Tatalo Alamu

 

Lagos has taken a bad beat, as they put it boxing parlance. Three weeks after the uprising, its infrastructure remains shattered and its populace stricken and wary. There is anxiety in the air. Having burnt their bridges—or more appropriately their buses- sullen crowds of forlorn commuters loiter endlessly in designated stops waiting for buses that will never come.

Stranded among this lot, the approach of dusk brings no joy. You never know when you will bump into hoodlums or when hoodlums will bump into you. Everyone is on edge. The city of a thousand musicians has gone eerily quiet. Up till mid-week, the police have largely refused to heed the call of their topmost cop to return to their abandoned post.

Obviously, the thought that a superior force of intimidation and coercion could suddenly materialize to overwhelm and humiliate arms-bearing state actors is proving salutary and a historic game-changer. Meanwhile, the authorities, while waving an olive flag, have reverted to their authoritarian default mode as they ratchet up a systematic harassment of the leadership of the EndSARS movement. The atmosphere is pregnant with unfinished business.

The Lagos Question combines subsisting ethnic politics with the question of mass poverty and underdevelopment in the emerging post-colonial conurbation.  It is not a happy combination. This urban demographic of human squalor and deprivation existing side by side with magical opulence and spellbinding  riches is perhaps the unique contribution of the postcolonial urbana to the global megalopolis. The joke is that Africans don’t do big cities or the modern nation-state either.

A recent European observer has dismissed a prominent Nigerian city as the biggest continuous stretch of slum he has ever since anywhere in the world. He was probably making a sly dig at the chaotic and irresponsible urban planning combined with the logic of demographic penetration which allows slums and shanties to proliferate even in so called Government Reservation Areas.

Recent African experience has shown that unless there is conscious and concerted weeding the tendency is for the slums to eventually overwhelm the entire Reservation, rather than the elite paradise beautifying the slums. This will happen as long as more people are delinked from the national wealth grid.

Victoria Island has already fallen. Next could be Ikoyi and the Lekki Peninsula with its much storied Banana Island. Surulere has since been transformed into a vast emporium of supermarkets and fancy stalls hosting suppurating slums. The original owners are dead and their children have cashed out and fled.

In ancient Africa before the logic of modern capitalist development and European city-planning suborned the continent, the rich lived side by side with the poor as one huge community. As attested to by early European visitors to the continent, this did not affect the structure or grandeur of their cities.

A foreign visitor to Ilesha in the fifteenth century spoke of a town with neat houses and paved roads while eighteenth century Benin boasted of wide traditionally lit boulevards and solid architecture. As usual, the palaces of the local monarchs were centrally located in the heart of the town to enable the rulers monitor the pulse of their people.

It is obvious that something of the ancient African psyche survives in turbulent modernity despite the economic, material and political superannuation of their original enablement. But such is the logic of current differentiations of society into adversarial classes that if a rich person decides to build his grand mansion in a slum just to show that he has arrived, he will be lucky to escape with his life when the people decide to show that they have also arrived.

To be sure, poverty and squalor also exist in virtually all the cities of developing nations. But a sanitary cordon is thrown around all these cities which prevent the hard-pressed countryside and outlying communities from emptying their economic cast-away and desperate population on the urban conglomeration. Thus a postcolonial megalopolis like Lagos is the ultimate nightmare of this collision of contrary forces.

Yet it has not always been like this. Even the colonial masters who helped to develop modern Lagos showed better common sense. After them, gone forever is the visionary impetus of the founding fathers which produced the aptly named Surulere as a strategy of urban containment, Apapa and the Ikeja industrial hub.

The displaced denizens of Maroko etc simply bade their time to take their revenge. Those who laid Lagos to waste recently were not invading barbarians but domesticated city miscreants from every conceivable corner of the country powered along by indigenous riffraff spawned by unremitting urban poverty which is far more dangerous than rural want.

A principal complaint of the surviving honchos of ancient Isale Eko was that the open thoroughfare where a Musendiku Adeniji-Adele or an Adeyinka Oyekan could be seen playing the local Ayo game with sundry commoners in those halcyon days has now been converted to a walled-in swimming people for the magically well-off that the original habitants have no truck with. Surely, modern development has its unique discontents.

It is within this context of urban psychosis, a peculiar affliction of nearly all of Nigeria’s city dwellers, that the Lagos Question must now be posed. The conundrum of a truly African megalopolis against the background of excruciating poverty and widespread social disaffection has once again crept upon the national consciousness as an integral part of the National Question.

It ought to be remembered that there is no other African metropolis like Lagos. Lagos seethes and roils with an authentic African spirit. Unlike the colonial and racial medleys of Cairo and Johannesburg, Lagos is a truly African combo which bursts with the anarchic energy and indomitable zeal of the Black person in his natural habitué.  The only other African cities that come close in comparison are Kinshasa and Abidjan.

This is why the mind must boggle at the scale of the physical, economic and infrastructural devastation of Nigeria’s premier city in the wake of the last social upheaval. But what is also downplayed is the extent of the cultural atrocity unleashed on the city by the furious mob: the torching and thrashing of historic monuments, the royal palace, iconic buildings, landmark courts, rare archival materials, pictorial panorama of Victorian and Edwardian Lagos and epoch-making judgements delivered by unforgettable legal heroes of colonial Nigeria.

A notable Lagos High Court judge due to retire next year and whose own father was an outstanding jurist of the Nigerian bench had his office thrashed and the priceless documents therein incinerated. He reportedly told a female colleague that he felt like being stripped naked for the whole world to see.

Personal losses can be recouped and razed buildings can be restored to their original perfection but such substantial loss of legal arcana can never be replaced. It is the equivalent of obliterating the legal memory of a nation.  The legal memory of the nation is the hard drive which powers its people in the race to civilization and civility. When it is trashed, the nation is like a wandering amnesiac in the crypt of time.

Lagos is suffering from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. According to the same female judge whose own judicial chamber was eviscerated, it is in the coming months that the nation will realize just what has hit it. In their unhurried demolition, the hoodlums even remembered to drink her priceless tea and biscuits before majestically strolling away decked in her official robe.

To address the physical despoliation, Lagos will need national and international help. It is heart -warming to note that some banks have already volunteered to rebuild the police stations torched by the miscreants. This is the way to go. This government and private sector partnership is the surest bet particularly when the nation is hobbled by fiscal stress. But this must not prevent the federal government from being alive to its responsibility.

A Special Federal Subvention for Disasters is needed for Lagos. The good people of Lagos did not create the disaster that befell them. For years, we have been warning that the Lagos metropolis was buckling under the demographic strain imposed by rapidly expanding population. The entire country came to view the metropolis as the ultimate Noah’s Ark as biblical poverty and threat of extinction overtook a land that ought to be flowing with milk and honey.

This epic migration of afflicted citizenry absconding from the concrete hell of the inner country owes a lot no doubt to the conducive and congenial environment of Lagos and its cultured and welcoming people. But this has in time proved a veritable formula for urban chaos and anarchy as hapless refugees and economic destitute began to outnumber legitimate residents. It has turned out a ticking time bomb.

Many have argued for a Special Status for Lagos to enable it to absorb the impact of a rapidly expanding population. But this will not make a difference in the longer run. Lagos needs to face the problems of its infrastructural deficit very squarely. A modern megalopolis without a functioning metro system is an urban joke taken too far.

Yet it must be remembered that the first time a visionary civilian government attempted to give Lagos a befitting metro hub, the project was promptly scuttled upon the return of the military apostles of unitarist uniformity and conformity in underdevelopment.

Matters have hardly been helped by a faction of the indigenous elite of Lagos and their occasionally strident calls for a separate status for Lagos. This separatist obsession which often oscillates between splendid isolationism and a Lagos exceptionalism harks back to the colonial legacy of the acquisition of Lagos as a British Crown Protectorate in March, 1862 years after the naval bombardment of the city.

Early Lagos exceptionalism is well and truly well- earned given the colony’s cultural, political and economic pace-setting. But whatever the subsequent legal hair splitting and erudite irrelevancies, that colonial legacy had already evaporated under Lord Lugard’s imperial sledgehammer which forcibly incorporated all the colonial territories under the rubric of the new Nigerian nation.

Lugard’s extant polemic against the Lagos elite and unremitting hostility towards them showed that crown acquisition was just an administrative convenience. Colonialism had no special favour to bestow on the colonised. It has since been left to the more driven emergent hinterland elite to provide the more pragmatic template for cohabitation in a multi-ethnic nation.

Consequently and in the light of the national cry for true federalism championed by the west, it will amount to a logical and political contradiction to argue for a special status for any part of the nation. All federating units must be treated as equal and without any special affection for any of the constituting units.

As a compromise, it has been suggested that autonomous zones of development should be created with major Nigerian cities serving as developmental hubs. This will encourage a more rigorous and serious creation of wealth and suburban growth which will absorb the excess population of our desperate urban conglomerations. If it is not another fancy policy pronouncement, the resolve of the federal authorities to resuscitate the old farm settlements is a step in the right direction.

In the end, Lagos will have to lift itself up by the bootstraps.  Luckily as it has been demonstrated in post-military Nigeria, Lagos has all that it takes once the resources are judiciously and prudently managed. Now that the chips are down in the wake of the recent apocalyptic meltdown, the government must eschew wasteful spending and elephant projects in order to free resources for infrastructural upgrading and urban decongestion.

The Lagos state authorities must pursue a simultaneous policy of urban renewal and decay reversal. To facilitate urban renewal and demographic reconfiguration, all the spare parts congeries, computer “villages” and electronic trading inlets must be removed from their inner city redoubts where they contribute to the urban nightmare and relocated to the outer precincts of the city.

The satellite towns of Ikorodu, Epe and Badagry which have served Lagos eminently well as population shock absorbers must now be rewarded through a massive infrastructural revamping and new housing estates together with special skills centres that serve as rehabilitation magnets for the so called hoodlums spawned by an uncaring society.

A sanitary and sanitizing cordon is imperative for any aspiring megalopolis. This is not just a governmental necessity but a function of enlightened self-interest for the elites. As we must have learnt from the recent upheaval if a society does not take care of its hoodlums, the hoodlums will eventually take care of the society.

 

 

By Tatalo Alamu 

Readers, there has not been an American Presidential election like this last one in living memory. First, the gargantuan turn out. It was as if the whole of America emptied itself to the polling booths like some huge electoral armies in contention. Second was the raw passion, the high-pitched drama and the nail-biting ebb and flow of presidential fortunes. Even by American standards of presidential melodrama, this was quite a new high.

For four nail-biting nights and days, the rest of the world has held its breath as a titanic battle for the soul of America raged.  As we signed off on this piece on Saturday afternoon, there was still no official winner in sight. But Donald Trump’s political obituary has been called. Dismissed as an obese turtle in its death throes floundering and flipping on its back in the hot sand, no American president has ever attracted this kind of hostility and revulsion from fellow citizens.

Yet the first surprise was that there was nothing overly exciting or even inspiring about the two American protagonists. One was the incumbent. But he was so severely flawed, so ethically damaged and so morally repulsive that you begin to wonder whether the Trump presidency was not some monstrous joke gone awry.

But his opponent was not a knight in shining armour either. Although less freighted with moral encumbrances than the incumbent, less perceived as lacking in honour and integrity, Joe Biden at seventy seven is not exactly a sprightly rooster to warm the heart.

The Scranton, Philadelphia born politician is brittle, frequently inattentive and mnemonically challenged. Both Trump and Biden are products of a system of manufactured consensus which deliberately encourages and rewards plodders who stabilize and secure the system rather than the disruptive razzle dazzle of political genius.

Yet however personally flawed and politically unappealing these two men are, the fate of the richest and most powerful nation on earth -and the world itself by extension- depended for the better part of this past week on their fluctuating fortunes. For a moment it felt like watching two Roman gladiators duel unto death with unremitting mutual hostility.

The echoes of the ancient Roman Empire are not entirely happenstance. Although not founded with an empire mind-set, America has been an empire in denial for almost two hundred years during which it acquired human holdings and colonies as far flung as The Philippines and Puerto Rico.

Founded by intellectual visionaries and starry-eyed idealists, America is a triumph of hope and daydreaming over practical but inconvenient reality; an act of human will enacted over and against the perversity of human nature. Something was bound to give eventually. What we have been witnessing since the beginning of this epic year is perhaps the unravelling of that daydreaming.

The American founding fathers were quite an interesting bunch. Extraordinarily gifted and intellectually endowed, they hunted with the hounds while running with the hare. The truth they held to be self- evident that all human beings are created equal was not self-evident in their own best practice. Jefferson and many of his colleagues were energetic and enthusiastic slave-owners.

Consequently, there was nothing in their worldview that would have made them to conceive of the Black slaves, the conquered Hispanics and the almost vaporized native Indians as human-beings. As far as they were concerned, these were sub-human species and evolutionarily stranded genetic cousins of some hominid precursors of humanity who should be grateful for being spared a more horrific fate.

The American civil war brought freedom and manumission to former slaves. As hordes of Black people swarmed northwards and towards the rapidly opening western frontier looking for a place to stand in the sun, it was clear that something will have to be done about this huge and heaving Black mass. If their forefathers and Black American ancestors accepted their degraded and dehumanized existence with some gratitude, their offspring were not likely to.

The periodic uprisings of former slaves and their savage suppression, the rebellions in the anachronistic South of the nation, Jim Crow, the regular lynching and the long-drawn Civil Rights protests which culminated in substantial concessions to the African Americans were all an indication that the American ant had taken more luggage than its weight could carry.

The unfortunate reality of American society and the predatory nature of its freewheeling capitalism is such that rather the list of the excluded to shrink and contract with rising wealth and prosperity, it actually expanded to take on board the dirt poor white Americans and the economic no-hopers who might have been tempted to believe that at least racially speaking America ought to belong to them.

This turbulent combo of racially and ethnically differentiated American underclass acting in contradictory and mutually unintelligible concert often accentuates the animus and divisions in an already bitterly polarized and badly divided society. Surely, if the issue is reduced to mere economic deprivation, that ought to be a unifying factor. But it is also a collision of racial, religious and sexual altars which makes a pan-American revolution impossible and national redemption unattainable.

This contradiction is at the heart of western liberal democracy and it dates far back to Athenian and Roman democracy itself which was powered by a slave-holding economy. For if democracy is truly the government of the people by the people and for the people, then it is obvious that poor people do not register as “people” at all.

In Great Britain before adult suffragette, those without landed property were not considered as stakeholders and therefore could not vote or be voted for. But as the people inch their way towards the banquet hall in great emancipatory strides, it is obvious that the great unwashed will have to be let in or they will smash their way to the table of self-engorgement.

Aware of the fundamental contradiction of untrammelled democracy, the American oligarchy had always hedged their bet. There is the business of an electoral college which negates the very idea of democracy as one man one vote.

This is a kind of demographic culling peculiar to America; something akin to electoral eugenics. In case the rowdy masses have still not got the point, a patrician and authoritarian senate acts as a countervailing force against the plebs and their raw emoting. Democracy is too serious a business to be left to the people.

Eventually, it is this great revolt of the masses in its contradictory momentum and unsettling dynamics that has descended on America and which has helped to expose its version of liberal democracy for the stunning charade it is. This forcible intervention of the great mass of American people acting for itself and its outcome is what the American oligarchy fears most. For it takes the game and gaming away from their hands.

The apocalyptic meltdown has now arrived and it has been long in coming. The needless pestilential deaths and the almost biblical ravages of Covid-19, Donald Trump’s detached cruelty and casually sadistic dismissal of same as well as the resurgence of underclass agitations following the slow-motion execution of Floyd George in Minnesota have acted as great social catalysts.

The more the presidential duel became stalemated, the more it exposed the great hoax behind American democracy. The old masters and fixers of American Republic would have been wondering whatever happened to their tested talisman. This was not how the political magic known as America Wonder is supposed to proceed to the raucous applause of deluded masses.

But now that the genie is out of the bottle, it is virtually impossible to put back. America needs to go back to the drawing board in order to fix its broken system. No human society is perfect. Luckily for America, there is still some architecture in the ruins. But it will require some honest soul-searching and studied statesmanship.

Good old Joe Biden will not be the answer and neither is he the solution.  As for Donald Trump, he is not the problem either but a symptom of a more fundamental political affliction. Many have wondered how many Americans, now over seventy million of them all, could have the courage and equanimity to still vote for such a misbegotten human fiasco.

They were not voting for Donald Trump. They were voting to express their neuroses, their fears and their frantic insecurities. To these teeming masses of afflicted Americans, Donald Trump represents an avenging avatar that has come to reclaim America for its rightful owners away from the rampaging hordes of Blacks and other coloured perils.

This is the result of a fundamental collapse of civic education about what it means to be a true American. In rooting for Donald Trump and nailing their mast behind his peculiar and noxious brand of politics, the American far right has produced its own nemesis, a right wing fascist despot who does not even believe in the fundamental tenets of democracy.

In functioning democracies, the outcome of a particular election is not as important as   fidelity to the process. For democracy is not a destination but a journey to institutional integrity.  In America this past week, Donald Trump attempted to destroy both the outcome of an election as well as its institutional integrity.

It is the kind of zero-sum political games which reminds one of Third World Banana Republics rather than God’s own country. By the time the smoke cleared from the rancour and nasty stonewalling, the notion of American Exceptionalism had taken a shellacking from which it is unlikely to recover very soon.

Unable to believe what they are witnessing, Third World pundits, in an open spree of what is known as schadenfreude, had taken to comparing America to the worst example of Africa’s democratic despotism. One even said that Zimbabwe was seriously considering revoking Donald Trump’s visa for perpetrating electoral irregularities. For denizens of what Donald Trump infamously dismissed as “shitholes”, it was a sweet revenge.

But let this jokey irreverence not obscure the fundamental lessons of this engrossing American spectacle. First, there is no perfect human society anywhere in the world. A society is only as good as the human institutions it has put in place to safeguard a steady regression into a state of nature. Without these institutions we are no better than our animal cousins.

Second, there is as yet no perfect or ideal democratic society anywhere in the world, not even the much rhapsodized Athenian and Roman democracies which were based on slave labour. Democracy is more about the integrity of process rather than actual electoral outcome. Once the integrity of the process is abjured, the outcome is likely to be severely tainted.

Finally, democracy is not a beauty contest. There is enough institutional impedimenta based on class, corporate, caste, creed, racial and religious affiliations thrown across the path of contestants to make it impossible for the best candidates to emerge most of the time. These structural contingencies based on self-interest, rather than public interest, often compel voters to file behind what is thrown at them by the system. This is a timely reality check for starry-eyed idealists. Democracy is not about meritocracy.

As we welcome President Joe Biden, let us remind him that it is not a done deal. He is taking over a nation centrally split down the line. American needs some healing from the internal horrors it has inflicted on itself and some restitution for the crimes it has visited on other people and nations as a result of its misguided idealism and misbegotten messianism.

For the whole course of the electoral melee which held the world spellbound, Joe Biden exhibited remarkable restraint and statesmanlike rectitude. He will need these qualities to halt his country from fast unspooling.  When all is said, the world still needs a strong and prosperous America to act as a powerful countervailing force.

One thing America has going for it is a ceaseless capacity for self-invention and self-renewal. This is the miracle that produced a Barack Obama at a point when America seemed to have lost the plot. For all their faults and human frailties, the founding fathers will be smiling in their graves. It is morning yet on creation day on the Potomac.

Tatalo Alamu

 

 

From the volcanic meltdown of Nigeria in the past fortnight has emerged a unique species: Homo Nigerianus.  Homo Nigerianus has been long in coming. He does not speak Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba and does not partake in any of Nigeria’s multi-lingual riot of possibilities. He has been delinked from linguistic communion. His lingo is inarticulate rage which he spews out in sharp, stuttering and spluttering cadences of equal opportunity violence.

Social prophets predicted his arrival on the scene. Long before he was hatched like a monster animal in the fetid and festering bowel of harsh inequity that is modern post-Independence Nigeria, early precursors have been making some sneak appearance.  Homo Nigerianus is a product of complete de-socialization; a haunting throwback to the primitive caveman of human antiquity where wild men roamed the wild forests hunting for what to eat.

Like the old African savages in Joseph Conrad’s infamous novel, The Heart of Darkness, whose skills of communication never went beyond “catch am, kill am” or “Mr Kurtz he dead”, the linguistic ability of Homo Nigerianus is pared down to the barest minimum mode of self-expression. A fortnight ago upon sighting edibles in a warehouse that had been prised open by bare knuckles, Homo Nigerianus brayed: “See food!”

This is what happens when humanity has been reduced to the most feral level of existence, a condition which echoes the darker stages of the hunter-gatherer epoch of history. It is a Hobbesian hell; a state of nature in which everything is short, nasty and brutish. It is eat or be eaten alive. Beyond the common foraging for food, there is no solidarity of purpose. What is looted is easily re-looted and what is stolen is briskly stolen again.

How did a modern Nigerian society regress this far to the infancy of humanity? It has been said that humankind first civilized in Africa, but it has not continued to do so there. Like the rest of the world, Africa has also known great civilizations, mighty empires, notable kingdoms, remarkable city-states and globally recognized trading emporiums that date back to the Babylonian epoch.

But beginning from the thirteenth century African witnessed a steep decline. The people and their societies became very vulnerable to emergent European powers and Arab marauders that laid siege to them from greater Arabia. Portugal, Holland, France, Germany and Britain conquered and subjugated huge swathes of the continent while newly created Belgium was waiting in the wings.

The unending nightmare and humiliation culminated in the Berlin Conference of 1884/85 when the continent was parcelled out among the contending European powers. This was not just conquest in the ordinary sense of the word. It was conquest accompanied by a systematic political, economic, intellectual, spiritual and cultural annihilation in which a people and continent already at the end of its wits lost their organic essence.

To appreciate the colossal scale of depredation, the old Kongo kingdom whose entire inhabitants had been transported as slaves through the new slave port of Luanda underwent three different types of colonial rationalizations: Portuguese, French and Belgian. With its extant traditional institutions destroyed and the new colonial replacements stymied by host rejection, Africa became a land of anomic normlessness.

In such circumstances, it ought to have been obvious to the generation of African leaders involved in the independence struggle for Africa that to make a dent on the global scene, the nations inherited from the colonial masters had to be reinvented and forced to undergo a drastic reconfiguration in order to be able to stand up on their own. The colonial nation was not designed for Africans.

Those African leaders who grasped this imperative necessity for a comprehensive overhaul of the ticking time-bombs gingerly placed on their laps such as Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Obafemi Awolowo, Eduardo Mondlane, Augustino Neto and Samora Michel were either destroyed or prevented from coming to power. Post-colonial Africa is a blood-splattered canvas indeed.

It is a tragic pity that Nigeria which has been touted as the Black person’s last hope and the potential Mecca of the Black race as a result of its humongous size and spectacular endowments in natural and human resources has failed to live up to its historic billing.

After a costly civil war, several coups, civil uprisings, religious upheavals, organized banditry which has devastated the north central states and an on-going sectarian insurrection which has lasted eleven years, Nigeria is bleeding on all fronts. The nation has been in traumatic transition since independence.

In a strange irony, the post-military epoch seems to have sharply accentuated the debacle. Nigeria suffers from a double jeopardy. Military rule brought neither accelerated development nor national cohesion while civil rule has failed to throw up an organic and nationalist political class capable of squarely addressing the grave national problems.

With its economy devastated by a crippling war bill, dwindling revenues due to a mono-cultural dependence on oil, open mismanagement of resources, graft and spellbinding corruption in all arms of government, Nigeria’s woes have been critically compounded by the post-Covid-19 realities.

As a result of a run on the national currency due to state larceny and pressure on the external reserves, stagflation, which is a combination of rising prices and low purchasing power reigns supreme causing untold hardship to many Nigerian homes. With unemployment among the vibrant and energetic youth running at an all-time high, it is not a question of low purchasing power for the youngsters but no purchasing power.

With such a plethora of negative forces tugging at the national underbelly, no state diviner can predict when the tipping point would be reached. This is the fate that overtook Nigeria in the last fortnight.

Against a background of increasing despair and general impoverishment, the steep increase in the price of petroleum and the punitive tariff on electricity seemed to have pushed the public to a point of no return. The EndSARS protest against police brutality was just a pretext for a more massive social upheaval.

Enter Homo Nigerianus. Homo Nigerianus was not part of the EndSARS movement. On his own he could not articulate any social grievances and neither does he have the social clout or group cohesion to lead any mass protest. Only the articulate can call out the articulated. It was a case of the tail wagging the dog.

Homo Nigerianus does not belong to any social class. He cannot even be classified as belonging to an underclass. Classes are distinct social categories with their own unique identity. Being the wretched of the most wretched, hoodlums are declasse and unclassifiable.

The EndSARS protest people were leaderless by choice. The hoodlums were leaderless by vocation or lack of it. Criminal gangs have kingpins. But who ever heard of the leader of hoodlums?  Hoodlums are an amorphous mass distinguished by the brutality of dumb resentment against a system that has completely dehumanized them.

Drawn mainly from the rump of Nigeria’s old middle class and the emergent entertainment aristocracy, the EndSARS movement had no commonality or mutuality with Homo Nigerianus on the prowl. But the genuine protesters saw their nemesis too late in the day until it was ready to side line or steamroll them as the case may be.

Homo Nigerianus has now arrived on the scene fully dressed or fully undressed as the case may be. The genie is already out of the bottle and cannot be put back. Unlike the more disciplined proletariat of yore, the more class conscious artisan groups and peasant formations, Homo Nigerianus cannot be enlisted for revolutionary rousing or progressive politics.

But as we have seen, it will always be available where looting, anarchic mayhem and arson are being contemplated on a vast scale. The apocalyptic nightmare we have witnessed in the last fortnight will be a child’s play if we were to witness a repeat performance.

That encore may not be long in coming if nothing is urgently done to contain the menace. The hostile, inhuman postcolonial state that has spawned the monstrosity will have to give way to allow Nigeria to be made anew. As a first step, our sprawling anarchic metropolis, particularly Lagos, which are nothing but conglomerations of urban chaos will have to be urgently depopulated.

It is either we are going to be dragged into modernity or we choose to remain in our current neither-zone until it gets to us. A modern mega-city without a metro system, adequate sanitation, dwelling quarters, civic centres and a polite and people-friendly security service can only produce the type of dehumanized denizens that have been on rampage in our cities in the past fortnight.

Lagos needs federal help which will transform it into a fully functioning megalopolis and revive its shattered infrastructure. As a federal policy, there is an urgent need to revive the whole idea of satellite suburbia which will release our besieged cities from their current claustrophobic confines and drain them of their poisonous influx.

The whole concept of farm settlements, out of city hubs for emerging technologies, auto-polis, aero-malls etc can be fundamentally rethought and adapted to the needs of an emerging Third World economic power-house. However much we hate Chief Obafemi Awolowo as an avatar of emancipatory politics we can at least borrow from his brilliant Keynesian ruminations about redistribution of public wealth and amelioration of poverty.

This year has been quite momentous for Nigeria. Nobody could have predicted its unhappy trajectory at the beginning. Covid-19 emerged from nowhere to place the economy in acute jeopardy. As if this was not enough, the legitimate, well-organized but profoundly naïve EndSARS movement prepared the ground for the emergence of Homo Nigerianus who promptly incinerated the nation.

The monster we birthed has become a full grown hoodlum roaming the length and breadth of the country like an apocalyptic demon. He does not believe in anything or anybody for that matter. Having grown up in Nigeria’s vast orphanage of political and economic inequities, the hoodlums no longer speak our language. Like all nihilists, and with due to apologies to Oscar Wilde, Homo Nigerianus knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.

His driving motive is sheer wilful destructiveness which is borne out of implacable social malice. But because he lacks both group solidarity and revolutionary cunning, he will be easily apprehended and neutralised by a police force buoyed and energised by group resentment and professional solidarity after being briefly overwhelmed. But like mosquitoes, they will continue to proliferate until the pond of filth that spawns them is drained.

We are very lucky that this time around that the police chose to abscond rather than join them. We have said it several times in this column that as long as we pretend to be paying the police, the police will pretend to be watching over us until some epochal event comes along to shatter the illusion of order. Next time around, the police having lost all illusions may be tempted to join. That will be real Armageddon.

We can only avoid this looming disaster if the rate of social absorption of the hoodlums through their economic rehabilitation outpaces their growth rate. For a society facing a drastic economic decline, this is going to be a tall order.

But there is no other way. Just as it amounts to sheer economic illiteracy to believe you can lift people out of poverty without economic production outpacing population growth, it is nothing but political delusion to believe that we have heard the last from Homo Nigerianus.

 

Tatalo Alamu

 

In the end, it is a typical Nigerian paradox that what began as a well-organized protest against police brutality quickly morphed into the biggest upheaval against state inhumanity that we have witnessed in post-military Nigeria. We have been warning about the possibility in this column for quite some time.

We have hinted about radical anarchy approaching. We have alerted about the rise of counter-hegemonic knowledge in this country and its potential for state disruption. We have dwelt on the demographic terror inherent in an increasingly young country with its vibrant and energetic youth without any gainful employment.

We cautioned about the drastic loss of popular faith in politics and in the major political parties as channels of communicating national grievances. Finally we spoke to the possibility of state implosion as the Nigerian post-colonial state is overwhelmed by adversarial circumstances.

Now that the advance wave of the hurricane is upon us, let us not quibble or equivocate about the nature of the adversity that has almost overwhelmed the nation or its sheer magnitude. It should now be obvious to everybody that the EndSARS uprising was nothing but a shorthand and decoy for something far more disruptive.

Eventually, the whole thing dissolved into an orgy of counter-revolutionary terror, anarchy, shameless destruction of property and mindless looting. The palace of a leading traditional ruler was torched and its most sacred totems became objects of hilarious profanity. Things were approaching the dangerous intersection between class and ethnic resentments.

This does not appear to have the imprimatur of those detribalized, urbane, cerebral, polite and thoughtful protesters Nigerians first glimpsed in the early days of the protest. Their leaderless structure, in its decentred totality and amorphous potency, spoke to a new vision of doing things away from the ego-fuelled one-upmanship that has been the bane of Nigerian organizations.

For a moment, many Nigerians thought their redeemers had arrived at last. These are new heroes to replace the bunch of old outworn and jaded heroes. There was something about these sleek, cyber-savvy citizens of a brave new world which brought joy and a sense of immense national revival to many applauding onlookers. The supermen finally arrived at the supermarket.

Among the supermen at the supermarket at that point in time was the Lagos state Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu. No one in his right mind could have faulted the governor’s superlative performance up till that point. It was a seamless and perfectly choreographed act. With his open positive mien and boyish features, Sanwo-Olu could easily have been mistaken for one of the EndSARS’ whizz kids as he tirelessly mixed it with them.

The major blot on this star performance was Sanwo-Olu’s decision to impose an imprecise and tardy curfew on the state in a miscalculated psychological offensive against the protesters. Both the psychological offensive and the subsequent physical violence on the protesters badly misfired initially pushing Sanwo-Olu into the untenable position that there was no casualty of the military blitz.

Yet apparently stunned by its success and the speed with which the authorities acceded to all its demands, the EndSARS movement was left stranded and with no exit strategy. It was a typically Nigerian lack of capacity for long-term perspective in the pursuit of revolutionary goals.

Leaderless and now rudderless at the very point where it needed a compass and a strong rallying force to steer it into a strategic retreat, its ranks were quickly infiltrated by the real lumpen-proletariats, people of the under and otherworld, petit-bourgeois scoundrels and economic wannabes with real class and ethnic grievances against the system.

Given the back and forth, the frantic pushbacks, the plethora of fake news, the photo shopping psych-ops, the return of the dead and the clinically altered images of the gory and apocalyptic scene, no one can be completely sure of what actually transpired at the Lekki Tollgate on Tuesday evening.

But the evidence of military presence was incontrovertible, despite the fatuous insistence of the military authorities that their personnel were not involved in the carnage. This was in spite of the global images of men in the uniform of the Nigerian army and the litter of casings and expired shells of military grade ammunition.

It appears that the authorities were panicked into forcibly dislodging the protesters from their stronghold once it became obvious that they were having problems of strategic disengagement in spite of the astonishing success of their outing. This was what brought about the dark murmurs about regime change and rumblings about an imminent regime collapse.

It was obvious that the government was faced with a security nightmare.  It was already discomfited and sorely vexed by the fact that the movement had no identifiable leadership to deal and negotiate with. The fact that they now appeared to be digging in after all their requests have been granted was proving a bridge too far and a signal for a more direct battle to be joined before they overwhelmed the presidential palace.

Even then, had the government not been of an authoritarian mind set with the default setting of prickly military juntas, the situation could have been handled differently. In a manoeuvre darkly reminiscent of the worst days of General Abacha, elements from a special unit whose command structure bypassed the normal operational cluster of the army opened fire on Nigerian citizens. By the time the soot and fumes cleared, several youths lay dead and dying.

Despite President Buhari’s plaintive pleas to the international community not to rush to hasty judgement about developments in Nigeria, let us make no mistake about this one. There will be international consequences for that fatal indiscretion. Whoever gave the orders that defenceless citizens whose only visible weapon was the Nigerian flag should be mowed down has succeeded in returning Nigeria to the pariah status.

This is the image crisis Nigeria now has to deal with two decades after exiting the same troubling predicament. In addition to this, Nigerians have to contend with a growing encirclement of the postcolonial state and the near certainty that something is bound to give sooner or later. Nigeria has been to hell and back; an apocalyptic nightmare of freewheeling anarchy in which looting, arson and murder became the order of the day.

This reign of feral hoodlums superintended by rampaging thugs and other social deviants is a haunting throwback to the darkest days of the nation; a grim reminder of the wetie insurrection in the old west and an earlier journey to perdition which culminated in coups, countercoups and a savage civil war.

There is something oddly familiar about this horrid spectacle. Fifty years after the end of the civil war, Nigeria has commenced another descent into Dante’s inferno, its leadership languidly strolling into disaster with the assurance of sleepwalkers. With the last flicker of the EndSARS protest dying out, Nigeria has resumed its shambolic perambulation in what one of its great writers has described as the eternal cycle of human stupidity.

But you cannot step into the same river twice. This is not going to be quite like the sixties. Every age comes with its own unique and specific characteristics. Nobody has seen this vast multitude of miscreants in this land before. They were still milling around on Saturday morning. It is when they begin to invade private residences and estates in number that we will realise the true dimension of the crisis on hand and the true nature of the monsters we have spawned.

Anybody expecting any quick fix must bury the thought. State authority may be about to collapse quite all right but anybody expecting a soothing balm from any presidential broadcast had better perish the idea. If the president had any such clue, he will not be there in the first instance. Such is the nature of the structural gridlock of leadership recruitment in contemporary Nigeria.

In the end perhaps nothing can beat the profound observation that it is not the land that has no heroes that is unhappy but the land that is in need of heroes.  Permanently tottering on the brink of disaster and despondency, Nigeria is a profoundly unhappy place indeed. In the ceaseless grind of human wastage, old heroes are unmade just as new heroes are undone.

Towards the end of the week, most Nigerians were yearning for a semblance of state authority to deal with the existential exigency of rampaging mobs and generalized insecurity. It was obvious at that point of desperation and frustration that any form of constituted authority that could contain the menace would do. At that point in time, the citizenry wouldn’t have minded a return of the dreaded SARS in some modified form.

It was the classic Hobbesian conundrum at play. The leviathan known as the state cannot be wished away if society were not to revert into a state of nature.  Ever since humans emerged from the animal kingdom to ordered society, the progressive struggle has focused on how to humanize the state and curb its ferocious excesses rather than do away with it completely. No human society has been able to do away with the state, however brutish and sadistic its temporary custodians may appear.

For two days this past week, Nigerians experimented with anarchy and generalized disorder. It was obvious that if nothing had been done to rein in this rush to perdition, it would have culminated in the destruction of the emergent Nigerian civilization as we know it. We are not out of the woods yet, given the backdrop of escalating social tension occasioned by the rising misery index in the nation.

The EndSARS movement has made its point. In order to live to fight another day, the directing brains should now press the reset buttons and go back to the drawing board. Revolutions are not a quick fix or an overnight affair. If a revolutionary momentum culminates in meaningful and solid reforms, it is a step in the right direction and a building block towards future advances.

Judging by their comportment, composure and composition, no one would accuse the EndSARS people of being flame-throwing revolutionaries. They appear to be more like high-minded reformers and idealists.  In that regard, they have succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. It does not even matter if the authorities, seized by hubristic spite, decide to renege on the fundamental reforms of the police organisation.

The Nigerian Police, just like the Nigerian military, originated as colonial instruments of pacification of the local populace through systematic degradation and dehumanization. It is an ironic reality of post-independence Africa and Nigeria that despite the transition to post-colonial status, these armed forces, in the main, continue to retain a fidelity to their originating summons.

It is like taming a wild animal and resetting its brains for domestic utility. Success cannot be achieved overnight. Where internal measures to humanize the coercive apparatus of the state fail, external measures sometimes come to the rescue. It is with an ironic and embarrassing tinge that one must admit that despite independence external forces have been more decisive in bringing rulers and their enforcers who brutalize and murder their own people to justice.

Looking at the political horoscope, it is obvious that the post-SARS period in Nigeria is likely to witness an unusual flurry of activities to bring Nigerian principalities and their accessories to international justice. Unfortunately and as we have seen with General Sani Abacha, this heroic effort to serve the cause of justice is likely to exacerbate the ethnic, religious, cultural and regional fault lines already manifest in the nation. Unhappy indeed is the nation without heroic leaders.

Columnist evacuates this column this morning to yield space to a childhood friend, Professor Jacob Olupona, as he pays a befitting tribute to our in-law, Chief Ayoola Akanwo, who was laid to rest in Aawe on Friday.

 

By Jacob K. Olupona

 

The transition of Chief Ayoola Alabi Akanwo, of Jolliters Pharmacists fame, is a reminder that the circle of honest, devout believers and patriotic Nigerians is gradually exiting the land and country they loved so much. Though some have departed at a reasonably expected elderly age, this generally should call for celebration for a fulfilled life.

Sadly, some have left us at a very troubling point in Nigeria’s history; and those still alive and in their dotage hope to see a better Nigeria before the end of their journeys. Nevertheless, and despite all the challenges we face daily as a country, the living must bury their dead and bear witness to their lives for moral guidance. We must leave the rest to God and hope that our fellow Nigerian citizens still on this side of glory will continue the legacy of the departed and emulate the good works they left behind.

Chief Akanwo’s departure is particularly sad for many of us and his community at large who have borne witness to his exemplary life. The vacuum he has left among us will be challenging to fill. Why is the sudden and painful transition of Chief Akanwo a national loss for Nigerian Christians, particularly Baptists, the guild of pharmacists, and humanity at large? What lessons can we, the living, learn from his time on earth?

Chief Ayoola Alabi Akanwo was born on October 16, 1934, in Lagos to Chief Oni Akanwo and Madam Bamidele Akanwo of Aawe in Oyo State. His father was educated and worked as railway personnel who traveled around the country and raised his children along the way. Before his death, Baba Omitowoju, as he was fondly called, became the Baba Ijo of the Methodist Church, Ekotedo, Ibadan. Mama Bamidele Akanwo was a skilled trader.

Chief Ayoola Akanwo did his primary school education first at St. Paul’s Breadfruit, Lagos, and later at Ijero Baptist School, Ebute Metta, Lagos. He was baptised at the First Baptist Church, Lagos and attended the Baptist Academy, Broad Street, Lagos, 1950-1955, for his secondary school education. After that, he was admitted to the School of Pharmacy, Yaba, Lagos (1956-1959), with several of his childhood friends, including Chief Adebayo Makinde, the Sagua of Oyo.

Upon completing his training at the School of Pharmacy, Chief Akanwo obtained a Diploma as a Chemist and Druggist, as was the custom then, and became a registered Pharmacist on July 3, 1959. After graduation, he worked as a Pharmacist in several government hospitals in the old Western Region (1959 to 1965), in Badagry, Ijebu Ode, Ilaro, and at the Psychiatric Hospital, Aro, Abeokuta. In 1964, he was appointed Senior Pharmacist by the General Hospital, Ikeja, where he worked until he retired from public service.

In 1962, Chief Akanwo married his sweetheart, Mrs. Comfort Akanwo (née Adedigba), of Ogbomoso. In 1964, at the prompting of his childhood friend, Chief Adebayo Makinde, Chief Akanwo joined a group of friends and associates to build a new Pharmaceutical company, Jolliters Chemists, with branches in Ile-Ife, Ibadan, Abeokuta, and in Lagos where the company’s headquarters was based. Chief Akanwo established Jolliters Pharmacy branch in Ile-Ife in 1970.

The friendship and bonds among these friends and associates were unparalleled. Jolliters Pharmacy would later become one of the most important indigenous pharmacy  companies in Nigeria, until it was dissolved about four years ago when Chief Akanwo and Chief Makinde formed a new corporation, SATA. The new name was derived by combining the two letters of their chieftaincy titles, Sagua-Bobataiyese.

The Jolliters associates desired to create a pharmaceutical company that would transcend generations into perpetuity. This certainly made Jolliters Chemists an excellent case study for Nigerian business studies, social sciences, history, and pharmacy. Such analysis may help in recounting the national history of pharmacy in Nigeria: why some business partnerships succeed and others fail.

However, what is most intriguing about Jolliters Chemists and the role Chief Akanwo played is its unique embodiment of the communitarian principle and the family (Ebi) ethos that I noticed among them as their company expanded across Southwestern Nigeria. Jolliters Chemists was modeled as an extended family and friendship-based business that maintained the cardinal principles of Yoruba culture—love, self-help, and communitarianism.

Even though its founders belonged to different faith traditions, they acknowledged, respected, and celebrated each other’s faiths harmoniously. Whenever one celebrated a religious festival, others joined in celebrating with them, acknowledging Yoruba pluralism, peaceful coexistence and a nobility of spirit that is gradually fading away from the society today. The shared discipline and unity among them was strong. They never allowed ‘outsiders’ to have undue influence on their company’s operations; neither did they allow envy, jealousy, or sub-ethnic origins to interfere or to disrupt their unity, since they came from different sub-groups of the South West.

Jolliters Chemists represents a classic case of what Nigerian businesses and enterprises can become if proper discipline, true friendship, and strong moral principles are maintained. Right business practices are fundamental to success because, as we know, failure to adhere to such practices have caused the downfall of many private and family companies and enterprises in Nigeria. I recall one such friendly gathering in Ile-Ife when Chief opened Jolliters’ new office on Ibadan Road, and all the founding members gathered for the ceremony.

Even though Chief Akanwo was an evangelical Christian in charge of the Ile-Ife office, one of their members brought a Muslim cleric to offer a special prayer for protection and success, Chief Akanwo consented. I also recall the young sales clerk at the new shop stepping out to drop her money into a prayer bowl in front of the Muslim cleric, giving her prayer as a worker in the establishment that someday they would be blessed to own their businesses. Chief Akanwo’s business ethic captivated me. Until his last day in Ile-Ife before traveling abroad, he was regularly in his pharmacy shop. His fervent prayer life never interrupted his professional life.

Chief Akanwo was a devout Christian, a role model, and a moral witness. As a Baptist, his religious practice was unprecedented; he was ever mindful of the higher calling of the Christian faith. Having personally experienced the prayer life espoused in Chief and Mama’s home, I can write endlessly about Chief Akanwo’s love for God, his neighbors, and humanity in general. Unlike several Nigerian Christians—even clergymen and women—who profess publicly to love God, but fail to extend similar love to their neighbors, Chief Akanwo lived out and expressed his Christianity in honour of God as an acknowledgment of God’s presence in his life.

Chief’s moral sensibilities and commitment to good deeds, charity towards his neighbors, including his relations and outsiders alike, many deeds he did anonymously, were almost as sacred as a covenant between Chief Akanwo and his God. It is no wonder, then, that since his death on May 27, 2020, numerous testimonies came pouring in —even from strangers who had just a single encounter with him—about his generosity, his kindness to the poor, the widowed, and the underprivileged.

Chief Akanwo was well-versed in Scripture and Christian worship, a tribute to his Baptist background. Through my encounters with him, I appreciated the depth of Nigerian Baptist Congregational understanding and interpretation of Scripture. For many years, during my field research in Ile-Ife, I intermittently stayed with the family of Chief and Mrs. Akanwo. No one in the household ever missed the early morning prayers, which began at around 6 AM with praise and worship. Baba would always be there before everyone else, rendering close to two or three songs before we all gathered for prayer.

One of his favorite lyrics that I particularly remember and loved was “Three Hallelujahs is Not Enough for the praise of God,” which would have us all shouting anywhere from ten to fifteen “Hallelujahs” at a time! He invited us all to read the Bible together, to recite a memory verse, and to offer prayers. It was here, I suppose, that I began to think about the notion of what I would later call “rereading scripture” in my scholarship. The term conveys how scripture—whether of the Bible or the Quran—provides new meaning and lessons each time the same passages are reread.

Chief Akanwo’s Christianity did not prevent him from participating in Ile-Ife’s city life and social circles. He was a member of the Lion’s Club, the Gideon’s and Bible Societies, which often took him to visit institutions and places around the greater Ile-Ife area, distributing bibles and evangelizing. Not only was he a committed member of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, Eleyele, Ile-Ife, but also he chaired many of the strong church associations, notably Ibukun Oluwa, Morning Star, and Itesiwaju.

He was a choir member and Lydia Society patron, serving as a member of the Royal Ambassador and an acting church leader during the resident priest’s interregnum; he was chosen because of his in-depth knowledge of the Bible. Chief Akanwo was also a benevolent philanthropist and benefactor of the Church. One of the church’s senior members described his transition, thus: ‘a big fish has disappeared from the Church’s ocean of existence.’

Chief Akanwo’s interest in Education made the Akanwo’s home a place where his relatives, friends, and even strangers sent their children to live and attend high school and the University. They were confident their children would undergo strict moral and Christian upbringing, sound tutoring, and spiritual support under Chief and Mrs. Akanwo’s roof. The number of children who lived in his household is too numerous to count; we could argue that almost a hundred children passed through Chief and Mrs. Akanwo’s care. Many of these children and teenagers have since become essential members of society today.

Here are just a few:

Dr. Olabisi Adigun of Bowen University, Dr. Diran Amosu, an Anesthesiologist in Atlanta, USA; Chief Akanwo’s niece, Dr. Mrs. Olufunso Amosun, the wife of Senator Ibikunle Amosun, past Governor of Ogun State, Abeokuta, Mr. Tunde Owolabi, a Banker and Group Executive in the First Bank, Lagos; Mrs. Adekunmi Adegunle, RN, of New York, Ms. Kudi Badmus, a Chief Financial officer in Lagos, Adebayo Jones, a London based world renowned Fashion designer, Dr Yinka Oduwole, a Pastor in UK, Yanju Makinde, a pharmacist in USA, Dr Femi Akinboboye, a physician in UK, and many others. It is gratifying to learn that the young men and women who lived in Chief and Mrs. Akanwo’s home in Ile Ife recently built a befitting library for the Ebenezer Secondary School in Ile Ife, in memory and honor of the deceased.

Among this esteemed class of benefactors, I give an honorable mention to His Royal Highness, Oba Moses Olaleye, the Agbokejoye IV, the Oba of Ilogbo Eremi, Badagry, Lagos State, whom Chief and Mrs. Akanwo took under their wing as a ward when he was only a teenager and an undergraduate at the University of Lagos. Kabiyesi, in deep appreciation of their benevolence and guidance, bestowed upon Chief Akanwo the Chieftaincy Title of Bobatayese, in recognition of Chief’s contributions to his upbringing.

Chief Akanwo’s love for his relations and in-laws was deep and genuine. This past academic year, I was on my sabbatical leave. By the time I returned to Boston in March, Chief Akanwo had already arrived in California for his medical checkup. He had asked of me from my wife, his niece, many times, and when he finally heard that I had returned home, even on his sickbed, he began to hum to my wife the famous song, “Ajala Travelled All Over The World.” Such fondness could only come from a person who nurtured deep and unprecedented love for others and towards one who is simply a nephew-in-law.

From that incident, I drew another lesson of life on the love and relationship between young couples and their in-laws. Whenever these relationships reach a stage where the couple begins to see the in-laws as birth parents, rather than as in-laws, the association has transcended a significant threshold to deep love and familial harmony. As traditional Yoruba communities in their wisdom uphold, marriage is indeed a union of two extended families, rather than the individualist Western world’s notion that limits marriage relationships to one person and their partner.

Chief Akanwo belonged to many Christian associations, including the Egbe Ifelodun Christian Society in the greater Oyo Metropolis, an association of Christians of all denominations established in Oyo 65 years ago, predating the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) as a unifying body of Christian fraternity. I mention CAN to demonstrate that the need for Christian unity through lay-led associations began from such humble sources in Southwestern Nigeria. Egbe Ifelodun Christian Society’s founding members intended to create an organization of Christian friends to participate in charity and mission work and thereby discouraged their members from belonging to what they considered to be unchristian associations.

In summing up who this great man was, Chief Akanwo’s son-in-law, the Rev. Tade Agbesanwa —in a Church farewell service at Custom Baptist Church, London, two weeks ago—rightly remarked that one central theme in Chief Akanwo’s life was his faithfulness. Faithfulness to his wife, children, relations, neighbors, home town, adopted town, Ile-Ife, his company, the church of God, and to his country.

As he preached, my mind returned to my childhood upbringing and how one of my teachers in the secondary school, the late Chief Mrs. Victoria Oni, made us memorize a verse for a school assembly that keeps ringing in my ears to this day:

‘A little thing is a little thing, but faithfulness in a little thing is a great thing.’ How I wish our leaders would adopt this dictum for our national life as Chief Akanwo did.

Chief Akanwo is survived by his wife, Deaconess Comfort Akanwo, their two children, Mrs. Abosede Agbesanwa, an educationist in London, Olusoji Akanwo, a Pharmacist in the United States, and their spouses, the Rev. Tade Agbesanwa and Mrs. Bisi Akanwo, a lawyer, and  his grandchildren. Baba is also survived by his siblings, Mrs. Mojoyinola Fagbenro, my mother-in-law, Mrs. Olusola Odesanya, the mother of the wife of the former governor of Ogun State, Senator Ibikunle Amosu, Mrs. Titilayo Kesinro, and five younger brothers: Mr. Agboola Akanwo, Mr. Bolaji Akanwo, Mr. Sunday Akanwo, and Mr. Lekan Akanwo, and numerous nephews and nieces, including my wife, Mrs. Modupe Olupona.

Tributes and messages of condolences from the church, the civil society businesses, and the communities where Chief Akawo had worked keep pouring into his Akanwo’s country home in Ile-Ife. His Royal Highness, the Elejigbo of Ejigbo, Oba Oyeyode Oyesosin II, whose daughter Funmi also lived with the Akanwo family when she was a student in Ile-Ife, remembered him as an exemplary Christian, prayerful, kind, humble and highly principled.

Chief Akanwo has fought the good fight and has faithfully finished the race of life, and now rest from his earthly labour.  We believe that his service to God and humanity has not been in vain. He has undoubtedly inherited the covetous crown of glory.

Baba was buried on Friday, October 16, in his home town Aawe in Oyo state.

May his place of rest be vested in peace and power.

• Professor Olupona, FNAL, NNOM

Harvard University

 

 

By Tatalo Alamu 

To Ojodu-Onikolobo and its quaint Town Hall where Baba Lekki is fielding questions on the state of the nation with the indefatigable Okon acting as political batman and enforcer .As the friendship and collaboration between the two deepened and matured, Okon had come to accord the enigmatic contrarian a wary reverence for his sharp intellect and devil may care attitude to constituted authority.  The old man on the other hand adored his ward for his waywardness and petty villainies.

This wet and soggy morning as tempers rose in the background as a result of recent increases in petroleum and energy tariffs, the fireworks began without any customary pleasantries.

“Baba Ogbologbo, how market now?” a rotund man with prominent tribal marks snorted with cynical relish as he watched the old man struggle to mount the podium. Okon rose to the occasion with a fierce push back.

“Zebra crossing, which kind market you dey ask for again? Market don close.  Mala don vamoose. Oporoku seller don return to him mama place,” Okon shouted at the poor man.

“Ha, it is the rude Ibiobio yam fryer again. A periwinkle thief from Itigidi”, an ancient adversary shot back at Okon .

“Thunder fire your Yoruba pepper soup and ewedu mouth. Just wait for baba to finish dis nonsense. May the devil of Ambazona cut your blokos”, Okon screamed at the man as he trembled with rage.

“Okon shut up. I have told you that this is not a cut and fry matter. This is a serious meeting”, Baba Lekki brought the meeting to order by scolding the crazy boy. Things seemed to have quietened down after that as Okon withdrew to a corner, sulking and biting his finger.

“Sir, after sixty years of independence where exactly are we?” one wiry looking man with a scholarly frown asked.

“We are in the middle of nowhere and without a map. What the Americans call a shit creek without a paddle”, Baba Lekki responded with a deadpan expression. At this point, Okon who had lapsed into a sleepy stare, suddenly roused as if stung.

“I hope say dem security people dey tally wetin everybody dey say. I sabi say dem boku here. Okon no fit go jail for Yoruba people again for dis life. Na Yoruba people dey cause trouble for dis kontri and na dem go run pass Seme Border first”, the mad boy screamed.

“Shut up and get lost!!” several people shouted at the same time as Okon retreated in wounded self-regard.

“Sir, as I was saying, can we ever come back?” the wiry man resumed his cunning probing.

“How can we ever come back? You can only go back to what you have left. You are coming from hell and you are asking how to go back? Whether suffer whack you or na you whack suffer, no be dem same thing?” the old man demanded. One tough looking man got up at this point.

“Oga, me I dey for revolution now, now now. I no dey for yabis. When dis dem yeye soldier man came, we all clapped for am. Now we dey curse am. What happened?” he growled.

“What happened is that nothing happened,” Baba Lekki quipped with oracular wisdom. There was a hush as they all digested the import of the old man’s gnomic brevity. One ancient man got up.

“Why do we find it difficult to agree among ourselves?” the old man demanded with a wounded look.

“Once a people agree to be difficult, it will be difficult for them to agree”, Baba Lekki snorted. Dead silence followed until a young man got up.

“Elder, what is your view on Pastor Adeboye’s advice on restructuring?” he asked with a coy mien.

“Ha as for dat one, the Law of Karma followed the Law of Cama”, Baba Lekki rumbled as a grin of complicity split up his face. The entire hall dissolved into a delirious din. Above the bedlam, somebody shouted.

“Baba, what is your advice to the people in power?” the baritone voice boomed over the noise.

“ My advice is that they should continue to ignore advice”, the old man retorted.