The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Baba Lekki fields questions at Okon’s investiture

    Baba Lekki fields questions at Okon’s investiture

    By Tatalo Alamu

    Ts  we  were  crawling into bed, the full investiture of Okon Anthony Okon as the Babajiro of Yanmuyanmu took place at a colourful ceremony at Orile Yanmuyanmu on the ancient route to the old capital of Oyo Empire.

    Dressed in traditional regalia and adorned with the ancient Akoko  leaf, the impossible boy was quite a sight to behold. An elated and tipsy Okon took a look at snooper and yelled: “Oga, se you sabi say I don become your oga now?”

    An embarrassed and crestfallen snooper quickly disappeared into the crowd before the mad boy could compel his master to pay him traditional homage. God forbid this desecration and abomination. Rather than prostrating for Okon, snooper would be willing to join his ancestors. If this was what things have turned into, the country has truly gone to the dogs.

    As snooper was ruminating in humiliation, Okon suddenly mounted the rostrum to give his acceptance speech. After thanking his childhood crony, the Oniyanmu for the honour, Okon suddenly launched into a tirade against leading traditional rulers in the country for selling their souls for a mess of pottage.  Their palaces, the mad boy thundered, will be converted to museums of atrocity for future generations to behold.

    By this time, the inevitable Baba Lekki had miraculously surfaced by Okon’s side, heckling the hecklers and cheering Okon on in his social abomination. He was impressive in his native Kembe and traditional Abetiaja cap. As the stale palm wine and prohibited weeds burgled his brains, he became more and more offensive and abusive of authority.  The crazy old man began singing in drunken revelry.

    A moye yi je

    Iwonna, iwonpapa  iwonna

    A moye yi je

    Iwonna iwonpapa iwonna

    At this point, two heedless and feckless reporters from a local newspaper approached the old man.

    “How do you see today’s investiture sir?” they asked him.

    “I don’t see nothing. This is bourgeois jiggery-pokery laced with feudal phantasmagoria”, the old man shot back in perfect English.

    “What?” the two chaps exclaimed almost at the same time. Thinking that they had a perfect copy, they quickly turned the argument into politics.

    “Sir, the senate has just announced a ten per-cent cut in salary”, one of them noted warily.

    “I see. What is their cut? “ the old man shot back again.

    “I said ten per-cent sir”, noted the reporter.

    “No, no, no!  It doesn’t work like that. Mr Reporter, you are a fool. The question is how much cut the crooks took before agreeing to a cut in salary. They must put all the figures on the table, otherwise they are just using Abu’s money to entertain Abu”, the old man snarled with much vitriol as he began to crawl away. “By the way, I don’t want to see myself in your bourgeois rag sheet, you hear?” he screamed at the boys.

     

    (First published in  May, 2009.}

     

     

  • Panic-stealing among Nigeria’s post-colonial elites

    Panic-stealing among Nigeria’s post-colonial elites

    **Okon fulminates as Mama Igosun fumigates

    Tatalo Alamu

     

    THIRTY five years after the late Dele Giwa lamented that Nigerians have been shocked into a state of “unshockability”, we must now wonder whether the limits we thought were the limits then were really the limits. Nobody ever imagined that what we are witnessing was possible in the history of modern Nigeria. The shock absorbers have finally come off the vehicle. It is surely going to be a noisy and bumpy ride to wherever.

    But as scary as this may appear, it should be the least of our problems. Neither is the fact that even the authorities appear to be so enfeebled and disoriented by the monumental mess that registering a minimal protest at the utter devastation of our post-independence of hopes is too much of a concession.

    Never in the history of this country has so much in your face stealing and looting of state resources meant for the amelioration of the piteous condition of the populace accompanied by such impudence, such impunity and such psychotic grandstanding.

    If anybody had thought that because of the history of suffering and degradation of the landscape the Niger Delta elite segment would be different from the national elite group of which it is a mere sub-national formation, it is now obvious that such a person has been living in a fools’ paradise. No straight furniture can be procured from crooked timber.

    Despite all the noise, the huffing and puffing in the creeks and the armed critique of the Nigerian post-colonial state, it is now clear that the Niger Delta sub-elite formation takes its character, inspiration and ideological outlook from the national elite formation. Nigeria is hostage to different elite groups sworn to extractive predation who merely resent the hegemonic group that has captured power at the centre through superior wiles.

    Consequently, the Nigeria political and economic jungle plays host to a posse of predatory elite hunting squads bent on imposing a radical kleptocracy on the nation with the attendant rubbishing of all institutions standing in the way. This relentless onslaught on all institutions of the modern nation-state is the surest route to modern savagery and a stark regression to the Stone Age of human infancy.

    Unlike panic buying which can occur in even the most advanced societies as a result of actual or imagined scarcity, panic stealing is attributable to congenital greed arising from a primitive psychosis which is a throwback to the hunter-gatherer stage of human existence where nothing could be taken for granted and where the next meal could not be guaranteed. In the ensuing free for all stealing, anything and anybody is “game” in all the senses of the word.

    The primitive hunter-gatherer of human antiquity was a victim of himself and of historical circumstances. Existing in the liminal zone between animal barbarity and the advent of true human civilization, his only notable achievement at that point in history was that he had exterminated rival hominids in competition with him for scarce resources while he had managed to subdue the bigger animals with his superior brains.

    But hunting down animals and defending himself with his primitive tools even as he relied on the bounties of nature which sometimes played the spoiling mother, the urge to return to the pure state of nature often proved irresistible. At least by so doing, he could free himself from all attempts to rein him in and force him to comply with evolving human institutions.

    That we have to reach back to antiquity and the childhood of humankind to find a comparison with the tragedy of anomic free fall that is unfolding in Nigeria is an indication of just how dire the situation has become. As we have seen with many modern nations that fell by the wayside, the utter destruction of a nation is normally preceded by the destruction of extant state institutions built with blood, sweat and tears.

    It is profoundly ironic that a nation containing many nationalities that had created famous empires, notable kingdoms and remarkable traditional institutions on their way to a version of modernity should find themselves in the middle passage of a journey back to the Hobbesian state of nature.  It is a consuming tragedy for Nigeria and the entire Black populace.

    But it did not start yesterday. It has been a long haul. In order to get a sense of where we are and how we arrived at this dire strait, it is necessary to go back and pull out some memorable milestones and benchmarks on the journey to perdition.

    It is almost fifty five years since that memorable morning when Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu famously proclaimed that Nigeria’s principal enemies were the ten-percenters: corrupt politicians who creamed off ten per-cent of every contract awarded. The irate major, burning with patriotic but misguided indignation,  went on to add with chilling resolve that he and his colleagues were ready to waste one percentage of Nigeria’s population in order to instil the fear of the Lord in the populace.

    He could have been talking to himself. Exactly seventeen years after in the aftermath of a popular military coup that ousted the corrupt and profligate regime of Alhaji Shehu Aliyu Shagari, a London-based Nigerian magazine proclaimed in loud banners: The End of a Lootocracy. It was a summary decapitation of the misbegotten legacy of the NPN and its band of looters.

    The irony of it all was that the coup was led by the current head of state, the then Major General Mohammadu Buhari who was to be ousted by his military colleagues a year and several months later. So despondent and desolate had Nigerians become that the military had to reassure the populace that they would make sure that Nigerians were proud of their country once again.

    But ten years later the military had exhausted its historic and political possibilities.  After mismanaging the economy and its own advertised transition to democracy programme in what would be described as the greatest exercise in political chicanery ever visited on a people, the military were at that point in time regarded as the greatest obstacle to the economic development and political emancipation of the nation.

    In what was described as an apt epitaph to misbegotten military messianism, a retiring Chief of Army staff, General Ibrahim Salihu, widely regarded as one of the finest products of the Nigerian Army ever, publicly dismissed the military as “an army of anything goes”. It was perhaps one of the most damning indictments ever slammed on an institution by one of its outstanding officers.

    Twenty one year into post-military rule and fifty five years after Nzeogwu’s famous excoriation, Nigeria is in virtual institutional ruins, overtaken by the worst kind of state larceny imaginable and panic-stealing everywhere. In retrospect and in contrast, the First Republic of the frugal and parsimonious Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa, the fiscally prudent Obafemi Awolowo and the royally Spartan Ahmadu Bello seems like a faraway dreamland, a mesmerizing paradise.

    The sordid revelations of the past fortnight are an eye-opener to how far we have travelled and how low we have sunken. No arm or faction of the ruling class has been exempt from the corrosive rot, not even the so called professoriate. It is said that the intellectual class is just a subordinated faction of the dominant faction.

    Of the three professors that have held sway so far in NDDC and its OMPADEC predecessor, one has permanently absconded from justice hiding away in the creeks, another has only recently been disgraced and disrobed while the third has just fainted in full public glare. It doesn’t get more professorial than that.

    In sixty years of post-independence existence, we have rubbished all the vital institutions, all the pillars of state integrity and all the principles of political and economic praxis that would have stood the nation in good stead in its march to authentic and organic nationhood. Now the nation is naked against the onslaught of hostile modernity.

    To take only two examples, just think of all the vibrant banks that have been burgled out of existence as a result of panic stealing by Nigeria’s post-colonial elite in the sixty years after independence: Bank of the North, Africa Continental Bank, National Bank, Savannah Bank, Oceanic Bank, Intercontinental Bank etc. Even the People’s Bank was eventually destroyed by “people”. Rodents had not started swallowing money.

    All the durable organs of the state have been decimated in an attempt by factions of the elite to secure the High Table at the state banquet of engorgement: the military, the judiciary, the legislature, the traditional institution and the bureaucracy. This is not discounting the fate of numerous Nigerian heroes and avatars from all parts of the nation and all walks of life whose careers and life have been destroyed in the epic struggle against the rise of modern savagery.

    In a moment of clairvoyant lucidity, General Ibrahim Babangida once wondered aloud why the Nigerian economy has managed to survive despite the damnedest efforts of the political elite. The same cry of wonderment should now be extended to Nigeria as a nation. It is a miracle that Nigeria is still limping on, like a shell-shocked survivor of the worst human atrocities imaginable.

    But this legendary luck cannot continue forever. Events of the past fortnight suggest a nation that is at the end of its historic tether. Many have ascribed the permanent rush on the treasury and the rise of panic stealing among Nigeria’s post-colonial elite to a declining loss of faith in the continuous viability of the nation as a single entity.

    It is said by many who should know that the hegemonic faction of the ruling class, aware of its many infractions against the spirit of the nation, its serial injustice against the constituting nationalities and above all its murderous rapacity, has been stocking up against that inevitable day of judgement.

    So are many factions of the dominated classes who are trying their best to bring the nation speedily to heel rather than prolonging its miseries. The outlandish scale of theft and the sheer mindless heist that have taken place in the NDDC is said to be part of this strategy of saving and face saving for the anointed hour of dismemberment. The whole sordid theatre is encapsulated in the Yoruba saying that what the bird eats is what the bird takes off with.

    There are many others who have traced the nation’s fundamental problem and the phenomenon of panic stealing to the toxic pathologies released by the reality of being unequally yoked together, a situation in which nationalities at different stages of human development are boxed into the explosive ambit of a single nation.

    Yet it is obvious that it is the absence of the will or visionary impetus to fashion and forge an organic nation out of the disparate entities that has made looting such a fashionable alibi for hard work and nation-growing. Despite realising that Nigeria is a mere geographical expression exactly seventy five years ago, Awolowo never gave up on the Nigerian project until his last breath over thirty years ago.

    It is important to make this point as a precautionary reminder to those who believe that Nigeria’s problems will be solved once the constituting nationalities decide to go their separate ways. To be sure, no proud people with a sense of history and where they are coming from will allow themselves to be subject to the permanent feudal blackmail of those who do not want to develop and who do not want others to develop without something giving eventually.

    But it should be clear that were Nigeria to splinter in the current circumstances of institutional meltdown and political normlessness, it is more likely to produce the two Sudans rather than Czech and Slovakia republics. It will be recalled that the two were separate national entities before their forcible merger by their European overlords.

    For the time being, Nigerians may yet have the British colonialists to thank for whatever drove them to create Nigeria as a nation-state. If Nigeria were to be a feudal monarchy, all the noise about looting and stealing would have been tantamount to treasonable utterances attracting capital punishment. In ways that may be unknown to its denizens, the spirit of the modern nation-state in Nigeria has always asserted itself at critical moments. It will do so yet again sooner than later.

     

     

    Okon fulminates as Mama Igosun fumigates

    To Freedom House in Ilasamaja where Okon is billed to take part in an interactive session on the lessons of Covid-19 organised by a group calling itself Coalition Against Covid-19 Criminals (COACOC). As the dreaded pandemic gradually naturalises and insinuates itself into human consciousness as a new way of life, many rogue groups are springing up claiming to have an answer to the scourge.

    The day began on a rather trying note with the usual early morning altercation between Mama Igosun and a feckless Okon.

    A sweet aromatic smell wafted through the air as Okon insisted that Mama Igosun was engaging in her witchcraft practice again.

    “Oga, oga, Mama say him dey prepare eja tutu(Fresh fish) But this one no be fresh fish at all. Na Yoruba magomago be dis one”, the mad boy screamed. Snooper ventured out only to be confronted by a most outlandish sight.

    There was the old Amazon dressed like an Ifa priestess walking up and down the street carrying a huge ancient bronze lantern from which smoke billowed furiously while mama unleashed some aboriginal incantations.

    “Akanbi mi, no mind the yeye boy. I tell am say I dey prepare etutu (sacrifice) and him think say na fish pepper soup. Dis dem Coffin 19 no be joke again.

    Coffin don reach one million. I say make I come clear dem evil forest. Na dem thin we use for dem smallpox for 1946”, the old woman chanted breathlessly. Yours sincerely quickly beat a hasty retreat.

    At the Freedom House, Okon was his old jaunty and swashbuckling self all over again, eyeing everybody with an insolent scowl. One man immediately registered his displeasure.

    “Oh, it is this rude boy with his saucy jokes again “, the fellow noted with cynical apprehension.

    “Thunder fire your Yoruba gbegiri mouth!” Okon screamed. The organisers quickly calmed the mad boy down as he burst into a torrent of Efik curses. The interactive session was immediately joined.

    “What do you think about this Covid-19 pandemic?” Okon was asked.

    “Ah thank you. You see dis one no be Covid-19 again. Na Covid-419 dis one be”, the mad boy crowed as the audience clapped in approval.

    “How do you mean?” the lead presenter demanded.

    “How do you mean how do I mean? You no see dem officials as dem dey spend money yafunyafun and as dem cheek come be like my brother dem Joseph Wayas  Obudu cheek?”, the crazy rogue retorted almost bringing the house down with mirth. It was at this point that some wag decided to up the ante.

    “Okon, do you have any underlying condition?” the strange looking man demanded.

    “Yes I get underlying condition and him dey under dem pant. Na Sikira and dem fat Yoruba women for Somolu  dey take care of dat with dem overlying condition”, the mad boy retorted with a devilish grin.

    “Oma ale!! (bastard)” an irate Lagosian screamed as he threw a book which caught Okon pat on the nose. Exeunt snooper with his tail firmly stuck behind his hinds.

     

  • Okon fulminates as Mama Igosun fumigates

    Okon fulminates as Mama Igosun fumigates

    Tatalo Alamu

    To Freedom House in Ilasamaja where Okon is billed to take part in an interactive session on the lessons of Covid-19 organised by a group calling itself Coalition Against Covid-19 Criminals (COACOC). As the dreaded pandemic gradually naturalises and insinuates itself into human consciousness as a new way of life, many rogue groups are springing up claiming to have an answer to the scourge.

    The day began on a rather trying note with the usual early morning altercation between Mama Igosun and a feckless Okon. A sweet aromatic smell wafted through the air as Okon insisted that Mama Igosun was engaging in her witchcraft practice again.

    “Oga, oga, Mama say him dey prepare eja tutu(Fresh fish) But this one no be fresh fish at all. Na Yoruba magomago be dis one”, the mad boy screamed. Snooper ventured out only to be confronted by a most outlandish sight. There was the old Amazon dressed like an Ifa priestess walking up and down the street carrying a huge ancient bronze lantern from which smoke billowed furiously while mama unleashed some aboriginal incantations.

    “Akanbi mi, no mind the yeye boy. I tell am say I dey prepare etutu (sacrifice) and him think say na fish pepper soup. Dis dem Coffin 19 no be joke again. Coffin don reach one million. I say make I come clear dem evil forest. Na dem thin we use for dem smallpox for 1946”, the old woman chanted breathlessly. Yours sincerely quickly beat a hasty retreat.

    At the Freedom House, Okon was his old jaunty and swashbuckling self all over again, eyeing everybody with an insolent scowl. One man immediately registered his displeasure.

    “Oh, it is this rude boy with his saucy jokes again “, the fellow noted with cynical apprehension.

    “Thunder fire your Yoruba gbegiri mouth!” Okon screamed. The organisers quickly calmed the mad boy down as he burst into a torrent of Efik curses. The interactive session was immediately joined.

    “What do you think about this Covid-19 pandemic?” Okon was asked.

    “Ah thank you. You see dis one no be Covid-19 again. Na Covid-419 dis one be”, the mad boy crowed as the audience clapped in approval.

    “How do you mean?” the lead presenter demanded.

    “How do you mean how do I mean? You no see dem officials as dem dey spend money yafunyafun and as dem cheek come be like my brother dem Joseph Wayas  Obudu cheek?”, the crazy rogue retorted almost bringing the house down with mirth. It was at this point that some wag decided to up the ante.

    “Okon, do you have any underlying condition?” the strange looking man demanded.

    “Yes I get underlying condition and him dey under dem pant. Na Sikira and dem fat Yoruba women for Somolu  dey take care of dat with dem overlying condition”, the mad boy retorted with a devilish grin.

    “Oma ale!! (bastard)” an irate Lagosian screamed as he threw a book which caught Okon pat on the nose. Exeunt snooper with his tail firmly stuck behind his hinds.

  • Anti-corruption meltdown

    Anti-corruption meltdown

    The good boy of Manchester United

     

    Tatalo Alamu

     

    The virtual collapse of the anti-corruption mantra of the Buhari government represents a significant erosion of credibility, authority and legitimacy.

    It is far more damaging than an external attack. To be sure, Nigeria has never been seriously threatened by external enemies.

    But enemy nationals abound who drive the country to perdition when they do not threaten its very existence. Many among these are those who have an axe to grind with the configuration of the nation which they believe is skewed in favour of a master-nationality that has lorded it over everybody since amalgamation.

    Others are members of a political class who have no conception of the nation-state, who do not seem to understand that a nation is an artificial entity brought to life by shared ideals which become sacrosanct and binding on everybody.

    In the absence of these shared ideals, a nation is nothing but an open kleptocracy in which stealing and looting everything in sight become the order of the day.

    In the course of this widespread desecration of the ideals of an organic nation, everything is game and nothing is exempt. All purported and putative institutions are ravaged or permanently embattled.

    The military is tarnished and afflicted by declining faith in the institution even among its ranking echelons.

    The executive is a rent-seeking cabal despite all pious protestations and homiletic pontification.

    The judiciary is rubbished, and the law enforcement agencies are so enfeebled and enervated that they become a source of nasty jokes and bitter derision among the hungry, angry and disillusioned populace.

    If a genuine census were to be taken, many will vote with their feet. It is a secular equivalent of Dante’s inferno.

    The situation recalls an encounter between an ancient Persian king and a ragtag rebel militia that had fought the mighty Persian army with unusual courage and distinction.

    The Persian ruler was so astounded by the courage and persistence of the rebels that during a lull in battle he rode off to the camp of the enemy.

    “Ah, why do you fight so hard?” the king demanded from the rebel leader.

    “For loot of course. What else is there to fight for?” the rebel mullah retorted. The king was so astonished by the response that he was momentarily transfixed. The rebel leader saw his chance.

    “And if I may ask, what do you fight so hard for?” he asked the king pokerfaced.

    “Why, honour of course!!” the king responded.

    “Ah so we are both fighting for what we lack then!” the rebel leader howled and then ordered the battle to be freshly joined  while honourably granting the king a safe passage.

    This interesting reminds one of the contemporary situation in Nigeria. The clouds are gathering and it is a short step to state implosion.

    Dialogue among enemy nationals reminds one of a dialogue between two seemingly diametrically opposed but paradoxically complicit worldviews.

    Neither of the implacable sides is motivated by purely noble motives. In fact the other side is ethically down and out and makes no pretence as to its preference for filthy lucre whereas the official side can have its feet held to fire because of its professed ideals even where they turn out to be nothing but hypocritical humbug.

    It is this farcical confrontation between the down and out and the up and down that makes Nigeria to resemble a permanent movie or what the Yoruba call the travelling theatre. Every day there is a new scene and a more horrid sub-plot.

    With the EFCC debacle still roiling in the background, a serving minister in self-defence openly accuses a former head of a parastatal under him of serial marriage—as if that is a crime—while the lady in question submitted that she once had to administer some hot slaps to ward off his unsolicited sexual advances. It doesn’t get more salacious, or does it?

    Salacity, or the city of Sala, is a word that combines Baba Sala-type of Alawada theatre with trifling and piffling venality.

    It will be recalled that Alarinjo, the Yoruba Travelling Theatre, because it has to improvise on the hoof and while still travelling, has plenty of room for audience participation and ersatz improvisations.

    In this comedy of horrors, permanent audience participation is guaranteed by contending cyber-warriors, Instagram insurgents, Facebook fanatics and hostile briefings from all sides.

    A secondary school classmate of a serving minister joined the fray asserting that right from his secondary school days, our man showed himself a master of scam which marked him out for distinction and star status in Nigeria’s ethical jungle.

    Another warrior, this time a fiery Amazon, quickly joined battle with Joi Nuineh on Facebook asserting that Port Harcourt girls do not slap would-be boa-constrictors. In fact they tend to welcome such encounters.

    Yet a third, hostilely briefing against Magu in the newspapers, noted that the interdicted EFCC supremo is guilty of over-invoicing his returns all in a bid to impress his patrons at Aso Rock.

    This is the insalubrious background to the current travails of Ibrahim Mustapha Magu. Yet there is no doubt that while the show lasted, Magu, despite his many faults, was the poster boy of the anti-corruption crusade. He was the symbol of its virility and go-getting ruthlessness.

    In our one and only public and private encounter with Magu at a newspaper briefing, this columnist asked the newly minted EFCC boss whether he would have the guts to apprehend generals who are deemed to be corrupt.

    Magu stuttered for words and then responded rather brusquely that any general deemed to be corrupt was fair game.

    While the courage and bravery was not in doubt, yours sincerely instantly concluded that Magu has inherited the messianic naivety and lack of tact which would eventually spell doom for his more famous founding predecessor. It was only a question of time.

    That notwithstanding, Magu was very popular and widely lionized in many parts of the nation. With each widely publicised conviction, he was seen as an avenging corruption-buster and a Daniel come to judgement.

    But many other sections and sectors of the nation could not understand this mushy sentimentality. They see it as a typical example of the perennial fudge over critical national issues.

    These widely divergent opinions are a reflection of the underlying tensions of the National Question and the incompatibility of cultural habitus. They require some understanding.

    Twice in recent memory, the dominant tendency in the Yoruba polity rooted for a Buhari presidency because his Statist inflexibility, his concern with national security and no-nonsense anti-corruption stance resonated deeply with the Yoruba psyche, despite his well-known and well-advertised peccadilloes.

    As inveterate state-builders and people of empire, the Yoruba worldview holds these inviolate attributes as the fundamental pillars of durable statehood and viable nation-building. Without them, there can be no state or nation worth its salt for that matter.

    This is why despite clashing political temperaments and divergent political views, leading Yoruba scions from all walks of life suddenly found common cause with the Buhari presidency.

    Yet as the brief scuffle over the Amotekun affair should indicate, whenever this fractious and combustible nationality discovers that it has been taken for a grand ride, its fractured will often coalesces into a granite impregnability heckling for a showdown or the mother of all confrontations.

    This is when all assumptions and goodwill collapse and faith in the viability of the nation evaporates.

    With the forward units of the Igbo nation already at this frontier, and without any residual feudal or statist cobwebs blurring their vision of emancipation, it is hard to see how Nigeria’s continued viability can be guaranteed in the face of a revolt by two of its major nationalities.

    This is a very dire moment for the country. If the Buhari administration loses the fight against mounting insecurity and if the crusade against corruption turns out to be another hoax, the APC may find itself completely unravelling in the old west in the next presidential election.

    Inadvertently the federal authorities, by their handling of critical national issues, may be helping to galvanize a critical mass which will endanger the political fortunes of those who put their reputation and career on the line to secure an alliance with the north. Many are already gloating at the prospects and with sadistic relish too.

    For sure no one is saying that Ibrahim Magu is a saint. For one, he has spent too much time as a regular police officer to be shorn of the venality and obstreperous rudeness and incivility associated with a wide stratum of a law enforcement agency crying for deep institutional reorientation.

    Yet this is the same Magu who was left in place after the senate twice rejected his nomination and after the DSS submitted damning reports about his unsuitability for office on the two occasions.

    Why was he left in the office for so long, and why is he now being thrown under the wheels if his crimes and infractions are so well known to the authorities?

    The manner of Magu’s daylight abduction on the streets of Abuja like a common criminal and his speedy arraignment before a Presidential Panel on allegations ranging from misappropriation to the egregious charge of insubordination to constituted authority leave much to be desired.

    A Presidential Panel on insubordination and headed by the revered and widely respected Justice Isa Ayo Salami?

    Having been a victim of severe miscarriage of justice himself, the distinguished jurist is not expected to lend his weight and gravitas to a travesty of justice.

    The whole shameful drama has lent credence to wild rumours that Magu’s real crime is his tardiness in frisking a leading politician who must be technically incapacitated before 2023.

    If there is not more than meet the eye in this sordid theatre, there are better and more civilized ways of handling matters.

    A signal could have been sent to Magu informing him of the end of a controversial tenure. Thereafter, he could be interdicted and swiftly arraigned.

    As Mamman Gulu Vatsa famously told his military tormentors, when you insult yourself, others will surely join in.

    It is said that a desperate disease requires a desperate measure. In its original conception, EFCC arose from the noble intuition that if corruption was not reined through some strong-arm tactics, Nigeria itself stands a chance of being fatally imperilled by the affliction.

    EFCC was never modelled on the conceptual template of international crime-fighting units which require cerebral sophistication and forensic brilliance rather than sheer brawns and minatory daring.

    As a consequence, there was always the unstated credo that the EFCC needed not just a cop to lead it but a very tough cop to serve as its driving and directing spirit. It has turned out a veritable recipe for disaster.

    With its ranks swollen by officers with a regular police mentality and with its leadership acquiescing in and encouraging a cult of personality, the EFCC soon mutated into a lawless outfit reeking of corruption and sheer political brigandage.

    The virtual implosion of the EFCC presents the nation with a grave state crisis. If anybody is still in charge of the nation, this is the time for such a person to take charge in order to avert an ethical meltdown of the post-colonial state in Nigeria.

    Unfortunately with several arms and organs of the state in open warfare against each other, the possibility seems very remote for now.

    Even PACAC chaired by the distinguished Itse Sagay seems to have caught the bug of internal dissension and acrimonious rifts with its leading lights openly engaging in claims and disclaimers.

    At this moment, the Nigerian presidency presents a picture of classic state dysfunctionality with the falcon no longer hearkening to the falconer.

    Meanwhile, the president appears eerily aloof from it all like a self-isolating spectator in his own presidency.

    It is turning out to be a very cruel demystification of a man in whom millions have invested hope. Indeed no one can step into the same river twice.

    The good boy of Manchester United

     

    All hail Marcus Rashford, the gangling attacking playmaker of Manchester United football Club, on being tipped for a Honorary Doctorate degree by the University of Manchester.

    It is honour richly deserved. As we have said in this column many times, the British society knows how to reward and honour its outstanding and heroic citizens.

    In all likelihood the Black footballer is being honoured not for his distinction on the field of football but for his large, noble heart and immense contribution to the deepening of equality in Britain and the world at large.

    It will be recalled that Marcus Rashford recently came to global attention for his stout and soul-stirring advocacy for free feeding for students from deprived background in British schools.

    Rashford walked his talk, volunteering to singlehandedly bear the cost from his pocket if no help was coming from officialdom.

    Watching the chap on television and his declaration that as a youth he also felt the pains and pangs of hunger, one cannot but be deeply moved. Despite his rise to soccer stardom, Rashford never forgot his humble origins.

    Please recall that the ruling conservative government at first pooh-poohed the idea, dismissing the whole project as starry-eyed idealism and a fiscal impracticality.

    But when the gale of public opinion rose against this narrow, tight-fisted monetarism, the government succumbed and promptly surrendered.

    This ennobling and enriching episode demonstrates the power of the lone visionary individual to influence the shape of governance and the trajectory of humanity.

    Generations of unborn British children will forever be grateful to Marcus Rashford. In a befitting soccer metaphor, a leading British newspaper dubbed the duel: Marcus Rashford 1; Boris Johnson 0.

    This column admires athletes who stand and pitch for something outside their field of play.

    Among these heroes are the late Germany-based Sam Okwaraji who fell in 1989 while playing for his beloved country and our own Patrick Olusegun Odegbami ,aka No7, who has been quietly running a successful Football Academy in his Orile Wasinmi ancestral homestead even while serially, albeit unsuccessfully, running for political office.

    So get on the field and dribble the hell out of ‘em, Dr Marcus. The only other playing doctor we can remember is Dr Socrates, full name Socrates Brasilei Sampaio de Souza Viera de Oliveira, guitar-strumming, contraband-smoking, soccer-playing medical doctor and attacking mid-fielder.

    Outside the football pitch, the tall, lithe, elegant and charismatic Socrates pitched for higher and popular causes.

    The iconic soccer star was the captain of the greatest Brazilian football team never to win a world cup. Snooper will never forget Socrates’ goal against Russia in the 1982 World Cup in Spain.

    A magical pile-driver which dipped and looped into the net, leaving the outstanding Russian goalkeeper completely stranded and bemused to the bargain.

    And talking about the deployment of soccer for hyper-nationalist causes, no one can beat the impish master, Diego Amanda Maradona.

    When the greatest Argentine soccer legend and former pickpocket from the slums of Buenos Aires was asked which of his two goals that ended English ambition in the 1986 World Cup he liked better, the old contrarian rooted for the first one.

    According to him, it was akin to picking the pocket of the English.

    Remember that the Falkland Island is still known as Las Malvinas in Argentina till date? Soccer is the continuation of war and politics by other means. Well done, Marcus.

     

     

  • The good boy of Manchester United

    The good boy of Manchester United

    Tatalo Alamu

     

    All hail Marcus Rashford, the gangling attacking playmaker of Manchester United football Club, on being tipped for a Honorary Doctorate degree by the University of Manchester.

    It is honour richly deserved. As we have said in this column many times, the British society knows how to reward and honour its outstanding and heroic citizens.

    In all likelihood the Black footballer is being honoured not for his distinction on the field of football but for his large, noble heart and immense contribution to the deepening of equality in Britain and the world at large.

    It will be recalled that Marcus Rashford recently came to global attention for his stout and soul-stirring advocacy for free feeding for students from deprived background in British schools.

    Rashford walked his talk, volunteering to singlehandedly bear the cost from his pocket if no help was coming from officialdom.

    Watching the chap on television and his declaration that as a youth he also felt the pains and pangs of hunger, one cannot but be deeply moved. Despite his rise to soccer stardom, Rashford never forgot his humble origins.

    Please recall that the ruling conservative government at first pooh-poohed the idea, dismissing the whole project as starry-eyed idealism and a fiscal impracticality.

    But when the gale of public opinion rose against this narrow, tight-fisted monetarism, the government succumbed and promptly surrendered.

    This ennobling and enriching episode demonstrates the power of the lone visionary individual to influence the shape of governance and the trajectory of humanity.

    Generations of unborn British children will forever be grateful to Marcus Rashford. In a befitting soccer metaphor, a leading British newspaper dubbed the duel: Marcus Rashford 1; Boris Johnson 0.

    This column admires athletes who stand and pitch for something outside their field of play.

    Among these heroes are the late Germany-based Sam Okwaraji who fell in 1989 while playing for his beloved country and our own Patrick Olusegun Odegbami ,aka No7, who has been quietly running a successful Football Academy in his Orile Wasinmi ancestral homestead even while serially, albeit unsuccessfully, running for political office.

    So get on the field and dribble the hell out of ‘em, Dr Marcus. The only other playing doctor we can remember is Dr Socrates, full name Socrates Brasilei Sampaio de Souza Viera de Oliveira, guitar-strumming, contraband-smoking, soccer-playing medical doctor and attacking mid-fielder.

    Outside the football pitch, the tall, lithe, elegant and charismatic Socrates pitched for higher and popular causes.

    The iconic soccer star was the captain of the greatest Brazilian football team never to win a world cup. Snooper will never forget Socrates’ goal against Russia in the 1982 World Cup in Spain.

    A magical pile-driver which dipped and looped into the net, leaving the outstanding Russian goalkeeper completely stranded and bemused to the bargain.

    And talking about the deployment of soccer for hyper-nationalist causes, no one can beat the impish master, Diego Amanda Maradona.

    When the greatest Argentine soccer legend and former pickpocket from the slums of Buenos Aires was asked which of his two goals that ended English ambition in the 1986 World Cup he liked better, the old contrarian rooted for the first one.

    According to him, it was akin to picking the pocket of the English.

    Remember that the Falkland Island is still known as Las Malvinas in Argentina till date? Soccer is the continuation of war and politics by other means. Well done, Marcus.

     

     

  • Christopher Columbus was there

    Christopher Columbus was there

    Tatalo Alamu

    Finally, the tsunami of statue-toppling has reached the city of Baltimore and the statue of the man who started it all: Christopher Columbus. With its huge Black and largely disaffected population, its teeming mass of alienated, unemployed youth and with a storied inner city brimming with human fiascos, drug freaks and slobbering junkies, Baltimore often feels like a secular hell. Despite all this, the visitor cannot but fail to notice a fundamental goodness about the denizens.

    Last week, the man who started it all and who can be regarded as the greatest iconoclast of all time got his own historic comeuppance. The statue of Columbus in Baltimore was taken down by an angry crowd and carted to the harbour for a watery finale. Out of water thee cometh and into water thee goeth.

    Although he was not the first person to discover the Americas— the Vikings having preceded him by almost six centuries- – Columbus was the first to weaponize the encounter with the native people thus setting the stage for the large scale conquest, expropriation and extermination of the indigenous people by European prospectors and speculators.

    So long, Christopher?

  • Big Boris is watching you

    Tatalo Alamu

    Whilst we are still on the subject of those who think it is their inalienable right to soil the image of the nation, it is meet to report that the international community and the global patrol may have finally tired of the fiscal heist of Nigerian fraudsters and money laundering panjandrums. After all it is not altruism that forces people to bury the corpse of an abandoned wastrel. It is the health hazard the corpse may constitute to the larger community.

    The story you are about to read may appear stranger than fiction. But it is the truth. Three years ago, this column celebrated a friend who turned seventy. Our friend, a titled Benin chief, is the owner of one of the biggest advertising companies in the nation and has been a major player in the field since the early seventies when he was a youthful Advert Manager of the Daily Times Group.

    In the said piece we described him as a business mogul and a major real estate investor. The article went on to describe our man as something of an enigma who lives in the equivalent of a fortress right inside colonial Ikoyi. According to the said piece, to access our friend, you have to pass through a prison yard, a famous Police Station, an immigration department and finally a thriving cemetery one after the other.

    Anybody familiar with colonial Ikoyi must know the street in question. But this is where tory begin to get K-leg as they say in Nigerian pidgin parlance. Sometimes this week, a letter from his bank arrived in our friend’s London home asking him in a rather querulous tone to furnish them with answers to the following:

    1              Why he thinks he is a mogul.

    2              Why he is living in a fortress-like enclosure.

    3              Why to reach him one has to pass through a prison, a police station and a cemetery.

    Echoes of the infamous Colombian Medellin cartel? As proof of invincible veracity, the London bank attached a copy of snooper’s article duly procured online. Oh mine, oh mine, all this is getting rather Kafkaesque and a little bit ghoulish for the delicate palate. Is fiction a slice of real life or real life a slice of fiction? Writing about businessmen can affect the business of writing.

    All snooper can say for now is that when our friend called from London to report the incident, he was in a cheerful and upbeat mood. Here is wishing him a powerful presence of mind as he is set to return the queries post haste.  To our feckless fraudsters, we say Big Brother Boris is watching you. Exeunt snooper with his tail between his legs.

  • Hush…hush… our puppies are here!!!

    Hush…hush… our puppies are here!!!

    Tatalo Alamu

    The heist is benumbing and mindboggling in its scope and scale. And the display of opulence and affluence so crass and in your face that something was bound to give in the end. It did with such a resounding thump that it reverberated across the globe and sent a chill down the financial epicentre of metropolitan derring-do. All sane and sober minds have kept wondering:  what did this boy and his horde of accomplices think they were doing?

    Ramon Abass Igbalode ,aka Hushpuppi, wanted to live out his child-like dreams and infantile phantasies of Croesus-like wealth and spell-binding affluence. He was determined to make it by all means and at all costs. Nothing was going to stop him, not even the unwavering scrutiny of international surveillance and round the clock cyber-patrol. There is something to be noted about such nerves and impossible temerity.

    Ramoni is our own whatever the sanctimonious outrage and hypocritical handwringing. He is a dysfunctional product of a dysfunctional society on the verge of an ethical and moral meltdown. Whether we like to hear this or not, there are still many puppies out there who will refuse to be hushed up.

    They are daily defrauding the banks, hacking into corporate accounts, cloning credit cards, phishing our e-mail correspondence, perfectly forging official letter heads, hijacking electronic transfers and trumping the most secure cyber fortresses. One day we will wake up to find that the nation had succumbed to the most daring fiscal heist that the modern world has witnessed. It will be the equivalent of an electronic Armageddon.

    They are our babies, our puppies; the children of the present darkness and prevailing midnight. The fruit does not fall very far from its parent tree. It is said in the bible that their fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set at the edge. And it came to pass that in the land of the living dead, only living ghosts can survive: ghost leaders, ghost followers, ghost workers, ghost soldiers, ghost traders and ghost writers serving as unsympathetic undertakers.

    But as it is said, a man can make for himself a throne of bayonets, whether he will be able to sit on it is another matter entirely. There are many culprits for this pandemic of rabid puppies that is about to swamp the entire nation and infect the international community in the process.

    They include a dysfunctional and kleptocratic political class, a thieving bureaucracy, a disoriented traditional institution, a disordered military profession, a paralysed police force, an alienated and enfeebled citizenry and a corrupt and corrupting spiritual merchant class that preaches the virtue of prosperity without commensurate hard work.

    It is impossible for a society to achieve meaningful nationhood or make meaningful progress as long as it is freighted with such debilitating debris, such terminal incontinence. It is instructive to note that while he was still at it before the FBI terminated the party, Hushpuppi garnered and gathered around himself over two million followers on his Instagram handle. Surely they were not all there for puppy party. They could not care a hoot if something did not add up.

    It is also worthy of note that while Hushpuppi carefully transformed himself into a celebrity of global notoriety, an endless stream of leading Nigerian politicians, media notables, so called cyber influencers and star singers flocked round him for photo-ops. Some of them were so star struck that they basked in the reflected glory long after departing the Dubai abode of the cyber fraudster.

    There were also ominous hints of an electoral heist in the making deploying the infamous hacking skills of Hushpuppi to damning effect had the federal authorities succumbed to a loss of concentration. This surely would have led to the mother of all electoral conflagrations in Nigeria. Hushpuppi’s obsessively flamboyant life style and the unexplained source of his plutocratic riches ought to have flagged off the politically prudent. It doesn’t get more heinous.

    This tragic episode has once again underscored the lack of a national ethos and positive value chain to undergird Nigeria’s march to authentic nationhood. As it has been noted several times in this column, no nation can survive without some core values that drive its politics and developmental goals.

    In the absence of an authoritarian but authoritative founding father who stamps his authority on the nation right from inception riding roughshod over sectionalist and special interest objections, core values cannot be an overnight affair.  They tend to mature slowly and organically and are usually a result of substantial pacting and considerable elite consensus.

    In multi-ethnic countries haunted by their colonial past and brimming with unresolved ethnic tensions arising from mutually countervailing and conflicting political, economic and spiritual modes of production, things can get very problematic and nasty indeed. It is like rolling a huge boulder up the proverbial Sisyphean hill; a futile venture.

    After twenty one years of post-military rule, Nigeria is nowhere near fashioning or evolving a set of core values. Rather than being a site for the aggregation of competing elite interests and the reconciliation of group differences, the Nigerian post-colonial state resembles an imperial Roman coliseum with political gladiators duelling on to death.

    This is why sixty years after independence, a civil war, several military upheavals, regional conflagrations, a subsisting religious insurgency that has lasted eleven years and a despondent climate of insecurity, Nigeria approximates a political jungle at best and a thriving bedlam at worst. There is a steady regression into the Hobbesian state of nature.

    As a result, the post-colonial state is often viewed as a hostile alien construct to be conquered at will and deployed for narrow sectional interests rather than the national interest. Every ascendant group captures the state and its overwhelming power apparatus before unleashing its might on other segments of the nation.

    In twenty one years of post-military rule, the last three administrations have been accused of gross nepotistic tendencies and of pursuing narrow sectional interests. The possibility of evolving core national values recedes farther and farther into the shadows and with that the possibility of organic nationhood.

    This is the only thing that can explain the rise of Hushpuppism as a pan-Nigerian ideology and a national way of life. In Western societies, there a very few billionaires who flaunt state-derived wealth with such impunity and lack of concern for the social fabric of the nation. In a disciplined and ordered country like China, such juvenile miscreants would have been flagged off before they become a source of international notoriety to the society.

    But it has not always been like this for most of Nigeria’s –and Africa’s—constituting nationalities. Judging from their extant philosophies, their illuminating proverbs, their mores and norms, it is clear that most of them had a dominant national ethos which drove and framed their lived experience before colonial disruption.

    This is why in the ontological and normative chaos of contemporary Nigeria, there is a growing nostalgia for the ordered and regulated normality of pre-colonial existence; a revival of political nativism and the resurgence of ethnic nationalism which clash often violently with the very notion of the post-colonial nation.

    In Nigeria, these urgent cries against the current normless non-existence sometimes take the form of plaintive pleas for a radical restructuring of the country or calls for outright dismemberment. In its classical incarnation, a nation must not only be, it must also mean something. Otherwise it is technically a normative non-entity where anything goes.

    More than its political, economic, intellectual and spiritual failures, the signal failure of the post-colonial state in Nigeria lies in its inability to mean something. In the absence of existential meaningfulness, the nation becomes an anomic free lease in which the terrifying void is filled by all kinds of aberrant pathologies: state larceny, nepotistic impunity, rape, ritual killing, kidnapping, cyber-crimes and deregulated violence.

    A national ethos is driven by a national ideology which in turn crystallizes from a set of core values. There is a nexus between the solidified core values of a nation and individual character and ultimate destiny. The Calvinist modern masters of Netherlands, whatever their fabulous wealth, are notoriously thrifty and marked by obsessive frugality. The Prime minister can often be seen driving himself to work on a rusty bike.

    In India, the founder and owner of one of the most famous companies can often be seen driving himself around Mumbai on a hot sultry day, or he could be found in the general cabin of commercial aircrafts poring over his files in indifferent self-effacement. Sometimes, he goes to the airport to welcome prospective employees while offering to help with their luggage.

    In America, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and one of the richest men ever, flies Club Cabin class in commercial airliners and has been seen several times taking his turn in a burgher queue. Sam Walton, the founder and owner of the Walmart chain, drives himself around in his old jalopy and has lived in the same house for over forty years.

    The ethos of the unreconstructed hunter-gatherer gets in the way in Nigeria and leads to monumental national tragedy. We can see this in the career trajectory and individual destiny of our own Hushpuppi and Eric Yuan, the founder of Zoom. Both are undoubtedly gifted and talented young men. But while the one will end up in American jail, the other was recently catapulted into the front ranks of American billionaires.

    Eric Yuan arrived in America a little over two decades ago virtually penniless after eight failed attempts to secure an American visa. With the Chinese national ethos of discipline, prudence and perseverance burnt into his genes across generations despite serial national humiliations, Yuan persisted despite crushing rejection and withering dismissal.

    His fortune changed with the current coronavirus pandemic. Eric Yuan is now a listed billionaire and the toast of American society. But he has not allowed the   outlandish success to get into his head or affect his worldview. He can often be seen among his workers with his sleeves rolled up. Not for him any ostentation or vulgar display of crass opulence. What Ramoni Igbalode tried to obtain by fraud and psychotic daredevilry, Eric Yuan can now procure from legitimate toil.

    In the unfortunate case of Hushpuppi, a personal tendency to vulgar exhibitionism coupled with the prevailing ethos of prosperity without genuine work, an aversion for honesty and a penchant for instant gratification  to destroy the young man forever except in a rare case of luck perchance the FBI needs his skills to solve some cyber mysteries.

    As we have seen from the preceding analysis, this is a case of a personal tragedy that is also symptomatic of a larger national tragedy. Our puppies have arrived. Only God can now save the nation from a terminal injury inflicted by its miseducated and misdirected youth.

    When General Buhari came to power after a momentous election five years ago, this columnist gave him a shopping list which included an urgent need to inaugurate a National Restitution Commission which will take a holistic look at the moral and ethical health of the nation with a view to fashioning out a national ethos.

    But that will be the day. Meanwhile five years on, the situation remains the same if not very much worse. Only Nigeria’s legendary luck can now avert an ethical meltdown in the greatest conurbation of Black souls that the modern world has seen.

     

     

    Big Boris is watching you

    Whilst we are still on the subject of those who think it is their inalienable right to soil the image of the nation, it is meet to report that the international community and the global patrol may have finally tired of the fiscal heist of Nigerian fraudsters and money laundering panjandrums. After all it is not altruism that forces people to bury the corpse of an abandoned wastrel. It is the health hazard the corpse may constitute to the larger community.

    The story you are about to read may appear stranger than fiction. But it is the truth. Three years ago, this column celebrated a friend who turned seventy. Our friend, a titled Benin chief, is the owner of one of the biggest advertising companies in the nation and has been a major player in the field since the early seventies when he was a youthful Advert Manager of the Daily Times Group.

    In the said piece we described him as a business mogul and a major real estate investor. The article went on to describe our man as something of an enigma who lives in the equivalent of a fortress right inside colonial Ikoyi. According to the said piece, to access our friend, you have to pass through a prison yard, a famous Police Station, an immigration department and finally a thriving cemetery one after the other.

    Anybody familiar with colonial Ikoyi must know the street in question. But this is where tory begin to get K-leg as they say in Nigerian pidgin parlance. Sometimes this week, a letter from his bank arrived in our friend’s London home asking him in a rather querulous tone to furnish them with answers to the following:

    1              Why he thinks he is a mogul.

    2              Why he is living in a fortress-like enclosure.

    3              Why to reach him one has to pass through a prison, a police station and a cemetery.

    Echoes of the infamous Colombian Medellin cartel? As proof of invincible veracity, the London bank attached a copy of snooper’s article duly procured online. Oh mine, oh mine, all this is getting rather Kafkaesque and a little bit ghoulish for the delicate palate. Is fiction a slice of real life or real life a slice of fiction? Writing about businessmen can affect the business of writing.

    All snooper can say for now is that when our friend called from London to report the incident, he was in a cheerful and upbeat mood. Here is wishing him a powerful presence of mind as he is set to return the queries post haste.  To our feckless fraudsters, we say Big Brother Boris is watching you. Exeunt snooper with his tail between his legs.

     

     

    Christopher Columbus was there

    Finally, the tsunami of statue-toppling has reached the city of Baltimore and the statue of the man who started it all: Christopher Columbus. With its huge Black and largely disaffected population, its teeming mass of alienated, unemployed youth and with a storied inner city brimming with human fiascos, drug freaks and slobbering junkies, Baltimore often feels like a secular hell. Despite all this, the visitor cannot but fail to notice a fundamental goodness about the denizens.

    Last week, the man who started it all and who can be regarded as the greatest iconoclast of all time got his own historic comeuppance. The statue of Columbus in Baltimore was taken down by an angry crowd and carted to the harbour for a watery finale. Out of water thee cometh and into water thee goeth.

    Although he was not the first person to discover the Americas— the Vikings having preceded him by almost six centuries- – Columbus was the first to weaponize the encounter with the native people thus setting the stage for the large scale conquest, expropriation and extermination of the indigenous people by European prospectors and speculators.

    So long, Christopher?

  • Two pandemics and one human race

    Two pandemics and one human race

    Wale Babalakin @ 60

    Tatalo Alamu

     

    There is a touching irony about the slogan, Black Lives Matter. The Black race is the founder and foundational race for the human species. In other words and technically speaking, it should be the Master race from which every other thing flows.

    But when it now comes to a point where this same race is pleading for existence, it means that there is a fundamental distortion about global race relations that has to be redressed.

    We have been told that Africa is a dark void; a terrible stain on humanity. Its trajectory has been likened to a column of ants going in the wrong direction that must be forcibly turned back.

    Those who left the continent a long time ago often return with superior skills and knowledge to terrorize and colonize those who remained. To be Black is to become an endangered species; a criminalised racial category.

    But it was not always like this, despite the historic disadvantages. At least we know that when the Portuguese adventurers arrived in the Kongo Kingdom around present day Angola in the middle of the fifteenth century, they met a society much better organized and with a higher standard of living than the one they left at home. Tales abound of pre-colonial African cities that boasted of superior infrastructure.

    Yet in five centuries of relentless modernization and industrialization albeit underwritten by slavery and exploitation, Europe and North America have stolen a march on Africa so stunning and incredible that it appears irreversible and divinely ordained.

    It is one of the nuclear fallout of that rapid advancement, the problem of Africans taken into slavery in America, that has now erupted on the world stage once again but this time with volcanic fury.

    The advent of Donald Trump has not helped matters. At the last count, the American honcho has exacerbated race relations in his country in a way and manner no one had thought possible in post-bellum America. America is beset by a human pandemic potentially more destructive than Covid-19.

    Not even the sacred occasion of America’s Independence Anniversary yesterday could persuade him to be less polarizing, less divisive and less confrontational.

    Trump has also done his best to undermine and destroy the existing global order which is the fulcrum on which world peace revolves.

    Consequently, the International Question has now assumed a more pressing urgency than even the National Question.

    With the ravages of this terrible double pandemic—both human and viral—  it is very clear that the implacable and inviolable division of the world into nations, races, religions and civilizations cannot be sustained without the human species embracing the horrid prospects of self-elimination.

    Yet it is also clear that as long as human activity is structured around the primacy of economic survival which pits nations, races, religions and civilizations against themselves in a war of all against all, there will always be a tendency to push for a final solution as a fundamental human impulse to ward off threats of extinction.

    It should be remembered that the human species itself exterminated other rival hominids on the road to earthly ascendancy.

    Whenever he was reminded that the human race is the last person standing, custom-built to withstand all earthly adversities, Sigismund Freud always chuckled to himself while reminding his interlocutors of the fate of the dinosaurs.

    The dinosaurs were by far the biggest animals in the jungle that the world has seen. They appeared too big to fail or fall. But an asteroid strike which altered the composition of the environment led to their rapid extinction.

    There is an American saying that if knowledge is power, secret knowledge is secret power. No one is absolutely sure for now what actually triggered the pandemic debacle, whether it is due to some natural mutation arising from human-animal interaction or some misbegotten experiment in some rarified laboratory shrouded in stealth and secrecy and the human will to dominate others.

    In the era of Artificial Intelligence and robotic engineering the rat race for supremacy among nations if it does not eventuate in a nuclear Armageddon may yet lead to a drastic date with human extinction. In the light of what we are currently witnessing, this cannot be regarded as a hyperbole.

    But there is always opportunity in crisis. The current pandemic tragedy may well be a divine adversity; a golden opportunity for the human race to reset its brains.

    Even if we wish, there is no way the world can now return to its pre-Covid-19 normality or America to its pre-Trumpian serenity.

    The new normal will be so surreal and unusual that we will be forced to embrace abnormality with a cheerful placidity.

    Just as nobody foresaw the advent of coronavirus, no pundit could have foreseen the global dimensions of developments in its wake.

    The murder in Minneapolis has turned out to be a dramatic game changer for humanity. Of course there is a compelling historic nexus between the ravages of the pandemic and the global revulsion at a murder most foul and loathsome.

    But this is not the place or the time to press charges. This is the time to press advantage.

    In his brilliant and illuminating critique of Frantz Fanon’s work, Jean-Paul Sartre, the great French Existentialist philosopher, novelist and celebrated cultural icon, dismissed the philosophy of Negritude as an “anti-racist racism”.

    It can be argued that it was Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor who set up Negritude for this critical manslaughter by invoking a set of binary polarities which distinguishes the Black race from its occidental oppressors.

    The irony of it all is that some of the rigid distinctions were borrowed and taken over from western philosophy.

    Yet it is difficult to proceed with the problem of identity in difference without setting up this binary division despite the play of ironic signifiers across rigid differentiations.

    It is known as excluding the excluders. But there is a sense in which the excluders can also become exclusivist in their own right.

    So in a sense, it can be argued that racism is part of the human condition. But there is defensive racism such as we may see in the philosophy of Negritude and there is offensive racism such as we see in all philosophies of racist supremacy evident in the philosophy of Apartheid, Aryan mythologies of the western superman and all theories of occidental Exceptionalism.

    Unlike Negritude which sought to project and protect Black identity in the face of the most savage intellectual, physical, political, cultural, economic and religious assault the world has seen, western racist constructs have sought to rationalize and justify these assaults on the ground that they were done out of historical necessity and the urgent imperative of bringing a civilizing order to a manifestly inferior race.

    In other words, the Black person has to be saved from himself and from dragging the rest of the world into perdition by his sheer fecklessness.

    It was left to Jean Paul Sartre, the supreme master of dialectical acrobatics, to redeem the argument by turning it on its head.

    In the same breath that he had dismissed Negritude as just another instance of racism, the French master holds that as the most oppressed, the most abused and most degraded race on earth, the Black people are also the best placed both emotionally and psychically to champion the redemption of the human race as a whole.

    Sartre was enlisting tropes from the Bible which holds that the meek will inherit the earth and that in the order of final succession the first shall be the last.

    More crucially, Sartre was borrowing insights from Marxism and the avant-garde radical writings of the time, particularly History and Class Consciousness by the influential Hungarian Marxist aesthetician Georg Lukacs.

    Lukacs advanced the thesis that as the most violently oppressed and degraded segment of humanity, the working class is in the best position to liberate the human race from the shackles of oppression and a manifestly degrading and unjust capitalist order. It was a frank and unapologetic marching order.

    Almost sixty years after, everything seems to be coming together. We have finally arrived at the intersection of race and class with the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

    But due to what is known as the cunning of history, it is not as either Sartre or Lukacs would have wished or wanted.

    What we have seen in recent weeks across the globe is not a monolithic Black race on the march or a unified working class on international rampage. It is a multi-racial and multi-national underclass in torrid ferment.

    First, the advent of globalization has fractured whatever remained of a monolithic working class consciousness either nationally or internationally by insinuating into their ranks a labour aristocracy more interested in perpetuating the hierarchy of labourers than in ending class hierarchies.

    Second, the dynamics of globalization has suborned the very notion of a unified Black consciousness. It has  created class divisions within the Black race itself especially in the Diaspora and particularly between the new waves of economic immigrants who are invariably better educated, better focused and less encumbered by the traumatic burden of slavery and those whose ancestors were enslaved.

    Those who carry the psychological trauma of slavery tend to view the new African immigrants with smouldering resentment and suspicion of betrayal. Things can degenerate to testy arguments and even nasty brawls among distant siblings.

    Consequently as things stand the Black subject as currently constituted and configured either within the post-colonial nation space or at the international level is too enfeebled by adversity, too enervated by historical circumstances and too disoriented by accumulated indignities to act as the sole vanguard and champion of human liberation.

    Hence, the Black race needs broad-based alliances and solidarity with equally concerned people across the world irrespective of race, religion or civilization.

    This is the lesson of the global solidarity we have witnessed so far in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

    Those who study the sociology of crowds will confirm that it has been a rainbow coalition of affected and afflicted humankind of all races and creeds. It is affronted humanity heaving forward to arrive at a new telos.

    Outside protests matter a lot and can in fact be quite decisive when it comes to changing or rerouting the internal configuration of politics both at the national and international level.

    It has been consistently demonstrated that politics is too important to be left to formal politicking and the referendum of crowds can be more impactful than legislative star-gazing.

    In western liberal democracies, the most meaningful changes are often initiated outside the precincts and perimeters of formal politics.

    It is therefore not surprising that the nation-wide protests that followed the death of Georg Floyd have led to a rash of administrative and police reforms in America.

    But before all these considerable gains can be consolidated and an irreversible momentum for the liberation of the Black race is generated there will have to be a galvanizing force emanating from the African continent.

    The second phase of the decolonizing and de-stigmatizing of the Black subject is here with us. Just as it did during the first phase, Africa now needs to throw up its most visionary leaders. That may be the tallest order.

     

     

    Wale Babalakin @ 60

     

    What personally touches us must come last. This has been the abiding refrain of this column. But it is time to celebrate my own.

    On Wednesday 1st of July, our dear aburo and kinsman, Bolanle Olawale Babalakin, aka B.O.B, the billionaire entrepreneur, financier, strategic investor, quiet philanthropist and major player in the education sector, turned sixty.

    In keeping with the mood of the moment, Wale spent the day quietly in his ancestral birth place, the village-city of a thousand stars, with his beloved father, the revered former jurist of the Supreme Court, Justice Bolarinwa Babalakin away from the glare of publicity and press hoopla.

    After returning to base, Wale called to personally inform me that I should note that having clocked sixty, he should be treated as an elder and granted the privileges accruing.

    I not only agreed with him but also noted that at his age General Yakubu Gowon had ruled Nigeria for a whopping nine years and had been retired from power by his junior colleagues for another twenty years.

    Wale is a bundle of talents, phenomenal energy and irrepressible drive combined with legalistic brilliance almost approaching the extraordinary.

    Gifted with a remarkable flair for seeing opportunities where others see only roadblocks, his rise to financial stardom began in rather humble circumstances that no one would actually believe.

    As a graduate student in Cambridge, he had converted an apartment left behind in London by his father to a block of flats through free financing and it turned out a very lucrative venture.

    After that, there was no looking back for the up and coming whiz kid as he clinched local deals after local deals and international financing ventures one after the other.

    There were roadblocks on the way. One of such daredevil ventures brought the hostile attention of the authorities, particularly the menacing glare of the dark-goggled despot who was said to have wondered aloud what kind of Law he thought he read that his own children didn’t.

    For his pains and temerity, he was summarily impounded and had to spend almost two years in detention.

    But there was no stopping the bulldozer. A man with a gargantuan appetite for business success, Wale once told me that he learnt from Chief Bode Akindele, the recently deceased real estate mogul and Parakoyi of Ibadanland , that in business, the size and scope of success are determined by the size and scope of appetite. It was a lesson he has taken to heart.

    The wide ideological gulf and political differences between us have not stopped us from enjoying an intimate and affectionate relationship bristling with bucolic banters and saucy jokes.

    He could be an impossible customer, often openly deriding snooper’s political affiliations while yours sincerely often stop him dead in his track by invoking certain village protocols and the possibility of political reprisals.

    There was a point he would wake one up in the dead of the night. Whenever snooper complained about his sleep being disrupted, the fellow would retort that yours sincerely was not entitled to any sleep as long as one’s friends i

    n high places will not allow him to sleep too. Saying this in the vernacular is more hilarious and entertaining than the English translation.

    Apropos of that, snooper once placed B.O.B and a leading politician in the same room with a retired justice of the Supreme Court acting as a Samaritan and do-gooder.

    The plan was to hammer out an acceptable solution to a longstanding dispute. After about ten minutes, to my sorrow and chagrin, the meeting ended in a fiasco with the participants heading in different directions.

    All in all, Wale has earned his spurs. It is not easy in an environment like Nigeria to combine successful legal practice with top-grade business venturing.

    The highly rated Babalakin Law Firm and the iconic NMA2 domestic airport stand as double monument to his exertions.

    In all this, Wale has been very lucky in his choice of wife. Gbolahan, the tame and temperate daughter of the heroic late Justice Jinadu, is a formidable pillar of strength and stabilising force in the background. Here is wishing the birthday boy many happy returns.

     

  • Wale Babalakin @ 60

    Tatalo Alamu

     

    What personally touches us must come last. This has been the abiding refrain of this column. But it is time to celebrate my own.

    On Wednesday 1st of July, our dear aburo and kinsman, Bolanle Olawale Babalakin, aka B.O.B, the billionaire entrepreneur, financier, strategic investor, quiet philanthropist and major player in the education sector, turned sixty.

    In keeping with the mood of the moment, Wale spent the day quietly in his ancestral birth place, the village-city of a thousand stars, with his beloved father, the revered former jurist of the Supreme Court, Justice Bolarinwa Babalakin away from the glare of publicity and press hoopla.

    After returning to base, Wale called to personally inform me that I should note that having clocked sixty, he should be treated as an elder and granted the privileges accruing.

    I not only agreed with him but also noted that at his age General Yakubu Gowon had ruled Nigeria for a whopping nine years and had been retired from power by his junior colleagues for another twenty years.

    Wale is a bundle of talents, phenomenal energy and irrepressible drive combined with legalistic brilliance almost approaching the extraordinary.

    Gifted with a remarkable flair for seeing opportunities where others see only roadblocks, his rise to financial stardom began in rather humble circumstances that no one would actually believe.

    As a graduate student in Cambridge, he had converted an apartment left behind in London by his father to a block of flats through free financing and it turned out a very lucrative venture.

    After that, there was no looking back for the up and coming whiz kid as he clinched local deals after local deals and international financing ventures one after the other.

    There were roadblocks on the way. One of such daredevil ventures brought the hostile attention of the authorities, particularly the menacing glare of the dark-goggled despot who was said to have wondered aloud what kind of Law he thought he read that his own children didn’t.

    For his pains and temerity, he was summarily impounded and had to spend almost two years in detention.

    But there was no stopping the bulldozer. A man with a gargantuan appetite for business success, Wale once told me that he learnt from Chief Bode Akindele, the recently deceased real estate mogul and Parakoyi of Ibadanland , that in business, the size and scope of success are determined by the size and scope of appetite. It was a lesson he has taken to heart.

    The wide ideological gulf and political differences between us have not stopped us from enjoying an intimate and affectionate relationship bristling with bucolic banters and saucy jokes.

    He could be an impossible customer, often openly deriding snooper’s political affiliations while yours sincerely often stop him dead in his track by invoking certain village protocols and the possibility of political reprisals.

    There was a point he would wake one up in the dead of the night. Whenever snooper complained about his sleep being disrupted, the fellow would retort that yours sincerely was not entitled to any sleep as long as one’s friends in high places will not allow him to sleep too. Saying this in the vernacular is more hilarious and entertaining than the English translation.

    Apropos of that, snooper once placed B.O.B and a leading politician in the same room with a retired justice of the Supreme Court acting as a Samaritan and do-gooder.

    The plan was to hammer out an acceptable solution to a longstanding dispute. After about ten minutes, to my sorrow and chagrin, the meeting ended in a fiasco with the participants heading in different directions.

    All in all, Wale has earned his spurs. It is not easy in an environment like Nigeria to combine successful legal practice with top-grade business venturing.

    The highly rated Babalakin Law Firm and the iconic NMA2 domestic airport stand as double monument to his exertions.

    In all this, Wale has been very lucky in his choice of wife. Gbolahan, the tame and temperate daughter of the heroic late Justice Jinadu, is a formidable pillar of strength and stabilising force in the background. Here is wishing the birthday boy many happy returns.