The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • The movement of transition

    The movement of transition

    Last week, on Sunday to be precise, Nigeria lost two of her most famous sons. Even for a nation inured to endless mysteries and political perplexities, the astrological signals and significance of these departures could hardly be missed. It was like a double meteor falling off the skies in quick succession. Nigerians had hardly taken in the import of the passing of a former ruler of the country in faraway London where he had sought medical refuge only to be informed that a frontline traditional ruler had also joined his ancestors, this time in the privacy of the royal bedroom.

     General Mohammadu Buhari was a notable soldier and civil war hero who became a military head of state and was removed by his colleagues for his strong-willed inflexibility and inability to transcend primordial and provincial proclivities. A man of adamantine resolve, he later became a civilian ruler of the country after three unsuccessful attempts. In the case of Oba Sikiru Kayode Adetona, he was a stellar and outstanding product of Nigeria’s durable and resilient traditional institution, becoming the Awujale  at the youthful age of twenty six in 1960 and going on to rule over his people with courage and forthrightness for the next sixty five years. After some youthful indiscretions, he settled down to rule his people with much royal flair and firmness.

    It was, as they say in this clime, the end of an era. But it is much more profound than that. It was a historic watershed for Nigeria. It was the culmination of the movement of transition in a particular direction which makes reversal in the former direction totally impossible having exhausted its historical and material possibilities. As enunciated by our former teacher Professor Oyin Ogunba, a liberal humanist and scholar of distinction, the movement of transition stresses the absolute contiguity between the world of the living and the world of the dead in the Yoruba cosmology. But it is a one-way traffic or as Amos Tutuola will put it in his colourful English: it is a journey to the land of the “unreturnable”. The dead have expended their visa and cannot return to the world of the living. This is why certain deaths are symbolic of a collective closure and the culmination of a particular phase of existence in a particular nation. It is the unforced and unhurried exit of certain historical forces and exceptional personalities that have dominated and determined the fortunes of their country for good or bad. They are what Charles de Gaulle, thinking of himself, called “sacred monsters”.

     The case of the late Awujale is more straightforward and less complicated. The nasty posthumous spat with traditionalists who wanted to take control of the royal remains notwithstanding, he was a beneficiary of more benevolent historical forces and a benign conjuncture. His was a cohesive society with core values shaped by the history and culture of his industrious and enterprising people. Among the various sub-nations of the cultured and cosmopolitan Yoruba people, the Ijebu people stand out for the solidity of their worldview, the rigour of their traditional institutions and the breezy confidence with which they deal with existential and historical exigencies. They have been living in the same domain continuously for over a thousand years and they have never been militarily subdued except once when overconfidence and lack of discretion allowed vastly superior British artillery to overrun their ramparts ending in a humiliating rout at Imagbon in 1892. They quickly recovered the initiative   after taking to heart the lesson that ancient amulets are no match for modern bullets.

      There can be no doubt that Oba Sikiru Adetona left Ijebu-Ode a much better, more prosperous and culturally thriving place than he met it, with his people more united, more vibrant, more accomplished and forward-looking. Thanks to his cousin, Mike Adeniyi Adenuga the Globacom mogul, the annual Ojude Oba gathering has been transformed into a global cultural extravaganza which has brought world-wide fame and recognition to his domain. He had met Ijebu-Ode a rural municipality and had transformed it through sheer determination and the force of his towering personality to a thriving modern city with well-paved roads, majestic edifices, amenities, first class institutions and a slew of industries. Nothing that could add lustre and prestige to his beloved town escaped his attention and searching scrutiny. A personal example will suffice. After the burial of Toun Onabanjo in 2011, yours sincerely in the company of some notable Yoruba leaders, repaired to his palace.

     It was our first and last meeting. After introduction, the Awujale concentrated his gaze and attention on the columnist bemoaning the fact that one was one of those Ijebu children lost to the diaspora. Even after Chief Segun Osoba had told him that one was from a village in Osun State, the revered monarch insisted on our departure that the columnist must return home to put something on ground. Such was his charismatic charm and the goodwill he radiated. By the time he joined his ancestors last Sunday, the late king had been transformed into a supranatural personage of transcendental courage and immanent integrity, a mighty oak and auroch among men. Little wonder that the entire Ijebuland had been thrown into deep mourning and depression.

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     Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said about the general from Daura who left his country far more bitterly divided, polarized and impoverished than when he met it as a self-professed born again democrat and civilian leader. In death as in life, General Mohammadu Buhari split his country and people centrally. While the Nigerian ruling class and its global cohorts showered effusive encomiums and fake testimonials on him, the teeming masses of Nigerians across ethnic and religious lines were not impressed. They jettisoned the cultural admonishment not to speak ill of the dead as nothing but feudal veto and autocratic overreach.

    Angry callers jammed switchboards condemning him as an ineffectual political leader and his reign a massive rip-off and hypocritical scam. Never in living memory, except the passing of General Sani which was met with widespread celebrations and wild jubilation in some sections of the country, has a Nigerian leader met with such hostility and scarification in death. They accused him of not walking his talk on corruption, of leaving Nigeria with a worse security nightmare and of compounding the problems of ethnic, religious and cultural diversities in the country. Yet others hailed him for his infrastructural feats which are unequalled and unprecedented in the annals of the country and his massive empowerment schemes which turned out a classic instance of Stone Age economics compounded by a fiscal fiddling of the Exchequer.

     These divergent and countervailing opinions point at something more fundamental: a deeper structural misalignment of the nation which Buhari was fundamentally incapable of perceiving. He was a systems man and not a system changer or disruptor. His was a narrow and circumscribed feudal worldview in which all the issues were already settled and in which everybody was supposed to know his place. Having such a man as a leader in a roiling postcolonial menagerie of combustible contradictions is a cruel set-up. But power hungry while being politically maladroit Buhari was a willing martyr and accomplice. He allowed himself to be set up while also setting up the country and its teeming expectant populace. Under the spreading colonial chestnut tree of political perfidy, you sold me and I sold you.

    A man of more cultivated social habits, wider reading regimen and sharper political instincts would have seen through the fog from a mile off. Throughout his life, there was a lingering whiff of spite, resentment and scornful contempt as if he could not live down the haughty condescension of the blue-blood feudal Brahmins who looked down on him as belonging to an inferior caste of forest dwellers and the humiliation of having been toppled by his own junior colleagues. After he was elected the president of the country, a senior military colleague and former benefactor was known to have remonstrated with him that it was time to forget and forgive those who had wronged him in the past. He was said to have looked up in consternation at his former boss before exploding: “Including Ibrahim?” Yet it was the same Ibrahim whose magnanimity and generosity of spirit made sure no harm came his way on the night he was arrested and dethroned.

    Nigeria is not a unified or homogeneous country. Its contradictions have not been simplified and unbundled to a simple confrontation between the haves and the have-nots. Those, including this writer, who invested unrealistic hopes in the general from Daura have not been fair to him or the country. We had unfairly surmised that with his populist mystique, his aura of authority and messianic infallibility he would be the avenging avatar that would drag the north by the scruff of the neck screaming and kicking into the portals of modernity. But General Buhari is not a Colonel Mustapha Kemal Ataturk; neither is he a Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser or even Colonel Muammar Ghaddafi for that matter. This is because Nigeria is neither Turkey nor Egypt or Libya. We must always modify our expectations based on the internal configuration and the state of nationhood of each country.

    General Mohammadu Buhari has given it his very best shot. He was not a rebel or a radical but a former herd-boy made good. In an engrossing play of irony, his military superiors who in 1976 upon the assassination of Murtala Mohammed foreclosed his appointment as Chief of General Staff, Defense Headquarters on the patriotic grounds that based on his political clumsiness such an appointment might imperil a sterling military career merely opened a surer path to political preeminence for him. General Obasanjo and General Danjuma could not see far into the turbulent future. Both Buhari and Shehu Yar’Adua, the man who acceded to the post, were classmates in Katsina Provincial College but there is no evidence of deep friendship between the two. The two military brass hats ended up in partisan politics with Yar’Adua perishing in Abacha’s Gulag while Buhari went on to become a twice elected civilian president.

      With the transition of General Buhari last Sunday, we have reached the end of an era; a critical threshold in the history of the nation and the culmination of events which began fifty years earlier with the overthrow of General Yakubu Gowon and the ascendance, military dominance and political hegemony of the civil war officers, those heady warriors who believed that because they fought for the unity and preservation of the country, they also had a right to control the political and economic destiny of the nation. They have left their deep marks on the tumultuous history of the nation. It has taken half a century for the nation to discharge its debt of obligation to them. But now, Nigeria has entered a new phase.

  • Hegemony, national decline and anomie

    Hegemony, national decline and anomie

    Several readers of this column have been asking the columnist to comment on current political developments in the country, particularly the gathering of the tribe of the discontented and disaffected under the aegis of the perennially mercantilist and irresponsible party known as ADC. This is a cartel of political courtesans willing to submit and surrender its flag to anybody provided the price is right. The first impulse is to dismiss the whole caucus, minus one or two misguided idealists such as our friend and beloved aburo, Rauf Aregbesola, as a stellar assemblage of crooks, conmen and compulsive carpetbaggers. But that will be sheer emotive diatribe, not in keeping with the stated ethos of this column to always historicize, that is to look analytically at matters arising and view things from a deeper historical perspective.

     Consequently, this column will not join in the demonization and stigmatization of Rauf Aregbesola. It offends the deep cannons and ethos of Yoruba Omoluabi culture to pour public scorn and invectives on a person with whom you have shared deep fraternal bonding.  A quirky, cerebral and intensely competitive fellow, Rauf loves to argue and contend at the highest dialectical level. An early sticking point was how to wean Rauf off his romantic idealization of the eponymous Soviet worker and his insistence on transposing this mythical personage to the Osun subsoil. As a person on ground, one had impressed it on the then governor that unlike his idealized Soviet worker with his promethean feats of endurance and self-denial in the service of a greater cause, the Osun people are joyous royalist regicides who brook no nonsense from any overreaching ruler.

      Under any draconian rule, they will chafe first in polite disavowal before embarking on a wholesale rebellion. This insistence on ramming unpalatable choices down the throat of a fiercely independent and freedom loving people has led to a political catastrophe in the state. When news of his political rebellion against his boss and benefactor began filtering out, God knows how many times one remonstrated with the erstwhile governor now minister which included two private trips to Abuja. On one occasion on a major Muslim holiday, the two of us were huddled together in his Abuja home in fierce contention for about four days. Alas, it was all to no avail as one of the greatest mobilisers of his generation appears to have crossed the Rubicon. We do not know what his former master knows, being a master gamesman in this deadly political polo, rumours swirled around that his boy had succumbed to combination of Fulani tira and even more potent political treachery.

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     This lethal potion is normally administered on notable Yoruba politicians who are stranded by choice, feeding them with the illusion that as better Muslims and more competent administrators, they are more acceptable choices than their leaders where it mattered most. At the tail end of the Second Republic, the rumour was rife that a famous disciple and aspiring clone of Chief Awolowo was about to succumb to the deadly diet before the military intervened. But he was to meet his comeuppance in not too dissimilar circumstances exactly ten years after.

      This is the stuff of another epic tragedy being enacted before our very eyes. It is not that a leader cannot or must never be deposed. But apex followership in a fraught multi-ethnic nation demands its own obligations, visionary sacrifices and political savvy. As we have seen in the Awolowo and Abiola saga, the Yoruba people have developed a sense of permanent siege in the roiling postcolonial coliseum that Nigeria has become and no matter the failings and the vulnerabilities of their subsisting arrowhead, the people never forget or forgive leaders who desert the trenches, particularly if they do not represent a clearer pathway to freedom and emancipation from the hell that is Nigeria. According to a Yoruba proverb, it is the stick at hand that one must use in killing or warding off a menacing snake. Unfortunate as it is for a nation aspiring to an organic cohesion of values, the ethnicization of politics among Nigeria’s major nationalities is a reflection of our badly skewed federal arrangement. In the absence of a pan-Nigerian avatar, the ethnic menagerie will survive until competing and countervailing ethnicities exhaust themselves either within the current nation space or without it.

      Before moving to the broader historical sweep, this is the political and sociological context to view current political developments, particularly the gale of defections and the berthing of notable refugees and other wayfarers in ADC. It has been said that Nigeria is a country of one major drama per day. But a lot of this is unproductive drama enacted for the entertainment of bemused and bewildered masses and spectators alike. Before now, it was the threat of a one-party state that had preoccupied the political imagination of the average Nigerian. The dramatic emergence of the ADC coalitionists suddenly changed all that jolting the ruling party out of its lethargic and self-absorbed complacency. Some APC topnotches were beginning to sound like the APP decamp who famously proclaimed a sixty year Reich for the PDP. This is what the lack of a viable opposition does to dominant political parties.

      In a sense then, there is a ring of inevitability about the emergence and structuring of the ADC. The problem with a murky pool is that it can only throw up muck. With the badly wounded PDP heaving in terminal trauma, there was bound to be some consequences. As this column has noted several times, Nigeria is too volatile, too combustible to naturalize a one-party state. But if there is some inevitability about the emergence of the ADC as a behemoth umbrella, there is also something eerily unsettling about the lack of freshness and originality in its form and format, its obsession at this early stage with post and preferment and the startling absence of any emancipatory zeal and vigour.

      You cannot give what you don’t have. It is a combination of farce and tragedy. This is the surviving rump of a supplanted post-military hegemonic coalition exhausting its historic and political possibilities in full public glare. It is a measure of how far its putative leader, Brigadier David Alechenu Mark, himself has journeyed down the road to political infamy. Forty two years ago Mark’s name travelled round informed circuits as the mastermind of a looming putsch by radically disaffected junior officers who were bent on terminating the mess and embarrassment the Second Republic had become. That was before their conservative seniors stepped in to preserve the dominant ethos.  Now, he is heading a conservative gathering of political desperadoes after his antidemocratic hell-raising during the June 12 debacle. 

       Political hegemonies are made of sterner stuff. It has never been a pounded yam and bush meat party. There are rumours however that acutely aware of its electoral deficits, its unpopularity with the wider masses and its lack of strategic and organizational acumen, the ADC innermost caucus are not actually gunning for an outright victory but seeking for a massive disruption of the electoral process which will eventuate in anomie and a total breakdown of law and order in the country. They will be hoping that their anti-democratic exertions will feed on and in turn be fueled by the rising wave of insecurity in the nation, the growing political discontent among segments of the elite whose federal feeding bottle has been taken away and the undeniable apocalyptic hunger in the land. It will be left to economic historians of the future to determine how measures taken to boost the economy and to reprieve the nation from certain fiscal collapse could also engender catastrophic political consequences in an ethnically polarized nation with contrasting and countervailing modes of production. This is where President Tinubu will face his stiffest political test in the coming months as elections almost two years away begin to assume a disproportionate centrality in the affairs of the nation. A famished soul is the devil’s ultimate play station. As far as the generalized masses of impoverished people are concerned, all the number-crunching about economic growth and promising indices of recovery are nothing but elite games of figures without any direct relevance to their parlous condition.

    Hegemony is structured domination over a period of time by a group, a people, a party or an organization. The domination is often so complete and “natural” that it rarely resorts to force, violence or coercion to impose its order and authority. The bane and tragedy of post-independence politics in Nigeria is that those who have shown themselves to be masters of hegemonic domination have not shown the same mastery in nation-growing or inclusive and egalitarian development. Hence the constant slide into decline and anomie as seen in the First, Second and Third Republics.

     Among the first crop of leaders thrown up in postcolonial Nigeria, the late Ahmadu Bello remains in a class of his own. He was a master of hegemonic politics. Through sheer heft of number, he was able to bluff his way and browbeat the other two regional rivals into substantial compliance. Through strategic gaming and brilliant bridge-building, he managed to weld a disparate and amorphous region into substantial cohesion turning it in the process to a forbidding and formidable threat to genuine federalism. But he was no visionary national avatar. His was not a pan-Nigerian vision of an all-inclusive economic growth and egalitarian emancipation but a northern-based subordination of modern citizenship to feudal subjecthood. Towards the end of it all with the Tiv forcibly subdued, with the west in conflagration and the east chafing from coerced cohabitation, the nation was sliding into anomie and it was left to Igbo artillery to break the political deadlock with ruinous consequences. With no lesson learnt, the Second Republic was upended by soldiers after economic and political profligacy buoyed by a sense of feudal entitlement pushed the nation in the direction of anarchy and chaos.

      Discounting the aborted Third Republic which summarily imploded as a result of military overreach based on a narrow and circumscribed regional ethos, it is now obvious that if care is not taken the Fourth Republic faces very much the same grim prospects. The fraught and contradictory ensemble of strange bedfellows which produced the APC has been fraying at the edges since the advent of General Buhari and his divisive proclivities. But they often manage to patch things up.  However, the gathering clouds this time around appear very portentous. Tinubu is a dogged fighter; a heavyweight bruiser in the classic American tradition. But it is not clear whether in the shifty and treacherous quicksand of Nigerian politics, he has managed to stitch and cobble together a sturdy hegemonic coalition which can withstand adversarial pressures.

     In a sense, it is beginning to feel as if we are back in the First Republic but with reverse dynamics. In the First Republic, a hegemonic project of political domination without an agenda for an all-inclusive national development and genuine elite harmony led to a fiasco. This time around, a push for an all-inclusive economic transformation of the nation relying on an artificial elite integration may well backfire on all of us. The historical process with its underlying morbidities often transcends individual actors however important or self-important. We must hope for inclement weather.   

  • Silently and savagely flows the Guadalupe River

    Silently and savagely flows the Guadalupe River

    Humanity has scaled the highest mountain in the universe. We have reached the bottom of the deepest ocean. We have performed incredible feats of endurance which would have made our ancestors wince in fright and admiration. We have reached the moon and have built unimaginable cities. We have developed sophisticated means of transportation which have made a short shrift of distance and sojourning. Yet the more we try to humanize nature, the more nature returns to dehumanize us. Despite all the advances of science and technology, nature and its unfathomable mysteries remain a source of misery and perplexity.

      Last week, the Guadalupe River in Texas struck with the ferocity of a dumb beast. Gathering strength and speed from flash floods, it rose phenomenally in a matter of minutes and began sweeping everything before it, tearing up the entire landscape. It was not a pretty sight. Destruction wrought on such an apocalyptic scale has never been known to be pretty. Such was the force and demonic momentum of the floods that whole counties were submerged, homes destroyed and farms flooded. Worst hit was the Kerr County with its infrastructure devastated. Many were those nestling in the comfort of their home or taking a leisurely walk with their partners who were swept away never to be seen again. Even more poignant and harrowing was the plight of a group of young girls camping out at a rural resort nearby named Mystic near Kerrville.

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      Designed to inculcate the virtues of heroism, discipline, fortitude and superhuman endurance in young Americans, the camp took a direct hit and became a casualty of its own exalted aspirations. In a gripping irony of misbegotten modernity, many of the kids were said to have been encouraged to leave their phones behind at home to forestall any reliance on the high-tech accomplices of civilized lassitude. The rampaging floods smashed up the whole camp and carried off most of the campers including the director. According to President Donald Trump, in a rare emotional speech monitored life in Kerrville on Friday evening, the flash floods were like “huge, huge waves in the Pacific Ocean”. Needless to add that such huge waves are like massive anacondas which first break the spine of their victims before gobbling them up. At the last count, one hundred and twenty one people have perished with at least 170 people still missing. There are heartrending images of traumatised parents of the missing clinging to the last straw of hope that their lost one would return to their warm embrace.

      As a former denizen of Texas State with its verdant and rolling plains as you drive up to College Station on your way to the Houston megapolis, and as a lapsed habitué of the quaint and beautiful city of San Antonio, with its scenic and picturesque downtown promenades, yours sincerely feel a deep emotional identification with the great people of Texas at this moment of pains and acute misery. The governor of Texas has said that it was an opportunity to rebuild and rebuild on a grander and vaster scale. There are some lives that will never be rebuilt. But life must go on. Like the nearby Mississippi River, life rolls on forever till the end of time.                       

  • The superannuation of Europe

    The superannuation of Europe

    (Have nukes and balls, will travel)

    Nothing lasts forever. Do not let anybody deceive or confuse you that things are fixed and eternal. While civilizations take much longer to unravel, hegemonies collapse regularly and routinely after they have reached the limits of their possibility. Between 1870 when the Germans reached the gates of Paris and 1944 when the French with the help of Americans and Allied Forces managed to expel the selfsame Germans from Paris after a four-year occupation, the dominant order was close to collapse as a result of a war of hegemony among leading nations. Between 1870 and 1944, there were over thirty six documented wars which included encounters in far-flung places such as the Anglo-Boer War in South Africa and America’s confrontation with the Spaniards in both Cuba and the Philippines.  Lonely isolated encounters and explosion of hostilities do not often herald the end of hegemonies. It is when they come together in a global maelstrom that tongues begin to wag about the end of an epoch. In all human history, if there is anything constant about the relentless wars of hegemonies, it is the centrality of arms and superior violence.

      With specific reference to Africa, consider these disturbing facts. Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and the Kingdom of Eswatini formerly known as Swaziland have all fallen off the world map without as much as a whimper. Kenya which again erupted in murderous violence in the past week is probably following close on their heels. The unique nature of postcolonial wars in Africa is that they are fought entirely as civil wars which reflect the vulnerability and fragility of the nation-state prototype imposed on the continent by the departing colonial masters. The peace accord between Rwanda and DRC superintended by Washington is not worth the paper on which it was written.

      The international community no longer cares about what happens on the benighted continent. If they care let them kill off and eliminate themselves to the last person as long as they leave the vast mineral resources intact. The minerals are far more important than the multitude of dehumanized humanity. Whatever remains can be put to better use for the rest of humankind in a way its thieving and unhinged elites could never imagine or contemplate. The cradle of civilization has become an embarrassment and an obscene insult to the rest of humanity.

       The international community did not reach this conclusion lightly. Its own plate is filled to the brim with combustible combos. It is embroiled and embattled on many fronts. The global order is fractured down the line. A local proverb says that if your garment is up in flames and your child’s fabric is also ablaze, you must first put out the fire singeing through you before you can find the mental equilibrium to deal with filial emergency. The Serbs are still nursing their wounds after they were expelled by aerial bombardment from their genocidal siege on Croatia and Kosovo as Tito’s Yugoslavia unravelled in a spiral of blood and mayhem.

     For almost three years, Russia, their fellow-traveller in Slavic hyper-nationalism, has subjected Ukraine to a slow-motion demolition with America, Europe and the rest of the world looking askance unable to do anything about the horrific carnage. The old map of the Middle East has been torn to shreds with Israeli emerging as the new law-giver and colonial superpower. Gaza is reduced to apocalyptic rubble and this past week it was the turn of Iran to be subjected to high-tech blitz by the combined power of America and Israel. Trump spoke of a possible nuclear obliteration of the ancient civilization and the Israeli High Command warned darkly that the Iranian Supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had lost the right to exist. It was a grim reminder of an oxymoronic formulation: civilized savagery or modern barbarism has become the new norm. Even our old primitive ancestors would have winced in fright at the images coming out of Gaza. Their own savagery was delimited and circumscribed by the fact that they had no access to modern weapons of mass destruction. The world has become a far more dangerous and threatening place. With China warming its cockles for its inevitable Taiwanese dinner, it is going to get nastier. The meticulous and mercilessly precise Chinese are merely waiting for the locked door to swing open on its own before they pounce.

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    The more modern and civilized humanity has become the more savage and unreconstructed their inner essence has turned out. Weak people and poor nations have no place in the new arrangement. The global subalterns can talk but they cannot be heard. It is the muffled rumbling of impotence. Walter Benjamin famously noted that there is no record of civilization which is not at the same time a record of barbarism. But this time around there is no record of barbarism which is not enshrined in the new code of modernity. With its back to the wall and its hands tied from behind, Iran was forced to eat the humble pie and accept a humiliating Pax Americana handed down by the new Supreme Global Leader, Taoiseach Donald Trump. Let the world know that a new international order has dawned.

      As the triumphant convoy of the American president swept past the NATO headquarters this past week with hubristic glee, you got a sense that something was not quite right. The atmosphere was of chilly and chilling solitude. There were no crowds to welcome and cheer on the all-conquering American chieftain. It was a grumpy and self-absorbed old man that slouched out of the sedan wearing his characteristic mixture of a frown and a grimace. The man of peace was not at peace with himself. The strains and drains of the sleepless nights were showing. Unlike the plucky, devil may care Benjamin Netanyahu whose older brother was killed during the raid on Entebbe, Donald Trump, for all the bluff and bluster, is not your natural warrior. He seems to harbor a profound distaste for blood and gore which may yet be the saving grace and abiding luck of Western civilization.

     It was after all the Israeli prime minister who showed him how it could be done and how the Iranians with their hysteric ranting could be taken down by high precision bombing and reduced to whimpering nonentities in their own homestead. The Israeli tail has been wagging the American body for quite some time and only God knows how that one will pan out in the coming months. Perhaps that was why Trump appeared so preoccupied even in pomp and glory. The Netanyahu question is even more compelling than the Putin puzzle as Trump is bound to find out. But what made the NATO drama more compelling was the surreal sight of European leaders tumbling and stumbling over themselves in groveling self-abasement to pay homage and compliments to the American leader who appeared to be the least interested in their sedulous inanities. The American president was in no mood to compliment any of them as he shunned and ignored them as they lined up for photo-ops whooshing and wheezing over the unsmiling autocrat from across the Atlantic who seemed to have a full measure of their cadging and wheedling.

       This is not Great Europe as the world knew it. This was no longer the Europe of Winston Churchill, Konrad Adenauer, Willy Brandt, Charles de Gaulle, Giscard Valery D’Estaing , Harold Wilson, Harold Macmillan, Margaret Thatcher and Sir Peter Carrington who once famously dismissed an American Secretary of State as a purveyor of Boys’ Scout Diplomacy. This was in response to his being privately shaded as a duplicitous bastard by the no-nonsense American four-star general. The new generation of European leaders have grown fat and unproductive on American largesse and are mortally afraid of the feeding bottle being snatched away by a vengeful and furious Trump who has seen through the charade of a multilateralism in which America is expected to pick the tab for protecting Europe against predators and for fighting its wars for them. Not being warrior-statesmen in the mold of Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle or a fierce amazon like Margaret Thatcher, European leaders are content to let Americans fight their wars for them so that the citizens can have a life of bliss and peaceful prosperity. Donald Trump is having none of that subsidized indolence. Although his country remains stupendously rich, Trump is insisting that the pains and pangs of war ought to be more evenly spread around.

    With the painful riot act dropped on them from the American throne like a mega-ton bomb, European leaders looked like supplicating sissies before an all-powerful global sovereign this past week. Now that America has abandoned all pretenses to multilateralism, it is going to be a bareknuckle contention all the way and Europe will find itself reduced to the status of a neo-vassal continent. European countries will find themselves in the excellent company of their former African colonies. There is no point in settling the order of precedent between coolies and serfs. This past week one watched with colonial satisfaction as Donald Trump barked at the Spaniards, the first real superpowers of the modern world, for being remiss in coming up with their NATO levies. It was all grimly reminiscent of Benito Cereno, a remarkably clairvoyant novella by Herman Melville, the great American nineteenth century novelist, which accurately predicted the humbling and superannuation of Imperial Spain. The puny Spanish sea-men cut a truly pathetic figure as the incredibly devious African sailors who had mutinied in high seas ran them aground in an unfurling web of intrigues and silent power plays as the burly, superbly fit Americans watched proceedings with stern interest ready to restore order at short notice.

       It was a truly astonishing insight into the absorbing dynamics of historical superannuation such as can only come from a creative genius. It may well be that the European statesmen, as wily masters of historical temporizing, may be playing for time, hoping that the long run of events will restore parity and sanity. It is said in local parlance that sometimes you may have to dress a dangerous mad person in the resplendent garb of a prospective much sought after bridegroom just to assure your safe passage. Unfortunately, the short and long term optics does not appear to favour such rosy optimism.

     In keeping with protocols, it is appropriate to end this drama of trading places with another conceit. At the end of the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin, the great American author, inventor, publisher and statesman, arrived in Paris as the ambassador and representative of the new nation. His gaiety, ebullience and devil may care aplomb astonished and alarmed the Parisian high culture in equal measure and led them to conclude that it was only in America that such a person could serve as ambassador. It was meant as a sly putdown but it was an ironic compliment. Last week and centuries after as Donald Trump swept through the NATO Headquarters with his gruff disdain for polite conversation and diplomatic etiquette, the same European high culture would have concluded that it was only in America that such gung-ho militarism and bad manners could be associated with the highest office in the land. The joke is on them. Donald Trump is the supreme law-giver.      

  • Baba Lekki sings Ketekete for Atiku

    Baba Lekki sings Ketekete for Atiku

    To the Agindingbi Town Hall on this dismal and wet late June morning where Baba Lekki, the famous contrarian and veteran hell raiser, is holding a seminar for politically displaced people, PDP. Ever since the president of the republic dismissed the motley crowd of political chancers hankering after his job as “political IDPs” tongues have been wagging as to whether IDP was the same as PDP and whether a lethal combination of the two meant DOD (Dead on Delivery). In a litigious society where litigation itself had been known to have been sued for not being litigative enough, one must proceed with caution in these matters. This morning with a fretful and rather nervous Okon in tow, the old man cut a figure of scholarly sobriety and legal gravitas. He had brought with him maps, sketches and political memorabilia to prove that the opposition had deliberately committed suicide which amounted to voluntary self-elimination.  But before things could get on an even keel, a huge disturbance emanated from the back of the hall which was packed full with miscreants, scoundrels and political Oblomovs.

    “Oga mi I never chop for three days, abi na so so politics we go chop? I no be PDP, I be EDP”, a rotund man with huge biceps screamed from the back.

     “And what is that?” an irate freelance thug demanded. With his mahogany frame and scarified face, it was obvious he was not a person to mess around with.

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    “Economically Deprived People”, the rotund man shouted.

     “Ha, I see. He is one of these Obidient people. He has been brought to disturb baba. If he doesn’t shut his mouth, I will seal it for him”, the mahogany man threatened as he began hauling a huge brown amulet out of his pocket. Things seemed to have simmered down considerably after that.

    “As I was saying,” the old man began, “ADA is Brought In Dead. They are dead politicians disturbing the peace of the land, it will end in what the Yoruba people call ADANU or great loss”. The audience swooned at this great play on words with one of them hailing the old recidivist as a great genius lost to the world of native poetry.

    “Baba, so what will become of a great man like Atiku? Na my in-law from Ilesha,” one man asked from the crowd with a funereal hiccup. Baba Lekki burst into a deranged smile.

    “Foolish man, why you no warn your in-law when him dey climb Langbodo tree? I warned Atiku. I told him these foolish wazobia boys will take all his money and run away. Now, they have broken the camel’s back. Atiku don become Tinko meat. Nwon ti pa ketekete” (They have killed donkey!) The entire hall erupted in applause.

      At this point, the old man began singing and dancing the ketekete classic to the great delight of the crowd.

  • The importance of struggle

    The importance of struggle

    Struggle or ceaseless contention whether at the personal or impersonal level and whether it is physical, metaphysical or cerebral, is about the most important aspect of human existence. We see it every day either at the nuclear family level, the extended family, the national, the societal, the global, gender and even at the most intensely personal levels. There can be no progress without conflict. No human advancement is possible without struggle; no civilization is feasible without some antagonistic exertions. Throughout recorded history, humanity has always oscillated between peaceful cohabitation and violent confrontation. Under peace humans covet war and during war they court peace. This is one of the most intriguing paradoxes of human existence.

        Penultimate Thursday on the thirty second anniversary of the June 12, 1993 presidential election whose outcome was annulled by a military cabal, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in his national broadcast unveiled a list of the protagonists of the struggle to rid the country of military despotism. The symbolic import of the moment was lost on many. Following on the protocol established earlier by General Mohammadu Buhari who broke the ice by insisting that Abiola, the winner of the annulled election, was a legitimately elected president of Nigeria, Tinubu’s was a bold and lightning move on the political chessboard which shattered the myth of the old feudal order and prised the lingering limpets of their remaining delusions and tenuous hold on political reality. It was a move which was as disruptive of the last vestigial remnants of the hegemonic coalition which has prevented Nigeria’s emergence as a modern nation as it was redolent of the possibility of a new beginning for Nigeria.

        President Tinubu must have struggled with himself and the list, judging by subsequent disclosures. It is no easy task coming up with a list of prodemocracy notables in a nation hobbled by divisions and fractured down the line by intense schisms. There are significant omissions and contradictions galore, apart from one or two curios and political hermaphrodites. For example Ken Saro-Wiwa and his Ogoni nation did not even bother to vote on June 12 1993 as a result of a lingering dispute with the Nigerian state but they are united with the June 12 agitators by their mutual hostility to the authoritarian antics of a harsh, unitarist state. In a paradoxical tribute to the residual powers of the postcolonial state to reorder the life of its citizens some living people were awarded lower honours than the one they already got while others were subject to state vivisection or posthumous retribution.

      But that does not vitiate the integrity of the gesture, nor its symbolic significance. There will be rectifications as the pressure eases. It is important to always retain a sense of the longer perspective or what the French call “la longue duree” in these matters. Nobody would have thought this possible twenty five years earlier as General Obasanjo began a deliberate and systematic roll-back of the gains of demilitarization by substituting brutish autocratic rule for fledgling democratic governance until he met his comeuppance in the hands of a resurgent senate led by Ken Nnamani. But here we are with the guns of hilly redoubts funereally silent. The cunning of history cannot be more cunning.

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      What is even more important is to retain a sense of struggle as the constant and permanent imperative of human existence. Without struggle, nothing can be gained and all will be lost. Without struggle, a society resembles a stagnant pool with foul and fetid odour oozing from its dark disabled mass totally lacking in restorative energy and dynamism. A stagnant pool cannot move itself forward, not to talk of its contents therein which are trapped in terminal inertia and progressive decay. It is useful to recall that before the whole concept of jihad became militarized and weaponized as an instrument of relentless conquest spearheaded by the Muslim conquerors of modern Turkey, it meant “self-striving” or self-struggle, that is constant self-improvement at the physical, intellectual and spiritual level. But the idea of the jihad as unrelenting siege against “unbelievers” helped the Ottoman warriors to steamroll an enormous swathe of Europe until it met its peril outside the gates of Vienna in 1683. Thereafter, a rapidly industrializing Western Europe infused with the dynamism of new technological advancement and philosophical enlightenment took over the reins of power and began to inflict serial humiliation on the Islamic world, a development which reached its apogee this past week with the remarkable blitzing of Iran by America and Israel.

      As we have seen with the June 12 campaign, the struggle for the democratic emancipation of a society is often spearheaded by the most articulate and enlightened segment of the society. But its bounties and dividends do not exclude or exempt any section of the society. The most recalcitrant and vociferous elements who were in support of the annulment are among the greatest contemporary beneficiaries of a democratic Nigeria. Active saboteurs of the democratic ethos and key members of the annullists’ innermost caucus and those who vowed to shoot Abiola the very moment he was declared president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria have since held down important posts in the post-military Republic including the senate presidency without anybody disturbing them or attempting to annul their election despite the glaring electoral malfeasance. Some of them have continued to strut and preen about as if nothing happened and without any sense of shame or remorse.

       This is the historic burden individuals, groups and sub-nationals at the frontiers of consciousness and human developments are called upon to bear with grace and nobility. In multi-national nations with uneven and even countervailing modes of economic, political and spiritual productions, it is often the most advanced and the most politically conscious segments of the society that are called upon to carry the burden of civilizational advancement on behalf of the rest of the society. If they are lucky, they escape with hideous scars, if not it is genocide and relentless pogroms or structural and systematic exclusion from power.

     The June 12 debacle is illustrative of persistent attempts to undermine or short-circuit Nigeria’s journey to authentic nationhood. In the run up to independence, those who stalled and stonewalled about whether it was the right time for national emancipation from colonial slavery and servitude, those who preferred the unfreedom of medieval peonage to the freedom of postcolonial civilization despite all its troubling shortcomings, were also the first to seize the levers of state power with the active connivance of the colonial powers. Rigged against political, economic and spiritual rationality, it is as if the nation is deliberately programmed to self-destruct. The dire consequences are inevitable. When the risible charade eventuated in pogroms, ethnic insurrections, communal upheavals, military rebellion and a tragic civil war with millions of casualties, it was those who had been discarded whose economic expertise was called upon to rescue the nation from economic collapse.

       With no lesson learnt and nothing forgotten, the wild binge and infantile romance with national suicide continued with the short-lived Second Republic. This time around, it was a man who had famously insisted that he desired to be nothing but a federal lawmaker who was adjudged to be the most qualified for the job. Lack of preparation for the job was the most efficient and effective preparation for the job. It was no more than superintending the most stupendous and mindboggling state larceny and unhinged looting of the national patrimony ever visited on modern humanity. After four years, the Bazaar of Beelzebub was terminated by the military that then proceeded to unleash the most horrendous instance of state aggression on the populace including widespread murder of citizens, state liquidation, mysterious disappearances, ethnic cleansing all culminating in a nasty civil war which claimed over two million citizens.

     When the whole thing ended in tears and predictable tragedy all over again in 1998 with the mysterious demise of General Sani Abacha, the hegemonic forces that have held Nigeria hostage since independence went back to traditional quarters once again to rescue the beleaguered nation. Unfortunately for the nation and his core supporters, General Obasanjo, due to limitations of character and intellect, mistook the sacred mandate to get the nation back on track with a charter of messianic intolerance and autocratic delusions. Mysterious eliminations persisted. Spellbinding corruption resurged.

     With the Owu-born soldier having set the template, Nigeria once again began to list and lurch about like an old ship that had entered uncharted waters and without any certificate of seaworthiness. Such was the unprecedented instances of economic heists and the mismanagement of ethnic, cultural and political diversities that by 2023 Nigeria was facing a seismic implosion. This time around, it appeared as if the nation’s legendary run of luck was about to desert it.

      This was the volatile and combustible conjuncture that threw up President Bola Ahmed Tinubu who is himself a veteran of many of the struggles and an epitome of life at the barricades. This time around, the organic crisis of the state has produced a dangerous power void. The old Selectorate, crippled by loss of credibility and historical legitimacy, were too enfeebled to make any serious move. With their wits scrambled and their perception of reality distorted by historic confusion, the hegemonic rump of the extant power bloc could not bring themselves to directly endorse Tinubu. And since heavens help those who help themselves, particularly in a normless postcolonial coliseum, it was Tinubu himself who made a direct power grab in an election that was as contentious as it was also redolent of the possibility of throwing up the hegemonic hub of a new power formation in the country.

       What Tinubu’s numerous detractors seem to forget is that an angelic leadership cannot evolve from a demonic environment. In the circumstances and in the absence of substantial elite consensus in a nation already split down the line by the misappropriation of its rich heritage of diversities anybody thinking of completely free and fair elections can continue to live in a fools’ paradise. It will not happen. We should stop putting the cart before the horse in this country. Successful elections are the outcome of intricate pacting and strenuous elite negotiations based on a give and take spirit and continuous struggle for self-improvement. This is not decided on election’s day but well before. Elections are routine manifestation of the state of the society itself. This is why countries such as Ghana, Senegal and Tanzania are enjoying a smoother democratic run than Nigeria.

      So far, President Tinubu has managed to contain the economic turbulence arising from the neoliberal prototype he has unleashed on the country with its hints of harsh inequities, brutal neocon social engineering and its Darwinian survival of the fittest. But deep resentments run deep and hunger abides. He has also managed to spring the traps of calculated political blackmail, sustained ethnic baiting and open courting of military intervention emanating from some quarters. Yet apart from the gale of defections which is nothing more than a shuffling of meal tickets among desperate politicians, what looked like the dawn of a new hegemonic power hub appears to have receded into the shadows leaving in its trail a resurgence of inter-ethnic hostilities and murderous confrontations in several northern states. With Benue State foaming in blood, it appears that the old masters of genocidal expansion and lebensraum are back in the game of testing the nerve of the nation to see whether something will give. If they succeed in Benue, they will train their gaze on the South.

       The president should not allow it to be said that the tenuous cord binding Nigeria’s fractious nationalities together finally snapped under his watch. There is little courtesy or accommodation one can extend to people who take delight in shedding the blood of their fellow citizens just to gain political advantage. Taking strong bold steps to preserve the corporeal integrity of the nation cannot be incompatible with vote-harvesting. In any case, those who perpetrate such crimes cannot be interested in elections or democracy for that matter. In 2015 at the inception of the Buhari administration, this column recommended the inauguration of a National Commission for Horizontal and Vertical Integration which works at the level of restoring and maintaining economic, ethnic and religious parity for all Nigerians. Unfortunately, the circumstances have since worsened and the country is being gradually returned to a theatre of massive bloodletting.

       No rational human courts war and disorder. Yet under peace some people desire war just to satisfy their nihilistic neuroses. If they cannot build civilizations they can help to destroy extant ones. With the most agriculturally productive belts of the nation already a prohibited zone thus inducing astronomical rises in the price of staple food, with our highways swarming with murderous marauders crippling inter-state commerce, it is beginning to feel as if the country is being gradually placed on a war-footing. The merchants of occupational terror and expansionist genocide are back on the prowl and Nigeria might have entered another decisive phase in the struggle for the soul of the nation. With the global order fast unravelling, it is a case of every nation for itself. The nation in itself has no chance.

       President Tinubu has shown more than enough political nous and guile not to appreciate the fierce urgency of the moment and how to go about the latest manifestation of the organic crisis of the Nigerian postcolonial state. Let his courage and political pluck not desert him at the appropriate hour. His Gboko Declaration and marching order to security forces will be read as a threat and oblique declaration of war in the appropriate quarters. The president needs to watch his back in the coming months. You can be right and yet be wronged. This is the signal lesson of the June 12 imbroglio.

  • An evening with President Abiola

    An evening with President Abiola

    It was a scene out of the Roman Empire in all its glory and grandeur. The din was impossible, yet there was something sedulous and magical about this display of power at its awesome summit. It was medieval pageantry in Technicolor; a brilliant fusion of the traditional and the modern. A very important man was traversing the highway between mortality and immortality.

        Horses and horsemen collide with outriders and state of the art limousines. State spooks mingle with traditional enforcers dressed like local hunters. An empty gold chariot blasted its way through, heralding the imminent arrival of his imperial majesty, even as a remarkably ugly masquerade which reminded one of an ill-tempered hippopotamus began to press its luck with the crowd. He was Pakaleke, a.k.a the devil of Apataganga.

        From the distance, a dancing procession was approaching. The law enforcement agents were beginning to have problems with the rowdy crowd. As they surged forward, they were beaten back with batons and horsewhips. Everybody was trying to catch a glimpse of the royal carnival. This was not a scene to miss. In his youth and penurious prime, his majesty was known as a dancer and drummer of exceptional endowments. And judging from the royal harem, his prodigious appetite for ravishing beauties remained undimmed by time and tribulation.

        As the dancing procession drew nearer, you could swear that you knew the king somewhere. There was something faintly familiar and yet oddly distant about him; an otherworldly aura of perfect self-control and inner tranquillity. But by now, the lead drummer was getting in the way of the cognitive senses. A brilliant purveyor of social acrimony, he was panning out litigious lyrics with savage delight and with his face permanently contorted in subversive exertion.

     Omo agbon jeje bi eniti o r’obinrin ri

     Beni aya nbe nile; omo nbe nile

        Sugbon obinrin dudu obinrin pupa

     Olorun maje o kuku obinrin.

      And later in response to the din:

         Dami dami dami, Ologundudu

          Dami, dami dami, ariwo majesin

          Kii pa alakara, dami dami dami.

    And much later:

    Gbedogbedo kan o le gb’agogo

     Akanbata o le kan lekun

      Alagbede o le r’ojugun

      Pejapeja o le p’olorun oba

      Oro t’eso pe sobe, pe sobe

       Eyin le so, eyin leso.

      By now as this riotous carnival came into full view, the ever joyous visage, the kind compassionate features, the in your face, devil may care bravura of an Alpha male in full menace, had become unmistakable. He was even more noble of carriage and majestic of mien. Yet like all artists, he had a remarkable sense of rhythm and cadence and was responding to the inner music with a feline suppleness and glorious flair that drew rapturous applause from the crowd. The jaw dropped in awe and astonishment and before you could pronounce the name, the riotous crowd had beaten you to it.

       “It is President Abiola in triumphal procession”, they chanted in unison. The good people of Nigeria, irrespective of race, region and religion, spoke seventeen years ago. And now power is concurring. History shall vindicate the just indeed.

        It has taken a tectonic shift from the template of evil misgovernance to acknowledge the obvious truth that whatever his personal failings and the objective contradictions of the circumstances, Abiola is a hero of democracy in Nigeria. It is not how you begin that matters but how you end up. The fallen hero may yet be forgiven, but it does not vitiate the claim of the emergent hero.

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       Seventeen years ago in June 1993, Nigerians spoke in unison against the barbarity of military rule. Fourteen million of them voted, nine of these for MKO Abiola, charismatic mogul and candidate of the Social Democratic Party. The victory in itself was a political odyssey whose story has never been told in full. Abiola outgunned and outfoxed the military High Command who were expecting a different outcome which would have made their job easier.

    In the event, the military still went ahead to annul the freest and fairest election so far in the history of the nation. It led to a five-year low intensity civil war in which many perished and the Nigerian military junta anathematised by the civilised world. Till date, many still carry the traumatic wounds of that encounter.  There were many, this writer included, who were not Abiola’s fans and who never met him on a one on one basis but who chose to fight on the side of truth and freedom. We chose to lose all, rather than be ruled by primitive predators. A nation-state is not a military or feudal fiefdom.

    As the carnival drew nearer, snooper thought that Goodluck Jonathan ought to be commended for finding the inner strength and resolve to acknowledge the obvious, unlike his mentor and benefactor who, consumed by hatred, irrational envy and petty venom, could not even bring himself to pronounce the name of Abiola. The greatest beneficiary of the June 12 struggle could not abide its greatest martyr and casualty even in death. But as it has been noted, a man may make for himself a throne of bayonets, whether he will be able to sit on it is the question.

    Now that he has taken the tentative step, snooper wondered, Jonathan should be encouraged to go the whole hog in order to bring the necessary closure to this open sore of the modern Nigerian nation. Abiola should be declared a posthumous president of Nigeria with commensurate edification. Truth is constant and steady and no matter how fast a lie travels ahead, it will eventually be overtaken by the truth.

    But judging from the mood of the crowd, If Jonathan does not immortalise Abiola, a future government will after the current farce must have run its course. This is a historic wager which will come to pass soon, no matter what anybody does or fails to do. Jonathan should ask himself why the sudden and vociferous cries for electoral reforms even after his principal had famously and characteristically pooh-poohed the idea. Electoral chicanery, just like annulment, leads to a breakdown of government and governance, not to talk of international derision and opprobrium.

        By now, the din had died down. All the revellers had disappeared. A celestial calm enveloped the universe. In the distance, a few female praise singers could be heard chanting the heroic panegyrics of the first posthumous president of Nigeria. But the late tycoon was nowhere to be found. Even the mad drummer, Ayanlere, with his droopy and dolorous visage, had disappeared. The wild drumming had now been replaced by an Ebenezer Obey classic in honour of the late tycoon.

    Balogun Ojoo, baba Bada, badabarawu

    Ti nbari balogun lehin mi

     Inu mi a dun, ara mi a ya gaga

     Odede lowa tabi yara logbe wa

    T’oba ti gb’ohun mi o

    Masun mawo maa bo, Ologundudu

    Masun mawo maa bo, oko Atinuke….

           Baba Kolawole mi o ire.

    Snooper had slept, joyous but exhausted, with a crushing pile of newspapers containing President Jonathan’s proclamation about Abiola’s heroic stature. In the last stages of consciousness, this avalanche of printed matter began crushing the neck as it made its way to the bare floor. This was a sure recipe for political hallucination. A mobile handset was beginning to slide down towards the buccal cavity now made more cavernous by sheer exhaustion. Suddenly, there was a door from nowhere and as it opened lo it was the late tycoon resplendent and well-rested smiling his famous cherubic smile. The chief was obviously in a bantering mood as he opened up with his famous fusillade of native wisecracks and witticism.

       “Chief, congrats on your posthumous apotheosis”, snooper opened cautiously.

       “ Ah, apoti osi ko, apoti ogun ni.  Oyinbo ti poju .(Haba grammar is too much)  Agboyinbo ki ku le”, the chief replied with devastating wit and local brio.

       “I mean a serving Nigerian president has conceded that you are a hero”, snooper pressed as he suppressed an urge to laugh.

        “Ah you see, I told them you cannot abort a full pregnancy. Ti o  bape titi akalolo a pe baba” the great chief retorted.

        “We must now await the formal proclamation”, snooper continued.

        “ Ah leave them. Adie tosu ti o to, ara e lowa”, the chief observed with fortitude.

        “Even Babangida has joined the chorus”, snooper noted with a hint of disapproval.

        “Ah leave Ibrahim out of it. Omo buruku n’ijo tie. Besides, as our people say, makanmakan loye. A man that is being pursued by a masquerade should take heart, because as people of this world get tired, so do people of the other world.”, the chief noted with a deadpan demeanour.

       “Sir, please explain,” snooper pleaded.

        “You see, Ibrahim is not alone in this thing. When a man says he is Dodondawa, you must know that there is a problem, because Dodo o dawa. Enia lowa lehin dodo to fi ni ohun ni Dodondawa” the chief explained with an even more recondite Yoruba saying.

        “Ah chief, how do you mean?” snooper pressed.

        “Wo iwo omokunrin yi ma fitina mi. (Youngman, don’t trouble me) You see, it is like the case of a masquerade who is killed by a lorry and the people are saying that he has gone back to heaven. Very soon, the mother of the missing will ask for her son”, the chief concluded with wit and calm forbearance.

        Snooper decided to change the topic.

        “Chief, is that not an empty bottle of stout I am looking at under your bed?” snooper queried in a mischievous tone.

        “Ah, some people came and I entertained them. In any case, when you recite the Quran up to the point of rabana, omi amala loku.”, he replied with a boyish grin.

       By now snooper could not resist a wild laugh of relish at the great man’s native wisdom and traditional savvy. He was eyeing me with the poker-faced perspicuity of a traditional savant. Here was the Griot-president Nigeria never had.

      “Chief, by the way, have you seen Alhaji Abubakar Rimi?” snooper asked MKO.

       “Ah, is he here? O ntan lo na niyen. You see, it is like the case of the man who was caught in bed with his own daughter in- law. When he was asked what he thought he was doing, the old man replied, well, gentlemen, e ti gbo? Then it is almost over, it will soon be over”.

         At this point, the bed lamp, dragged by the cord of the mobile set, hit snooper on the ridge of the nose, sending him awake with a crushing pain. It was midnight in Lagos.

    • First published in June, 2010. Now being republished by popular demand.
  • Baba Lekki storms Panti building as Okon calls out Senator Kiti-Kiti

    Baba Lekki storms Panti building as Okon calls out Senator Kiti-Kiti

    The muted celebrations of the Sallah having petered out, Baba Lekki lapsed into a protracted meditative mood and mode. The old contrarian had spent the entire period holed up with his bosom childhood friend, Ibrahim Domingo, who had managed to slaughter a scrawny fowl to commemorate the occasion. This was in response to the biting economic condition. Of solid old Brazilian-Lagosian stock, Ibrahim Domingo was given to Sufi mysticism and end-of-the world-as-we know-it intellectual peregrinations. The dearth of good Sallah ram meat was to be regretted, but if this would cure the denizens of the biggest black nation on earth of their red tooth, the development was wholly welcome, the old man miserably concluded. By red tooth, the old scoundrel meant a predilection for the unrestrained consumption of raw red meat which harks back to some old cannibalistic ethos wired into the DNA of the Black person. But on Monday evening, the old man broke free of his meditative trance. He was back in his warlike default mode. He had bumped into Okon in a nearby street while the crazy boy was moonlighting as an itinerant cobbler.

     “Okon, I am going to Panti Building. Enough of this nonsense”, Baba Lekki growled.

      “Baba, abi dem don nab you for Indian hemp again? “ Okon sniggered.

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      “You are a fool. I am not going to that Panti “, Baba Lekki fumed, hiding a miserable grin.

       “Baba, I don tell you I no dey go near dem Panti place. Na like dis dem Yoruba people go dey put people for trouble. Dem last time for Panti, he get one Sergeant Pepper from Owo and him finis me. Him wan pull out my front teeth with dem old klipa. That one na real scorpion and him don be sergeant for fifty years. Even dem big policeman for Abuja dey dobale for am”, Okon croaked, looking furtively across his shoulder. The old codger could no longer contain his mirth.

      “Okon, I say you are a fool. This is not that Panti, na another Panti be dis one”, Baba Lekki croaked as he convulsed with laughter.

       “So, which one be dis oo?” Okon demanded with a cynical grin.

        “ Na where dem dey warehouse dem abandoned and displaced and yeye politicians, flotsam and jetsam of Nigerian politics. Dem boku there. Na from there dem go transfer them to dem main dining hall after proper registration”, the old man responded matter-of-factly.

       “Baba, wetin be flosam and jesam?” the boy demanded.

       “Rubbish and refuse meant for the dunghill. They contaminate everything. They pollute everywhere and by the time they finish with their invasion nobody will be able to recognize Akanbi or his party again”, Baba Lekki charged, trembling with indignation.

       “Excuse me baba, how dat one go bring down the price of garri and manpower? Se na defection we go chop?”

       “You are a bloody fool. Isn’t that what we are talking about?” the old man fumed as he stormed off with Okon in hot pursuit. “Baba, baba!!” the crazy boy screamed at the old man. “As you dey go meet dem panti politician, he get one of them who get juju pass dem Arochukwu people. Him be Senator Kitikiti Wotowoto and him owe man small change from last job. But tell am say as dem dey decamp, na so people dey camp too”

  • Phantom opposition and its discontents

    Phantom opposition and its discontents

    Averting elite suicide in Nigeria

    Two years into the Tinubu administration, the political society remains deeply polarized and bitterly divided. Some sections of the political class are still nursing the wounds of the last elections. Yet it is incontrovertible that before the current administration took over the reins of power, the country was on the verge of economic disintegration. All the indices were pointing towards a catastrophic collapse. But even if we ignore the countermanding chorus of hysterical supporters and hostile disapproval, not even Tinubu’s most virulent critic can deny the obvious fact. From his eclectic toolbox of orthodox and unconventional economic placebos sometimes so mutually exclusive and countervailing that they are supposed to cancel out each other, the president might have found the formula to stave off catastrophic economic collapse such as happened in Venezuela after the revolt against the ancient master-class, a development which sent millions of Venezuelans heading for the Colombian border  or the apocalyptic fiscal meltdown that overtook Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe after the old Shona wizard went to work on the buoyant economy the colonial masters left behind.

      It is a classic study in the management of mismanagement, and we must thank God for little mercies. Three generations down the line, Zimbabweans are still feeling the pains and pangs of the ruinous economic policies of their founding father. Only the discipline and resilience of a proud people and the bitter conundrum of having to fight to liberate themselves from their old liberator kept the nation together. It could have been worse. After the harsh and unforgiving Treaty of Versailles, the collapse of the German currency led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and opened the door to Hitler and the Third Reich and the nunc dimittis of the extant world order. But Germany is an organic country with its disparate sub-tribes and warring principalities forcibly welded together through “blood, sweat and tears” by Von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor.

       After two million souls have been lost to a civil war which failed to resolve the fundamental question, Nigeria is struggling to remain a single unified entity. If we are to witness the kind of economic meltdown occasioning a total currency collapse, the tenuous cord binding the entity together might snap irretrievably. The Tinubu economic programme with its “shock and awe” tactics reminiscent of an economic pacification of an already brutalized society is far from perfect. It has led to a fiscal distress for the most vulnerable sectors of the society, further polarization of the political elite and a rapidly expanding multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multipurpose underclass ready to do anything to stay afloat or to upend the entire system accordingly. The tragedy and bane of the current conjuncture of post-military rule in Nigeria is the dearth of coherent paradigms of alternative economic development and political pathway beyond ethnic sabre rattling and outworn shibboleths. If we can avoid a catastrophic currency collapse and ramp up local production which adds value to the export of raw materials while the government continues the tinkering with economic fundamentals, there may still be a lot to play for.

     Virtually all those shouting themselves hoarse while angling to replace the Tinubu administration are tired and jinxed political jobbers who cannot come up with a single productive idea. Without any sense of irony, some of them even ape and regurgitate Tinubu’s economic policies or their main planks. When a major opposition figure rents a thirty million hall to celebrate his birthday and all he could come up with were shouts of hunger, you begin to wonder whether Kafka’s celebrated hunger artist is on a visitation to Nigeria. If this is the stuff the opposition is made of, what may be the staring the nation in the face is not a one-party system but the possibility of an all-party meltdown leading to elite suicide in all its dire consequences. It is this possibility that we must fear most and the story that follows should be quite illustrative of that possibility.

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      In 2017 or thereabout, yours sincerely and one or two others accompanied Lieutenant General Ipoola Alani Akinrinade, the respected and influential former Chief of Defence Staff, to Bayelsa State to deliver a lecture on restructuring and the National Question. It was a golden opportunity to visit the old province which was part of the old Western Region ruled by Chief Obafemi Awolowo. That was in the magical days of regional governments and competitive federalism. There was no viable airport in Yenagoa at that point in time, so we had to undertake the journey, first by air to Port-Harcourt and then by road to Yenagoa. Before flying out, the famed warrior and celebrated military strategist had informed one that the aircraft was going to be a one-engine fixed propeller plane, a revelation which froze the spine.

       As the plane dipped and banked perilously through the enveloping clouds on takeoff before leveraging into the clear blue sky, the general reassured that he had been through more precarious and dicey flights during the civil war. Reminding him that you were not enlisted as a soldier was a waste of time. Luckily after about an hour, the aircraft, after a steep descent, bumped on the runway and gamboled to a halt without any further trepidation. Our host this clear calm morning, the then governor of Bayelsa State, Henry Dickson Seriake, was already waiting for us in his office with his Deputy Chief of Staff, a Ms Ndiomu. Seriake, who traces his remote ancestry to an Ijebu woman named Bola, was as courteous, polite and welcoming in the best tradition of native Nigerian hospitality. After official formalities including a welcome address by the governor, we were rushed through breakfast joined by two notable Yoruba Nation activists who had materialized from an inner room. They were on a different mission.

     The lecture hall was filled to the brim despite the tight security. It was a distinguished crowd that came to hear out the general as he pronounced passionately and with cerebral gusto about the desirability and inevitability of a major structural reconfiguration in a country wracked by ethnic, religious and cultural schisms. His global references were apt and his conclusions sharp and point-device. The audience listened with rapt attention. It was obvious that this was an issue very dear to the people of Bayelsa and the attendance cut across the partisan lines of party, creed and credo. Among them were top traditional rulers, notable politicians, retired military brass-hats and high-octane clergy. At the end of it all, the general got a standing ovation which lasted for about five minutes. The governor concluded events with a rousing speech which was a tour de force of hope and optimism for Nigeria.

      In the intervening years, Henry Dickson Seriake has transited from the gubernatorial mansion in sleepy Yenagoa to the senatorial coliseum in Abuja. Last week, the hefty, imposing law maker with the embonpoint of a retired American heavyweight bruiser made a dramatic entry into the palatial venue hosting the sixtieth birthday anniversary of Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, the former speaker of the Rivers State of House of Assembly, former governor of the same state and former Minister of Transportation in the underwhelming Buhari government. His intervention was no less dramatic and explosive. Bearing down on the august crowd which bristled with luminaries of state incapacitation and stars of national eclipse who were gathered in stiff opposition and conspiracy against the Tinubu regime, Seriake reminded them that that was exactly what some of them did about eleven years earlier with baleful consequences for the nation. He dismissed them as masters of perpetual conspiracies to unseat sitting governments but who lack the requisite skills, the political capacity and the mental magnitude to rule a vast and complex country.

      It was a damning verdict on the phantom state of opposition in the country and the unenviable circumstances in which multi-party democracy has found itself in Nigeria. One or two of them was even regurgitating wholesale Tinubu’s subsidy removal regimen and deregulation package. Seriake’s Facebook wall page filled with admiring endorsements with one hailing him as the lion of the creeks but one sly sourpuss dismissing it as a gambit for the vice-presidential slot in a coming configuration. Meanwhile, the seminal contribution of the celebrant himself was to proclaim that he was hungry like everyone else, a clear case of post traumatic stomach disorder. If this is all the putative opposition against the Tinubu administration could muster, the leading lights of the regime can as well go to sleep with their two eyes firmly shut.

       But here lies the problem. The vulgarization of politics and the demise of a viable and functioning opposition bode ill for the entire nation. With discomfort slowly taking a firm grip and acute poverty spreading even if it is only temporary, the vulgarization of politics and the negation of its most sacred and noble ideals could push the masses and the vastly proliferating underclass in the direction of a revolt against politics and a ruinous de-marketing of liberal democracy itself. If that were to be the case, what is tugging at the undertow of the nation is not the prospect of a one-party state or all-party meltdown but the possibility of elite suicide in postcolonial Nigeria.

       As it is, Nigeria is prey to two major forces of destabilization. Both appear to be aided by significant sections of the elite bent on bringing the state to its knees. On the one hand are the shadowy activities of an ancient superpower which believes it could topple the nation into radical chaos and anarchy through massive propaganda and the relentless insinuation of AI generated pictures of paradise and el Dorado from a military-run, poverty-wracked landlocked African country. The other group consists of resurgent Islamic groups already operating within the confines of the nation bent on turning it into a fifteenth century medieval tyranny. Calls to arms are sprouting every day.

      To spring the trap laid by these groups of enemy nationals, government must come to terms with some sobering realities. First, elite pacification is not the same thing as elite consensus. While elite consensus is a product of strenuous but free negotiations, conciliations and concessions, which conduce to national harmony and cohesion, elite pacification is often superintended by economic coercion and political cajolery leading to abiding resentments and hidden animosities which could find temporary truce in a one-party state but which is bound to erupt in open treachery in the nearest future. Second, government must improve on its political capacity building through open forums, interactive sessions with various stakeholders and brainstorming retreats with critical sectors rather than shadowy consultations and confraternity-like communing which sow the seed of doubt, distrust and discord in the wider populace and which revives echoes of an Ottoman presidency. Balancing the competing and often conflicting claims of various elite groups without harmonized values makes effective governance very difficult if not impossible.  Despite all these, the balance of momentum and the possibility of critical success still lie with the former senator from Lagos who has many things going for him. The game changer may yet be his pluck, courage and capacity to change direction once it is obvious that he has taken a wrong turn.

  • Baba Lekki turns the table on June 12

    Baba Lekki turns the table on June 12

    To Gbayanrin and the upmarket Bantu Television Station where Baba Lekki was running rings around the  main anchor of the station and his colleagues over the vexed issue of the annulment of the June 12 1993 presidential election and the true heroes of the struggle to liberate Nigeria. It was a long time one had heard from the geriatric scoundrel after his last attempt to scam a nearby bank using AI generated images failed and he took to his heels. When he was finally apprehended, he claimed to be a ghost on spiritual sabbatical attached to a nearby church and everybody fled in turn. It is a scammers’ market and no one is sure of who is scamming who anymore.

      “Sir, if I heard you very well, you just said it is June 23 that should be celebrated and not June 12. If my memory does not fail me, that was the very day the election was annulled”, the anchor asked the old man who was beginning to show signs of growing impatience and irritation.

      “So, if you heard me very well, why are you repeating the question? Let your memory fail you that is your father’s problem. All I am saying is that June 23 is the real day or the McCoy. That is the day the soldiers finally overreached themselves and shot themselves in the foot. That is the reason we are enjoying this spell of democracy, otherwise they would have been back again with their gra-gra and this nonsense about I Brigadier Sukuniyan or Colonel Dodondawa”, the old man exploded. The entire hall in turn erupted in rapturous applause. A Lagosian-looking dandy in Edwardian bow tie and heavy parting inhaled his snuff with preposterous loudness which reminded one of an asthmatic baboon.

       “Wo, omo eleniyan, o ri yen so”, he shouted and fell back asleep with thunderous snoring. Okon, who had staggered in moments earlier reeking of cheap alcohol and periwinkles and eyeing everybody with tipsy self-importance, saw an opportunity for his usual mischief and hanky-panky. He had fastened his gaze on a huge self-composed lady who sat quietly behind the crew taking notes and passing suggestions. He staggered up, ogling the lady with wild relish.

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      “Bia, bia, no be you I been they check out for Mafoluku before before, abi na for Akowonjo sef?” the mad boy drawled, rocking on his feet in a drunken haze. The lady, a no-nonsense disciplinarian, rose to her full, frightening height ready to pounce on the urchin but was restrained by the crew who might have seen her in action before. She weighed at six foot six with ample bulk to match. Rumour swept the hall that she was a niece of the famous Giant Alakuku from Mbala in Isuochi and could beat up ten men put together.

       “Idiot, I have been warning you, this is where you will meet your Waterloo”, Baba Lekki charged.

      “Baba, water no dey for loo for Oshodi again”, the mad boy slurred and fell back asleep. The interview resumed.

    “Baba, one last question and it is about this Amaechi fellow. How can a former minister say he is hungry in this country?” the youngest member of the crew asked.

      “You have answered your own question. You see, government na wicked people. I used to like that boy. But when you suddenly remove the federal feeding bottle from an old man of sixty after feeding continuously for twenty four years, he is bound to develop some social psychosis known as Post Traumatic Stomach Disorder, a mad craving for anything ingestible.” The old man responded with professorial solemnity.   After that, a massive power outage terminated proceedings. Okon was the first to jump out through the window.