By Tatalo Alamu 

Unitary federalism is a political oxymoron.  When its misbegotten history in Nigeria is written, this past week will be seen as a watershed.  Fearing the gale of national consensus as it surges past its hitherto impregnable fortress, the federal authorities finally abandoned their scornful silence for a more vigorous and hysterical denunciation of the apostles of restructuring.

Even by the standards of repressive autocracies that one has witnessed in Nigeria, the display of state distemper was quite remarkable. The presidency resorted to hurling epithets at the proponents of restructuring even as it darkly hinted of possible reprisals for “unguarded and unpatriotic utterances”.  Among the targets are the nation’s leading Pentecostal priest and possibly a Vice President who appeared to have suddenly and ominously rediscovered his crusading gusto.

There appears to be no limits to political obscenity anymore.  It is an ungainly descent from the realm of tolerable statecraft to the dark ossuaries of political witchcraft. One would be excused to imagine that the issue of restructuring was never part of the original manifesto of the ruling party.  Yet it is, and has survived several clever ruses to give it a state funeral.

A manifesto is the ultimate sacred covenant between a party and the people. But in postcolonial Nigeria, manifestos mean nothing, and are not worth the paper on which they are written.  What matters is the will of the “party” as implacably enacted against the absent will of the populace. In the electoral void and just as it happens in conventional warfare, God marches on the side of the bigger battalion. The people are just idle spectators.

The reason for this hiatus is even more fundamental than parties and their manifestos.  It speaks to the lack of a foundational social contract between the people and the postcolonial elite thrown up in Africa after the physical cessation of colonization.  What ensued after the epoch of colonization was not liberation in the fundamental sense of the word but the naturalization of the personnel and apparatus of tyranny.

There is no difference whatsoever between King Leopold’s manager of the interior, a memorable sadist brilliantly captured in Joseph Conrad’s haunting novel who supervised the systematic plunder of the African interior while being elegantly turned out, and Joseph Mobutu who presided over the rapine of his people while being nattily attired in leopard cap and all the appurtenances of an authentic African Taoiseach .

Four hundred years earlier, the Portuguese invaders had rounded up all the inhabitants of the old Kongo kingdom around present day Angola and transported them to the new colony of Brazil through the slave port of Luanda. The Iberians were emboldened when they discovered that the mighty African kingdom had no passable army.

There was no talk of a social contract either in Mobutu’s Zaire or King Leopold’s Free State of the Congo.  This is because the people did not register as real people but as mere objects of economic exploitation and further dehumanization. This is even more so of those who have been enslaved. Social contract is not a free meal ticket. It can only exist between people of the same race, creed, caste or even religion, no matter the differentiation in economic status.

African intellectuals and scholars are deluded when they think that the social contract as known in Europe and America can be transferred in its organic essence to African history.  You cannot inherit other people’s historical trajectory.  You must create your own often in conditions and circumstances that are not of your own making.

The European social contract is not a product of African exertion. You can extend the subliminal trope to give the theory a universal validity, but you cannot appropriate other people’s toil and tears. To be sure, there were pre-colonial African societies that fought off their tyrannical rulers to secure a form or version of the social contract.

For example, for close to three hundred years leading to colonization, the Yoruba people were engaged in a war of will and wits with their traditional rulers which pushed back the frontiers of feudal autocracy by enshrining some code of conduct in the affairs of the society. But all that was lost in the rubble of colonial conquest. The quest for freedom had to start afresh.

European social contract was the product of protracted wars and unimaginable bloodshed in which people rose against tyrannical and unaccountable authorities. People easily forget that the Magna Carta was signed into law on June 15, 1215 by King John. There were countless other such uprisings in the next three hundred years as human yearnings for freedom and self-determination came into violent contradiction with feudal absolutism.

But as the Dark Age receded in all its pristine savagery and the Age of Enlightenment crept in, philosophers from Thomas Hobbes to Rousseau began to see the state as a necessary evil, a leviathan which must be put in place to save human societies from reverting to a state of nature. Humans may be born free but to enjoy the fruits of civilization some of humanity’s worst excesses must be reined in. In order to enjoy freedom, humanity had to be leashed.

It was then left to liberal-minded philosophers such as John Locke and his followers to insert the contractual clause binding on both the people who have surrendered their freedom and liberty to the state and the state that has collected such freedom in order to be able to protect the people and safeguard their interest. Any breach of the contract on the part of the state could lead to revolt or revolution.

That is as good as the social contract is. A closer look will reveal that there are vast categories of humanity pointedly excluded from the social contract.  First by substituting “man” for the supreme gender category, the very idea of “womanity” is conceptually abolished. In other words, women are not part of the social contract and must struggle to become part of “mankind”. This was exactly what happened in Britain.

Second, in the way and manner it is conceived and theorised, social contract excludes people who have been economically enslaved and taken away from their native land and those who have been politically enslaved—a euphemism for colonization—and retained at home.  Consequently, social contract is a racially determined construct which is also caste compliant and gender insensitive. It fails to accommodate the enslaved, the colonised and the fairer sex.

But you cannot blame Locke and the Enlightenment philosophers. They theorized the world as they found it and as far as that world could reckon, the negroes, the American Indians and South American Latinos were hazy unrealized aliens and evolutionary by-passes from remote antiquity of humanity; sub-human species that cannot be accorded the status of human-being.

Locke’s extant writings on the Amerindians were quite revealing. Justifying the brutal expropriation of their land by their American conquerors, the British philosopher insisted that the red Indians had no claim to the ownership of the land on the ground that they had not done anything sensible with it. Nothing must stand in the way of the manifest destiny of western civilization.

From the foregoing, it should be obvious that social contract does not include the enslaved, the colonized, those brutally subjugated in their own land and the physically inferior gender. Despite the physical cessation of colonization, Africa merely exchanged one set of colonisers for another.

In Nigeria as well as the rest of postcolonial Africa, the absence of any contractual obligation between the ruled and the rulers is very disruptive of democratic possibilities.  This remarkable absence often manifests in despotic military rule, one-party states, civilian autocracies and democratic despotism which parades all the paraphernalia of pluralistic rule but which in reality is a military dictatorship.

Those who are condemning the violently abusive dismissals of the proponents of restructuring by the Nigerian presidency this past week must now understand where the presidential mind set is coming from. It is of an anti-democratic and anti-people provenance. The language is not only foul and intemperate it is also abusive of the spirit of the nation and the right to dissent.

Restructuring has now become the albatross of the administration.  Twice it found its way into the party’s manifesto. Twice the party has reneged on its own sacred promise. In genuine, people-powered democracies, the punishment would have been swift and exemplary. But with the possible exception of the old west nothing will happen.  Even at that, greater political and pragmatic considerations may override the thirst for ideological vengeance.

Beyond  instant gratification that does not last beyond election day, there is no social contract as we have seen. Second, there is no unified consciousness among the populace which makes for pan-national exertions. Finally, the post-colonial political class is itself a product of surrender, perfidy and mutual betrayal and cannot but act true to type.

The absence of any binding social contract has made it possible for Nigerians to suffer all kinds of indignities and infractions in the hands of military despots and civilian autocrats alike. In a country of almost two hundred million people, the June12, 1993 election decisively won by MKO Abiola was annulled by a handful of military officers. In vain the great Zik asked for the groundnorm that made this possible.  But that was the whole point.

A few more indignities may be on the way before something finally tips. In what nobody would have believed was possible in our lifetime, General Buhari has further desecrated the whole concept of social contract to mean caste contract, a development that has led to the most scandalous instances of nepotism and graft in the history of the nation.

So far, it has been a potent and sure fire formula for national evisceration. And it is working like hell. With so many armed critiques of the Leviathan going on in different theatres of the nation, it may not be long before the fat lady sings.

No nation that hopes to survive can avoid routine and periodic restructuring. To oppose restructuring is like saying that a particular structure can last forever without occasional re-examination and reconfiguration.  Unfortunately in Nigeria, restructuring has become a victim of a brutal power play.

Those who believe that the current structure confers some political advantage on them do not want to let go even if the roof caves in on them. On the other hand, those at the receiving end of the structural malfunctioning will not mind bringing the roof down. But one thing is sure those who oppose restructuring today will not be prevented from enjoying its perquisites tomorrow.

After all, there are generals who kept surreally quiet during the June 12 imbroglio and who have gone ahead to enjoy the largesse of the highest democratic office in the land, just as there are high-ranking officers who vowed to shoot Abiola who have since occupied some of the highest democratic offices in the land. It is a question of honour, but who cares about personal honour in a land full of political horrors? The Black person has some distance to cover.

Tatalo Alamu

Last Thursday as Nigerians celebrated the diamond jubilee of the nation, a sombre mood of quiet despair and dashed expectations was all pervasive. For a normally upbeat and uproarious people, this deeply felt spirit of despondency cannot be said to be in the Nigerian nature. But sixty years under the crushing hammer of a malignant deadbeat state, Nigerians must be forgiven for losing their sense of humour and joie de vivre.

Whether in its colonial incarnation or post-colonial actuality, the Lugardian torture-wrack bequeathed to Nigeria by its colonial masters has been a source of boundless miseries and endless national tragedies. In over a hundred years of existence, this nation often resembles a crude abattoir.   It has been a blood-splattered canvas; a killing frenzy that rivals a Homeric battlefield.

In Africa only two countries, Congo and Sudan, can be said to have suffered more than Nigeria. But there is suffering and there is suffering. There is quantitative suffering and there is qualitative suffering. These three African countries are distinguished by their humongous sizes. Perhaps in the post-colonial condition “big” is the password for big trouble.

Yet after the forcible partitioning of Sudan, South Sudan has not known any peace, having dissolved into a nasty multi-sectorial ethnic melee shortly after independence.  In the circumstance of complete institutional disorder, the nightmare of colonial cartography sometimes survives radical structural surgery.

In the light of the disaster it has wrought in Africa and particularly in Nigeria and the monumental tragedy it has engendered for the Black race, a strong case can be made for the swift termination of the colonial state-nation imposed on Nigeria by its imperialist conquerors in their bid to forcibly co-opt Africa into the orbit of western capitalism.

This is what forwarding-looking Nigerians mean by a structural reconfiguration of the terror state bequeathed to us by the colonialists if not its summary termination.  The colonial state-nation has had its heyday. It is a historic by-product of the structural logjam engendered as the western world transited from the epoch of empire to the paradigm of the modern nation-state.

Still seeing itself very much as an empire accessory and brute enforcer, this schizophrenic state needed to internally create imaginary rival empires to crush to in order to sustain its delusions. These hegemonic wars of self-assertion against rival structures in post-empire entities result in pre-emptive strikes against other sections of the nation, chaos and permanent bloodletting such as we witness in post-colonial Nigeria.

The most powerful intellectual and ideological critique of the empire-state was launched by the American founding fathers in a heroic bid to fashion a new type of nation away from the ashes of feudal Europe and the empire-state. Famously, George Washington declined the invitation to become a life president of the new nation on the grounds that his ancestors did not leave Europe to inaugurate a democratic monarchy in America.

This powerful critique at the level of ideas soon transmuted into an armed critique when an obdurate British Empire insisted on collecting tax from a people who had declared their independence and who had no representation whatsoever in the British parliament. Tax without representation has a modern equivalent in subjecting people to punitive tariffs without genuine democracy.

But a nation is a permanent work in progress which requires constant repairs and self-surveillance. Despite its heroic antecedents, it is a tragic pity to watch America mutate into a modern version of the belligerent and bellicose empire-state that its progenitors detested with all passion and which they had to take up arms against.

It was not as if Nigeria’s founding fathers did not suspect that something was not right with the terror toy bequeathed to them by the departing colonial masters. But they were like the proverbial visually challenged clutching at different parts of an elephant and each thinking he has discovered the real thing.

While Zik stressed the need for political resurgimento and economic determinism , an Awolowo insisted that this cannot be as long as Nigeria remains a mere geographical expression. In the case of Tafawa-Balewa and the Sardauna, they laid emphasis on the vast cultural and religious differences among the constitutive people which might militate against unity and core values.

The passage of time corrects errors of perception. It is now time for Nigerians to build on the initial insights of their founding fathers. First, we need to fashion out a new, integrative and wholly indigenous Nigerian constitution which recognizes diversity as a basis for unity and the unifying essence of a multi-ethnic nation. Second, we must find a way to humanize the current warder state which is an old empire instrument of pacification.

Nigeria has been badly served by elements from all sections of the country who have acted as an indigenous class of coolie collaborators against the true interests of their own people. Hence as Nigeria turns sixty, the National Question is taking on a dangerous hue: the gradual mutation of intellectual critiques to a vigorous armed critique of the state as evidenced by the mushrooming of ethnic determination groups and violent rogue separatist movements bent on taking down the Lugardian state.

This morning, we take an unusual look at the amalgamation not as a political tragedy but as a classic love story. Love and loving are human attributes transcending race, religion and creed.  Reading through the following may soften our heart towards Lord Lugard. He was human after all, and a gallant and chivalrous lover to the bargain.

Love in the tropics of malaria

There was something of the tropics about Fredrick John Dealtry Lugard. Despite his ice-cool exterior and glacial temperament, there was an underlying fire, a capacity for fury and vengefulness, which was quite tropical in nature. Lugard also had a capacity for torrid, equatorial passion in the amatorial sense which would be considered in the west as a sign of the emotional incontinence that Africans are particularly prone. Despite being a British warlord, Lugard was in every sense of the word Othello’s compatriot.

Fredrick was a child of the sultry tropics. He was born in the tropics, in Madras, India. He was the son of a British clergyman and his third wife. But he was raised in Britain and eventually enrolled at the Sandhurst Royal Military Academy.  After commissioning, he was posted to the East Norfolk Regiment and from there to the second battalion in India. The tropics had reclaimed its own. It was from the orient that Lugard was to contact the malaria that plagued him for the rest of his life and which became worse as Africa added its own vicious variety.

The fateful conjoining with the tropics and its colonial history was to alter the fundamental trajectory and course of Lugard’s life. But in retrospect, it did not affect his substantial destiny. This is the way fate sometimes plays poker with human destiny. In any case, there is malaria and there is malaria. There is also emotional malaria, which sends the afflicted to the pitch of fevered delirium.

In India, the young officer fell hopelessly and fecklessly in love with a married woman. It was the height of indiscretion. The ensuing furore was to destroy what was a promising military career. Normally high-strung, it was believed that it was at this point that Lugard suffered an emotional and nervous breakdown.

In a feat of self-obliteration partly to redress the shame of an aborted career and partly to satisfy his love of high-risk adventure on behalf of the crown, the future ruler of Nigeria journeyed to East Africa to join the battle against predominantly Arab slave raiders.

The year following his arrival in Africa, Lugard was severely wounded while leading a charge against the stockade of a slave raider very close to Lake Nyasa. For days, Lugard hovered between life and death. It was probably at that point that he experienced a radical epiphany. He found his life’s purpose. He was not going to be a regular British officer periodically called out to defend the interests of empire. But he was going to spend the rest of his life fighting for and securing the interests of the royal majesty in Africa and the Far East.

It was actually on his second tour of what was to become Nigeria that Lugard was named High Commissioner for the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria. Even by then, the Madras-born soldier had become something of a legend in colonial military history. In several campaigns, he had distinguished himself for exceptional valour and his fabled contempt for personal safety. Often hopelessly outnumbered by the swarming natives, Lugard’s military maxim seemed to have been never to spare a maxim or show mercy when you needed to be merciless.

The African campaigns—or punitive expeditions properly speaking—were marked by such savagery and brutality that they marked Lugard in turn for the rest of his life. Apart from having been severely wounded in Zanzibar, Lugard also had a poisoned arrow stuck on his forehead from northern Nigeria. Nobody is sure of how this impacted on Lugard’s mental and psychological state. But gone forever was the callow officer of the Indian Second Battalion, or the youthful inexperienced lover.

Margery Perhams’ description of Lugard is incredibly graphic and unforgettable: “Africa has marked him as her own: Tall, gaunt, angular, dark as a Spaniard, Lugard has the yellow skin, the hollowed cheeks, the sunken eyes, the indented temples which mark the man who has struggled for life with the fever-fiend”.

Perhams could as well have been describing a classic Byronic hero. There were also the dark Spanish looks and a hint of the ancient conquistador and his menacing machismo. But Lugard was not your typical garden variety Don Juan. Any hint of sensual frivolity had been savagely repressed, particularly after the Indian fiasco. Enveloped in a forbidding aura of testy reserve, Lugard never gave anything away.

Yet it was at this point in time that the invisible hand of fate summoned Lugard to what was perhaps his greatest campaign. Militarily and politically, he was already approaching the summit of his power and glory. But emotionally, he remained an Arctic tundra of frigid and frozen impulses. The conqueror of the lower and upper tribes of the Niger was ripe for conquest by love, by affection and by lifelong devotion and faithful collaboration. Romance beckoned…… in the tropics of fever.

Fiona Louise Shaw was born in 1852, six full years before Fredrick John Dealtry Lugard. She was the daughter of a British general of Irish extraction and a French mother.  She was as beautiful as she was proud, imperious, fiercely independent and intellectually self-assured. In the history of British journalism, she was the first woman to have reached its stratospheric summit.

Margery Perhams’ description of this Amazon of the pen is equally gripping: “She looks what she is, a woman to go anywhere and do anything; the woman to write three columns of good copy for a newspaper on the back of a portmanteau in a desert.” Fiona Shaw was an original in every sense of the word. Like her husband to be, she did not take hostages or suffer fools gladly.

They first met in 1893 when they were both approaching midlife.  Nothing came out of that encounter. But it was obvious that they shared a passion for the new British colonies of Africa, Nigeria in particular. It was Fiona Shaw who coined the new name for the British protectorates, although it can be argued that the name had been in private circulation among the Lagos coastal elite for some time. It is an irony of history that the same elite group would view the subsequent amalgamation of the protectorates with considerable dismay.

Fiona Shaw was at this time romantically involved with Sir George Goldie, the legendary helmsman of the Royal Niger Company. It was a doomed relationship. Goldie was a notorious womanizer and feckless rake. His brutal indiscretions led to Fiona’s emotional breakdown. It was at this point that Lugard stepped in like a shining knight in armour. Even then, Fiona Shaw turned him down and only accepted his proposal the second time.

They married in Madeira in 1902 while Lugard was on a leave of absence from the Northern protectorate.  Shaw fully supported Lugard’s proposals about the need for an amalgamation of the protectorates. The basic argument was that there was no need sending the surplus extracted from the South through taxation on liquor, railway and natural produce to Whitehall when the north remained virtually bankrupt.

The union seemed to have liberated Lugard’s political genius. This was Lugard at the summit of his political and administrative ingenuity: brilliantly gaming against Whitehall and frustrating its attempt to rein him in militarily; propping up belligerent subordinates like Abadie, the Colonial Resident of Zaria, against wiser and more restrained counsel from his more experienced lieutenants. An exasperated Whitehall mandarin actually whispered the word “coup” to describe Lugard’s adroit manoeuvres. The amalgamation was actually Nigeria’s first coup.

A vengeful Lugard was bent on putting the old north, particularly the emirate of Kano and the Sultanate, to sword: The emir of Kano for joyously welcoming the thuggish band that put Moloney to death in Keffi and the sultanate for the contumely of Sultan Abdu who had questioned his authority in a moment of frustration.

Military historians have suggested that the Emir of Kano was actually on his way to Sokoto with numerous supporters to commiserate with the new Sultan, Attahiru, over the death of his predecessor and to urge him to get the Fulani to flee en masse from the protectorate to escape the mighty wrath of the Raj. This strange movement provided Lugard with a casus belli. Lugard moved with swift and merciless precision. The Fulani hegemons were put to death. Men are killed not because horses are stolen, but so that horses will not be stolen. The sultanate had been pacified.

But nothing lasts for long in the tropics. Tropical fever set in. Fiona suffered an irreversible breakdown. She left never to come back, but remained in ceaseless correspondence with her beloved husband.

It is a curious irony that Lugard who was to singlehandedly establish the University of Hong Kong and who also championed the cause of the sophisticated Chinese islanders would be so riled by the sophisticated and western-educated elite of Lagos.  In correspondence with his wife, he noted of them:” I am not in sympathy with him. His loud and arrogant conceit are distasteful to me.”

The vengeful African tropics had left their indelible marks on the greatest colonial administrator of the last century. But when we deliberately hurt others, we also hurt ourselves.  Unlike the Chinese who had five thousand years of fairly stable history behind them and who did not have to adopt a new culture and language, early educated African elite came a long way overcoming the colonial mind-set about Africa and other entrenched prejudices. They could not but be loud, arrogant and conceited, unlike the self-assured Chinese who had nothing but sublime contempt for Western culture and civilization.

The pity of it all. Britain would have found a powerful ally in a powerful, prosperous, democratic and liberal-minded contemporary Nigeria. Equatorial distemper is no respecter of humanity. Lugard was human after all. Let good old Freddie now rest in peace while we get on with it.

The life and times of Henry Fajemirokun, 1926-1958

Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us – Eccl 44.1

Protocols. Let me begin by observing that the Fajemirokuns of Ifewara, Oke-Igbo, Ile-Oluji and now Lagos are a fascinating lot. Among them they boast of legendary farmers, great entrepreneurs, magnates, notable professors, bishops, clergy, eminent lawyers, Supreme Court jurists, a NAFDAC amazon, doctors, engineers, bank owners, game-changing health service providers, musicians and many in different walks of life. After four generations of settling and dispersing, they are now spread all over the country, particularly in the old western region.

Of this remarkable brood, none has been more remarkable and fascinating than Henry Oloyede Fajemirokun.  Former colonial soldier, outstanding trade unionist, fiery anti-colonial orator rousing the somnolent masses, business mogul and statesman, Henry loomed large in life packing into his fifty one years on earth what will take many men several incarnations to achieve. Colourful and flamboyant, his life reads like a colourful and flamboyant work of fiction.

It is just as well that this pioneering biography of a gifted and extraordinary Nigerian is coming out at this time which coincides with the diamond jubilee anniversary of the nation heralded by a sombre mood of failed expectations and disappointed hopes.

At sixty, Nigeria remains a giant toddler trundling about the floor unable to walk or even crawl; an antediluvian monstrosity. This writer said so twenty five years ago and the situation remains very much the same. It is a sad tribute to aborted nationhood.

Had this biography been delayed any longer, a great injustice would have been done to the memory of a great man. In order to cultivate a cult of heroism and to recuperate the lost essence of the nation, Nigerians need to know more about exceptional individuals like Henry Fajemirokun who clawed their way to the top by dint of hard work, patience and perseverance.  Genius indeed is five per-cent inspiration and ninety- five per-cent perspiration.

Henry Fajemirokun belonged to the body of distinguished men and women thrown up by the anti-colonial ferment and the decolonising project in Nigeria. These were people who had seen through the ruse of imperialism and the myth of an inferior Black race and were ready to push their way forward in the heady momentum, and as far as their luck and talents could take them.

Looking back one can say that Nigeria had never witnessed such an explosion of talents in different fields of human endeavours and from various segments of the new nation. It was as if this probing and heaving mass of Black avengers was bent on having a place to stand so that they could move the world.

They were not going to be fazed by anything or anybody. Many had seen white soldiers shake with fright as canons exploded or perish like helpless chickens in water-logged trenches. The world noticed that the Black person was on his way.  In the old western region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and his lieutenants took their fractured and war-weary Yoruba people from a semi-feudal  agrarian  community to the portals of western modernity.

In five brisk years of relentless transformation that shook the old Yoruba race to its foundation western region became a theatre of radical innovations in governance and economic development. As many observers have noted, if Nigeria had carried this momentum forward post-independence, only God knows where the country would have been today.

As a young man hungry for fame and self-actualization, Henry Fajemirokun made his way through the debris and post-empire commotion of the old Yoruba world with considerable sure-footedness and aplomb.

Henry Oloyede Fajemirokun was born on July 14, 1926 at Odololo Quarters, Ile-Oluji. His parents were Daniel Famakinwa Fajemirokun and Madam Felecia Adebunmi Fajemirokun.  History has it that the founding progenitor of the Fajemirokun clan was Balagbe Fajemirokun,a famed warrior and generalissimo, who was forced to leave Ado Ekiti after a bitter succession struggle for the vacant Ewi stool.  Balagbe first settled at Ifewara but the series of Yoruba intra-ethnic wars of the nineteenth century took him to other parts of Yoruba land, particularly around the Ife perimeter.

After the wars, the founding father settled in Oke-Igbo where he established the largest farm in the community. He was also known to have acquired several wives and fathered many children. But duty beckoned in Ifewara where he was named to the high chieftaincy title of Orunto which is like the traditional prime minister and second in command to the Oba.

However the great warrior, now hobbled by old age, could only serve for two years before death came calling in 1904. His death led to a great dispersal of his family. One of Balagbe’s wives, Princess Ademola whose father was Ooni Degun Ologbenla, fled to her maternal homestead of Ile-Oluji with her three children rather than accept the marriage proposal of one of his sons, Akingbola.

It was in Ile-Oluji that Princess Ademola brought up her three children, namely Daniel Famakinwa Fajemirokun, Oladipo Olaegbe (later Dr Olarerin) and Wuraola Fajemirokun (later Mrs Olasanmiju). It can be seen from this brief genealogy that the Fajemirokuns of the Daniel Famakinwa branch are directly related to three great Yoruba royal stools: Ewi of Ado-Ekiti, Ooni of Ife and Jegun of Ile-Oluji.

This constant movement and endless shuttling so typical and reflective of a society in a state of revolutionary flux was a standard fare of the Yoruba people in the nineteenth century, particularly after the collapse of the old Oyo Empire. It was to lead to cross-over personalities, fascinating cultural hybrids, alien indigenes and a fluidity of identity which dissolved all sub-ethnic stereotypes.

When Henry Fajemirokun eventually answered the call of his maker, it was to lead to a battle royale over his final resting place with Oke-Igbo and Ifewara tussling with Ile-Oluji. Ile-Oluji eventually won the bet after a powerful intervention based on logic and cold reality by his oldest child, Chief Oladele Fajemirokun.

It was in Ile-Oluji that Daniel Famakinwa blossomed as a farmer and pioneer carpenter.  It was in this town that his son, Henry Oloyede, was enrolled at St Peter’s Primary School in 1932 at the age of six.  After spending five years in this school, the young Henry was transferred to St Luke’s Primary School in Oke-Igbo in order not to lose sight of his distinguished ancestry.

It was after leaving primary school at Oke-Igbo that Henry Oloyede began to demonstrate the fierce independence of spirit, fearlessness and love of adventure that were to be the hallmark of his personality in his later years. He had journeyed to Lagos all on his own and got himself enrolled as a student of the highly competitive CMS Grammar School, Nigeria’s first secondary school in 1941.

This was no mean achievement, considering the stiff competition. Henry’s determination and congenital inability to take no for an answer had begun to manifest. But the financial burden of staying in Lagos added to the sheer logistics of a person from a humble rural background trying to get himself educated in the city proved a bridge too far even for a man of Henry’s daring and assertive self-confidence.

The young man was forced to eat the humble pie by seeking a transfer to the equally prestigious Ondo Boys High School. With his homestead of Ile-Oluji only a stone’s throw away, all his parents had to worry about was how to pay his school fees and some money for unforeseen expenses since feeding was virtually guaranteed.

It was here that fate played a nasty and cruel joke on the young lad in the guise of an incident which would have been as traumatic as it was character-defining for a youngster filled with immense hope and expectations of a great future.

In his bid to escape the poverty trap and bring some relief to his hard-pressed parents, the young man had written a plaintive personal letter to the then Anglican Bishop of Lagos, Rt Reverend L.G Vining, painting a picture of squalor and excruciating poverty.

He had averred in the letter that his father was already dead and that his mother could barely afford three square meals a day not to talk of funding a secondary school education. He beseeched the man of God to grant him the same facility of scholarship normally extended to indigent students.

This daring gambit backfired spectacularly and was to bring to a shuddering halt Henry Fajemirokun’s quest for formal secondary school education. Unknown to him, the bishop had forwarded the letter to Rev J.F Akinrele, the principal of Ondo Boys High School asking him to conduct a background check on the chap before he could reach a decision on the request.

It was an irate and affronted principal who summoned the boy before all the students at the Assembly Hall having discovered that his father was not only hale and hearty but was thriving as a master-carpenter in Ile-Oluji.

Not only that, his mother was fully engaged as a petty trader. In keeping with the motto of the school which placed premium on righteousness and its exalting power, Akinrele was determined to make an example of the rustic culprit in order to stamp out such repulsive behaviour in his school. (page 35)

With theatrical flourish, the man of God poured invectives and vituperations on the young lad, calling him a liar and an importunate beggar. By his conduct and misdemeanour, the lad had shown himself to be unworthy of the school’s uniform. Without wasting any further time, the principal proceeded to slam a week’s suspension with ignominy on the young Henry vowing to send a report of his findings to the bishop in Lagos.

There should be no doubt that the young Henry would have found this disgrace so traumatic and the indignity so deflating for a proud young man that he concluded it was not worth his while coming back to the school at the end of his suspension. He decided there and then to join the colonial Army, handing his portmanteau to his best friend and asking him not to reveal his whereabouts to anybody, including his parents.

As the author of this book rightly surmised, the young Henry, by limiting his choice to the military rather than all the numerous and less life-threatening alternatives, could have been obeying the warrior genes flowing in him. The family’s cognomen of odidemade apa bi eleta which dates back to the founding generalissimo attests to this natural instinct for the jugular.

This warrior mantra was to stand Henry Fajemirokun in good stead in all the battles he was later to fight to emerge as one of the greatest industrialists ever thrown up by the country. Just as the Japanese were to adapt and domesticate the Samurai code for the rapid modernization and industrialisation of their beloved nation, Henry Fajemirokun was to emerge from the ashes of defeat and despondency to become a Nigerian equivalent of the Samurai-mogul.

One juicy piece of information that is not in this book is the fact that after he vanished without trace, the future tycoon was given up for dead by his parents. Fortuitously, it was an older brother who had also enrolled in the colonial Army after him who was to discover that the fellow was not only alive but in fine fettle in India on her majesty’s service.

Years later upon demobilization and decommissioning from the colonial Army, it was a proud and erect Henry Fajemirokun in uniform and with the unmistakable military gait that was to last him a lifetime who browbeat his way to the office of a rather nonplussed Bishop Vining  in Lagos. Henry told the clergyman about how their last encounter had led him to join the colonial army.

Bishop Vining was so impressed and bowled over by the young man’s steely resolve and fierce independence of spirit that he must have decided to make amends for past infractions. It was on the strength of his recommendation that Henry was able to secure a job as an Accounts clerk in the Posts and Telegraphs Department in January 1947.

After this lucky break, there was really no stopping the Henry juggernaut. Aware of his educational deficiency, he was to secure what he missed at Ondo Boys through private tutorship under the tutelage of a visionary Okeigbo indigene, Chief Olowu.  Combining hard work with hard swotting, Henry in 1948 passed the Cambridge School Certificate Examination in flying colours.

Henry Fajemirokun thereafter plunged into union activities as a labour activist. His abiding concern for the plight of the poor and workers’ welfare came to the fore. This identification with the poor and struggling mass of humanity was to become a recurring decimal in his life. With his commanding presence, effortless mastery of the spoken English language and fiery oratory, the world began to notice the grandson of the great warrior of Ifewara.

Later in life and having become a leading business magnate in his own right, his first son was to wistfully remark that no siblings or scions could match Henry Oloyede’s flair in this department of human endeavour. By 1956, Henry Fajemirokun had been elected as the Vice President of the Nigerian Civil Service Union.

A year later, he was to crown this with his ascendancy into office as the President General of the Nigeria Civil Service Union. Not unexpectedly, his frenetic activism and fierce integrity came to the attention of the federal authorities as well as Chief Awolowo and the leading intellectual luminaries of the old Western region. In 1957, he was appointed a board member of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria and in 1959, Chief Awolowo appointed him to serve as a member of the Salaries Review Commission.

Chief Henry Fajemirokun was to leverage his antecedents as a labour leader when he made the heady transition to a business magnate of plutocratic wealth. His abiding concern for the poor and downtrodden never left him. He was a genuine man of the people and lover of humanity. Despite his flamboyant life style, he had nothing but contempt for the affluent that chose to ignore the plight of their community. Typically, he was leading a Nigerian business delegation to Ivory Coast when he fell on the night of February 15, 1978.

Reading through this biography, one is overpowered by sadness and a sense of loss about what could have been.  Had he lived longer, Chief Henry fajemirokun could easily have transformed into Nigeria’s first authentic socialist billionaire, a development which could have shaped the template and complexion of politics in post-military Nigeria.

He had the pedigree, the conviction, the elemental force of personality and character and above all the generosity of spirit to influence the course of events in his beloved country. We are all the poorer for his tragic early exit. The moving posthumous tributes from no less a personage like Obafemi Awolowo and the rousing encomium by his friend Professor Samuel Adebimpe Aluko attest to this fact.

But he has played his part and left at the allotted hour. Future generations will look back and say that a man was truly here. May his great soul rest in peace.

By Tatalo Alamu

These are precarious times in Nigeria. Two weeks to the diamond jubilee celebration of independence, Nigeria has never appeared more vulnerable to centrifugal forces, or more prone to the dangers of disintegration.  The dissolution lobby is gathering force and gaining more recruits every minute even from the ranks of former die-hard nationalists and Nigerian patriots. But it is turning out that self-determination also has its grave contradictions.

For a nation which held out remarkable promise as the Mecca of Black people and the repository of hope for the most injured and abjured human race since the beginning of history, this is a terrible tragedy. But even if dissolution becomes inevitable, it is better to step back to see what lies beyond the abyss.

For those adept at reading rustling tea leaves, something significant is afoot on the Nigerian political chessboard. Like vultures adept at sniffing something other than burning grass in a smouldering savannah forest, Nigeria’s power blocs are on the move again.

As usual in these matters, there are pawns who think they know what they are doing when in reality they don’t .And there are powerbrokers who say one thing in public while working for a totally different outcome in private.

The past fortnight has not been particularly kind to the Nigerian authorities. The odour of death is regnant everywhere, what with unremitting clashes among ethnic groups, ritual killing, savage reprisals, banditry and the odd extra-judicial state execution. With the near universal outrage over the punitive hike in tariffs, the government appeared to have its back to the wall.

Enter our four-star general who is always lurking with implacable intent. A man with the legendary memory of an elephant, nothing escapes the Owu-born general, not even the slightest infraction. Obasanjo settles scores with the unhurried single-mindedness of his ethnic compatriots who conduct age-long hostilities with all flair and funfair.

A past master of political delegitimization and psychological intimidation, Nigeria’s former military ruler and two-term civilian president delivers his famous sucker punches when his opponents are at the weakest point, often walking majestically away in devilish relish. Occasionally, he pounces without warning while the adversary suffers a lapse of concentration as a result of clumsy entanglements or when they have been brought low in a nasty melee.

Biting your opponent is part of the armoury of fighting. This time around, Obasanjo has chosen the innocuous occasion of an equally innocuous interactive session among some major regional groups to deliver a devastating attack on the government at a time when the Buhari administration was having serious problems over its economic policies and its perceived indifference to the plight of the nation.

This is the second time Obasanjo has succeeded in putting the Buhari administration in acute discomfort. Earlier, he had hit the government with the rather inflammatory charge of pursuing a policy of Islamization and Fulanization of the nation. For telling effects, Obasanjo had chosen the neutral grounds of a church premises to detonate his atomic bomb.

This time around the old hell-raiser has charged the Buhari government with bringing a badly divided nation to the brink of state failure and national disintegration.  Not unexpectedly, the reaction of the government and its official mouth organs has been as dismissive as it is vitriolic when not downright rude. They upbraided Obasanjo as a spiteful old man filled with envy and resentment at the success of his former military subordinate.

This inflammatory and hysterical rhetoric is hardly helpful. Because of their ill-mannered tone, they shore up sympathies for Obasanjo even in some quarters that are not normally Obasanjo-friendly and they tend to open up the very ethnic fissures that Obasanjo is pointing at. The inability to separate message from messenger and treat the former with dispassionate objectivity has again compromised the integrity of the disclaimer.

As readers will attest, this column has never spared Obasanjo for his political transgressions. But as the Nigerian commander who took the Biafran surrender, former military ruler and two-term civilian president, Obasanjo deserves some respect and deferential treatment, no matter the provocation. The irony of it all is that in some other incarnation this column had warned the former president about the dangers of foisting a culture of rudeness and incivility on the nation way back in 2004.

But this is not about whether you personally like and admire the retired general or not. You must give something to the Otta farmer. Of all Nigeria’s former heads of state, both civilian and military, Obasanjo has been eerily and unerringly correct  in reading the mood of the nation and in accurately gauging the political barometer.

He can sense when the ship of state has reached uncharted waters or when it approaches an iceberg. His motives may not always be altruistic or politically ethical, but there can be no doubting the political courage he brings to bear on this and the passionate concern for the plight of the nation.

It is noteworthy that early support for Obasanjo came from most unexpected quarters and the other end of the ideological spectrum.  In a sharp intervention dripping with anger and indignation, Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, while maintaining that he was neither a friend nor a fan, not only endorsed Obasanjo’s position about the fissiparous forces that have virtually overwhelmed the nation but took time to take Obasanjo’s traducers to the cleaners.

This is a prime example of how incompetence and bigoted politics can bring mutual opponents together in a broader coalition of expanded interests. By the end of the week, there were more surprises in the political kitty. While the government was reeling from the combined assault of the two titans, some more ominous development was taking place outside the shores of the nation.

Last week, a number of Yoruba self-determination groups based in London took to the streets calling for an immediate declaration of an Oduduwa Republic. They came with a logo, a map, an anthem, cultural totems and a staff of the new republic amidst much dancing and pulsating drumming. They came to consign Nigeria to the trashcan of history.

What was whispered and put about in carefully coded intellectual riddles was now blown into the open. If one were to be unkind and uncharitable one could conclude that once again, the Yoruba political mob has taken over as it has always threatened in moments of acute stress and tension once the elite and leadership show signs of weakness, vacillation and indecision.

It happened during the Wetie crisis, the Agbekoya imbroglio, the June 12 palaver, the OPC uprising and in the last days of the Jonathan administration when it attempted to frighten off  the dominant political tendency in Yoruba land with an awesome display of thuggery and sheer political brinkmanship.

But the London rally for swift political autonomy for the Yoruba people cannot be dismissed as mob action. It is a new phenomenon which has to be factored into analysis and subsequent plan of action; a reflection of the growing impatience of the Yoruba Diaspora with the stalemate and stasis at home.

The Yoruba are not natural secessionists. The fact that a sizeable proportion of the Yoruba political elite are beginning to harbour the thought and entertain the possibility openly should be of concern to those who think they can delay any further the immediate structural reconfiguration of Nigeria. In all its trials and tribulations in modern Nigeria, the Yoruba dominant consciousness has never contemplated secession.

The Yoruba have endured the murder and maiming of their most illustrious children; the imprisonment, harassment, exiling, torture and summary political liquidation of their star products without ever contemplating leaving Nigeria. As empire builder themselves and great statists, it has been burnt into their genes that it takes great patience, discipline and forbearance to get nations going.

It is only those who have never built an empire and those who find it easy to destroy other people’s empire without being able to put anything tangible or memorable in its place that find it easy to walk away from a nation-project. Yet the ruthless truth is that a lack of emotional, intellectual and psychical investment makes divestment and severance easier when the nation-project becomes a burden on humanity and a fascist terror machine.

It is this emotional and intellectual investment in a failing project which has consumed much capital that is the background to the existential and ontological dilemma of the Yoruba elite in contemporary Nigeria. In a profound irony, the dilemma also explains why the intervention of General Alani Akinrinade, the third leg of the Yoruba heroic triad, is particularly illustrative and point-device.

While Obasanjo is a gruff old soldier-statesman who does not take hostages and Soyinka a grand literary tiger who does not suffer fools gladly, Akinrinade is the soldiers’ soldier, an officers’ officer and the classic example of a Yoruba patriot and Nigerian nationalist. Essentially, the Yakoyo-born retired general remains a professional soldier without any palate for partisan controversies.

Four weeks ago, yours sincerely watched his visage glower in immense personal satisfaction while the general played host at his country home to a new generation of top military officers. It was at the final funeral outing of his stepmother and mother of Rear Admiral Akinjide Akinrinade.  It was obvious that the military was, and still is, his principal constituency.

But it doesn’t mean that the military kingpin does not know his political onions. Anybody confusing the outward civility of Akinrinade with an innate weakness of character will find himself up against native toughness camouflaged as placidity. It was this toughness that saw him through the gruelling, thirty-month civil war from which he emerged a national hero widely lionized for his bravery and outstanding brilliance as a military strategist.

In post-military Nigeria even the most astute military general can be blindsided by the ever shifting tempo of self-determination and its contradictions.  General Akinrinade has himself drawn the flak from younger Yoruba agitators who find his caution and tact on the matter not very appealing or appetizing for that matter.

In private Akinrinade has been particularly irked by this development which he believes to be informed by a certain political obtuseness and lack of maturity. Loquacity has its limits until real bullets start flying. Balkanization does not come easily to people of professional military background.  Having fought with troops and without troops, Akinrinade is not about to be railroaded into a third campaign in old age by ethnic zealots.

This is what makes his intervention particularly intriguing. Like an astute general, he has chosen the occasion and location very well indeed.  Typically and in a gambit that makes logic and symbolism to mesh seamlessly, Akinrinade chose the occasion of a bridge-building in an ancient community in his native Osun state by army engineers to act as a ventilator of public grievances.

He was neither bitter in tone nor caustic in tenor. Having praised the military for this exemplary display of patriotism and civic responsibility, the former chief of army staff went ahead to unburden his heart and reiterate the charges of bigotry, religious fundamentalism, ethnic one-upmanship and arrant nepotism often laid at the doorsteps of President Mohammadu Buhari.

Without being patronising or hurtful, Akinrinade urged his former subordinate to shape up and accept the fact that rather than balkanize the country as some people allege, “restructuring is what is required to move our country out of the doldrums into modernity”.

What should interest close observers of these remarkable interventions by three illustrious Yoruba sons is the elective affinity and complementarity of their thinking despite the well-known differences of personality and perspective among them. Not for once did any of them advocate for secession or a precipitate dissolution of the country.

Akinrinade would not even hear of the word. While aggressively probing the soft underbelly of the Buhari administration, Obasanjo canvassed for a structural reorganization based on “mutuality and reciprocity”. Soyinka laments the fact that Nigeria has become “a suppurating slaughterhouse “and urged that the “militarized centralized contraption” should be discarded with.

Secession and balkanization are lazy and uncreative catchwords that have had their time and have never sat well with the Yoruba psyche for reasons earlier adduced. We can be more original and creative in our thinking.

The current universal crisis of the nation-state affords Nigerians an opportunity to come up with original and creative ideas about how to surmount or creatively bypass the affliction in multi-ethnic and multi-religious conglomerations.  This is going to be the true test of the Black person’s liberation from colonial intellectual slavery.

Tatalo Alamu

Political incontinence and foul distemper has taken over the land. Okon has been adding fillips to the disorder in his own unique ways. When he is not running abusive commentaries about the political elite, he is busy excoriating the major ethnic groups for bringing Nigeria into disrepute.

One sultry afternoon, Okon stormed out of the house after a heated exchange with Mama Igosun vowing to form his own party. He had asked the tough matriarch which party she would vote for in the coming election.

“Mabolaje Grand Alliance”, the old woman replied with a frown.

“Mafoluku abi wetin you call am?  Which kind Yoruba secret society be dat one again? Abi na fuku dis mama think dem dey chop for party?”, Okon snorted.

“Na your papa dey Mafoluku. Na dem party of dem Adelabu, dem Akinbiyi and dem Akinloye. Abi no be dem Gbomogbomo (kidnappers) party your kobokobo people dey do for Ikot Olosi?” Mama snarled, eyeing the mad boy with angry disdain.

“Chei! Dem dead Yoruba troublemakers again! Nigeria don kaput.” Okon lamented bitterly.

“Wo tinba la orogun yi mo e lori waagba”, Mama cursed and charged at the mad boy.

You can then imagine snooper’s consternation when the half-crazed dustbin woman charged breathlessly into the sitting room to announce that Okon was on television fielding questions. And lo there was the crazy one dressed like a resource control chieftain running rings round everybody.

“Etubom Okon, thanks for coming again. It takes a lot of courage. It…” the adorable lady interviewer opened.

“See me see trouble ooo. I never come once and you don dey say again. Let me tell una, dis yeye thin no dey take courage at all”, Okon retorted with devilish hoopla. The poor girl squirmed in embarrassment. At this point, Baba Lekki staggered in thoroughly drenched with incontinence reeking of cheap illicit gin and shivering like a rain-beaten chicken. Okon took a scornful look at the human fiasco and burst into deranged laughter.

“You see, make una throway salute for baba oo. Him dey come from Ikorodu Island. Him come reach Majidun by boat and him come swim the rest,” the mad boy crowed.

“May we know you sir?” the other lady asked Baba Lekki.

“I am Lambert Adesokan, the Elegiri of Alekuso, Inter-LLB”, Baba replied promptly.

“Sir as they say, let charity begin at home..” the first lady began.

“Ah dem Ibo girl again! Dem Charity be dem Ibo girl wey im papa dey wire. When dem ask Ibo man why him dey wire him own daughter him come reply say Charity must to begin at home”, Okon sneered.  The interviewers ignored the mad boy.

“Sir, what is the name of your party?” one of them asked baba.

“CAN. Comedian Association of Nigeria.” Baba replied.

“What is your motto?”

“Toyota Landcruiser!”, Okon jumped in again and was ignored.

“And where is your party manifesto?” one of the lady’s asked sniffily and prettily.

“Nonsense. I don’t do bourgeois chicanery. A people’s party needs no manifesto. The educators need to be properly educated”, Baba Lekki spat in perfect English.

At this point, the station succumbed to a massive power cut.

• (First published in 2010)

Tatalo Alamu

This is not an Aesopian fable.  May God bless the soul of Aesop, former Greek slave, great philosopher and moral genius. But because human beings are the same everywhere, certain ancient morality tales often take on a universal resonance.

Among the Yoruba, esusu describes a traditional African system of economic cooperation, an informal banking network in which individuals contribute in order to harvest substantial loans for investment in some capital project which would have proved impossible without a massive injection of capital.

The beauty of it all is that it goes round seamlessly without any defaulter or weak link. But once upon a time, an ancient community decided to involve the ruling monarch and the crown prince in the esusu system. Naturally, the king took the first slot followed by the crown prince. Thereafter, the esusu collector maintained a stony silence.

All pleas to him to rotate the collection met with glum nods and heavy grunts. The affronted villagers then decided to take the matter before the village sage who expressed disbelief at their naivety:

“You should never have involved the king in this commoners’ business”, the ancient magus began. “You want to desecrate the crown by making his royal majesty to eat in public? You see in any esusu system involving royalty, “once the king takes and the crown prince takes then esusu is finished”.

Can any ancient philosopher out there tell us the true import of this? When we put the question to an old colleague, an implacable Marxist dialectician who had taken a vow of silence in opposition to developments in the country, he was as withering as he was dismissive: “What the old guy is telling you funny jokers is that you cannot mix modes of production. The king is a product of old feudalism. What those esusu fellows were doing is rudimentary capitalism. You cannot put people with the mind set of feudal predators in charge of a modernizing economy, period.”a