By Tatalo Alamu

 

It is time for the annual celebration of womanhood. For most of the week, it has been eulogy and encomium galore for extraordinary motherhood. Indeed, when one looks back at the achievements of many women in the last century, one cannot but beam with satisfaction. Many of these female feats have taken place in the face of gender hostility and savage repression. Yet in many quarters, tipping one’s hat to women is considered an act of effeminate cynicism.

There are people who are long gone in their cynicism and utter disdain for the more uplifting virtues of gallantry and chivalry. At a charity ball, George Bernard Shaw, the great Anglo-Irish wit and literary hell-raiser, was asked by a great society lady on whom he had lavished time and attention all night as to why she should be the object of his affection and admiration considering the presence of many dazzling beauties.

“Well it is a charity show, isn’t it?” the rogue Irish charmer glumly retorted without blinking. Yet there can be no doubt that women have been the salt of the earth. They have always acted as the last rampart before the barbarians overwhelm the barricades. Historically, they have been left to clean up after men have fouled up everything.

The relationship between men and women, particularly between mothers and their sons, has always been complex and complicated; a source of profound fascination and mystery. Take the case of Oedipus the eponymous Greek hero who was notoriously fated to kill his father and marry his mother.

Sigismund Freud, the great Austrian psychoanalyst, was later to zero on this epic tragedy as the linchpin and leitmotif of male existence on earth. Every male child is pathologically jealous of the father while being instinctively protective and adoring of the mother. Astute and foxy motherhood has turned this socio-erotic drama into a veritable blackmail and sustainable negotiating ploy.

Yet in many households, this mother and son bonding could be a source of unease and permanent tension. One of Nigeria’s leading entrepreneurs once informed yours sincerely of how his younger sister confronted their mother as to why he should always be the object of her attention and lavish praise even in the presence of other siblings. The unfazed matriarch retorted that her daughter would never be half as kind and devoted as her brother.

Sometimes the fallout can be as portentous as it is peace endangering. At the first anniversary of their mother, a cousin was asked for his contribution to the celebration of the formidable lady.  “Well, wasn’t she known to everybody as Mama so and so?” (Older brother’s name withheld.), the impudent rebel retorted with a contorted grin. The argument died there and then out of the fear that it might lead to a fistic irruption from the rogue contrarian.

As this column once noted, it is precisely when global politics demands the virtues of empathy, sensitivity and compassion that female leaders always tend to come into their own. In the current pandemic gloom, we singled out as exemplars of compassionate leadership the female leaders of Germany, New Zealand, Finland and Iceland.

It is to be noted that it was the New Zealand prime minister who first bucked the metropolitan trend when she insisted on parcelling out to needy nations her country’s surplus supply of vaccine. Other advanced nations have since buckled under the international moral pressure. This is the power of international agenda setting which the post-Covid-19 global community sorely needs.

The masculinization of politics, or the enthronement of violence and force as the organizing principle of human affairs, dates back to the evolution of human society and the emergence of the patriarchal male-ordered dominion in all its minatory possibilities. The male with the raw brawns and physical power to prevail holds all the aces when it comes to providing food and security in a predatory environment. The phenomenon of the Alpha male comes to mind.

This canonization of force and raw might has produced varied and mixed results in our contemporary world. In postcolonial Asia, it has led to the emergence of the aptly baptized daughters of the Orient, a breed of fearless and exceptionally determined women who often insist on recouping and recuperating the family political heirloom in a situation of much strife and apocalyptic tension in their respective nations.

These modern-day political Amazons, or daughters of their fathers if you like, include the assassinated Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, Sheikh Hasina Wazed of Bangladesh, Megawati Sukarnoputri of Indonesia and the doyen of them all, Indira Ghandi of India. We must not forget the unfinished and unfolding business in Myanmar where a gang of military thugs have deposed the lawfully elected leader of the country, Aung San Suu Kyi.

It will be recalled that this woman’s own father, a founding leader of the country, was assassinated while she was still a toddler. Mention must also be made of Corazon Aquino, the doughty and redoubtable fighter, who went on to become the president of the Philippines after her husband was assassinated on the orders of the Filipino tyrant, Ferdinand Marcos.

The masculinization of politics has its terrible downside. It breeds a culture of endemic violence and rabid intolerance in which the contest for power becomes a winner takes all zero sum game all leading to the survival of the crudest and most brutal. Almost without exception, these female warriors of Asia were sucked into a vortex of violence and savage suppression in which only a few of them have lived to tell the story.

After them, and despite the sterling and stirring efforts at political reforms by one or two, their respective societies simply reverted to their default setting without meaningful economic progress or the expansion of democratic space. In the particular case of Benazir Bhutto, her reputation was marred by the allegations of corruption and political intolerance even within her own nuclear family.

Politics of masculinity, the hegemonic dominance of manly violence and male-ordained muscle-flexing, has been a consuming tragedy for the civilized world. Not even the most civilized and advanced nations are exempt from its terroristic snares. In America, it has led to the rise of a brutal nonentity whose vicious power-gaming and macho disdain for the elementary norms of democracy almost upended America and its vaunted civilization.

In Germany, Italy and Spain it bred and fed the ascendancy of authoritarian right wing nationalism otherwise known as fascism. Hitler, Mussolini and Franco all valorised the cult of the strongman who carried all before him by force and fire. To sustain the historic swindle of their people, both Hitler and Mussolini cultivated what has been called the aestheticization of politics or its adornment by gaudy artifices and meretricious razzmatazz, even when the pursuit of power and its raw consumption was all that matters.

If gold can rust, one can then imagine the fate of dross. In Africa where certain accretions of the hunter-gatherer phase of human existence subsist, the masculinization of politics has been reinforced by the colonial introduction of the culture of superior violence and force. This has made sure that things remain very much in a state of nature with the exception of a few political oases.

For the world’s oldest continent, it has been double jeopardy all the way. Available records indicate that before the colonial irruption, certain traditional African societies  were already feeling and intuiting their way towards a more inclusive and democratic ordering of the political space in which the right of women and minorities were placed at the front burner.

But given the haphazard and ad hoc rationalizations of incompatible societies at different levels of political development and with different modes of economic and spiritual production into the rubric of single national entities, the resulting multi-ethnic nations often resemble a modern coliseum in which there is a war of all against all. Force and violence become the organizing principle and it is a question of my machete is bigger and sharper than yours.

In such multi-ethnic African nations which are the products of a misbegotten colonial experimentation, the masculinization of politics is extreme and exacting. This weaponization of political struggle flows from the logical assumption that since these colonial contraptions are themselves products of preposterous violence unleashed on the native populace by the invading colonial powers, the resulting ethnic Babel can only be held together by force and violence.

It is an ideal breeding ground for armed usurpation. In Nigeria, the greatest and most commodious of these colonial amalgams, this self-fulfilling prophecy has become a veritable nightmare. Nigeria has not known any peace since its amalgamation by Lord Lugard in 1914. In this land of cultural and political mismatch, it has been one palaver per day and one commotion per night.

In the roiling cauldron of contraries, the plight of women as the infamous weaker sex is particularly concerning. As the dominated stratum of dominated manhood, politically exposed women have borne the brunt of male psychotic aggression in both colonial and postcolonial Nigeria. In certain hegemonic sections of the country, this contempt for and hatred of women has morphed into an anti-feminine phobia that is all-consuming.

When Kudirat Olayinka Abiola was publicly executed on the direct instruction of General Abacha, it was noted by insightful observers that had Winifred Mandela lived in Nigeria, she could not have survived her serial confrontations with the apartheid authorities who had impounded her husband. Unlike Nelson Mandela who survived his ordeal and was later crowned as the president of South Africa, Abiola was to perish in Abacha’s Gulag two years after the murder of his wife.

In addition to Kudirat, two other notable Yoruba women, Madam Bisoye Tejuoso, the late Iyalode of Egbaland, and the late Suliat Adedeji, became victims of grisly ritualized executions on the orders of Abacha. Till date, nobody has said a word about these dastardly murders and neither has there been any public inquiry into what actually transpired.

It has been noted that unlike the astute and wily Boer supremacists in South Africa who knew when the game was up and when to isolate and cultivate moderate and visionary ANC stalwarts who would be eventually sympathetic to their historic plight, the antediluvian hegemons of the feudal-ordained political stranglehold on Nigeria are too dumb and unwise to appreciate when their crippling dominion is no longer sustainable.

But if it is of any comfort, it can be argued that male-ordered hatred and phobia for women, particularly women who develop political “balls”—an exogenous miracle in backward societies—  is a function of all authoritarian societies whether feudal, semi-feudal; monarchical, military or proto-modern transitional.

In the nineteenth century, Madam Efunroye Tinubu was expelled from Lagos on account of her political and economic activities. She was lucky. About three decades later, Efunsetan Aniwura, the Iyalode of Ibadan, was murdered on the orders of Aare Latosa, the Ibadan military supremo, following political and economic disagreements between the two.

Almost a century later, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, after leading a revolt of Egba women against her sovereign, barely survived her ordeal in the hands of Nigeria’s military dictatorship. As a matter of fact, many insist that she lost her will to live after that storied and memorable encounter with rampaging soldiers who were bent on bringing her famous and iconic son to heel.

It is an unhappy conundrum for our female avatars. As we have seen from the tragedy of the daughters of the orient and the unfolding saga of the iron lady of Myanmar, when women join the political fray in their societies to effect a change of personnel, they risk being sucked into the vortex of political brutality, violence, perfidy and corruption without being able to make any dent on the fundamental structure of their societies which enabled the horror show in the first instance. Here is wishing our martyred mothers, a glorious repose.

 

By Tatalo Alamu

Oh dear, oh dear, we live in exacting and apocalyptic times. Events rush at us with such a breath taking speed. In the maelstrom of utter confusion, we tend to forget easily. Not even national memory is spared. It is a strategy of containment to ward off uncomfortable truths. But as it has been famously observed, history does not forget us, even when we tend to forget it.

In the famous Yoruba tortoise allegory, the great terrapin sage suddenly lurched forward amidst the din of celebration and much merrymaking. “Ladies and gentlemen, when we have finished eating, drinking and making merry, let us not forget the person we said we are going to tie and bind up , and let the person we said we are going to tie and bind not forget himself”, the tortoise announced.

Read Also: Jangebe abduction will be the last – Buhari

How many people remember that the man whose hand was lobbed off for non-compliance with Sharia during the brief theocracy of Ahmad Sani Yerimah was  Buba Bello Jangebe  from Jangebe in Talata Marafa? Last week, two decades after the event, and as if history itself was responding to a tough audit query, more than three hundred female students of a secondary in Jangebe were abducted by bandits in an operation that lasted several hours.

With the release the Jangebe girls, the nation has now found itself in a more exasperating quandary. More than Chibok, Dapchi and Kagara, this is the cruellest demystification of the Nigerian postcolonial state. Outsmarted and outgunned by non-state forces, the Nigerian state has become a buffoon pantomime, the object of wicked jokes and fierce dismissal by affronted citizens. How much farther can a nation sink into shame and obloquy?

With the state completely cowed, the Zamfara bandits treat official bluff with scorn, as if to emphasize the superiority of non-state armoury and armaments. They have even accused the Head of State of breach of trust over an earlier agreement and are asking him to come for a meeting. Nowhere in the history of the modern nation-state has this been heard before. The ungoverned space has finally become the ungovernable theatre of state implosion.

Given his limited education, Malam Jangebe may not be able to appreciate the profound ironies. State-ordered amputation is a wicked, unjust and ungodly act. But two decades later it is turning out to be a precursor to the amputation of the state itself.

This morning, we bring you an article written two decades ago exactly at the time of the Zamfara Sharia controversy. Readers are invited to come to their own conclusion.

By Tatalo Alamu

 

In Born into Journalism: Memoir of a Newspaper Reporter, Kayode Soyinka has penned a memorable and unforgettable memoir, destined to become a classic of its genre. The great memoir requires three vital ingredients: excellent writing skills, a vivid imagination and fantastic memory. This memoir boasts of all the three qualities. Arguably Nigeria’s best known and best-connected international journalist, Soyinka can now be said to have joined its pantheon of remarkable writers.

Written in crisp, lucid prose and with the fastidious elegance of a man who cannot afford to make mistakes, this is the moving story of growing up and maturing in full public glare. Having started out as a boy-reporter, barely eighteen years of age, Soyinka has become an elder-statesman of Nigerian journalism and himself a grandfather to boot.

How time flies, we may say. But flying time also carries storms and biting dunes. The journey has not been easy. It requires hard work, persistence and integrity. Soyinka is an epitome of all these. Despite his perpetual boyish looks and spontaneous affability, he can be as tough and hard as a palm kernel. At the appropriate time, the hardy no-nonsense Owu man in him always comes to the fore hinting the unwary that this is not a person to needlessly or heedlessly toy or tangle with.

The road to excellence and human distinction always requires hard work and unremitting toil. From humble beginnings, Soyinka has clawed his way up to the summit of his profession. He has collected a few scars along the way. But then, the road to stardom and distinction is not for the weak, the feeble and the faint-hearted. As this rich memoir unfolds, you have a sense of destiny and inexorable fate and of a career guided by providence.

So racy is the pace of this book, so riveting are the revelations of the intrigue-soaked nature of contemporary Nigerian journalism, and such is the remarkable clarity of exposition, that it was after a first reading that a reader drew the this writer’s attention to the copious praises of admiration and appreciation heaped upon him by the author.

Soyinka was not born with a golden spoon. Although his parents could not be described as dirt poor, they were far from affluent. Life began in a room and parlour apartment of a garrison-like block belonging to Alhaja Humani Alaga, the famed Ibadan women leader and staunch Action Group supporter. The occupants of each apartment were identified by the number. The Soyinkas were known to the co-denizens as No2.

Even when they moved to their own buildings at the low-keyed suburbs of Odo Ona, things were far from rosy. The father was mid-ranking storekeeper at the Nigerian Tobacco Company while the mother was a dutiful and devoted seamstress.

Like many members of the southern educated class thrown up by colonial intervention, the Soyinka parents subsumed their own ambition in the ambition of their children selflessly giving up whatever aspirations they had for the sustenance and upbringing of their offspring. Soyinka’s mother made sure that her children stood out from the crowd and were always elegantly turned out while the father made sure they never lacked anything within what his meagre resources could afford.

It was a childhood of happiness and contentment. An extant picture of the time shows a swankily suited Kayode and his older brother, Adesina, flanking their equally comely mother. Another shows the two brothers finely attired like royal princes peering at the outside world in satisfaction and unruffled delight.

It was a confidence and capacity-boosting upbringing. Kayode grew up a confident and self-assured person. This began to show right from primary school. It was as if the young boy was marked by a star quality. In 1967 at the age of nine he was chosen to lead the entire Western state’s troops of the Boys’ Scout to welcome to their camp the military governor of the state,   the then Brigadier-General Adeyinka Adebayo.

He had followed up on this star performance at the Primary School with an equally impressive string of laurels in Secondary School. The famous Baptist Boys High School was his father’s alma mater and he felt very much at home in the Egba ambience. Soyinka was an organist, a soprano and a champion debater for the school. At this point, any lingering doubt that the young man was marked out for greater things would have been dispelled.

But no one knew where and how the pendulum would swing. The young Soyinka had wanted to be a lawyer, a journalist or a political scientist. In the event, a combination of totally unforeseen developments conspired to push him in the direction of journalism.  A friend of his uncle and a power broker in the old Sketch establishment had come visiting and had encouraged him to apply to the organization whenever they advertised for the job of a reporter.

One thing led to another and shortly afterwards, Soyinka found himself ensconced as a cub reporter at the head office of the Sketch Publishing Company in Ibadan. As usual, he proved himself a fast and diligent learner. His courtroom reports from Iyaganku soon attracted the attention of the authorities and he was celebrated as a young man of great promise. Some of the lowly staff began hailing him as editor in the making.

There can be no doubt that given the remarkable flair he had shown for the job within a short period and his outstanding competence, Kayode would eventually have made the editorship cadre of the newspaper. But that was only if things had remained stable and events had remained constant and unchanging.

But in human affairs the only constant thing is the sheer inconstancy of events and the random contingencies of life itself. What seemed like an open door could lead to a cul de sac while a cul de sac could suddenly become a wide thoroughfare. Impressed by Soyinka’s star performance, the authorities at Sketch Publishing Company decided to send him for further training at the famous Fleet Street College of Journalism in London.

The deal was that after his training, the budding journalist would be bonded to the company for the number of years. To cap it all, soon after he arrived in London, Soyinka was appointed as the London correspondent of the newspaper. In effect, he had become the overall head of the London Bureau of the newspaper, a very big post for a young man of twenty three.

For the young man what appeared to be a glittering entrée into the powerful world of global opinion brokers actually turned out to be a gruelling rite of initiation into the often paranoid, cloak and dagger milieu of journalism .Six months before he could finish his course both his appointment as London correspondent and his sponsorship got the big boot.

After the installation of the new civilian administrator in Oyo state and the emergence of Segun Osoba, the veteran journalist and administrator, as the new helmsman, a gale of furious recriminations and terminations of appointment swept through the newspaper. According to his memoir, Osoba himself had been at the receiving end of the intrigues and high-wire politics even before his appointment.

But now that he was in charge, it was obvious that he was not going to allow people of unsure and divided loyalty to sabotage his efforts at rebuilding and repositioning the paper. Despite his excellent performance on the job, Soyinka must have been fingered as a protégé and beneficiary of Dayo Duyile who was Osoba’s principal rival for the job and a known sympathiser of the NPN, a party that had been resoundingly trounced at the polls.

All entreaties that Soyinka was a neutral and independent player fell on deaf ears. Even the hint that the Sketch Publishing Company was legally bound to fulfil its side of the contract to sponsor the young journalist cut no ice with the authorities.  Rather than going back to Sketch in an atmosphere of hostility and humiliation, Soyinka was faced with no alternative than to resign his position and seek his fortunes elsewhere.

His next port of call was the Concord Group under Henry Odukomaiya who appointed him as the London correspondent of the newspaper owned by the business magnate, MKO Abiola. It was a very rewarding time professionally for the young journalist. He was to serve under the tutelage of some of the best editors the country had thrown up as at that time: Doyin Abiola, Yakubu Mohammed, Ray Ekpu, Duro Onabule and Dele Giwa who took to the young journalist as if he was a blood relation.

But MKO Abiola’s management style was as eccentric as it was unpredictable. He could hire and fire with remorseless alacrity, depending on which side of the bed he had woken up. He once ordered Kayode through a phone call from Lagos to fire his own blood brother as Financial Director of the company. Sule Abiola was on holiday in London and was staying with the newly wedded Soyinkas.

It was an unmistakable sign of inevitable mishap and it came sooner than later. What began as a chummy father and son relationship in which Abiola ceded to Kayode the right to sign cheques on his behalf and the authority to disburse enormous sums of money without any clearance eventually degenerated into a traumatic tiff with the young foreign correspondent shortly after his wedding.

When Abiola could not get any of his top management team to fire Soyinka, he undertook to write and sign the letter of dismissal himself. This was after a tense faceoff. The newly wedded journalist whose wife was expecting their first baby had appeared tardy and reluctant to comply with an earlier instruction to report forthwith to the Lagos Headquarters on the legitimate ground that he was not recruited from Nigeria.

After a brief stint with Peter Enahoro’s  Africa Now, Soyinka was appointed the founding London Bureau Chief of the newly established trendsetting Newswatch magazine. It was a reunion of professional soul mates. The trio of Dele Giwa, Ray Ekpu and Yakubu Mohammed finally got their own comeuppance from the implacable business mogul after a celebrated public spat.

It was at Newswatch that fate played its cruellest joke on Soyinka. On the morning of October 19, 1986, Dele Giwa was blown out of existence after a huge envelope which turned out to be a parcel bomb was handed over to him in his study by Soyinka having been delivered by some mysterious people who were said to have come on a motor bike.  It was a novel and daring method of elimination which sent shock waves through the nation.

Soyinka was in Lagos on routine consultation with his bosses at Newswatch. As anybody who knew him well enough would attest, Dele Giwa lived virtually in his study where he loved to have his meals and hold intense intellectual conversations while showing off his rich collections of books, records and other memorabilia. As the first non-staff columnist of Newswatch, had yours sincerely been in Lagos on one of those trips, he would certainly have been in the study.

In order to obliterate traces of the heinous crime and fob off genuine investigations, Soyinka became a victim of a cruel and vicious game of disinformation so beloved of the intelligence community. Despite the fact that he lay critically wounded with concussions and perforated eardrums next room to where Dele Giwa’s shattered body was laid out, he was fingered as a prime suspect in the dastardly murder.

As Soyinka himself puts the absurdity of the development in this gripping memoir: “This could only have happened if I was a suicide bomber. Otherwise, how could anyone explain someone carrying a parcel bomb and knowingly detonating it in his own presence?” (p296)  Yet this notwithstanding,  a rogue organization actually took him to court on the ground of being the principal suspect and for years his name was fed into all entry and exit points as an assassin on the loose. Nigeria had become an Orwellian nightmare.

After being smuggled out of Nigeria in a disoriented and dishevelled heap, Kayode Soyinka was to give the country a wide berth for six years until the Babangida military junta fell in utter disgrace and terminal disorientation as a result of the annulment of the June 12 1993 presidential election emphatically won by MKO Abiola, Soyinka’s old boss. Soyinka was later to team up with Abiola in London in the battle to reverse the annulment of the election.

For Soyinka, it was the hour of gold as well as the hour of lead. While the spectacular success of Newswatch magazine brought him considerable international attention, the even more spectacular despatch of its charismatic founding editor in his presence brought him global name recognition. Fate had once again played a cruel card. This was not the kind of immortality anyone would crave and it concentrated his mind about securing his own lasting legacy.

After almost two decades of tumultuous apprenticeship, Soyinka decided to strike out on his own. In May, 1995, the international magazine, Africa Today, debuted with Soyinka as publisher and editor in chief to much hoopla and considerable attention. It had carried a rare full interview with the iconic Nelson Mandela who also graced the cover. The boy from Odo Ona has come into his own.

This was where fate conjoined the two of us once again. Yours sincerely was designated columnist and editor at large, a relationship which subsists till the moment. Our first piece was an October 1st survey of Nigeria, titled: A Giant Toddler At Thirty Five. It is left to morbid anatomists to conclude whether twenty six years after Nigeria remains a toddler or a monster man-child.

It is a tribute to Soyinka’s courage and audacity that Africa Today is still standing where many others have faltered and fallen. The magazine has weathered some severe storms including two seizures by the Abacha junta over articles written by yours sincerely. At a point, the exasperated dark goggled tyrant was known to have exploded: “Who is …..?” (Name withheld)  But that is a story for another day.

This is a moving story of quiet heroism and dignified generosity of spirit. At every turn, Soyinka heaps effusive praises on his comely and personable wife, Titilope. Born into Journalism is the work of a master journalist at the very summit of his trade. Kayode Soyinka has come a long way indeed.

 

By Tatalo Alamu

 

By the time he breathed his last about a fortnight ago, Alhaji Lateef Kayode Jakande had already passed into a legend as one of the superhuman avatars of visionary governance in post-independence Nigeria. It is not an expandable club, as it is reserved for only a few. Having grown up in straitened circumstances, Jakande knew what it means to excel against all odds.

For a person to be said to have passed into legend is not an ordinary achievement. But to become a legend in your own lifetime is something else altogether. It is akin to watching yourself transformed from a mere historical figure to a mythical personage .The outpouring of grief, the solemn regrets and the public adulation of the past fortnight are an eloquent testimony to the fact that Jakande continues to live in the heart of his people.

Long after time had mellowed the public misgiving over the June 12 imbroglio, long after what was widely perceived as an instance of grave political misjudgement on his part has receded to the background, it is the essential Jakande, the great man of the people; the politician of unusual valour and dogged perseverance that remains in the public purview. Public esteem is not determined by a solitary error of judgement but by the cumulative heft of exertion at the behest of the people.

Jakande earned his spurs and epaulettes. To be privileged as a ringside spectator as history and legend unfolded is not a common bestowment. Anybody who was at The Nigerian Tribune at the very turn of the seventies when Jakande held sway as Editor-in-Chief must consider himself that lucky.

As a teenage journalistic apprentice, yours sincerely watched in awe and star-struck wonderment as Jakande imposed his imprimatur on The Nigerian Tribune. It was an imprimatur of hard work, abstinence and order. A man of Spartan discipline and ferocious focus, Jakande’s capacity for hard work and grinding exertion was legendary indeed. He was not a fan of slackers and slobbers.

Even though it was generally known that Jakande lived and was domiciled in Lagos, he would always arrived at his desk in Ibadan before 8 am in the morning having journeyed through the old colonial road. How he did it remains a source of eternal mystery. The man of the people was not a man of many people; neither was he the one for dramatic flourishes. With steely self-assurance and supreme confidence, he would saunter to his office and the door would slam as if forever.

Whenever he was around, the atmosphere at The Nigerian Tribune was like a military drill held for wayward civilians. Order and orderliness prevailed as people went about their chores in hushed tones. Even the recuperating stalwarts of the Wetie crisis and ancient Action Group musclemen who abound in the place knew when not to press their luck.

As I have written somewhere else, it was not an unusual sight to find dangerous charms and amulets dangling precariously from rumpled pockets. These were hard men who had seen action on the old Western front. But even nature obeyed political necessity. A nearby stream named Agbadagbudu which hinted of commotion and fistic exertions so beloved of the local populace went eerily quiet whenever Jakande was around.

In addition to what was generally perceived as his unswerving loyalty and dogged devotion to his master and mentor, these were the qualities that brought Jakande to the portals of the Lagos State House on the resumption of political activities and the restoration of democracy in 1979. A meticulous learner and diligent understudy, Jakande imbibed and internalized the Awo persona and political philosophy as if he was studying for an examination.

It was said that had the UPN gubernatorial contest been left to direct primaries, the more socially astute and politically convivial Ganiyu Olawale Dawodu would have prevailed over Jakande. Famously rhapsodized by the unforgettable Ayinde Bakare in one of his songs, the ever capering and cantering old Gregorian was a wizard of grassroots mobilization and organization. It would have been a cakewalk for Dawodu but Chief Awolowo was known to have directly intervened on behalf of his faithful and trusted lieutenant.

In the event, Jakande turned out a brilliant and inspired choice. In four years and three months of frenzied work the monumental developments in Lagos state are only surpassed by Chief Awolowo’s frenetic transformation of the old Western region in five years. The landmarks are truly staggering. People still point at some land mass as designated stops for the aborted metro rail. Jakande’s memory had become permanently etched in the heart of his people.

The military putsch at the end of 1983 put paid to Jakande’s rising political profile. He was back in the political wilderness with his beloved leader. The trauma of the rigged national elections proved too much for Chief Awolowo’s lion heart. The Ikenne titan had publicly disavowed further participation in Nigeria’s democratic charade. In a parting shot, the old man insisted that if Nigerians still needed his services, they knew where to find him.

At that point in time, the political grapevine was agog with rumours that the northern power brokers, in a bid to nail the political coffin of Awolowo, were making overtures to his beloved disciple in a typical political gambit combining opportunism with coldblooded perfidy. Jakande never reacted to these rumours. However, a legitimate but politically quixotic attempt to trace his ancestral roots to Omu Aran backfired seriously.

As the usurping soldiers dug in and set about imposing a new military-dominated political culture on the nation, the old political class faced the spectre of growing irrelevance and diminished influence.  New kids were emerging on the political aisle. They were products of the military incursion into politics and owed no allegiance to the old political class and its expiring panjandrums. If anything, they behaved in a manner that suggested that they were political subalterns of the new military aristocracy.

The death of Awolowo in 1987 put things in sharp perspective and alerted the larger world of the imminent possibility of another fracture in the old Afenifere fraternity. Massive chinks surfaced in Jakande’s hitherto formidable and seemingly impregnable armour. As mourners turned the home of the Ikenne sage into a Mecca of political pilgrimage, Jakande skilfully positioned himself as the chief mourner.

Virtually every blessed morning in the weeks preceding the funeral, the former Action governor of Lagos State could be found sitting alone in lonely royal splendour in front of Awo’s residence with his famous fly whisk acknowledging cheers from the crowd even as he directed and coordinated events with a chilling resolve.

His former colleagues and rivals in the Awolowo clan did not take kindly to this attempt at self-coronation which they viewed as evidence of inordinate ambition, political greed and sheer lack of collegiality. If this drew only muted recriminations and loud sighs of distaste from most of them, it was left to Bisi Onabanjo, former governor of Ogun State, Awo’s favourite political spymaster and famous Aiyekooto columnist, to break ranks.

In a sharp public rebuff, the urbane and witty master journalist let it be known that all those who were angling to be Awo’s successors or parading themselves to be such would soon discover to their chagrin and peril that there was no crown to be won and no throne to accede to at the end of the day. It turned out to be a prophetic and clairvoyant peep into the political horoscope.

Four years after as General Ibrahim Babangida opened a window of partial restoration of political activities in his unpredictable transition programme, Alhaji Lateef Kayode Jakande was to find himself embroiled in a bitter fight for his political life with emergent power brokers in Lagos state who were bent on wresting his crown from him. A year after in 1992, this nasty political melee ended in a political stalemate which allowed the opposition NRC to take over the state.

Battered and badly bruised, the Action Governor soldiered on. He was not the one to be summarily retired from politics by political wannabes who had no history of heroic exertion at the behest of the people, or by Young Turks aided and abetted by the new military powerbrokers. Lagos was still his political territory and he was going to show the usurpers at the earliest opportunity.

The following year the progressive grandees closed ranks and came together again as one monolithic unit with MKO  Abiola’s presidential prospects as the rallying point. Until that point in time, Abiola was never their idea of a honourable man or a man imbued with a progressive and egalitarian vision of society. He came across more as a carpetbagger.

But with nobody sure of the Army’s intention and with their old northern nemesis on the prowl, an Abiola presidency might be preferable to sure political suicide. Thereafter, events proceeded at a confounding pace leading to the annulment of the presidential election, an interim government, Abacha’s emergence from the shadows and nomination of Jakande as one of the minister, Abiola’s famous Epetedo Declaration and his prompt imprisonment.

The progressive rank did not survive the crisis. As Abacha dug in and bared his despotic fangs and with the prospects of de-annulment of the election receding into the shadows a sense of siege descended on the entire Yoruba nation. Like all people who feel under siege particularly in a fragile multi-ethnic nation, they resorted to extreme measures.

A hurriedly convened and rather disconsolate Yoruba Assembly that held at the Premier Hotel in Ibadan ordered all Yoruba sons and daughters serving in Abacha’s cabinet to resign and come home not later than a given date. But Jakande in particular was having none of that nonsense. To start with, he was very suspicious of the motives of his political rivals and former colleagues in the intrigue-soaked Action Group, Unity Party of Nigeria and the recent Social Democratic Party.

Second, he appeared extremely contemptuous of the credentials of some of his rivals who rose to political stardom on the back of Awo without anything tangible to show for it. They were not the kind of people who should be ordering him about at an advanced age. Finally Jakande felt that to have obeyed the order would have gravely imperilled the Yoruba nation.

The gambit played directly into the hands of Jakande’s affronted peers. They promptly defrocked him as an archpriest of progressive politics and banished him from their fold. As a purported friend of a Yoruba tormentor who had imprisoned their beloved son for the crime of winning a presidential election, Jakande had knocked himself out of contention in the struggle for Awo’s mantle.

If the Action Governor felt that this was such a passing storm, he was wrong. He was shunned, ignored and ridiculed. His political stock fell and his followership evaporated. Having put him in a political hamstring, his adversaries were not ready to let go. In 1999, the AD, a political alliance spearheaded by Awo’s surviving political lieutenants, romped through the entire South West , including Lagos, without any input from Jakande. It was akin to watching one’s own political funeral.

This development has very interesting implications for the current conjuncture and it says a lot about Yoruba post-empire politics in a fractured and fractious multi-ethnic nation. Whenever the Yoruba nation feels itself under siege, a mob psychology prevails which does not brook dissent or contrary manoeuvre even from its acknowledged leaders or leading lights. Any attempt to step out of line is visited with swift and severe retribution.  The Yoruba mob has taken over.

Having seen the indulgent, adulating and worshipping side of his people, Jakande was now compelled to taste the less appetizing side.  He was to endure the ordeal and humiliation for the last two decades of his life. It was a very heavy price to pay. Proud, stubborn with his head bowed by sheer physical attrition but his spirit unbowed, the Action Governor remained defiant till the end.

When he breathed his last two weeks ago, it was the heroic and valiant first civilian Executive Governor of Lagos State that the people recalled and remembered for good reasons. Full restitution having been paid, it was time for redemption. May the illustrious man of the people rest in perfect peace.

By Tatalo Alamu

 

As ethnic conflagration threatens to overwhelm Nigeria in a way and manner we have not seen before, it is important to step back from the brink in order to know where we are coming from and how we got to where we are. With rogue radio stations and fake media outlets fanning the embers of hate and beating the drum of hysteria, the situation is eerily reminiscent of Rwanda circa 1993, before the apocalypse kicked in.

In 1998 at the height of General Sani Abacha’s despotic infamy, this writer published an academic article in an American journal. Titled Closed States and Open Borders: The Fiction of Postcolonial Nationhood in Africa, it was ostensibly a review of Wole Soyinka’s Open Sore of A continent. But it was in reality a critical inquiry into why and how organic nationhood continues to elude African nations created in the colonial image.

The thesis bears restating. Ascendant factions of the postcolonial elites in Africa regard the colonial state bequeathed to them as an alien hostile construct which they must conquer and barricade off even as rival groups close in to forcibly prise it open. The result is a permanent war of all against all in which the borders of these nations are permanently contested by local warlords. Closed states lead to open borders.

At that point in time, there were several African countries roiling  in this predicament: post-Mobutu Zaire, Congo-Brazzaville, Somalia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Algeria, Togo, Gambia, Burkina Faso, Mali, Equatorial Guinea, Cote D ‘Ivoire. Africa was a vast desert of despotism. While many of these tyrants have since been forcibly dislodged, several African countries are still under the thraldom of their successors or family descendants.

It is to be noted that while wars among African nations are almost non-existent, civil wars abound on the continent with most African countries hosting open borders which are subject of fierce contestation and armed disputes by rival groups trying to dismember the nation or render the state hors de combat.

In Nigeria after a civil war, several armed uprisings, coups and a decade old religious insurrection, the phenomenon of open borders has now assumed a paradoxical redefinition with heavily weaponized transnational tribesmen taking advantage of the open porous borders in the north of the country to flood the nation in what has been fingered as a new hegemonic project to alter its internal demographic configuration.

As we are finding out in this traumatized nation, the closed state is organised along the principle of ethnic exclusivity or even caste particularism. You either belong or you are firmly excluded. This is turning out to be a dangerous, double-edged sword particularly in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious nation with fragile national cohesion like Nigeria.

Mobutu famously expelled the Congolese Tutsi whose ancestors have been living in Congo for three generations with the war cry: “A tree trunk does not become a crocodile simply because it has spent some time in water”. It is a rigid and barbaric code of exclusion which completely ignores the role of human migration in the formation of modern national identity.

The Tutsi returned the compliment. Aided by their recently victorious ethnic kinsmen from war-primed Rwanda, they forced their way through three thousand miles of dense Congolese forests to dislodge Mobutu from his hitherto impregnable fortress in Kinshasa. Mobutu who had managed to rule his country for over forty years by playing one ethnic group against the other finally played one ethnic joker too many.

The impact of this endemic instability on the postcolonial state in Africa and the rapid modernization of the continent after the epoch of colonization is better imagined. Just this past week, Somalia returned to turmoil with the dismissal of its interim president.

It will be recalled that despite being the most ethnically and religiously homogeneous country in Africa, Somalia has been virtually stateless since 1991 after the monstrous Siad Barre was expelled by rival clans. The renegade al-Shabbah group commemorated Somali’s return to virtual statelessness by detonating a roadside bomb in Mogadishu which killed over a dozen people.

From the foregoing, it will be seen that Nigeria’s situation is very dire indeed. In the past fortnight, the situation has reached a tipping point with the herdsmen palaver with several communities resorting to self-help in the face a self-demobilized federal government. While President Buhari remains glum and uncommunicative, agents of hate and hysteria have been fanning the embers of national discord and dismemberment.

Many now believe that the country is on the verge of a horrendous descent to the abyss. This is always the case with closed states. While it is true that there are several adversarial groups with political, economic, ethnic and religious axe to grind with the government, what is even truer is that Nigeria has never had a more divisive government and polarizing leadership.

It is a known truism that you cannot step into the same river twice. But history often repeats itself in a curious and engrossing way. As it was during General Mohammadu Buhari’s first coming as a military dictator, so it is turning out to be in his second coming as a civilian ruler. Character is turning out to be fate once again.

Around October or November 1984 during the Buhari military administration, Stanley Macebuh, the doyen of intellectual journalism in post-independence Nigeria, published a piece in The Guardian titled Barricades at Dodan Barracks. It was to decry the hostile disdain of the military junta, particularly its leader, for all the critical sectors of the nation in the face of mounting elite resentment and the growing exacerbation of the National Question.

As usual with Macebuh, it was a subtle, nuanced but ultimately damning critique of the state of the nation. The Yoruba political establishment was growing restive over what it considered an alarming lop-sidedness and grotesque distortion of justice in the trial of Second Republic politicians.

With his penchant for unforced errors and tendency to shoot himself in the foot, it was General Buhari himself who set the pace in the early days of his regime by going on national television to announce that contrary to idle rumours, the deposed Head of State, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, was never brought down to Lagos in handcuffs.

While Shagari was kept in the relative comfort of a government guest house, his deputy, Dr Alex Ekwueme, was thrown into jail at Kirikiri Maximum Prison where he developed a beard of Nebuchadnezzeran proportions. Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu was also availed of the same facility where the smoke from his cigarette billowed in fulsome indignation.

As the months wore on the sullen resentment, particularly in the west, snowballed into a national tempest. Two civil war titans, General Benjamin Adekunle and General Alani Akinrinade, were in open revolt and began canvassing for a confederal arrangement for the country which would prise the closed state from the hegemonic claws of a particular ethnic group.

Those of their serving military colleagues who had tried to exert some moderating influence on the Daura-born general soon gave up, settling instead for a consummate game of military chess and grinding attrition which will eventuate in Buhari’s ouster in a clinical palace coup. Contrary to popular myth, Buhari was not part of the core group that undertook to remove the civilian administration.

It was this same core group that chose to remove him when his cup overflowed and when they could no longer put up with his arrogance and sense of feudal entitlement. As it was to be expected, the coup day broadcast charged Buhari with serial lack of consultation, authoritarian intolerance of other views, arrogant stubbornness and insensitivity.

By a remarkable irony, thirty six years after and six years into his second coming as civilian head of state, the political atmospherics in Nigeria appear preternaturally similar to the old conjuncture, what with the entire west in open commotion; the east in restive rebellion and the old north dissolving in anarchy and mayhem.

Those who rooted for Buhari’s second coming based on his record of security and state preservation, and without any prejudice to his foibles, have now come to the unfortunate conclusion that he may well be the greatest security menace to the nation in view of unfolding events. If Nigeria were to unravel, nobody will remember any infrastructural effort or attempts to revamp some moribund facilities.

One of the signal failures of post-military political leadership in Nigeria is the inability to correctly gauge public mood or to stubbornly go against it as we have seen in the case of former military Caesars.  Political reforms also depend on public disposition. There was a brief moment in the last six years when a diligent restructuring might have addressed most of the contentious aspects of the National Question.

Unfortunately, we have allowed that momentum to slip past us. Given the poisoning of the community well of national wellbeing by the herdsmen crisis and the frightening national repercussions we are witnessing, there are many apostles of restructuring who have come to the conclusion that the current situation is well-nigh beyond restructuring.

The consuming paradox about the current conjuncture is the fact that whereas as a military ruler, there were still a few of Buhari’s military colleagues who could look him in the eye or exert countervailing influence until it became impossible to do so, the current monolithic and authoritarian structure of the ruling APC is such that everybody appears to have been browbeaten or cold-shouldered into bleating compliance. The party has become a proto-military formation or a mere empire accessory after the fact of civilian dictatorship.

The Ottoman presidency is making its final debut in Nigeria. This is the only way to explain a situation in which a fundamental exercise such as the validation of party membership could elicit open disavowal if not outright condemnation from two former national chairmen of the same party. This abhorrent development speaks volumes for the level of internal consultations and the organic cohesion of the party.

The public display of disaffection amounts to nothing but trying to shut the door of the stable after the horse has bolted. The APC as it is at the moment is deeply fractured and fragmented. Unless urgent efforts are made to effect national reconciliation and rebuild the party from scratch, it is likely to suffer a catastrophic implosion in the run up to 2023 or meet a humiliating comeuppance at the federal polls.

We have been through this route before and it always ends in tears and gnashing of teeth. The outcome this time is not likely to be different. Never in its chequered history has this country been this badly divided and bitterly polarized.  The only consolation is that there is already a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth in the land.

By  Tatalo Alamu

 

You can trust Okon Francis Okon to mess up on the big occasion. As soon as the rogue was informed that he would be making his first international trip to Ghana, he became uncontrollable with excitement. But despite the spiritual and alcoholic fortifications, the mad boy developed a nasty fear of flying on the morning of the trip. The weather-beaten scallywag crept into snooper’s bedroom shaking and palpitating like an old corn mill.

“Oga, Ghana, I no fit go again. I don visit Muri dem airport. I no fit enter dem iron bird. Dem Calabar gods no go gree make man enter dem flying coffin. I see one as he come fly and smoke and thunder dey come from him mouth. Na dat one dem dey call Evil Vulture. Naim I come pick race. Dem Oyinbo people be mad wizards”, Okon moaned in real terror..

“Okon, you have only thirty minutes left”, I snapped at him.

“Yoruba people wan kill me again oo. Na dem Buhari Jogbojogbo and dem OPC. Dis one na OPC, operation pafuka Calabar ooo,” the mad boy wailed uncontrollably.

“Okon, dress up now or forget it”, snooper screamed at the urchin.

At the airport, Okon immediately began another drama with the immigration people.

“ What is your surname?” one official asked as he stared at Okon’s passport.

“I no get saw-name. Abi na sawmill you mean?” Okon answered with impudence.

“Okay, what is your family name?” the same official asked in alarm.

“I no get family. Papa don quench and mama come pick race with dem yeye Igbo man to Mgbirichi”, Okon snapped. The immigration people shrugged and struggled with mirth as they quickly waved him on. Once inside the aircraft, Okon began another round of trouble-making.

“Please fasten your belt”, the bulky, no-nonsense hostess directed Okon as the pilot announced imminent departure.

“I no dey wear belt so therefore nothing to fast”, Okon retorted with a frown,

“Fasten your seat belt for departure, please”, the lady growled, eyeing Okon with malice and malediction.

“Haba, seat no dey get belt now. Abi which kind belt you mean, You mean fasten your Ndemdem….?” At this point, the lady, realising that she was dealing with an incorrigible rogue, moved over to Okon’s seat and forcibly dragged the belt across his midsection before fastening it.

“No be belt you dey look for na trouble ooo. As your hand come dey touch something else, wetin you wan man do now?” Okon snarled. The lady ignored him completely. As the plane taxied furiously and leapt to meet the sky, Okon began frantically scratching at the window in fright and desperation.

“Abasi mbo, Abasi mbo!!!” Okon screamed as the plane banked and dived towards the sea.

“Okon, what’s the matter with you?”, snooper shouted from his seat.

“Oga, I wan pee and I wan faint”, the mad boy growled as he attempted to unbuckle the seat belt to no avail.

“The toilet is at the back, and you can go as soon as the red light is off”, the hostess explained with a grimace.

“Nonsense, make una open window make I pee jo. Which kind toilet dey for back for sky?”

“Okon, let me warn you that the pilot has decided to throw you out of the plane”, I screamed at the mad boy. This threat seemed to have worked wonders as the mad boy lay in a deathly still and with a frozen grimace for the rest of the flight. It was not until the following day that the crazed rogue regained his voice and confidence. On the way to Flagstaff House, Okon had engaged the driver taking us in a deadly verbal duel.

“Mister driver, why you dey drive like dem asinwin like dis?” Okon screamed as the diligent state operative tore his way through the streets of Accra like a demon.

“ Wetin be your name sef?” Okon roared.

“My name is Carlos”, the driver replied.

“No wonder. You be callous man, you hear?” Okon shrieked.

As soon as they announced the arrival of J.J Rawlings to wild applause, the mad boy discovered another prey. He stood up excitedly and started singing and clapping, “J.J  do something before you die”, he wailed and then addressing Rawlings directly, “Oga Jerry make you come Nigeria now, we get plenty job for una”, the mad boy noted as snooper whipped him into silence with the eyes.

When it was time to leave Accra, the mad boy opted to travel by road rather than enter the “iron bird”. As at press time, we were still expecting Okon.

First published in February 2009.