Category: Tatalo Alamu

By Tatalo Alamu

 

One of the paradoxes of nations in distress is their capacity to spawn strange political species. It is a colourful laboratory indeed teeming with bizarre specimens, outlandish crossbreeds and other genetic absurdities. As the colonial nation-state paradigm finally unravels in Africa leading to its superannuation or sublation as the case may be, we have all become spectators of a great historical drama.

Some African nations have been able to weather the storm with minimum stress and bloodshed. This is because they are more ethnically or religiously homogeneous, more harmonious in their original configuration or blessed with a visionary pathfinder. They have managed to overcome the crippling limitations of colonial cartography and have moved on to face fresh challenges of history.

It is in Nigeria, the most commodious and unwieldy of these colonial contraptions, that the existential drama of being and becoming has turned out to be most cruel, most absorbing and blood-consuming. We had all thought that with the retreat of the military from the political space, Nigeria has turned a new corner. Alas, it has turned out to be a false dawn.

There is no foundation or basis for that optimism. In the Fourth Republic, Nigeria has witnessed a sharp resurgence of divisive and nation-disabling politics, a separatist religious ploy which could have eventually consumed the nation, several armed critiques of the state, the rise of non-state actors wielding veto power over the state and the ascent of non-state and anti-state politics bypassing and even challenging the traditional channels of state politics.

In Marxist telos, the state is projected to wither away after all class divisions have been abolished and transcended in a new society. This makes eminent sense since the modern state is viewed as the site for the resolution of elite conflicts and the aggregation of competing and countervailing elite interests. But it has turned out to be a profound ideological delusion.  As a matter of fact rather than wither away, the modern state is proving more powerful and recalcitrant.

But in contemporary Africa particularly in Nigeria, the state appears to be withering away in a remarkable retreat and rollback of its primal function and fundamental raison d’etre. The Nigerian postcolonial state is dissolving without having secured the nation or solidifying the very ideal of nationhood. It is leaving Nigeria in a sorry mess.

If we are going to be honest and frank with ourselves, this crisis of nationhood began early enough in the Fourth Republic and with the Sharia political gambit. It was a morbid political gamble, an attempt to further divide an already fragile and fractious polity. It was a mortal blow struck at the secular roots and foundation of the modern nation-state and would have eventuated in the dismemberment of the nation as a corporate entity.

It was just as well that the whole thing collapsed like a pack of cards. But the genie of separatism has already been let out of the bottle. Political Sharia has spawned many imitations and mutations, the most dangerous and alarming being the Boko Haram insurgency which has been going on for twelve years and which has completely devastated the north east of the country.

With the spectacular success of its kidnapping industry and extortionist franchise and not a little inducement from rogue state actors, Boko Haram has now morphed into banditry and mass abduction which have turned the north west and north central corridors of the country into a living hell. Taking their cue and inspiration from a successful brand, native and non-native marauders have invaded the entire south of the nation in a killing, raping and kidnapping spree.

Like a disoriented mammoth at bay, Nigeria is bleeding on all fronts. As gallant and forbearing as its men and officers have proved, the Nigerian armed forces cannot fight on many fronts at the same time without something eventually giving. Not even the best armies the world has seen can surmount this, particularly when they are traversing hostile local territory.

With Boko Haram and its adjunct ancillaries laying siege to the entire north, with what appears like an urban guerrilla movement taking root in the old east and with the west playing host to restive forces of dissolution or disintegration, the entire nation has become one vast theatre of multiple hostilities.  It will take a massive dose of reengineering and reconfiguration to bring an exhausted and demystified post-colonial state back into contention.

Whether that feat of reinvention will serve any useful purpose in the current context remains to be seen. But the profoundly ironic fact remains that even to negotiate the reconfiguration or structural adjustment of the nation, we need the semblance of a functioning state or we may find ourselves on the road to Mogadishu or worse still the slide towards Darfur.

This is a fate Nigeria must avoid at all costs. Let us begin to pick our way through the landmines. Of the remarkable developments of state distress and national trauma hobbling Nigeria, none is more fascinating than what we have termed, for want of a better term, as the rise of non-state or anti-state politics.

An insurrection is an armed critique aimed at state capture for the purpose of its reconstruction or dissolution as the case may be. A political party is a congregation or conglomeration of people for the purpose of capturing state power and reorganising the nation along their political ideals as the case may also be.

Non-state actors may also exist for the sole purpose of predatory extraction of resources as we have seen with kidnappers and marauders or for the overthrow of the existing status quo or political order as the Boko Haram insurgents claim.

All these forces are in contention in contemporary Nigeria. But how do we situate mass and largely uncoordinated movements drawing strength and sustenance from mass discontent with politics and the postcolonial state itself and whose sole objective seem to be the dissolution or disintegration of the nation? If they transmute into an armed rebellion the puzzle resolves itself.

But since they lack the nous, capacity and wherewithal to transit into regular political parties, they will continue to stoke the fire of disintegration until something gives. This non-state or anti-state politics is the greatest threat to party formation and the survival of the Fourth Republic particularly in the south.

It is this phenomenon that has birthed non-state political actors such as Sunday Igboho in the west and Nnamdi Kanu in the east. Feeding on and off the raw emotions of disappointed, disillusioned and disconsolate masses, they represent a new equation of anti-state rally and exertion in post-independence Nigerian politics. As the Yoruba proverb puts it, the ant cannot wear trousers but it can surely remove trousers.

Nnamdi Kanu appears to have mastered the art of “silence, exile and cunning”. Being a novice in the game of state-baiting, It is possible that before too long the brave and daring Sunday Igboho, either from the arrogance of ignorance or through a combination of political overstretch and overreach, may find himself fatally neutralized, politically speaking that is.

But this will only give fillip to more potent and sophisticated forces already waiting in the wing ready to pounce at the appointed hour. Yet despite the ominous augury, it is not clear whether the two state parties are sufficiently exercised by this potent threat to their suzerainty and supremacy.

In the past fortnight, a town hall meeting organized in Anambra State to shore up support for Charles Soludo’s gubernatorial aspiration was broken up by gun-wielding anti-state actors with state casualties. In what may turn out to be his political swansong, Soludo himself has let it be known that no political ambition is worth the life of a chicken. Even chickens deserve a better fate.

In the same east that is already preyed upon by marauding herders, a serving governor this past week alerted the nation of a plot to make the entire region ungovernable. As we were putting this together, report came of the killing of three policemen at a highway checkpoint by executioners disguised as mourners. Meanwhile in Osun State, the authorities have just suspended three secondary school principals for disseminating the gospel of secession.

While all this is going on, the two state parties appear to be hooked on ephemerality and pomposities of office.  With no clear cut ideological differentiation between them and with the involuntary homogenization of the Nigerian political class proceeding apace, politics as the ameliorative pursuit of a better society and the greater happiness of the greatest number has disappeared.

It is this collapse of ideological politics and the lack of a clear cut visionary blueprint for rescuing Nigeria from the current ethnic and fiscal morass that is fuelling the current wave of anti-state politics and the strident calls for the dissolution of the country. Those who refuse to take a wise cue from history are condemned to become victims of its harsh and alienating necessities.

If it is of any comfort, it should be recalled that Chief Obafemi Awolowo fought bravely and sternly against the homogenization of the Nigerian political class and the absence of clear cut political ideals and ethical values. It is the main reason why he never got to rule Nigeria.

The pan-Nigerian critical mass needed to galvanize Nigeria to greater political glory was simply not there and is still not there. To rule Nigeria requires hectic consensus forging and bridge building even among political scoundrels merely gaming for personal advantage or ethnic exceptionalism.

Awo was acutely aware and critically alert to the fact that to become president or prime minister under such conditions and in such circumstances is to become permanent hostage to retrogressive forces who are only interested in the preservation of their feudal privileges rather than the political progress or economic development of the nation.

But that is the way it is at the moment and there is no way out of this Nigerian conundrum as long as the balance of forces remains with the prevailing status quo. As we have noted several times in this column, Nigeria is permanently rigged against rationality and modernity as a result of its lopsided colonial configuration.

Despite the fact that the tragic events of the last six years have tasked the patience of the average Nigerian beyond the limits of human endurance, the structural contingencies that have held the nation down and which have made it impossible for the colonial gridlock to throw up its best eleven remain very much in place.

This is why many have come to the conclusion that the only option available to the nation is either a radical reconfiguration or its peaceful dissolution. It is also the reason why non-state or anti-state politics has become a more attractive option than the conventional route of regular politics.

So what is to be done? It may yet amount to locking the door of the stable after the horse has bolted, but the only way conventional and regular politics can help resolve the historic impasse and head off the forces of disintegration is to bring ideology back to the framework of contemporary Nigerian politics and to take a second look at the mode of leadership recruitment while forswearing nepotism and self-preferment.

Too much devaluation and debasement of the noble art of politics is going on at the moment. In saner climes and more organic societies, the political elites sense when the hour of change is at hand and when the oddity of the knight’s move must challenge the established conventionalities of the chess game itself. Conventional politics can only postpone the day of reckoning. It cannot resolve the nation’s epic gridlock.

 

By Tatalo Alamu

 

This past week the good people of Tanzania bade farewell to their plucky, no-nonsense and no-frills leader, John Pombe Magufuli, who died in storied circumstances about a week earlier. At sixty one, the sprightly and energetic Magufuli was a spring chicken by contemporary global standards of leadership. As attested to by his wife, the late president was a passionate romantic who was partial to the early morning romp.

Although the official cause of death was ascribed to a subsisting heart condition, the true nature of his sudden demise has given rise to frenzied speculations among his compatriots and the world at large. The late president of Tanzania was a famous Coronavirus sceptic who maintained that the whole pandemic scourge was a grand hoax.

There are not a few of his fellow Tanzanians who believe that Magufuli, like the Burundian president before him who pooh-poohed the whole idea of the pandemic, eventually succumbed to its deathly claws. To these people, it was a case of an anti-scientific cast of mind getting a short shrift from the brisk terminator.

Whatever the cause of death, the outpouring of grief among Tanzanians has been remarkable. The national mood was of profound bereavement accompanied by a feeling of irreplaceable loss. Six people were trampled to death in the rush to bid the fallen leader a final goodbye.

Magufuli was not a saint by any stretch of the imagination. Neither did he cast himself in the garb of a secular angel. Yet despite what is widely perceived as his ruthless autocratic streak, his authoritarian bravura in going after perceived enemies and his populist disdain for elite racketeering, it has been an emotional rollercoaster for the people of Tanzania.

Even his most adamant critics concede that Magufuli rolled up his sleeves to make his country work. In six years of bold and visionary leadership, he has brought his resource-strapped and rather somnolent nation to the portals of modernity without caring whose ox is gored.

Magufuli was an impatient and driven moderniser committed to an infrastructural overhaul of his country. Nothing seemed to deter him. On many occasions, he could be seen mixing it with construction workers or sweating it out with grimy and soot-covered foremen.

This was inspired and inspiring leadership. Magufuli led from the front. The people always appreciate a good leader when they see one. Good leadership is like a luminous fish which cannot be hidden. This is not about shameless canards which attempt to justify poor and uninspired leadership or the resort to ethnic and cultural victimhood in defence of abominable performance.

It has been observed that African colonial nations are poor imitations of the original Westphalia model of the nation-state. But there are colonial nations and there are colonial nations. Some have been known to lift themselves out of the morass of ambiguous paternity through the gritty determination of the people and by exemplary leadership.

The original treaty of Westphalia handed territorial authority and sovereignty to the particular principality in charge of a delimited territory. It was a mortal blow to the notion of empire and religious suzerainty.

But it does something else. Unlike the empire-state which depended on the whims of an absolute ruler who regarded himself as the embodiment of the will of empire, the nation-state paradigm facilitates the institutionalization of democracy and the rule of law through the enthronement of the people of a particular territory as absolute sovereigns who merely donate their sovereignty to government on the basis of credible elections.

For this transformation to occur, certain conditions must be in place. There must be an organic essence to the nation. The people must share certain ideals and core values which conduce to uniformity of worldview and the standardization of occasionally clashing norms no matter the surface disagreement or superficial tension.

This process of forming the nation and infusing it with a life of its own is not a one-off affair or a one-day business of empty pontifications. Nation-building depends on a continuous supply of visionary and committed political elites who have adopted the nation as their sole religion, their sole family and life purpose. In most of these successful countries, the worship of the nation assumes a sacred and mysterious dimension; the divinity of nationhood supersedes the nationhood of divinities.

It has been observed that one sure thing about organic communities is the fact that they are always gone; they always belong to historical antiquity. In other words, the idea of a perfect organic community is a myth always invoked to beat the disorderly present into some form of order and rationality. This elusive Elysium of harmonious humanity is nothing but an imaginative construct that speaks to human yearning for order and progress.

What this means is that an “organic” nation can actually be coerced or willed into existence by a visionary elite driven by sheer necessity and extraordinary will combined with intellectual daring. This is what has happened in the case of continent-nations such as the USA, Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

These are all colonial and colonized nations far removed from the original Westphalia template of the nation-state. A visionary elite group is the difference between these nations and the politically regressive caricatures of nationhood such as found in postcolonial Africa. In the particular case of the USA, its founding fathers were bent on creating something radically different from the feudal autocracies their forefathers fled from.

The process of nation-formation in the US is as intriguing as it is engrossing in the scope and scale of human ambition. The whole idea of a little city on the hillside with light shining is a tolerable and honourable myth. So is the idea of manifest destiny and American Exceptionalism. These are intellectual tools needed to forge a great nation from the furnace of adversity.

The savage suppression and vaporization of the indigenous people are great crimes against humanity to be regretted. So is the enslavement of Black people who were subsequently treated as sub-humans. But it can be argued that it was the stage the historic dialectic had reached at that point in time, after all there are Westphalia nations that had also progressed through brutal suppression and elimination of other people all in the name of human advancement.

The point to note is that all nations are artificial entities and like all human constructs, nation-growing is a permanent work-in-progress. The mistake certain western elites, particularly Americans, make is to imagine that their nations are perfect and fit for purpose without any need for further refinement and social reforms. The advent of Trump and the current pandemic scourge ought to have served as a cautionary tale against such inherent fallacies.

It will be useful to wrap this up by comparing the fate of two African colonial nations: Tanzania and Nigeria. Both are multi-ethnic human conglomerations cobbled together by imperialist will. But while Tanzanians were having a festival of renewal and rededication to the essence of their nation as it was obvious in the national solidarity that benchmarked the funeral of their departed leader, Nigeria was dissolving into near anarchy and chaos.

With a divisive and polarizing leadership bent on imposing its primitive and anti-modernizing phobia on the rest of the country, the most significant sections of the Nigerian populace appear to be up in arms. The previous week, a gubernatorial convoy was overwhelmed by non-state actors bearing superior munitions. The governor took to his heels. It has never been so bad in the history of the country.

Yet both countries started out around the same time. In fact for Tanzania it was a case of double or even triple colonial jeopardy. It was originally a German colony. But after the Germans lost out in the First World War, it became a British protectorate. This is not discounting the impact of Arab slave traders who overran the territory after dislodging the Portuguese who had held sway for about two centuries.

Tanzania’s sister island of Zanzibar was ruled by an Arab Sultanate until it was liquidated in a bloody revolution spearheaded by an ethnic Ugandan. In 1964, Nigeria troops were instrumental in quashing a military rebellion in Tanzania. Thereafter, the two nations took different trajectories. What did Tanzania get right that Nigeria with its superior human resources, spectacular natural endowment and much bigger population got wrong?

Tanzania is lucky to have had a unifying lingua franca like Swahili.  Despite its roots in Arab colonization, the Swahili language has acted as an instrument of elite cohesion and a weapon of mass mobilization on the East African sub-continent.

Swahili-speaking political elites cut across diverse East African countries such as Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Sudan, Somalia and Djibouti.  In an irony of history what began as a language of cultural and political subordination has transformed into a vehicle of popular liberation. This is how an initial disadvantage often turns into a later advantage.

But what has made the most critical and crucial difference in the emergence of Tanzania as a viable nation is the presence of sterling and exemplary leadership at the time of independence. The founding father, Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere, was quite a model of principled, focus and visionary leadership.

Post-independence Tanzania owes a lot to this simple, modest, austere and detribalized former teacher. Coming from a minority ethnic group, like Nkrumah in Ghana and Senghor in Senegal, Nyerere was able to weld together a disparate collection of ethnic groups into a coherent and cohesive modern nation by sheer force of personality and unrivalled moral authority.

Nyerere led Tanzania from the front and by the power of example. He was an ethical exemplar passionately committed to the ideals of social justice and political equity. His ideology of Ujamaa may smack of a relapse into primitive communalism which only equalized poverty and Stone Age underdevelopment.

But despite leaving his country in virtual economic ruins, it should be noted that nobody ever accused Nyerere of personal corruption, ethnic or religious bigotry or arrant nepotism camouflaged by sanctimonious humbug and fraudulent grandstanding. He was for all Tanzanians irrespective of caste, creed or religion.

So parsimonious, ascetic and self-denying was this man that when he retired, he had to appeal to his compatriots to stop bringing gifts to him because there was no place to store them in his modest bungalow. The people are always willing to follow the example of a selfless leader committed to the greatest good of the greatest number. By the power of personal example, Nyerere virtually succeeded in eliminating humongous corruption from all aspects of Tanzanian public life.

There is nothing like luck or happenstance in these matters. You cannot plant the seeds of corruption and expect to harvest the palm kernel of probity. A fruit does not fall very far from its parent tree. Having put down the template of good governance, it was inevitable that Nyerere would be followed by a remarkable string of Tanzanian leaders who set store by accountability and decent governance.

Among this breed of Tanzanian leaders who followed Nyerere are Ali Hassan Mwinyi, his handpicked successor, Benjamin Mkapa, who focused on fighting and preventing corruption but left with a smear on his reputation, Jakaya Kikwete and the recently departed John Magufuli. They may not be branded by the mark of political genius like the founding father. But they have succeeded in holding their country together, gradually transforming it into a viable modern nation.

In the light of the above exposition, it can now be seen why many colonial nations fail and why only a few succeed.

By Tatalo Alamu

To picturesque and rock-strewn Abeokuta penultimate Wednesday to rub minds on pressing cultural and historical matters with his Royal Highness, Oba Michael Adedotun Aremu Gbadebo, Okukenu the Fourth. On this cool and pleasant morning the normally chaotic and impossible to navigate Lagos end of the nation’s premier express road where frantic reengineering is taking place was so eerily agreeable and uncluttered that you began to suspect a trap somewhere.

Such is the paranoid state one has been driven to by the freewheeling anarchy and chaos on our roads that even the appearance of normality and order is taken as a sign that something quite sinister is unfolding.  A few days earlier, on Saturday March 6th to be precise, it had taken one five and a half hours to get to Ibadan. A journey that began at 8 am finally terminated at I. 30 pm.

But it was a straight and unhindered run to the famed city this blessed morning. With its native intelligence system and surveillance capacity still very much in place, despite the termination of its glorious city-state status by colonial Maxim gun, Abeokuta is one place you cannot afford to be flippant or foolish about anything you say. As the Yoruba saying puts it, nobody should restrain a kid from climbing the hill of Langbodo.

Suffice it to observe that the name Gbadebo has become something of a permanent royal fixture in Egba and Abeokuta modern history. It is an enviable royal brand. The name is rooted in the evolution of the city.

Sagbua Okukenu, the current Alake’s ancestor and the first man to be crowned Alake after the Egba people abandoned their forest homesteads, had been asked by the traditional council to go and bring the head of the last Alake from his last resting place in the ancestral forest domain as part of the ritual of coronation.

On the way he was overtaken by a messenger who informed him that his wife had given birth to a male child in his absence. The overjoyed monarch was said to have exclaimed that Gbadebo- he who brings the crown- has been borne. The paternal exultation has since turned out a self-fulfilling prophecy in its gripping historical accuracy. Three Gbadebo monarchs after, the world is still counting, and the reigning one is an object of much admiration and veneration.

Like their Yoruba ancestors, the Egba people are proud and fiercely independent, detesting authoritarian misrule and any hint of tyrannical overlordship with a passion. Famously described by Commodore Forbes, the same man who had reduced Lagos to rubble, as the most extraordinary republic in the world, its template of governance and distribution of civic responsibility was a marvel to behold even for Europeans struggling with autocratic democracy at that point.

Demonstrating an unusual confidence in their traditional institutions, power was devolved and decentralized; authority was dispersed and legitimacy diffused. Yet the entire society was suffused with the order and orderliness of a completely governed space. It was a template of productive federalism which could have served as a model for African societies in the throes of traumatic transition from colonization had the colonial authorities allowed the Egba people to be.

This was not a novel administrative rubric brought to bear on diverse people of the same tongue held together by the exigencies of relentless internal wars and unremitting external hostilities particularly by the brutal and war-like King Ghezo of Dahomey. It was a template developed and taken to their new homestead from the Egba forest.

Under the arrangement, the ruler of Ake was a mere primus inter pares without any overarching power over the constituent units except in matters of war, diplomacy and economy which was ceded to the central authority or what has come to be known in Nigeria as the federal exclusive list “as amended”.

The Egba people were to forfeit their city-state ambition after they were vanquished in the Adubi war of 1918. But they were to have their sweet revenge and last laugh over their colonial tormentor. The sheer carnage forced Lord Lugard to resign his commission which was joyously accepted by the colonial office. It had saved them the embarrassment of having to fire him for the second time over his highhanded mishandling of Nigerian matters.

It will be recalled that during Lugard’s first official tour, the Colonial Office had been so appalled by the horrific massacre attending to the military liquidation of the Sokoto Caliphate and the subsequent Attahiru jihadist uprising that it ordered the former London truck pusher and military Romeo to proceed home for a three month consultation. He had been diplomatically cashiered. Strangely enough, Lugard would show up in Hong Kong as Governor General the following year.

Despite their aversion for the use of excessive force, it should be obvious that the colonial authorities shared Lugard’s martial mind set and forcible subjugation of native Nigerians. A man of exemplary personal bravery but with a troubled and traumatic childhood which saw him orphaned at an early age, Lugard was never happier then when inspecting a military parade or when personally leading a furious charge against the native hordes.

His disdain for formal argumentation showed in his diplomatic dispatches which were suffused with crisp, staccato like discharges as well as in his bitter polemics against the Lagos westernized elite whom his brother, Major Ned Lugard, dismissed with colourful contempt as “trousered natives”. This could not have resonated well with even the emergent Yoruba indigenous elite.

Interestingly enough, the other known attempt impose a countervailing autocratic tyranny on the Yoruba people of the colonial period by Kurunmi, the Aare of Ijaye, ended in tears and tragedy. The Ibadan army under Ogunmola mounted a sustained a siege on Ijaye which ended with the liquidation of Kurunmi and his entire family. Kurunmi was bandit warlord and freelance warrior who had fought and ransacked his way from his remote Oko ancestral homestead near Ogbomosho to impose his suzerainty on Ijaye people.

This afternoon all the classical features of Egba federalism were on display at the Ake palace as the Kabiyesi graciously permitted the entourage to observe an open session of the Alake court. Sitting on the throne of his ancestors, the Alake was resplendent, exuding confidence and calm wisdom. Despite the unmistakeable royal ambience, the atmosphere was devoid of hauteur and intimidation.

All the cases were self-argued. In most instances, Yoruba traditional arbitration is more about justice and reconciliation rather than punitive exertion or retroactive retribution. Wisely enough, the Egba royal court steers clear of any unwieldy entanglement in the overarching and overriding English penal code which is the supreme arbiter in these matters. The Alake does not directly intervene in the proceedings, leaving the cross examination to his leading chiefs.

There was a robustly contended land dispute. The militant protagonist accused a leading Egba chief of hatred and bias towards his person. There was no attempt to hush him up or to shout him down as he repeated his allegations ad nauseam. But it turned out that the case had a crippling legal flaw. There was a subsisting court judgement in favour the defendants.

In his summary of the proceeding, the Balogun of Egbaland noted that since there was no legal judgement to countermand or set aside the ruling, the status quo stood and must be respected. But in its collective wisdom and judiciousness, the Alake court ruled that a portion of the land should be excised to allow for the interment of the protagonist’s parents. It was an epic Socratic intervention.

It was time to retreat to the Alake’s private chambers where homage and adjudication continued. There was a particularly touching case of a hunters’ chieftain who was going to be forcibly stripped of his title by his adamant rival on the grounds that he had gone completely blind and hence unable to perform his titular duties.

But there is a Yoruba saying that without the death of the animal known as Ekiri, you cannot use its hide to make the humongous Gbedu drum. Citing a precedent in which a blind chief nominated his relation to act on his behalf, the Alake directed that the visually impaired chief should be encouraged to nominate a relation who would act for him in state matters until his final recall.

This was traditional rule at its most ennobled and ennobling. A refined and civilized person, a former students’ union notable at the nation’s premier university, a former ranking officer in the engine room of military rule and somebody well- schooled in palace politics, Oba Gbadebo comes comprehensively equipped for the task at hand.

At this point, yours sincerely asked the Egba monarch whether he didn’t think it might be more profitable for an Oba of his immense stature to beam illuminating searchlight into the Nigerian conundrum rather than get entangled in the current roforofo fight about the obvious lopsided configuration of the nation. Fixing the columnist with a quizzical stare, Oba Gbadebo gravely nodded his assent.

Perhaps it all boils down to a combination of historical luck and good leadership. At every critical conjuncture, events always combine to thrown up the right leadership for the Egba people. When decentralization and deregulation of authority went too far and they needed somebody to stiffen their military backbone in order to throw off the yoke of the old Oloyo, they found a brave and visionary warrior called Lisabi Agbongbon to cobble together their first standing army from a farmers’ collective.

At the point they needed a truly great leader to stabilize them in their new homestead in order to face down the numerous enemies that besieged them on all fronts, they found an outstanding politician and exemplary warrior-diplomat named Sodeke to harness their collective gifts in a wise and judicious manner.

A single exceptional individual made the difference between the Egba people and the Kurunmi model of autocratic leadership to their immediate south and the buffer zone between them the war-primed Ibadan militocracy. Such was the outstanding leadership mettle of the tall, light-skinned Egba thoroughbred that even the British mourned his passing.

In modern times, the Egba people have been lucky to be blessed with a string of temperate and judicious rulers to steer them through the arduous pitfalls of the postcolonial coliseum of post-amalgamation Nigeria. Among these we must mention the statesman-monarch, Sir Ladapo Ademola, the wise, wily and politically astute Oba Funso Oyebade Lipede and of course the three Gbadebos.

It may well be that there is something much more fundamental at play here than the vagaries of accidental leadership. An organic people with commonalities and mutuality of ambition and aspirations will always manage to throw up the right leadership at the right time. There is always something about the inner yearnings of a people, a bonding elective affinity which strikes the right cord at the right time.

During one of his long nights of ruminations with Andre Malraux, his confidante and beloved Minister of Culture, Charles de Gaulle noted that at critical points in their history, the French, despite their querulous and disputatious nature, always manage to find the right leader. As examples the great man mentioned Charlemagne, Joan of Arc, Napoleon and— by honourable extension— De Gaulle himself.

That is the difference between organic nations with common aspirations and inorganic nations of extremely diverse people with clashing civilizations and mutually unintelligible cultures boxed together by colonial fiat. That is the reason why the old Egba city-state succeeded brilliantly and why Nigeria has not found her feet after a hundred years of turbulent cohabitation. Here is wishing Oba Michael Adedotun Aremu Gbadebo a long and prosperous reign.

By Tatalo Alamu

As the Sallah festival approached, the house has suddenly become a beehive of activities with many going and coming. Misfits and muggers abound. Snooper was curious as to the reason for this sudden upsurge of human traffic.

It turned out that the indefatigable Okon had established a thriving ram market very close to the house. Having made some money recently from sourcing and transporting human containers to the various EFCC political road shows, snooper had thought that the mad boy wanted to show gratitude to god by giving off Sallah rams to the deserving.

But always with an eye on the main chance, Okon had come to the conclusion that with hardship biting harder in the country most people who cannot afford a ram might prefer to rent one for bragging purposes.  So Okon rents the rams only to rent them out again. After he might have struck by midnight before Sallah day it might then be given out that the poor ram had died or had been stolen.

“Oga, dat way, man happy, goat happy and dem Lagos mumu happy too”, Okon exulted in this new found economics of disaffection.

“Na dis one dem dey call Okonomics. This boy get brain pass all dem Okonjo and dem Owonjo Ewunla people”, Baba Lekki elaborated with perfunctory malice.

In a more advanced and sophisticated version of the same scam, Okon actually collected money from people on the pretext that he was going to sell rams to them only to come back to inform them that the poor animal had died in transit owing to heat, exhaustion and toxic weed from flooding.

“Na dem Majidun weed come poison dem ram and dem come dey shit like Baba Suwe”, Okon calmly explained to a distraught Alhaja from Okokomaiko.

“Madam, na dat one dem dey call ewekoro”, Baba Lekki sniggered.

But nemesis caught up with the crazy boy in the guise of an irate mallam from Agege. After listening to the cock and bull story with stoic dismay, the poor man made a gesture of fatalism to the skies and brought out a long knife.

“Barawo…bani naira!!”, he screamed as he lunged at Okon. Okon ducked and took to his heels with the mallam in hot pursuit. Snooper quickly locked the gates of the house against Baba Lekki.

First published in 2011.