with the eyes clouding over several times. Yours sincerely is famous for his stout and stoic constitution. But there are events that could break the heart of the hardest of men.

How do you reconcile with the mysterious deaths of some of the most illustrious offspring of the nation in the past eighteen months? It is as if providence has chosen the best and brightest of the land for a special cleansing of this blighted landscape. Hopefully, the angry deities of Nigeria and the Black person will be placated and propitiated by these mysterious deaths.

On a scale of comparison, it recalls the late Professor Oyeleye Oyediran, a notable Political Science guru, breaking down terminally in tears at a conference on the Dilemmas of Democracy in Nigeria held in faraway Madison, Wisconsin, USA in November, 1995 exactly twenty six years ago this week. It was the week Kenule Saro-Wiwa was executed on the order of his friend, the monstrous General Sani Abacha.

Oyeleye had been narrating the experience of his friend and junior in school, General Olusegun Obasanjo, in the hands of the self-same Abacha when the dam broke and the old man gave way to torrid tears. That week’s edition of The Economist put out the cover which read: Nigeria foaming in Blood. Twenty six years after, Nigeria is still foaming in blood.

But this morning twenty six years after, having been unavoidably absent at the funeral which took place in Ibadan on Friday three days earlier, yours sincerely had joined the online Zoom virtual gathering and was settling in when a call came through from Sola Adeeyo, the deceased’s well-heeled business mogul nephew, who wanted to know where exactly one was keying in from.

Apparently there was a miscommunication somewhere, given the frenzied pace of events. When one responded that he was in Lagos, Sola insisted that one must come over to Harbours at once since one had been listed to speak on the life and times of his uncle. The other speaker was to be Professor Ibrahim Gambari, a close associate and friend of the deceased. One had raced post-haste to the place to join the live session.

It was a solemn and sombre gathering of many influential people who had come to pay their last respect to the late publisher of the now rested Anchor newspaper which made such a splash in the late nineties and early years of the new century and the crowd reflected Wale Adeeyo’s great emotional intelligence, his urban ubiquity and omnivorous sociality.

Among those who graced the occasion was a serving governor, Dapo Abiodun of Ogun state, the current Chief of Staff in the Buhari Presidency, Ibrahim Gambari, the immediate past governor of Ogun State,  Senator Ibikunle Amosun and his wife Olufunso, a former student and in-law of yours sincerely, and the man reputed to be the richest Nigerian ever, Alhaji Aliko Dangote.

Also in attendance were the closest pal and kinsman of the deceased, Dr Deji Adeleke, the Ede-born billionaire and business mogul together with his megastar troubadour son, Davido. There was also the quiet, self-effacing billionaire business magnate, Hajiya Bola Shagaya among many others.

In his lifetime, Adewale Adeeyo was quite a handful, a many-sided Renaissance figure who reminded one of what was said about Thomas Jefferson dining alone. Poet, philosopher, Yoruba patriarch, savant, raconteur of genius, gifted literati, publicist, publisher, shrewd arts collector, aficionado of fine music and recondite Yoruba culture and gamey matador of life lived at its most rarified and refined. He radiated immense goodwill and an endearing bonhomie even while choosing his friends very carefully.

Yet for all his gifts and accomplishments, he remained deeply spiritual, humble and self-effacing. He avoided loud and vexatious people like a plague. There was a deep Islamic piety about him and a fierce restraint which made him quietly disdainful of self-advertisement and fatuous exhibition of material prosperity and self-proclaimed accomplishments.

He was a Yoruba omoluwabi to the core: kind, genuinely compassionate and ever solicitous of the well-being of his friends and associates. But he can also be unapologetic in canvassing the virtues and values of those who choose to be self-effacing and understated in this Age of Conmen. He was the first publisher ever in Nigeria to put one on the front page of his now rested, agenda-setting newspaper. Such was his political nous and visionary idealism.

At a party in the garden of his beautiful home in Ikeja to felicitate and fraternize with the staff of the Federal Mortgage Bank where he had just been appointed Chairman by the federal authorities, everybody in the garden was asked to introduce themselves for ease of recognition.

Read Also: Good night, Adewale Adeeyo: An intellectual giant

But when it came to one’s turn and one responded with a glum one-liner,  Adeeyo was having none of that nonsense. He snatched the microphone insisting that there were two people in the crowd who were fond of understating who they really were and underreporting their stellar achievements. He fingered yours sincerely and his remote and retreating kinsman, Dr Deji Adeleke. He then went on to make what he considered judicious amendments to great applause.

It has been noted that although humankind first civilized in Africa, he has not continued to do so there. Africa lost it a long time ago. The problem with contemporary Africa and in particular Nigeria is that they are ruled in the main by people on a lower scale of evolution and civilization, specimens of the lower species of humanity, who have seized the levers of power and atrocious governance.

Lacking in intellectual, moral and philosophical anchor, they are fundamentally and genetically incapable of coming up with a set of noble precepts and core values for purposeful and visionary governance which will ameliorate the dire circumstances of their distressed and disoriented people. The result is the frightful noise of state collapse everywhere in Nigeria with the politically undesirable leading the ethnically gullible and electorally culpable to sure perdition.

Hell is no longer the other but an integral part of the contemporary Nigerian condition. It is to be noted that before it mutated to a philosophy of permanent war and attrition, the Islamic concept of jihad was about strenuous striving or self-struggle for human improvement.

As for the led and even more particularly for the aspiring leaders, this regimen of constant self-improvement and unrelenting self-rectification is a categorical imperative. In one of his autobiographical ruminations, Chief Obafemi Awolowo noted how he strove to curb and conquer a tendency to irascibility and an intemperate impetuosity.

As it is for individuals, so it is for nations.  All serious nations must engage in constant striving for self-improvement towards a more perfect union and a more perfect nation as the Americans famously put it. In many nations, this jihad takes the form of relentless self-examination and critical self-interrogation. Nothing is taken for granted and nothing is left to chance. All the cards are put on the table in an unremitting ritual of self-purgation.

It is only in jaded and unserious nations like Nigeria that this ritual of self-renewal and self-validation are deliberately aborted and consciously stymied by an irresponsible political elite. But the result is the hell staring us in the face.

For example, when the newly consecrated chairman of the PDP opened his tour of duty by saying that his party was on a rescue mission without any sense of irony and without first apologizing for the sixteen year depredations the party unleashed on the nation, it is clear that a barbarous horde is about to overwhelm the nation once again. A sadly pedestrian and uninspiring rabble, this lot.

But historical logic suggests that it will never come to that. While not giving excuses or condoning the betrayals and shenanigans of the ruling party, the PDP is not an alternative to the APC. If the coming elections were to be stalemated between the two state parties, if it is too late in the hour for the political class to throw up some higher specimens of humanity, then the current anarchy will be a child’s play compared to what is looming.

As a committed adherent of Islamic faith given to long introspections and constant self-striving, the late Wale Adeeyo would understand the plight of his country and unhappy compatriots as well as the need for paradigmatic game-changers in this bedevilled nation. He could not have been a saint, but he strove for constant self-improvement demonstrating a prodigious capacity for self-recuperation in the process.

Unlike some of us professional agitators and spiritual rebels, he was given to a calm and fatalistic acceptance of what was beyond human capacity to change or alter. In one of our intense ruminations  in the garden of his house, I called his attention to the fact that duo of Ondo chieftains, Seye Ladapo and Ope Bademosi, that I sat with during the early morning prayers on the occasion of his seventieth birthday met there untimely deaths barely three weeks after. He responded sorrowfully that everyone had their allotted hour and nothing could be done about that.

But what he could change, he tried to change. He was a man given to quiet philanthropy and compulsive giving.  On his own and away from the public glare, he had honed his natural writing gifts to near perfection, becoming a master literary stylist in his own right.

His tributes to Justice Salihu Modibo Alfa Belgore on the occasion of his retirement from the Supreme Court in August 2007 and to Dr Williams on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, his powerful obituary of his cousin, the late Isiaka Adetunji Adeleke, as well as his memorable Commencement Lecture at the Adeleke University in 2115, Ede, are all stand-out monuments worthy of the greatest exemplars of the trade.

This is the gem of a man we lost a few weeks back. His own allotted hour had come and there was nothing anybody could do about that. May his remarkable soul rest in peace.

Wonders will never cease in this wonderful land. Reality keeps trumping fiction. The magic of America wonder is a very poor copy of real Nigeriana. Why read fiction when the real stuff, hot and unadulterated, keeps popping up everywhere?

Who would have thought that after the scandal of snakes, monkeys and baboons swallowing money, a federal department would actually go ahead to budget a whopping thirty nine million to combat snakes, monkeys and other extra-terrestrial terrorists? O ti sumi patapata, your worship.

In his preface to his only novel ever published, titled A Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, the great German novelist, noted that his novel would not attempt to enter into any competition with reality. It is a very dangerous and precarious thing to do in a society that has itself become the stuff of outlandish fiction.

As it should be expected, Okon, the eternally loony chap, has been cottoning in on the latest outlandish developments in the land, exploring and exploiting their contradictory crevices for his perennial money-making scams. When it comes to thinking on his feet and working out the crude econometrics of the moment, the mad boy seems to be marked by genius.

The previous day, the crazy chap barged into the room with a collection of ancient catapults and what looked like a crudely improvised surface to air missile which he slung across his shoulders even as he beamed a satanic smile.

“Okon, what is the meaning of this nonsense?” an irritated snooper demanded in suppressed alarm.

“Ha, oga no be nonsense at all. I fit bring down any yeye plane now. I wan make dem military boys bring dem dollar come negotiate as dem do with dem Zamfara bandits. Otherwise, Anieke dem iron bird go fall from sky”, the mad boy chortled after which he commenced a vigorous war dance reminiscent of Tigrayan rebels.

“Not on your life!” yours sincerely screamed as one drove the crazy chap out of the room. Unknown to one, the crazy boy had been erecting no-fly-zone stumps around the house. But his luck ran out when he was apprehended by a police patrol unit led by a bluff rotund sergeant with a hint of affable criminality and who seemed to be carrying a ten-month old pregnancy.

“You see now? You see how wetin cobra go eat, he come meet am inside him hole? Dis one you don do you fit spend all your life for jail “, he rogue sergeant growled as he rubbed his palms together in a sinister relish.

“Wetin I do you now? “ Okon snapped as he was being manhandled by the cops.

“You still get mouth talk nonsense? Abi your mama juju don miscarry? Na treason you don commit with anti-state akitifity”, the rotund sergeant shouted as if he was reading from a charge sheet.

“I no dey do dem anti-state. Na dem Ambazona and Egbesu boys be dat. Na only interstate I dey do and dat one be when I reach Itigidi from Afikpo Junction”, Okon groaned under heavy physical restraint.

“Shut up!!! If I slap you with this right hand, you go dey see ya mama’s grandfather. Is that why you dey erect no-fly zone? You wan kill dem baba for Abuja? You wan shoot down Olori Oko him plane?” the sergeant screamed at Okon.

“Baba na my job I dey do”, Okon responded unfazed.

“Omo oloriburuku wetin be your job?” the rotund cop demanded.

“You know say I be cook and my office na kitchen”, Okon crowed sensing imminent victory.

“Hen, hen, if you be cook nko? Na you go be the first cook?” the sergeant shouted.

“So na dem fly, dem mosquitos, dem tsetse fly and dem flying insects I dey warn make dem no come near kitchen make dem no come spoil business for Okon. Abi I do wrong?” the mad boy crooned with triumphant relish. Deflated beyond description, the porky sergeant stood transfixed on the spot like the effigy of a misbegotten crusader.

“Oya make we go. Dis one no be easy food   Na kukuruku rogue and he be like if say him head dey do skein-skein. Na dat crazy baba lawyer from Ibadan who dey train am and dat one he get brain pass dem FRA and dem Richard put together pass”, the rogue sergeant rued as the patrol team disappeared into a dark alley.

 

It was Enoch Powell, Colin Powell’s great namesake, who famously observed that all political careers end in failure. To be sure, the late British politician from the West Midlands who became a professor at the age of twenty five did all his best to undo himself in politics.

He courted and cultivated failure with a cruel assiduity that suggested a pact with political suicide. He took extreme positions in a country whose politics is calibrated on moderation and permanent fudge. In the temperate climate of liberality and order, the likely lads and the gentleman who will succeed in politics must wear their hats and opinions lightly.

But last week as Colin Powell succumbed to Covid-19 complications, it would appear that the maxim of his British namesake has come to stand the test of time. The tributes came in equal measures as the diatribes.

Many were so offended by Colin Powell’s complicity in America’s military debacle that they became downright offensive themselves. Some dismissed him as a typical house nigger, lacking in character and cujones when and where it mattered most. It was as if the old wizard from the British Midlands and Birmingham backyard was up to stir things up a bit. Call no political career glorious until the day it ends in glittering obituaries.

Born to Jamaican immigrant parents, Colin Powell was a shining example and classic manifestation of the American dream. The essence of that dream is for talent, hard work and gritty determination to take a person to the highest position in the land without having to cringe or beg his way to stardom. Being of lowly station in origin should not debar or prevent a person from aspiring to the highest office in the land.

Colin Powell was an African American of many firsts. He was the first person of colour to serve as the chairman of the Joint Service Chiefs, the first to serve as National Security Adviser, the first to be appointed Secretary of State and only the second to reach the hallowed rank of a four-star general. He was by all accounts an outstanding military officer and a gifted administrator.

There was a lot about Colin Powell which recall Dwight Eisenhower, another much decorated war time four-star general who went on to become the president of America. Powell’s open genial features spoke to a genuine kindness and compassion which appealed to juniors and subordinates alike while his calm discipline, unaffected sense of gratitude and unalloyed loyalty would have warmed the hearts of his seniors and military superiors.

He was made for the army while the army seemed to have been made for him. He had no hesitations or reservations whatsoever in joining the army in 1958 upon graduating at the age of twenty one having served as a student cadet with distinction. As he himself was to put it, it was military uniform that gave a distinctive feature and form to what would have been an indistinctive mild-mannered personality.

The military institution swallows up such individuals just as they deeply imbibe and internalize its dominant ethos and worldview. Colin Powell was the quintessential system man. He was not a great disruptor or innovator of genius. Neither was he a military philosopher nor a thinker of note. If he was he could not have risen very far. It is able and competent middlers who stabilize the system and give it its backbone.

In many respects, Colin Powell’s career mirrors the trajectory of his beloved nation in all its outstanding strengths and tragic failings. They have led to the current debacle of the greatest military power the world has seen since the Roman Empire. America was not founded as a warrior-nation but it browbeat itself into becoming one with dire repercussions.

American founding fathers were intellectual mandarins and visionary idealists who thought they were creating a new type of nation-state away from the ashes of feudal Europe. But the intellectual hubris which saw to the creation of this unique nation mutated very soon into a political hubris which made military hubris almost inevitable.

Powered by messianic self-belief and notions of American Exceptionalism which liberated the native genius of people experiencing the exhilarating tonic of untrammelled freedom for the first time, this land of boundless possibilities and immense natural resources carried everything before it in a seemingly unstoppable momentum.

After defeating Great Britain in a revolutionary war of independence, America browbeat the French into relinquishing their North American holding and then expelled the Mexicans from Texas before delivering the sucker punch by overrunning Mexico itself. Meanwhile the Spaniards were humiliated out of Cuba and the Philippines seized from them in a one-sided encounter.

Commodore Perry’s submarine fleet bobbed up on Japanese shores all the way from the west coast of America forcing the outraged oriental islanders into compulsory trading. The Japanese were later to retaliate by obliterating the American naval base in Pearl Harbour at the onset of the Second World War.

America’s rampart and relentless militarism carried everything before it from the nineteenth century up till the middle of the last century. After the Second World War, America emerged as the undisputed master of the world and the greatest military power that has been thrown up in the crucible of western hegemony and domination of the world for almost five centuries.

This was the extant global balance of power by the mid-twentieth century despite the growling and rumbling of a Soviet bear that had smashed its way to the gates of Berlin to terminate Adolf Hitler’s genocidal hallucinations about a so called Aryan racial superiority over the rest of humanity.

But soon thereafter, the wheels began to come off the American locomotive. Other nations and people with alternative histories, alternative cultures and emerging alternative paradigms of war began to tug at the beard of the American lion in a global duel unto death which was to reshape the contours of human history.

First were the Chinese and their notion of human waves assault which almost steamrolled the Americans out of the Korean Peninsula. With their surplus production of men, if not of munitions at that point in their history, the Chinese launched themselves against the American troops with a suicidal ferocity which stunned everybody.

It was to lead to a hastily negotiated armistice and the partitioning of Korea into North and South Korea. It also led to a famous tiff between America’s most decorated combatant general and the American president which led to an inglorious recall of the old warhorse. General Douglas MacArthur never forgave President Harry Truman.

But that was small beer. The tiff signposted the beginning of the fierce struggle between the right wing hegemonic military industrial complex and an emerging left of centre coagulation to rein in America’s macho militarism and warmongering bellicosity.

Yet a little over a decade after escaping what could have been a major military disaster, America found itself embroiled in Vietnam and Indochina again in an ideological offensive against rampart communism. It was to end in another catastrophe in 1975 with American troops escaping the Vietcong insurgents by the skin of their teeth.

This was what set the stage and template for what a notable American political scientist was to characterize as a clash of civilization in which America found itself confronted by a virulent version of Islam which is as uncompromising as it is unforgiving. All this, it must be said, in addition to residual communism and the regnant hyper-Slavic nationalism in Russia.

This was the dominant rubric that prepared the ground for America’s humiliating exit from Afghanistan. Along the way was the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the botched attempt to rescue American hostages in Teheran, the mayhem in Mogadishu and the infamous 9/11 2001 attack on American soil which left a scene of apocalyptic destruction.

Colin Powell was an all-time American hero. But he is seen by many of his compatriots and elsewhere else as being complicit in the historic setup which lured America to wage futile and senseless wars against enemies with a countervailing civilization, an organic culture all of their own and a storied history which does not brook interference from hostile foreign entities.

His eloquent testimony at the UN backing the spurious claims of non-existent weapons of mass destruction is known to have tilted scale in favour of serial wars which have ended in defeat and demystification for his beloved country.

Powell was found wanting when and where it mattered most and when he could have used his massive prestige and universal adoration to prevent his country from sliding into self-destructive wars. Famously, Dick Cheney, just before Powell’s testimony, was known to have told the son of Jamaican immigrants that since his approval ratings were very high, he could afford to come down a few notches.

A generous and gracious man, Powell was known to have later rued his involvement in the whole disaster calling it a blot on his record. Yet in retrospect, there was little a systems man could do to effect fundamental changes in the same system that made him and that became the leitmotif and rationale of his whole existence.  You cannot give what you don’t have.

With internal upheavals fuelled by centuries of institutionalized inequities coupling with an external military fiasco, what America needs now are visionary statesmen and out of the box thinkers at par with their founding fathers who will reset and recalibrate the country.

Not only that, they will have to align it with modern realities and in particular the place of the America nation in a post-imperial global order. It is hard to take but the harder fact is that the world is a-changing. You cannot demobilize a new day. Colin Powell has given his best to his country. Let him now depart in peace.

And still on the American debacle….

Dear readers, it is curious how history sometimes endorses or mocks the efforts of humanity. Twelve years ago as the Obama ascendancy took hold of the entire American landscape, yours sincerely penned a piece while watching the Obama inauguration from the ringside.

Titled A Day in the life of America, it was an attempt to examine the prospects of genuine changes in America brought about by the Obama presidency in all its grim possibilities. This morning we bring you an excerpt from the essay as a companion to the above piece. It is quite intriguing that twelve years after a version of the concluding sentence found its way into President Joe Biden’s inaugural address. But that is a minor matter compared to the problems facing a great country.

All nations are artificial constructs, counterfeit contraptions arbitrarily slammed on a territorial space by the imperial will of a mighty few. The United States of America is no exception to this iron law of modern nationhood. The modern history of America itself bespeaks a constant and occasionally violent struggle to impose order and cohesion on an increasingly unwieldy and dramatically shifting territorial space.

Empires, kingdoms and fiefdoms are nothing but signifiers of space delineation at specific historical conjunctures, subject to change and terminal duress. What is permanent are the human communities so arbitrarily marked by the human will to power.

In this Homeric battlefield, some nations have turned out to be more cohesive and coherent than others. If the nation is an expression of the imperial will of the few, it takes the collective heroic will of the many to turn it into a national community of organic principles.

A nation that has not transcended its inchoate origins to become a national community of shared values and common destiny remains what the revered Obafemi Awolowo has called a mere geographical expression or a congregation of mutually antagonistic armed camps permanently at war with themselves.

Once the organic principles that bind a nation together evolve, it is the constant battle to reaffirm these core principles that shape and frame the evolution of the nation. The founding fathers of America envisaged a nation of freeborn where all are equal before the law. But the ink had hardly dried on this noble declaration before America reverted to the default setting of a savage slave plantation.

It is in the nature of human societies for noble ideals to be corrupted. The chief culprits are often the visioners themselves. What is important is not the corruption of ideals or their progressive desiccation but the innate capacity of each society to summon the will and the inner resources of strength to challenge the decimation of its core principles. This is the road to renewal and self-validation.

It is this battle for the soul of a nation, for its core values that the world has just witnessed in America. With the election of Barack Obama, America has once again demonstrated an amazing capacity for self-renewal which should be the envy of the rest of the world. It has not been easy for this change to come, and it has taken decades of blood, sweat and tears.

Freighted with several contending and mutually contradictory notions of what is good for the nation and society, America has been a natural candidate for a deadlocked existence and the inevitable paralysis of the collective will. But once in a while in every society, an extraordinary figure of charisma and vision often emerges to break the deadlock and defreeze the frozen dialectic of history once again. In Barack Obama, the gifted son of an absconding African immigrant, America appears to have found such a person.

It is too early to say whether the old stalemating demons will not return to hobble Mr Obama’s presidency. Many an American presidency had started on such a glorious note only to come spectacularly unstuck. Defeated, demoralised but not completely demobilised, the old warmongers and petrified foes of progress are still lurking with intent. In Obama’s case, youthful idealism and visionary vigour may well be a stuff that will not endure, as Shakespeare famously noted.

But if Obama’s extraordinary campaign and the swift and surefootedness of his opening move on the political chessboard are anything to go by, the omens are very reassuring indeed. Obama has shown a precocious understanding of the dilemmas and uncertainties that face his beloved country. He has shown an unusual empathy for the tragic emptiness of contemporary American society and the ultimate futility of the rampart militarism of its super-security state.

The comparison with old Abe Lincoln may not be farfetched after all, and it is one that Obama himself seems to deliberately invite. The gangling and inexperienced Lincoln also won a gruelling campaign against better fancied opponents and went on to become arguably America’s greatest president till date. Lincoln went ahead to build bridges and to invite his implacable political adversaries like William Seward to the cabinet.

Obama has done exactly the same thing, drawing sustenance from his opponents’ strength while building bridges of goodwill and genuine fellowship across a bitterly polarised polity. While his Republican opponents ran a divisive, partisan campaign and politicised everything under the sun, Obama chose to remain wisely above the murky fray coming across in the process as the healer and statesman America needs at this particular moment of its history.

The mammoth crowd that witnessed the coronation of an American of African extraction is unprecedented in human memory. It was a carnival-like atmosphere of human regeneration. Something is astir in God’s own country. In transforming itself, America may yet help to transform the rest of the world. It will do so by the might of its example and not by the example of its might.

 

• First published in January, 2009

In retrospect, it could not have been otherwise. The man who was handpicked by his military colleagues to lead the nation after the military exhausted its historic possibilities was a former military head of state, a retired general with an authoritarian cast of temperament who viewed everywhere as a garrison to be dominated and subjected to discipline and order.

He was also a much respected global citizen who had begun to see himself as larger than life. To make matters worse, General Obasanjo himself was a victim of military intrigues and Machiavellian conspiracies which saw him briefly sentenced to death by his former subordinates only later to be commuted to life imprisonment. There was abiding trauma somewhere.

Obasanjo’s brief from his former junior colleagues was to hold the nation together at all costs and to prevent it from fracturing in the hands of its fractious political elite even if it means dragging it from the brink with a brinksmanship all of its own. It could not have been his fault if he inserted a messianic self-help into the clause and the project. It all came with the territory, after all those who put him there cannot be accused of being entirely altruistic.

To his credit, Obasanjo and his kitchen cabinet had within a very short time achieved a brilliant feat of demilitarization which is unequalled in the annals of military disengagement in postcolonial Africa. Within a very short time, Obasanjo was able to return the country to international respectability and global prestige from hitherto pariah status. The economy was also beginning to show a bounce.

The vainglory and messianic self-righteousness notwithstanding,  such a person can be excused if he began to see himself as God’s specially anointed with a divine mandate to treat the territory handed over to him as he deemed fit. He can treat the inhabitants with brusque disdain and all adolescent effusions from the other arms of government as evidence of judicial and legislative rascality which must not be condoned.

This was the situation that set the template for the inevitable confrontation between Nnamani’s fifth senate and the Obasanjo presidency. Before we come to this, it is appropriate to say a few words about the concept of institution and institution-building .Contrary to received notions in some quarters, there is no egg and chicken paradox about the notion of institutions and strong men. Please note that by this I do not mean strongmen as they have come to be known in Africa and the remaining enclaves of authoritarian one-man rule in the world.

All human societies build institutions to suit their needs and as a veritable compass to negotiate existential pressures. Institutions are products of leaders with the requisite strength of character and visionary selflessness to consider what is best for their society. They, the burgeoning institutions, in turn serve to modulate and modify the behaviour of errant and unstable leadership particularly in precarious existential circumstances.

For example when George Washington declined the invitation to rule America in perpetuity in close approximation of the same autocratic monarchy which had driven his forbears from feudal England, he was laying down the foundation of the modern American presidential system which has been the envy of the modern civilized world.

It takes granite determination and a radical envisioning of a new world order to do just that. Warts and all America is the better society for that noble gesture and an exemplar of liberal democracy for the modern world.

Read Also: Institution building in post-military Nigeria: The example of the Fifth Senate

Institutions are products of prodigious human endeavours, repeated gestures or what the French call, repete gestes, which are then burnt into human consciousness to become routinized and ritualized as accepted norms and conventional behaviour. Without such institutions which guide and rail-guard societal procedures, there can be no human civilization.

African societies have practised institution-building from time immemorial. The debate about whether Africa needs strong men or strong institutions is a mere signpost for the political epidemic of human dereliction imposed on Africa as a result of the colonial rupture that has brought African postcolonial societies into a state of historic disorientation and political schizophrenia.

The last point to note is that of the three arms of government, the legislature is the most ill-served by the phenomenon of military incursion into politics in Nigeria and elsewhere. While the executive and the judiciary survive military interregnum albeit in a hobbled and disfigured form, the legislature is summarily abrogated with its capacity for growth stunted and stultified.

This has had a telling effect on the legislature of the Fourth Republic. As we have seen with the case of Nnamani himself, the executive at both the national and sub-national levels exploit this inherent weakness and the lack of organic capacity for growth to play perfidious poker with the destiny of the nation.

As a result, political greenhorns are pushed into positions of legislative authority where their abysmal political and moral incontinence begin to show immediately. Worse still, untested political acolytes without any antecedents or storied lineage are crowded into the legislature where they act like political robots and neutered human cyborgs. The toll on the cherished tradition of continuity and the political evolution of the nation can be better imagined.

Given this background, it was clear that a thorough and diligent person like Nnamani would have his work cut out for him when he assumed the presidency of the Fifth Senate on the fifth day of April, 2005. Like many of his colleagues, Nnamani knew where the rains started beating the senate of the Fourth Republic. There was no need pretending any further. The fortunes of the senate of the Fourth Republic were at their lowest ebb and their public ratings very poor indeed.

Nnamani embarked on wholesale legislative reforms which involved massive housecleaning exercise and the clearing out of the cobwebs of corruption and legislative shenanigans. A legislative aide of the new senate helmsman who thought it was all a joke was summarily dismissed for illegal procurement of fertilizers using forged letter heads of the senate presidency.

The executive duly took notice. In an interactive session with President Obasanjo before the inevitable clinch, the retired General ,a past master of the art of psych-op, noted that Nnamani’s successful business background might help him, but it could also injure him. Obasanjo deliberately left the matter hanging, leaving the senate president to work out the double-edged praise in all its gnomic ambiguity.

Nnamani braced himself for the inevitable confrontation. It stole upon the senate like a thief in the night. Ever since the beginning of the Fourth Republic, there has been a clamour for the drastic amendment of the constitution bequeathed to the nation by the departing military oligarchy. Many dismissed it as unrepresentative of the genuine wishes and aspirations of Nigerians and unworthy of being called a genuine people’s constitution.

Rotimi Williams, the legal luminary, dismissed it as a constitution “which tells a lie against itself”. Itse Sagay, the noted Constitutional Law expert, slapped it down as a fraud. All over the nation, there were concerted efforts to join issues with the federal authorities. Most notable among these was the PRONACO movement led by the veteran nationalist and twice exiled activist-patriot, Anthony Enahoro which went ahead to hold its own alternative National Conference.

The federal authorities at first pooh-poohed the whole idea of a National Conference claiming that it is legally and politically impossible to have two sovereign authorities in a nation at the same time. The good people of Nigeria as a collective electorate had already delegated their sovereign authority to the elected ruling government. Beyond waiting for a new cycle of elections, there was nothing anybody could do about that.

However when the national clamour became impossible to ignore, the government, in a stunning volte face, suddenly reversed itself by convening what it called the National Political Reform Conference loading the 400 membership with its well-known acolytes and cohorts. It was an attempt by the Obasanjo presidency to kill two birds with one stone.

Obasanjo set an agenda for the conference highlighting areas that the delegates should debate. But he also controversially set the limits for its deliberation and by implication the end-result by pointing out areas he considered to be no go such as the oneness of the nation, its indivisibility as well as federalism and the presidential system. According to him, these are settled issues requiring no further ruminations or cogitations.

The sparks began to fly once the Constitution Amendment Bill was presented to the Senate on April 4, 2006. All in all, there were one hundred and sixteen clauses. But despite the laudable nature of most of the recommendations and their nation-invigorating potentials, there was a big elephant in the room. Surreptitiously smuggled into the proposed amendment was the poisoned chalice that was to become known as The Third Term Bill that canvassed further elongation of the two terms limit proposed by the Constitution for executive office holders.

This is how Nnamani himself described the strange manoeuvre on page 125 of this engrossing book.  “Then deep in the middle of these desired amendments to the 1999 Constitution, they buried the provision for a third term for the president. And they presented all the proposed amendments, including the third term amendment proposal as one bill”.

The ruse was not all that clever. It amounted to hiding behind one finger. When it was discovered the public became implacable. Many of the senators were livid. The very few among them who still defended the Third Term project could only do so furtively and not without casting anxious glances behind their own back. If the intention was honest and patriotic, why did they need to hide it?

After an exhaustive debate commencing a month later which began with whether the constitution should be amended in the first place, the senate voted overwhelmingly to reject the entire bill. In so doing, they also appeared regrettably to throw the baby out with the bath water. In such circumstances, there would have been no room for such political finesse as separation and unbundling of sub clauses. The circumstances were too dire and desperate.

The rejection of the third term agenda was a massive blow to its proponents. Many of them never recovered their bounce. Some of them went to their grave shunned and cold-shouldered as pariahs. For President Obasanjo it was a profound personal rebuff and a cataclysmic blow to his personal prestige and international standing.

From that time on and with the unfortunate and protracted dogfight with the Vice president compounding its fortunes and further eroding its public credibility, the Obasanjo presidency became a lame duck and Obasanjo himself a raging bull to be gently eased out of the room before doing further collateral damage to the nation .

Despite his repeated public denials and the fact that nothing could be directly traced to him, the evidence of the former president’s complicity in the Third Term fiasco was as overwhelming as it was damning. Like a relentless prosecutor of exemplary forensic skills, Nnamani focuses on the details from every conceivable angle stripping outright lies, dishonest denials and ingenious misrepresentations of facts from the body of evidence.

One cannot but feel sorry for the culprits. In a revealing postscript, Nnamani discloses how a call came through the secure line in his office shortly after the senate rejected the term elongation bid. It was from retired Major General Abdullahi Mohammed, President Obasanjo’s Chief of Staff. In a frantic tone laced with anxiety and apprehension, the retired general asked Senator Nnamani what he wanted him to tell Baba. “Tell him it is all over”, Nnamani bluntly responded. The game was up.

After nailing his quarry, Nnamani is generous enough to impute noble motives to some of the actors. A few of them genuinely believed that elongation of terms under the incumbent was the national panacea needed to guarantee peace, stability and progress. It did not occur to them that the listed benefits would become the most critically endangered by term elongation in a multi-ethnic nation roiled by religious, cultural and regional polarizations.

As for the principal actor, Nnamani notes Obasanjo prodigious capacity for hard work, his meticulous attention to details and his capacity to spot and nurture talents.  But he also surmises rightly that the authoritarian diktat of personalized rule cannot match the potentials of consensual politics in fragile democracies particularly in nations torn apart by ethnic strife and mutual misgivings. In the end, Obasanjo is a victim of his own messianic delusions.

It is a pity that all the other weighty considerations and well-judged ruminations in this memoir appear to have been overshadowed by the Third Term imbroglio. Fifteen years after, Nigeria is still haunted by the spectre of aborted constitutional reform conferences.

The recommendations of the last one ended on the desk of the former president staring him in the face until he was democratically deposed. It was said that it was because it did not quite serve his ploy for term extension. The Fourth Republic appears fated to the charade and chicanery of expensive national gatherings which raise the national hopes of rejuvenation only to dash them at the finishing line.

Senator Nnamani must be congratulated for the exhaustive research and diligent presentation of facts and events which went into putting this important memoir together. It is a seminal intervention in Nigeria’s political process and a must for everybody interested in how we got to where we are and the possible escape routes. I thank  you  all.

• Excerpts from review of STANDING STRONG presented in Abuja on October 21, 2021