The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • ….and Nigeria still does not get it

    Tatalo Alamu

     

    Ladies and gentlemen and fellow Nigerians, please compare this with the shambolic treatment meted out so far to Nigerians stranded abroad as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic by the Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its accessories. As if they were criminals deported from a Third World country, these unlucky Nigerian nationals were subject to the brutal humiliation of having their passports impounded by officials of the foreign ministry even before they left London.

    This was after they paid the mandatory four hundred and twenty five pounds evacuation fees demanded by the ministry in addition to many of them paying the three hundred and twenty five pounds for a mandatory Covid-19 test which became irrelevant once they landed since everybody was treated as a potential carrier of the virus. Thereafter they were abandoned on the tarmac at Ikeja because proper arrangement was not made for the onward journey to Abuja.

    Among the eminent Nigerian citizens abandoned on the tarmac for a long spell was Prince Abiodun Ogunleye, a former Deputy Governor of Lagos State and elder statesman, who had trained in England as a Chartered Accountant in the sixties. Thereafter, a video of the evacuees went viral as they complained about the poor feeding arrangement and the grossly insensitive nature of their reception.

    This is not the way to treat your own compatriots or to nurture patriotism. It is one of the reasons why Nigeria is teeming with enemy nationals and hostile interlocutors. To compound the infamy, the foreign affairs authorities, still solely driven by profit motive even in national adversity, released a document last week stating that evacuees would have to pay almost three hundred thousand naira for their feeding and accommodation while under observation in Abuja.

    But barely twenty four hours later, and citing a “barrage” of queries, the ministry withdrew the document. The ministry now claimed it was able to source the funds from the Central Bank and the NNPC. The question is when did this become obvious and why was it not obvious before? And whatever happened to all the humongous donations we have all heard about? When governments profit from the misery of their own citizens, they lose authority and legitimacy.

    It is worthy of note that after this dismal inaugural outing, the authorities have not attempted any further evacuation of Nigerians stranded abroad. Yet there are still thousands of Nigerians marooned in so many countries due to no fault of theirs.

    After the cack-handed attempt to airlift Nigerians from Canada ended in a diplomatic fiasco, the authorities withdrew behind a wall of glum silence. Meanwhile those who resorted to self-help —as it was bound to happen— by unofficially arranging for their own evacuation have had the plane impounded by an unusually patriotic officialdom.

    It is now obvious that the Nigerian Foreign ministry has resorted to deliberate and dilatory stalling, hoping that Covid-19 would quietly go away and save them from further embarrassment or that the elapse of time would return us to the much celebrated new normal when any stranded national can make his own travel arrangement. The offensive odour of this shameless racket is only exceeded by the shameless abdication of national responsibility. No wonder.

  • Cultural Genius and National Delinquency

    Tatalo Alamu

     

    You search for what has gone missing in a frantic and heedless way. In the light of this saying, is there a connection between national literary gifts and political backwardness, between poetic exuberance and national delinquency?  To pose the question in another way, why do some nations produce outstanding creative geniuses only to come a sad cropper in the husbandry of human resources and visionary political engineering?

    When Oscar Wilde was asked why he thought Britain never stood a chance in a war with France, the Anglo-Irish wit and hell-raiser famously declared that it was because the French wrote perfect prose. There was an element of truth in this seemingly eccentric assertion.

    Compared to the literary figures and cultural icons thrown up by France at the end of the nineteenth century, the British literati appeared like hewers of wood and drawers of water.

    Yet it was the dour and predictable Britons that produced the enduring human institutions. The Germans were even crueller and mercilessly supercilious in their attitude to British cultural and intellectual endeavours.

    Compared to the outstanding thinkers thrown up by a unified Germany, the  Kants, Hegels, the Marxes, the Feurbauchs, British philosophers of the late nineteenth century were provincial nonentities sunken by the leaden weight of intellectual timidity and the facile superficialities of Empiricist philosophy.

    Yet where it mattered most the British were light years ahead. While Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, was still trying to bring the Germans together under a unified state by the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had already achieved stable nationhood for almost two centuries.

    While there were no Rousseau or Voltaire to raise the literary and philosophical stakes, Britain was ahead where it mattered most, particularly the strategic capture of Canada and the gritty elimination of French continental influence in North America as a whole.

    As for an America dismissed as a primitive cultural backwater by the European haute couture, it was to become the military and economic lord of Europe by the beginning of the twentieth century.

    The connection between politics and letters, between creative output and national destiny has been well documented. But not so the intriguing disconnect between vast surplus of creative genius and political and economic underdevelopment.

    To pose the question concretely is to come face to face with one of those ineluctable mysteries of the nation-state paradigm.

    How can the country of the Soyinkas, the Achebes and those wonderful Benin bronze masters also be associated with arrested political and economic development? A rational inquiry is mandatory.

    Surveying contemporary Nigeria is thus like surveying the extant ruins of the old Roman Empire. Amidst the catacombs of self-inflicted ruination, there is evidence of grand dreaming, of Utopian longing.

    Amidst the massive wreckage of hope and aborted destiny, there is evidence of great poetic exertions, of furious summons and fiery sermons when it was probably too late. As Shakespeare will put it, there is some architecture in the ruins.

    If a nation’s destiny were to be determined by the verbal gifts and the rhetorical razzmatazz of its founding leadership, Nigeria ought to be a nuclear power and first class First World economy by now.

    Just take a sample. From the blistering anti-colonial ripostes of an Herbert Macaulay, the magnificent magniloquence of an Nnamdi Azikiwe, the deep philosophical ruminations of an Obafemi Awolowo, the grim apocalyptic hectoring of an Anthony Enahoro,  the cerebral hecklings of a Mokuwgo Okoye,  the terse anti-colonial genuflections of an Adegoke Adelabu, the keen witty repartees of an SL Akintola, the dignified cadences of a Tafawa-Balewa, to the caustic excoriations of a later-day Bola Ige, Nigerian first generation leaders seemed to have had the knack for turning politics into pure poetry in motion.

    But poetry is merely a passion, and one that can be put to clearly subversive use if not well-harnessed. This is probably one of the unstated reasons why Plato evicted the poet from the People’s Republic.

    A nation needs more than passion to survive and to flourish. It needs great will and great strength of purpose.

    The stage for this embarrassment of literary gifts was probably set by the anti-colonial struggle. It was led by the nascent, feisty and fiery Nigerian press.

    Dominated by returning freed slaves and Brazilian immigrants who had seen enough of the weaknesses and failures of the metropolitan society, they were not going to be fazed by colonial viceroys.

    It was a great cultural war whose thunderous echoes and brilliant ripostes resonate till date. To read some of these fierce exchanges even today is to be transported to a world of exemplary verbal ingenuity.

    To be sure, not all the subsequent verbal fireworks are wrought from the imaginative reservoir of these great political dramatists. Sometimes it is the great occasion demanding great eloquence and getting it.

    Such we see in Anthony Enahoro’s motion for self-governance or his famous intervention on the declaration of emergency in the old west.

    We see it in the forbidding eloquence and chilling prophesy of Chief Awolowo’s  allocutus before he was sentenced for treasonable felony.

    It rears its fine Roman head again in Zik’s celebrated philippic against his political tormentors in the Second Republic, his earlier treatise on diarchy and his literary slugfest with Anthony Asika.

    Finally we glimpse the historic nature of the occasion in M.K.O Abiola’s speech rejecting the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential elections.

    It was a tour de force of heroic defiance which guarantees Abiola’s sacred place in the literature and history of rebellion against military tyranny.

    To be fair, even the military that are hardly famous for their gift of the garb cannot be left out of this illustrious pedigree. Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu’s solitary broadcast is a rousing revolutionary sermon brimming with anger and Armageddon.

    General Buhari’s speech to the nation on the occasion of the termination of the Second Republic remains a classic of its genre, endlessly quoted till date. So is Murtala Mohammed’s fiery put-down of western powers over their meddling in Angola.

    Yet it should be clear by now that the stunning eloquence, the verbal accomplishment and the grandiloquent grandstanding of our founding fathers sit greatly at odds with the revolting shambles of a nation they seem to have bequeathed succeeding generations of Nigerians.

    How can men and women with such powerful imagination beget such a miserable and squalid nuisance? And how did such a supremely gifted country end up in the slough of despair and despondency, and with the current pedestrian rabble lording it over a hapless citizenry?

    When all has been said, Nigeria is not an ordinary country. Nigeria is a profound tribute to the power of the colonial imagination and its self-subversive genius.

    If Nigeria did not exist in the colonial imaginary, it would have had to be created as a post-colonial necessity and as the ultimate test for the black multitude.

    The only other country that resembles Nigeria is the Belgian Congo, the hobbled central African giant. But Belgian Congo is not a willed creation but an instance of primitive seizure by King Leopold of Belgium.

    While assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the leading presidential contenders of the Second Republic, Stanley Macebuh had noted that if Azikiwe were to be elected, eloquence and rhetoric would flourish again.

    To many, it seemed an obscene and provocative affront. Yet Macebuh might have been stalking a bigger beast. Rhetoric does not feed a nation, but people do not also live by bread alone.

    It has been noted that the great Zik was not a man of details, nor was he possessed of a practical transforming mind. But with his equable, even-tempered nature, such a figure could have been preserved as the ultimate symbol of national unity, dreaming great dreams in bold rhetorical brushes while leaving the practical business of transforming the country to visionary workmen.

    Forty seven years later, the needed political restructuring which will allow Nigeria to optimise the complementary gifts of its various nationalities and their elite factions continue to elude the nation.

    In the event, it is their worst vices and most vicious proclivities that are on national parade as coerced cohabitation produces its toxic pathologies.

    Having failed the elementary test of nation-building, having found the colonial state an insurmountable monstrosity in all its alienating rigour, the political elite have taken refuge in the political equivalent of poetic license.

    Put to callous work, poetic license thrives in feverish and fiendish plots against the nation, in cynical bonhomie. When he was accused of chopping money, the late SLA famously asked whether anybody’s grandfather could ever swallow coins. He rested his case.

    It is the same imagination that produced the great speeches that also produced creative carpet crossing, historic embezzlements, clinical coups, annulment, the twelve two thirds legerdemain, sharia, misapplication of funds and digitalised rigging.

    The result has been one of the more memorable hellholes of humanity. The Nigerian evil genius is at war with the genius of the Nigerian nation.

    In many respects, contemporary Nigeria recalls pre-revolution Russia in all its momentous contradictions. To many perceptive observers of the era, it was a great irony that a nation roiling in miseries and subhuman degradation could also throw up the greatest literary artists of the century.

    The country of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov and Pushkin was also a country of appalling brutalities and inhuman suffering. Engels put it to the fact that economically backward nations could also play first violin. But the obverse of the coin is equally chilling.

    When a resident diplomat of the period was asked what he thought the Russians did best, he sighed in wry exasperation and then exclaimed: “They steal!”

    Perhaps, then, this is as good as any other time to return to the first principles of nation-building, to the foundation of social and political justice upon which great nations are built. It is time to restructure and to recreate Nigeria in order to properly harness the creative gifts and imaginative fecundity of its people.

    While Nigerians continue to enjoy and lap up the verbal resourcefulness of its errant political leadership, other apparently less gifted African countries have moved ahead, devoting their creative resources to genuine nation-building.

    They may not be throwing up potential Nobel laureates in literature, but they are building great harmonious communities out of the turbulent contradictions of colonial intrusions.

    Unlike the tortured fabulations of the great but alienated artist, Ghana, Botswana, South Africa and perhaps Tanzania are concrete works of art in progress.

    In the end, it is perhaps pre-revolution Russia that may yet provide the golden key to the Nigerian conundrum. In a brilliant, apocalyptic forage into the future, an ordinary Russian of the twenty first century was asked for the names of the Russian pre-revolution leaders.

    “Weren’t these people minor political officials during the time of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky?” the bemused national replied. It is not unlikely that the same fate will overtake Nigerian leaders of this dismal period.

     

    ( First published on this page in October, 2007 to commemorate Nigeria’s independence anniversary)

  • And now, arise Sir Tom!

    And now, arise Sir Tom!

    ….and Nigeria still does not get it

    Cultural Genius and National Delinquency

     

    Tatalo Alamu

     

    (Some nations do have ‘em)

     

    The foundational principle of nation-building is knowing when and how to honour the authentic heroes and icons of the nation.

    The Brits surely know how to honour their own. Just come to Trafalgar Square and see how a grateful nation honours and appreciates its avatars and those who put down their life for the incarnate ideal of the nation.

    Exactly four weeks back (April 26), this column predicted that a knighthood may well be on the way to Captain Tom Moore, the plucky centenarian and classic epitome of the British bulldog spirit, who has captured the imagination of his compatriots with his fundraising heroics. (see, Stars of the New Plague, The Nation on Sunday, April 26) Whitehall must not keep the old man waiting, snooper admonished in the piece.

    This past week, a letter arrived in the post to that effect and to the delight of a Captain Moore who received the news with puckish humour and fetching self-minimization. Before then the now ennobled former captain has been made honorary colonel of his old regiment. Oh the thrill and excitement of it all.

     

    ….and Nigeria still does not get it

     

    Ladies and gentlemen and fellow Nigerians, please compare this with the shambolic treatment meted out so far to Nigerians stranded abroad as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic by the Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its accessories.

    As if they were criminals deported from a Third World country, these unlucky Nigerian nationals were subject to the brutal humiliation of having their passports impounded by officials of the foreign ministry even before they left London.

    This was after they paid the mandatory four hundred and twenty five pounds evacuation fees demanded by the ministry in addition to many of them paying the three hundred and twenty five pounds for a mandatory Covid-19 test which became irrelevant once they landed since everybody was treated as a potential carrier of the virus. Thereafter they were abandoned on the tarmac at Ikeja because proper arrangement was not made for the onward journey to Abuja.

    Among the eminent Nigerian citizens abandoned on the tarmac for a long spell was Prince Abiodun Ogunleye, a former Deputy Governor of Lagos State and elder statesman, who had trained in England as a Chartered Accountant in the sixties.

    Thereafter, a video of the evacuees went viral as they complained about the poor feeding arrangement and the grossly insensitive nature of their reception.

    This is not the way to treat your own compatriots or to nurture patriotism. It is one of the reasons why Nigeria is teeming with enemy nationals and hostile interlocutors. To compound the infamy, the foreign affairs authorities, still solely driven by profit motive even in national adversity, released a document last week stating that evacuees would have to pay almost three hundred thousand naira for their feeding and accommodation while under observation in Abuja.

    But barely twenty four hours later, and citing a “barrage” of queries, the ministry withdrew the document. The ministry now claimed it was able to source the funds from the Central Bank and the NNPC. The question is when did this become obvious and why was it not obvious before? And whatever happened to all the humongous donations we have all heard about? When governments profit from the misery of their own citizens, they lose authority and legitimacy.

    It is worthy of note that after this dismal inaugural outing, the authorities have not attempted any further evacuation of Nigerians stranded abroad. Yet there are still thousands of Nigerians marooned in so many countries due to no fault of theirs.

    After the cack-handed attempt to airlift Nigerians from Canada ended in a diplomatic fiasco, the authorities withdrew behind a wall of glum silence. Meanwhile those who resorted to self-help —as it was bound to happen— by unofficially arranging for their own evacuation have had the plane impounded by an unusually patriotic officialdom.

    It is now obvious that the Nigerian Foreign ministry has resorted to deliberate and dilatory stalling, hoping that Covid-19 would quietly go away and save them from further embarrassment or that the elapse of time would return us to the much celebrated new normal when any stranded national can make his own travel arrangement. The offensive odour of this shameless racket is only exceeded by the shameless abdication of national responsibility. No wonder.

     

    Cultural Genius and National Delinquency

     

    You search for what has gone missing in a frantic and heedless way. In the light of this saying, is there a connection between national literary gifts and political backwardness, between poetic exuberance and national delinquency?  To pose the question in another way, why do some nations produce outstanding creative geniuses only to come a sad cropper in the husbandry of human resources and visionary political engineering?

    When Oscar Wilde was asked why he thought Britain never stood a chance in a war with France, the Anglo-Irish wit and hell-raiser famously declared that it was because the French wrote perfect prose. There was an element of truth in this seemingly eccentric assertion. Compared to the literary figures and cultural icons thrown up by France at the end of the nineteenth century, the British literati appeared like hewers of wood and drawers of water.

    Yet it was the dour and predictable Britons that produced the enduring human institutions. The Germans were even crueller and mercilessly supercilious in their attitude to British cultural and intellectual endeavours. Compared to the outstanding thinkers thrown up by a unified Germany, the  Kants, Hegels, the Marxes, the Feurbauchs, British philosophers of the late nineteenth century were provincial nonentities sunken by the leaden weight of intellectual timidity and the facile superficialities of Empiricist philosophy.

    Yet where it mattered most the British were light years ahead. While Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, was still trying to bring the Germans together under a unified state by the middle of the nineteenth century, Britain had already achieved stable nationhood for almost two centuries.

    While there were no Rousseau or Voltaire to raise the literary and philosophical stakes, Britain was ahead where it mattered most, particularly the strategic capture of Canada and the gritty elimination of French continental influence in North America as a whole. As for an America dismissed as a primitive cultural backwater by the European haute couture, it was to become the military and economic lord of Europe by the beginning of the twentieth century.

    The connection between politics and letters, between creative output and national destiny has been well documented. But not so the intriguing disconnect between vast surplus of creative genius and political and economic underdevelopment. To pose the question concretely is to come face to face with one of those ineluctable mysteries of the nation-state paradigm. How can the country of the Soyinkas, the Achebes and those wonderful Benin bronze masters also be associated with arrested political and economic development? A rational inquiry is mandatory.

    Surveying contemporary Nigeria is thus like surveying the extant ruins of the old Roman Empire. Amidst the catacombs of self-inflicted ruination, there is evidence of grand dreaming, of Utopian longing. Amidst the massive wreckage of hope and aborted destiny, there is evidence of great poetic exertions, of furious summons and fiery sermons when it was probably too late. As Shakespeare will put it, there is some architecture in the ruins.

    If a nation’s destiny were to be determined by the verbal gifts and the rhetorical razzmatazz of its founding leadership, Nigeria ought to be a nuclear power and first class First World economy by now. Just take a sample. From the blistering anti-colonial ripostes of an Herbert Macaulay, the magnificent magniloquence of an Nnamdi Azikiwe, the deep philosophical ruminations of an Obafemi Awolowo, the grim apocalyptic hectoring of an Anthony Enahoro,  the cerebral hecklings of a Mokuwgo Okoye,  the terse anti-colonial genuflections of an Adegoke Adelabu, the keen witty repartees of an SL Akintola, the dignified cadences of a Tafawa-Balewa, to the caustic excoriations of a later-day Bola Ige, Nigerian first generation leaders seemed to have had the knack for turning politics into pure poetry in motion.

    But poetry is merely a passion, and one that can be put to clearly subversive use if not well-harnessed. This is probably one of the unstated reasons why Plato evicted the poet from the People’s Republic. A nation needs more than passion to survive and to flourish. It needs great will and great strength of purpose.

    The stage for this embarrassment of literary gifts was probably set by the anti-colonial struggle. It was led by the nascent, feisty and fiery Nigerian press. Dominated by returning freed slaves and Brazilian immigrants who had seen enough of the weaknesses and failures of the metropolitan society, they were not going to be fazed by colonial viceroys. It was a great cultural war whose thunderous echoes and brilliant ripostes resonate till date. To read some of these fierce exchanges even today is to be transported to a world of exemplary verbal ingenuity.

    To be sure, not all the subsequent verbal fireworks are wrought from the imaginative reservoir of these great political dramatists. Sometimes it is the great occasion demanding great eloquence and getting it. Such we see in Anthony Enahoro’s motion for self-governance or his famous intervention on the declaration of emergency in the old west. We see it in the forbidding eloquence and chilling prophesy of Chief Awolowo’s  allocutus before he was sentenced for treasonable felony.

    It rears its fine Roman head again in Zik’s celebrated philippic against his political tormentors in the Second Republic, his earlier treatise on diarchy and his literary slugfest with Anthony Asika. Finally we glimpse the historic nature of the occasion in M.K.O Abiola’s speech rejecting the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential elections. It was a tour de force of heroic defiance which guarantees Abiola’s sacred place in the literature and history of rebellion against military tyranny.

    To be fair, even the military that are hardly famous for their gift of the garb cannot be left out of this illustrious pedigree. Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu’s solitary broadcast is a rousing revolutionary sermon brimming with anger and Armageddon. General Buhari’s speech to the nation on the occasion of the termination of the Second Republic remains a classic of its genre, endlessly quoted till date. So is Murtala Mohammed’s fiery put-down of western powers over their meddling in Angola.

    Yet it should be clear by now that the stunning eloquence, the verbal accomplishment and the grandiloquent grandstanding of our founding fathers sit greatly at odds with the revolting shambles of a nation they seem to have bequeathed succeeding generations of Nigerians. How can men and women with such powerful imagination beget such a miserable and squalid nuisance? And how did such a supremely gifted country end up in the slough of despair and despondency, and with the current pedestrian rabble lording it over a hapless citizenry?

    When all has been said, Nigeria is not an ordinary country. Nigeria is a profound tribute to the power of the colonial imagination and its self-subversive genius. If Nigeria did not exist in the colonial imaginary, it would have had to be created as a post-colonial necessity and as the ultimate test for the black multitude. The only other country that resembles Nigeria is the Belgian Congo, the hobbled central African giant. But Belgian Congo is not a willed creation but an instance of primitive seizure by King Leopold of Belgium.

    While assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the leading presidential contenders of the Second Republic, Stanley Macebuh had noted that if Azikiwe were to be elected, eloquence and rhetoric would flourish again. To many, it seemed an obscene and provocative affront. Yet Macebuh might have been stalking a bigger beast. Rhetoric does not feed a nation, but people do not also live by bread alone.

    It has been noted that the great Zik was not a man of details, nor was he possessed of a practical transforming mind. But with his equable, even-tempered nature, such a figure could have been preserved as the ultimate symbol of national unity, dreaming great dreams in bold rhetorical brushes while leaving the practical business of transforming the country to visionary workmen.

    Forty seven years later, the needed political restructuring which will allow Nigeria to optimise the complementary gifts of its various nationalities and their elite factions continue to elude the nation. In the event, it is their worst vices and most vicious proclivities that are on national parade as coerced cohabitation produces its toxic pathologies.

    Having failed the elementary test of nation-building, having found the colonial state an insurmountable monstrosity in all its alienating rigour, the political elite have taken refuge in the political equivalent of poetic license. Put to callous work, poetic license thrives in feverish and fiendish plots against the nation, in cynical bonhomie. When he was accused of chopping money, the late SLA famously asked whether anybody’s grandfather could ever swallow coins. He rested his case.

    It is the same imagination that produced the great speeches that also produced creative carpet crossing, historic embezzlements, clinical coups, annulment, the twelve two thirds legerdemain, sharia, misapplication of funds and digitalised rigging. The result has been one of the more memorable hellholes of humanity. The Nigerian evil genius is at war with the genius of the Nigerian nation.

    In many respects, contemporary Nigeria recalls pre-revolution Russia in all its momentous contradictions. To many perceptive observers of the era, it was a great irony that a nation roiling in miseries and subhuman degradation could also throw up the greatest literary artists of the century.

    The country of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov and Pushkin was also a country of appalling brutalities and inhuman suffering. Engels put it to the fact that economically backward nations could also play first violin. But the obverse of the coin is equally chilling. When a resident diplomat of the period was asked what he thought the Russians did best, he sighed in wry exasperation and then exclaimed: “They steal!”

    Perhaps, then, this is as good as any other time to return to the first principles of nation-building, to the foundation of social and political justice upon which great nations are built. It is time to restructure and to recreate Nigeria in order to properly harness the creative gifts and imaginative fecundity of its people.

    While Nigerians continue to enjoy and lap up the verbal resourcefulness of its errant political leadership, other apparently less gifted African countries have moved ahead, devoting their creative resources to genuine nation-building. They may not be throwing up potential Nobel laureates in literature, but they are building great harmonious communities out of the turbulent contradictions of colonial intrusions. Unlike the tortured fabulations of the great but alienated artist, Ghana, Botswana, South Africa and perhaps Tanzania are concrete works of art in progress.

    In the end, it is perhaps pre-revolution Russia that may yet provide the golden key to the Nigerian conundrum. In a brilliant, apocalyptic forage into the future, an ordinary Russian of the twenty first century was asked for the names of the Russian pre-revolution leaders. “Weren’t these people minor political officials during the time of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky?” the bemused national replied. It is not unlikely that the same fate will overtake Nigerian leaders of this dismal period.

     

    ( First published on this page in October, 2007 to commemorate Nigeria’s independence anniversary)

     

     

  • And there shall be music again

    And there shall be music again

    Tatalo Alamu

    If music be the food of love play on, William Shakespeare memorably pleaded. After Sam Mbakwe, the late teary governor of old Imo state, dramatically promoted a school musician on account of the sonorous beauty of his rhythm, the Daily Times wrote an inspired editorial titled: Play me that number again.

    The Daily Times was then under the delectable spell of the cultured, cigar-chomping Patrick Dele Cole and the immensely cultivated, cognac-swigging Stanley Macebuh. A few months later, both Cole and Macebuh were to disappear in a great purge masterminded by Umaru Dikko and the hard men of NPN. Pray, of what use is music to a man monitoring the slow progress of his rice armada in the implacably rough seas? It was sheer irredeemable folly coming from some Americanised sissies. Let them go back to Brooklyn or better still Albuquerque.

    Yet a nation’s political and economic decline is often accompanied by the retreat of good music. Political barbarity is always accompanied by a corresponding cultural barbarity. Whenever barbarians arrive at the barricades, it is the cultural monuments they first go after either out of vulgar fascination or sheer destructive vengeance.

    Now ask yourself this troubling question. Where are all the great cinema houses in the country today? Where is Scala, Odeon, Rivoli, Metro, KS, Plaza, Royal etc? Some have fallen off the face of the earth forever. Some have been converted to huge abattoirs. Some have become warehouses for unholy merchandise.

    Some have become great refugee camps for hoodlums and casual riffraff on the fringes of the society. Tell your children that you were at a cinema every weekend in those days and you will be greeted with juvenile guffaws. You will be lucky if one of them does not ask you: daddy what is a cinema?

    Led by insensitive and culturally challenged interlopers, this is the trough of social degradation that we have found ourselves. If it is so bad in the department of visual refinement, one can imagine the damage that has been done to musical evolution in the country.

    Just as you cannot philosophise on an empty stomach, you can also not listen to music when your stomach is rumbling away, or when hunger is “wiring” you—— as Bishop Gbonigi once memorably put it.

    But there is a silver lining in the cloud. There is some quiet revolutionary stirring in the land which suggests that Nigeria may well be on the road to slow recovery in the musical department. For the past three weeks, snooper has been on the cusp of what is truly a musical renaissance in the country. It has been the equivalent of a midsummer madness.

    Ironically, it all began on a sad and sombre note. Snooper was to attend the wedding of the daughter of a late and beloved friend, a remarkable medical doctor who died as a serving brigadier-general five years ago in 2002. Our departed friend was a genial social animal and a plucky, thoroughbred officer to boot. Although a medical officer, the late Brigadier had served as John Shagaya’s personal bodyguard on the night the tanks rolled out of the mechanised brigade in Ikeja to terminate General Buhari’s rule.

    As a mark of respect and honour to a fallen officer and gentleman, snooper began the day listening to his friend’s favourite musician: Theophilus Iwalokun, a.k.a “Theo Baba”. Iwalokun was an obscure juju musician of the late sixties, a quiet, self-effacing genius of stirring and soulful lyrics. In a feat of counter-hegemonic cultural politics, the medical students of UNILAG in the early seventies made sure that the Ilaje musician was a regular fixture at their annual ball. This was where our friend caught the bug.

    But how to locate Iwalokun’s music became an odyssey of cultural sleuthing on its own, and investigation led snooper to a quiet corner of Somolu and to a heroic and intrepid collector and cultural entrepreneur. Of course, snooper went for more after the wedding.

    Ever since the head has been bursting with the complete works of Fela, Olaiya, Roy Chicago, Rex Lawson, Eddie Okonta, Ambrose Campbell, Zeal Onyia, Felix Aigbe, Celestine Ukwu, the mournful and deeply thoughtful Igbo philosopher,  Julius Araba, Christopher Oyesiku, Tunde Nightingale, Ayinde Bakare, Fashola, Joseph Olatunji, Tatalo, Foyanmu, Oluwa, Danmole, Denge, Ojoge Daniel, Rose Adetola, I.K Dairo, Dan Maraya and a host of other musical titans.

    That a single nation could throw up such a wide and varied assembly of musical geniuses in a single epoch is a weird tribute to the glorious fecundity of the womb of mother Nigeria, and a proof and affirmation that such a nation will not go under lightly without a historic combustion.

    Listening to these geniuses, one can hear the anxieties of influence playing out, one can detect skilful borrowings and what is known in cultural theory as inter-musical tensions, one can measure the seismic tremors of oedipal strife between musical fathers and their children. These are profound resources for a nation’s journey to cultural and political redemption. And there shall be music once again.

     

    Author’s note

    When this piece was published thirteen years ago on this page, a Nigerian musical revolution was still in embryonic form. Now the revolution is in full bloom with Nigerian music ruling the global roost. Contrary to what the author thought, it has not been a complete return to the past but a mere grafting of aspects of the past with the radical musical ingenuity of the present. All the same, memories are made of this.

  • The Many Consorts of Comrade Xi

    The Many Consorts of Comrade Xi

    *And there shall be music again

    Tatalo Alamu

    As they say, the bigger the head the greater the headache. China’s global ascendancy and virtual elevation to the status of numero uno in the world’s economic pecking order has come with its own aggravations.  All at once, there are so many countries accusing China of unacceptable conduct in international relations and even outright cruelty in its attitude to certain countries and their people.

    While some Nigerian officials are openly accusing China of racism and xenophobia in its treatment of Nigerians residing in China or working for Chinese consortiums in Nigeria, the Philippines bitterly laments the sadistic treatment meted out to its sailors working on Chinese fishing fleets.

    While Donald Trump openly frets about massive sabotage of the American economy and what he has only stopped short of calling attempted genocide, many other countries, particularly in Africa south of the Sahara, are complaining about Chinese meddlesomeness and virtual overrunning of their territorial space.

    These are grievous charges indeed and grievously will China pay for them in the post-Covid-19 epoch. In the comity of nations, nobility and hegemonic status also have their obligations. China still has a lot to learn from its predecessors. Until the nation-state question is resolved or dissolved into the rubric of disruptive global transformation, national ascendancy will not count for much.

    In all this, the plight of the head of a polygamous house with quirky and quarrelsome consorts noisily and endlessly feuding among themselves and with the master of the house comes to mind.  Yet it is also known that in polygamous homesteads, some consorts, because they are consortiums in their own right, are more equal than other consorts.

    While a debtor-nation like Nigeria and other laggard African nations can be brusquely ignored, China can neither ignore America or Japan, it is old bête noir, nor Taiwan its current doppelganger. Rarely do international relations resemble an uproarious soapbox opera in more significant respects than in the current era. We must recall such classics as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers or the ominously apposite epic, The Brides of Fu Manchu.

    The protagonist, a mad Chinese doctor with ambitions of world domination, abducts the daughters of world leaders and then compels their fathers to help him build a death ray in return for the safety of their daughters. Echoes of the current global curfew? China may be asking for no less as we may discover when the cloud clears.

    Anybody who finds the image of a bridal train upended inapposite should recall the late Mobutu Sese Seko who famously described himself as the cock that leaps from hen to hen in the barn yard. Lord Lugard’s infamous “dual mandate” which forcibly conjoined Nigeria and much of pre-colonial Africa with imperial Britain in unholy matrimony is cut from the same matrimonial loins.

    Without batting an eyelid, the great colonial adventurer, in a tremendous turn of uxorious metaphor, actually described the forcible union between a rich and prosperous southern Nigeria and an arid and impoverished Northern Nigeria which he was about to superintend as a union between a promising lad and a woman of means. This is nothing but an elegant trope for colonial plunder and rapine.

    As we have noted once on this page, China, unlike America, France, England, Spain Portugal and most of the Latin American countries, is not a land of immigrants and has remained the same for more than a thousand years, with the people merely exchanging the docility under classical feudalism with the docility imperative to communist state capitalism.

    Once in a long while, that docility and passiveness are often roused into revolutionary rebellion inspired from above in the face of injustice and inequity but at the end of it all, the more things change, the more they remain the same. The Forbidden City of the old Chinese emperors remains the Forbidden City of the new Chinese emperors.

    It is an engrossing and perplexing human drama which has characterized the rise of modernity and its different versions since the advent of the nation-state paradigm. Embedded in the current Corvid-19 tragedy are contrasting visions of how human societies ought to be organized for the maximum benefits of their habitués and a continuing clash of civilizations emblematized by a resurgent China and a backsliding western world epitomized by a troubled America.

    The seeds of future despair and defeat are often lodged in the fruits of current success and triumphs. China is very much a victim of its own success, past and current. By the tenth century, China was clearly the leading country in the world.

    Its naval vessels with their huge mast unfurling in the skies were described as ocean-going wonders. Artefacts in the old museum at the ancient port of Mombasa in contemporary Kenya suggested that the Chinese had already reached Africa by the seventh century if not earlier. This was when primitive England was being put to sword by Norman conquerors.

    But thereafter, China went into steep decline as a result of a protracted power struggle between the mandarinate (the bureaucratic class) and the ruling feudal oligarchy which completely sealed off the nation. By the time China emerged from its political, economic and cultural somnambulism, the world had moved on. There were new kids on the block. Europe had emerged from the Dark Age. The world had new power centres in Europe and America.

    There were to be consequences. As a result of its prolonged self-isolation, there is a provinciality about China which cannot be hidden away. Owing to a lack of sustained interaction and engagement with people from other cultures and outlook, racism and xenophobia are never far away.

    There is considerable stiffness and starchiness towards strangers, a wary distrust of the non-familiar; an insecurity of outlook which can be overcompensated for by what appears as supercilious arrogance and condescension to foreigners.

    Black people are known in local mythology as devils and till date there are no concerted official attempts to dispel this febrile fabrication whereas in neighbouring Russia there were outstanding nineteenth century writers with Black ancestry who were considered the toast of the society. The Ethiopian roots of the writer, Alexander Pushkin, were well known and could only provoke admiring fascination. His maternal great grandfather was an African-born Russian general.

    By contrast and in every material particular, China remains a cultural autarky with the demographic dynamism usually engendered by the influx of immigrant talent largely missing. The push and pull of conquest and colonization across different epochs up till modern time, the sustained interaction of commerce and religious proselytization have dispelled the whole notion of racial and cultural monoliths in Europe, America and Africa.

    The current difficulties of China can be summed up in one startling paradox: an aspiring empire without a history of recent colonies, well except ill-starred Tibet. This is a paradox that can only be thrown up by the post-Westphalia nation-state paradigm. The normal evolutionary course we are familiar with is for an empire state to shed weight and be gradually transformed into a nation-state.

    This is an evolutionary course that bypassed China as it shut itself out from the rest of the world to deal with its own internal contradictions. Unlike Britain, Japan, Russia, America, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Holland and Italy that acquired colonies if only to drop them eventually either through conquest, defeat or voluntary divestment, China has arrived at pole position through its own unique trajectory and without having to go through the decolonizing purgatory experienced by the colonialist state.

    The result is the splendid spectacle of a nation that has achieved unprecedented prosperity and a version of modernity and modernization by pulling itself up by the boot straps. But the toxic side product can also be seen in the frank anomalies of Taiwan and Hong Kong, the inability of China to conform to certain norms of international engagement as well as the dark undersides of the current Covid-19 global debacle.

    The more one looks at this, the more it looks like a well-plotted revenge by the nation history and the post-Westphalia nation-state paradigm almost dealt out of contention. The irruption of the Chinese state on the global scene as a superstar and hegemon has eventuated in some revolutionary tremors for the nation-state paradigm. The Wuhan plague is just one manifestation. It can actually get worse.

    The nation-state paradigm is a revolutionary advance on the empire-state template.  The intense rivalries and competitive dynamism it unleashed among emergent nations led to remarkable technological innovation, the dramatic expansion of the frontiers of knowledge and unprecedented prosperity in a way that the inherent sluggishness of empire, its constrictive feudal template and narrow confinement of human prospects could not have managed.

    In the core empire-states, the energies unleashed by the human spirit in an attempt to break free from the strangulating confines of feudal terror led to revolutions in Haiti, Britain and France and revolutionary wars of liberation that set free Holland from Spain and America from Britain.

    The fierce nationalistic spirit this engendered led to the disintegration of the Austro-Hapsburg Empire, the eventual dissolution of the German super-state and the humiliation of the rump of the Spanish Empire in Cuba and the Philippines by the emergent American superpower.

    Some lessons can be extracted from this. While the brutal competitiveness unleashed by the nation-state paradigm has led to technological breakthroughs and unprecedented global wealth, the cut-throat rivalries it has spawned among nations have led to epic world wars, unaccustomed global strife, unprecedented bloodshed and most likely the current Coronavirus debacle.

    Second, the quest by some later day empires for colonies, or what the Germans colourfully described as lebensraum or living space, engendered acts of unimaginable cruelties and even genocide in the so called colonies: Germany in the old Tanganyika, Namibia, Togo and Cameroons; Italy in Ethiopia; Belgium in the Congo and Japan in Korea.

    Correspondingly, the quest by China for post-colonial economic colonies in Africa has spawned accusations of callous mistreatment of Africans and conduct bordering on economic malevolence. Several African communities have called out the Chinese leadership on these grave infractions. Like a neo-colonial power taking umbrage about being told on how to manage its overseas possession, China has responded with a combination of bluff and glum dismissal.

    China came late to colonial dominion, and it is probably bent on making up for lost time but under different circumstances. It should be remembered that it almost became a colony too, but for outstanding visionary leadership. The scars and the psychological impairment are still there for everybody to see.

    The China Question is part of a bigger nation-state question which must take into cognisance the anomalous imposition of the nation-state paradigm on African communities that were already autonomous states in their own right and which would have benefited from being left alone or as part of a loose supra-national arrangement. Until we address this issue, there will be no order worth talking about in the world.

     

     

     

    And there shall be music again

    If music be the food of love play on, William Shakespeare memorably pleaded. After Sam Mbakwe, the late teary governor of old Imo state, dramatically promoted a school musician on account of the sonorous beauty of his rhythm, the Daily Times wrote an inspired editorial titled: Play me that number again.

    Sam Mbakwe
    Sam Mbakwe

    The Daily Times was then under the delectable spell of the cultured, cigar-chomping Patrick Dele Cole and the immensely cultivated, cognac-swigging Stanley Macebuh. A few months later, both Cole and Macebuh were to disappear in a great purge masterminded by Umaru Dikko and the hard men of NPN. Pray, of what use is music to a man monitoring the slow progress of his rice armada in the implacably rough seas? It was sheer irredeemable folly coming from some Americanised sissies. Let them go back to Brooklyn or better still Albuquerque.

    Yet a nation’s political and economic decline is often accompanied by the retreat of good music. Political barbarity is always accompanied by a corresponding cultural barbarity. Whenever barbarians arrive at the barricades, it is the cultural monuments they first go after either out of vulgar fascination or sheer destructive vengeance.

    Now ask yourself this troubling question. Where are all the great cinema houses in the country today? Where is Scala, Odeon, Rivoli, Metro, KS, Plaza, Royal etc? Some have fallen off the face of the earth forever. Some have been converted to huge abattoirs. Some have become warehouses for unholy merchandise.

    Some have become great refugee camps for hoodlums and casual riffraff on the fringes of the society. Tell your children that you were at a cinema every weekend in those days and you will be greeted with juvenile guffaws. You will be lucky if one of them does not ask you: daddy what is a cinema?

    Led by insensitive and culturally challenged interlopers, this is the trough of social degradation that we have found ourselves. If it is so bad in the department of visual refinement, one can imagine the damage that has been done to musical evolution in the country.

    Just as you cannot philosophise on an empty stomach, you can also not listen to music when your stomach is rumbling away, or when hunger is “wiring” you—— as Bishop Gbonigi once memorably put it.

    But there is a silver lining in the cloud. There is some quiet revolutionary stirring in the land which suggests that Nigeria may well be on the road to slow recovery in the musical department. For the past three weeks, snooper has been on the cusp of what is truly a musical renaissance in the country. It has been the equivalent of a midsummer madness.

    Ironically, it all began on a sad and sombre note. Snooper was to attend the wedding of the daughter of a late and beloved friend, a remarkable medical doctor who died as a serving brigadier-general five years ago in 2002. Our departed friend was a genial social animal and a plucky, thoroughbred officer to boot. Although a medical officer, the late Brigadier had served as John Shagaya’s personal bodyguard on the night the tanks rolled out of the mechanised brigade in Ikeja to terminate General Buhari’s rule.

    As a mark of respect and honour to a fallen officer and gentleman, snooper began the day listening to his friend’s favourite musician: Theophilus Iwalokun, a.k.a “Theo Baba”. Iwalokun was an obscure juju musician of the late sixties, a quiet, self-effacing genius of stirring and soulful lyrics. In a feat of counter-hegemonic cultural politics, the medical students of UNILAG in the early seventies made sure that the Ilaje musician was a regular fixture at their annual ball. This was where our friend caught the bug.

    But how to locate Iwalokun’s music became an odyssey of cultural sleuthing on its own, and investigation led snooper to a quiet corner of Somolu and to a heroic and intrepid collector and cultural entrepreneur. Of course, snooper went for more after the wedding.

    Ever since the head has been bursting with the complete works of Fela, Olaiya, Roy Chicago, Rex Lawson, Eddie Okonta, Ambrose Campbell, Zeal Onyia, Felix Aigbe, Celestine Ukwu, the mournful and deeply thoughtful Igbo philosopher,  Julius Araba, Christopher Oyesiku, Tunde Nightingale, Ayinde Bakare, Fashola, Joseph Olatunji, Tatalo, Foyanmu, Oluwa, Danmole, Denge, Ojoge Daniel, Rose Adetola, I.K Dairo, Dan Maraya  and a host of other musical titans.

    That a single nation could throw up such a wide and varied assembly of musical geniuses in a single epoch is a weird tribute to the glorious fecundity of the womb of mother Nigeria, and a proof and affirmation that such a nation will not go under lightly without a historic combustion.

    Listening to these geniuses, one can hear the anxieties of influence playing out, one can detect skilful borrowings and what is known in cultural theory as inter-musical tensions, one can measure the seismic tremors of oedipal strife between musical fathers and their children. These are profound resources for a nation’s journey to cultural and political redemption. And there shall be music once again.

     

    Author’s note

    When this piece was published thirteen years ago on this page, a Nigerian musical revolution was still in embryonic form. Now the revolution is in full bloom with Nigerian music ruling the global roost. Contrary to what the author thought, it has not been a complete return to the past but a mere grafting of aspects of the past with the radical musical ingenuity of the present. All the same, memories are made of this.

  • The return of Big Brother capitalism

    The return of Big Brother capitalism

    Love in the Time of Global Cholera

    Armistice Day with Mama Igosun

     

     Tatalo Alamu

     

     

    State capitalism and Keynesian economics are back. Lord John Maynard Keynes has become the toast of civilized economic discourse all over again. What was pooh-poohed by right-wing economic theorists as sheer economic illiteracy has returned as the cornerstone of fundamental economic wisdom.

    With human civilization crouching under the hammer of a vicious pandemic, massive state intervention has become the order of the day.

    A western Nigeria proverb holds that it is the wintry Harmattan weather that will teach a scantily dressed woman some memorable sense.

    It has taken a truly lethal virus originating from China to reset the human brain. You cannot abandon primal state responsibility to the cruelty and brutal vagaries of market forces.

    That amounts to a denial of the fundamental raison d’etre of the state. The state exists to protect the weakest from the strongest and to forcefully adjudicate among contending classes in order to arrive at what is best for human society.

    Otherwise, it is headlong rush back to the state of nature. With their subways littered with human fiascos, with urban ghettoes and squalid slums dotting the landscape and with the homeless roaming the streets in search of food, some metropolitan cities were already beginning to evoke the memories of a hell on earth or Dante’s inferno even before Covid-19 struck.

    Anarchy and lawless chaos beckon where the state retreats and abandons its responsibility in the name of liberty and human freedom. If human beings were divine specimens, there would have been no need for the state in the first instance.

    A society is ultimately judged not by its wealth and immense riches but by how conducive it is to human development and refined civilization.

    It is a rebuke to humanity for so much wealth to sit side by side with so much squalor and excruciating poverty.

    Many conspiracy theorists have fingered China in the current global meltdown. If this were to be so, China will get its own comeuppance very soon.

    However that may be, there is a lot to be said in favour of the current Chinese model of state capitalism. It rewards its disciplined people with compassion and empathy.

    The paradox of the enlightened authoritarian state is that it often treats its people with the indulgence of an ancient patriarch.

    The problem of post-colonial Africa is discipline and order. African political elite cannot impose discipline from above because they lack discipline themselves.

    You cannot give what you don’t have. In Nigeria it has been noticed that it is when economic nationalists are in charge of the economic engine room, no matter the political colouration of the regime, that the nation experiences economic stability and relative prosperity: Awolowo/ Adedeji under Gowon and Ani/ Aluko under Abacha.

    But while we are at it and however harsh and uncaring it may often appear, we cannot afford to throw away the baby with the bath water of monetarist economics. We must never forget what brought the old Welfarist state into disrepute in the first instance.

    The state cannot return to the old Father Christmas patent; a huge economic alms house doling out largesse to everybody including those who have refused to work and those who have refused to find work.

    Nothing stifles human creativity and ingenuity more than the thought that there is no reward for those who go the extra mile and those who are gifted with the unusual ability to solve civilizational problems.

    The passion for social justice must not be equated with the thirst for vengeance or the equalization of poverty.

    The most successful instance of state capitalism recognises and rewards the talented ten-percentile without abdicating its primary responsibility to the less endowed.

    The economics of disaffection as a dire consequence of a lack of national consensus is militating against any fundamental economic progress in Nigeria.

    Twenty one years after the formal cessation of military plunder, there is still a run on the national treasury because everybody believes that something must eventually give.

    Unfortunately, the stolen monies stashed away in foreign and local bank vaults are savings that are not worth the name in the long run. It will not save anybody.

    It certainly takes a ruling elite gifted with transcendental wisdom and self-enlightened kindness to know that the rich cannot enjoy their wealth if the poor and less endowed do not have the purchasing power to obtain elementary comfort.

    While some people made this discovery almost a century ago, the feudal barons holding Nigeria hostage have not, despite the world-historic tragedy gradually enveloping them and the nation.

    When what you are about to read was published here about thirteen years ago in 2007, nobody could have thought of a pandemic that will devastate the global economy.

    After 9/11, America was preparing for the wrong kind of war. Now, it has been upended by a mere virus which has laid bare for the world to see its great racial and economic divide.

    If the United States had spent one tenth of what it had expended on munitions on boosting infrastructure and improving health care facilities the outcome might have been different.

    Now the greatest country the world has seen lay prostrate and in terribly piteous condition. Like a polar bear at bay, a clearly distressed Donald Trump brays in distemper while the Chinese chuckle with sinister relish.

    This time around, an older civilization seems to have the full measure of America.

    This article is republished this morning after thirteen years so that the debate about the economic and political wellbeing of the post-Covid-19 world can commence in earnest.

     

     

    Love in the Time of Global Cholera

     

    Our heart is warmed by the news that about a hundred freshly trained Nigerian medical doctors are returning to the country courtesy of Cuba. This, no doubt, is going to be a great boost to the failing national health programme and a windfall for our drying pool of human capital.

    Snooper salutes Fidel Castro and the good people of Cuba for this act of generosity and munificence, particularly at a time when their own economy is not in the best of shape. Just as there are noble people, there are also noble nations.

    Readers who are familiar with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ wonderful epic, Love in the Time of Cholera will agree that raging epidemics do not prevent human beings from falling in love.

    If anything, the stress of affliction often predisposes certain people to premature romance. But the world changes and so does humanity.

    In our own age, the idea of love among nations may seem like a gospel from a quaint and distant era, erased forever from human memory.

    Despite the pretences of globalisation at turning the world into a global village, what it has actually turned the world into is a global cage with a polar cat set among frightened pigeons.

    There is nothing strange or unusual about this. Only those who read their history wrongly are wrong-footed by historical developments.

    When the early Europeans, in the first wave of globalisation, set out from their city-states to explore the rest of the world, it was not to bring peace or mutual cooperation.

    It was a mission of unequal exchange, conquest and colonisation. As it was in the beginning, so shall it be at the end.

    It is noteworthy, then, that at a time when the forces of globalisation have unleashed a brutal competitiveness among nations and an unhealthy polarisation of the world into an affluent and politically stable west and the rest of us, we find glimpses of the old paradigm of cooperation among nations irrespective of dominant ideologies.

    Like the two aging former lovers in Marquez’s classic who renewed their vow after half a century of separation, the path of Nigeria and Cuba has crossed before in happier circumstances and a fruitful liason, too.

    When the tempestuous General Murtala Mohammed famously erupted at the 1976 OAU conference against western meddling in Angola, it was Cuba that provided the military teeth.

    There is a consensus that this was probably Nigeria’s golden moment as a nation. With the help of Cuba and under Nigeria’s vociferous watch, the MPLA triumphed. Holden Roberto was sent scampering across the border to his Zairian in law while Jonas Savimbi retreated southwards to his Ovimbudu tribal enclave.

    Thereafter before the biblical cock could crow thrice, Nigeria had betrayed its former ally serially. As the nation fell under the iron grips of a string of right-wing IMF-compliant dictators, the idea of radical and revolutionary fraternity also receded into the shadow.

    As the rhetoric of African liberation faltered, it was replaced by the rhetoric of market forces and the end of ideology.

    As the ogre of dictatorship matured, Nigeria also came under the spell of the intellectual clones of the neo-con, a strange African hybrid evolved from the American militarisation of the entire globe, the militarisation of post-colonial Nigeria and a corresponding militarisation of the thinking faculty.

    These are hard men and women mouthing empty platitudes like military recruits drilled into senseless obeisance. If ever one can have the daring oxymoron of intellectual zombies, here they were.

    As apostles of mindless economic and political violence, they were to receive their official canonisation as the Obasanjo regime drifted farther and farther to the right in a fruitless and futile search for relevance and western endorsement.

    This is not Castro or Cuba’s turf, and both have given us a wide berth. Despite the declining national revenues, despite the economic blockade, despite the massive propaganda and the seeming unpopularity of rigid centralization, Cuba has refused to go under.

    Bloodied, battered and brutalised, this heroic nation, in fifty years of revolutionary turbulence, has achieved full literacy and comprehensive medical service for all, a feat still in the realm of an impossible dream for many western nations.

    Whatever may come after him, Castro has changed Cuba forever for the better. He has laid the foundation of a great nation from the marsh bog of corruption and sleaze.

    His gift to Nigeria at this time could not have been more symbolic and damning. A nation can continue to ape western ideologies until the kingdom comes, as long as the political elite do not get their act together, the country will be marooned in the limbo of underdevelopment.

    After fifty years of oil revenues, Nigeria has to rely on a small island off the American coast to boost its supply of doctors, no thanks to a string of maniacally corrupt rulers.

    Being a gifted ironist, Fidel Castro would understand that there are leaders and there are leaders.  Here is thanking the old man of Havana once more for his thoughtful medical assistance to a diseased nation.

    ( First published in June, 2007)

     

    Armistice Day with Mama Igosun

     

    It felt like Europe on Armistice Day exactly seventy five years ago. As dawn broke last Monday and government’s relaxation of some of the restrictions occasioned by Covid-19 came into effect, all hell broke loose in Lagos, the greatest megalopolis of the Black person in contemporary epoch.

    It was like watching a human volcano erupt as the outlying slums and suburbs emptied their contents on the besieged city.

    Only God knew what had roused the crowd to this early morning animation. But there were people everywhere heading in no particular direction and often at apparent cross purpose.

    Very soon, the banks, hospitals and government offices filled up to their capacity with the unruly conurbation spilling to adjacent streets as tempers flared and hot arguments about right of way and other priorities settled for fistic adjudication.

    Watching the human maelstrom from the veranda, Mama Igosun exploded in mirth and wicked humour: “ even when dem Ibadan army come drive dem Owu people comot and dem come scatter everywhere, the crowd no reach this one oo”, the ancient damsel noted still confining her point of reference to ancient Yoruba feuds.

    The old woman was clad in snow-white apparel, like a priestess of some dreaded orisa deity. Thinking that an apparition had stolen into the house, a dozy Okon was about to scream for help before realising it was Mama Igosun.

    “If you like, make una appear like Angel Gabriel. No be you go drive me comot for Lagos, since I no come Lagos becos of una, you hear?” Okon swore at the old woman.

    “Yeye boy, na mariwo (palm fronds) you see, you never see dem egungun”, she shot back having comfortably ensconced herself in a ringside seat outside the house. By now the crowd was becoming even more unruly with people running helter-skelter in all directions without any reason or rhyme.

    “Abi dis dem Shaina (China) people don poison dem water supply for dem Iju sef? Dis one come dey pass Kurunmi and dem Ijaye war”, the old woman mused to herself with a mischievous twinkle.

    Suddenly Mama Igosun sighted her favourite police buddy in mufti trudging rather desultorily among the crowd with horror written all over his face.

    “Ha officer, policeman, how market?” Mama Igosun sneered at him.

    “Ha mama, ilu (town) don burn you still dey ask for market? Market don scatter”, the distraught cop rumbled as he elbowed his way forward.

    By this time, the old woman noticed the undersized police fellow often in oversized uniform who doubled as the orderly to the older one, struggling with the crowd to keep up pace with his boss.

    Despite his puny size, he was quite a handful with his colourful turn of phrase and funny northern Yoruba accent.

    “Ha, ha, kunduke, kunduke !! ( ancient Yoruba word for miniscule or kindergarten masquerade) You don thief finish  today?” the old woman snorted at his heels.

    “Ha mama, town don scatter. Dem say drum don tear and you dey ask for Ayantoyinbo? Even if you call Ayanleke he no fit. Armed robber come rob armed robber today. Manamana (Thunder pronounced with Oke Ogun accent) come descend. Dem Awawa boys finis baba police for bank today.

    Dem take all him money from him pocket and him ATM card. Oga just dey look dem him no fit talk. Dem even ask him to write him ATM number, and oga come dey paranpitate as he write am”, the rogue cop chanted with barely suppressed malice.

    “Wetin happen?” the ancient lady asked in mock concern.

    “Mama, sebi you be ogbologbo? Dem masquerade without mask na him be the master of masquerade with mask. Without uniform and rifle policeman na ordinary Idumota omolanke man.

    He don dey reach time make man leave dis yeye job jeje. Dem boys I see today even Inspector General go pick race”, the old boy sniggered.

    “Yekinni, stop releasing state secrets or I will put you on guardroom trial as soon as we get to the station, you stinking idiot”, the older cop finally exploded without any conviction which elicited a girlish laughter of derision from the old woman.

    “ Kai, dem don finish dem police. Dis one no be police force of Oluokun of Amunigun, Areoye of Beiyerunka and Elekuru of Agbadagbudu”, the old woman lamented.

    “Mama if dem like make dem go bring Alalubosa and leave Elekuru na the same thing. When  Abiku dey fight Ayorunbo something must to give”, the younger cop drawled.

    It was at this point that the noise of heavy duty military grade shooting panicked the already disorderly crowd. Amidst the din and confusion, the old woman of Igosun vanished into thin air.

  • Armistice Day with Mama Igosun

     Tatalo Alamu

     

    It felt like Europe on Armistice Day exactly seventy five years ago. As dawn broke last Monday and government’s relaxation of some of the restrictions occasioned by Covid-19 came into effect, all hell broke loose in Lagos, the greatest megalopolis of the Black person in contemporary epoch.

    It was like watching a human volcano erupt as the outlying slums and suburbs emptied their contents on the besieged city.

    Only God knew what had roused the crowd to this early morning animation. But there were people everywhere heading in no particular direction and often at apparent cross purpose.

    Very soon, the banks, hospitals and government offices filled up to their capacity with the unruly conurbation spilling to adjacent streets as tempers flared and hot arguments about right of way and other priorities settled for fistic adjudication.

    Watching the human maelstrom from the veranda, Mama Igosun exploded in mirth and wicked humour: “ even when dem Ibadan army come drive dem Owu people comot and dem come scatter everywhere, the crowd no reach this one oo”, the ancient damsel noted still confining her point of reference to ancient Yoruba feuds.

    The old woman was clad in snow-white apparel, like a priestess of some dreaded orisa deity. Thinking that an apparition had stolen into the house, a dozy Okon was about to scream for help before realising it was Mama Igosun.

    “If you like, make una appear like Angel Gabriel. No be you go drive me comot for Lagos, since I no come Lagos becos of una, you hear?” Okon swore at the old woman.

    “Yeye boy, na mariwo (palm fronds) you see, you never see dem egungun”, she shot back having comfortably ensconced herself in a ringside seat outside the house.

    By now the crowd was becoming even more unruly with people running helter-skelter in all directions without any reason or rhyme.

    “Abi dis dem Shaina (China) people don poison dem water supply for dem Iju sef? Dis one come dey pass Kurunmi and dem Ijaye war”, the old woman mused to herself with a mischievous twinkle.

    Suddenly Mama Igosun sighted her favourite police buddy in mufti trudging rather desultorily among the crowd with horror written all over his face.

    “Ha officer, policeman, how market?” Mama Igosun sneered at him.

    “Ha mama, ilu (town) don burn you still dey ask for market? Market don scatter”, the distraught cop rumbled as he elbowed his way forward.

    By this time, the old woman noticed the undersized police fellow often in oversized uniform who doubled as the orderly to the older one, struggling with the crowd to keep up pace with his boss.

    Despite his puny size, he was quite a handful with his colourful turn of phrase and funny northern Yoruba accent.

    “Ha, ha, kunduke, kunduke !! ( ancient Yoruba word for miniscule or kindergarten masquerade) You don thief finish  today?” the old woman snorted at his heels.

    “Ha mama, town don scatter. Dem say drum don tear and you dey ask for Ayantoyinbo? Even if you call Ayanleke he no fit. Armed robber come rob armed robber today. Manamana (Thunder pronounced with Oke Ogun accent) come descend.

    Dem Awawa boys finis baba police for bank today. Dem take all him money from him pocket and him ATM card. Oga just dey look dem him no fit talk.

    Dem even ask him to write him ATM number, and oga come dey paranpitate as he write am”, the rogue cop chanted with barely suppressed malice.

    “Wetin happen?” the ancient lady asked in mock concern.

    “Mama, sebi you be ogbologbo? Dem masquerade without mask na him be the master of masquerade with mask. Without uniform and rifle policeman na ordinary Idumota omolanke man.

    He don dey reach time make man leave dis yeye job jeje. Dem boys I see today even Inspector General go pick race”, the old boy sniggered.

    “Yekinni, stop releasing state secrets or I will put you on guardroom trial as soon as we get to the station, you stinking idiot”, the older cop finally exploded without any conviction which elicited a girlish laughter of derision from the old woman.

    “ Kai, dem don finish dem police. Dis one no be police force of Oluokun of Amunigun, Areoye of Beiyerunka and Elekuru of Agbadagbudu”, the old woman lamented.

    “Mama if dem like make dem go bring Alalubosa and leave Elekuru na the same thing. When  Abiku dey fight Ayorunbo something must to give”, the younger cop drawled.

    It was at this point that the noise of heavy duty military grade shooting panicked the already disorderly crowd. Amidst the din and confusion, the old woman of Igosun vanished into thin air.

  • Love in the Time of Global Cholera

     Tatalo Alamu

     

    Our heart is warmed by the news that about a hundred freshly trained Nigerian medical doctors are returning to the country courtesy of Cuba.

    This, no doubt, is going to be a great boost to the failing national health programme and a windfall for our drying pool of human capital.

    Snooper salutes Fidel Castro and the good people of Cuba for this act of generosity and munificence, particularly at a time when their own economy is not in the best of shape. Just as there are noble people, there are also noble nations.

    Readers who are familiar with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ wonderful epic, Love in the Time of Cholera will agree that raging epidemics do not prevent human beings from falling in love.

    If anything, the stress of affliction often predisposes certain people to premature romance. But the world changes and so does humanity.

    In our own age, the idea of love among nations may seem like a gospel from a quaint and distant era, erased forever from human memory.

    Despite the pretences of globalisation at turning the world into a global village, what it has actually turned the world into is a global cage with a polar cat set among frightened pigeons.

    There is nothing strange or unusual about this. Only those who read their history wrongly are wrong-footed by historical developments.

    When the early Europeans, in the first wave of globalisation, set out from their city-states to explore the rest of the world, it was not to bring peace or mutual cooperation.

    It was a mission of unequal exchange, conquest and colonisation. As it was in the beginning, so shall it be at the end.

    It is noteworthy, then, that at a time when the forces of globalisation have unleashed a brutal competitiveness among nations and an unhealthy polarisation of the world into an affluent and politically stable west and the rest of us, we find glimpses of the old paradigm of cooperation among nations irrespective of dominant ideologies.

    Like the two aging former lovers in Marquez’s classic who renewed their vow after half a century of separation, the path of Nigeria and Cuba has crossed before in happier circumstances and a fruitful liason, too.

    When the tempestuous General Murtala Mohammed famously erupted at the 1976 OAU conference against western meddling in Angola, it was Cuba that provided the military teeth.

    There is a consensus that this was probably Nigeria’s golden moment as a nation. With the help of Cuba and under Nigeria’s vociferous watch, the MPLA triumphed.

    Holden Roberto was sent scampering across the border to his Zairian in law while Jonas Savimbi retreated southwards to his Ovimbudu tribal enclave.

    Thereafter before the biblical cock could crow thrice, Nigeria had betrayed its former ally serially. As the nation fell under the iron grips of a string of right-wing IMF-compliant dictators, the idea of radical and revolutionary fraternity also receded into the shadow.

    As the rhetoric of African liberation faltered, it was replaced by the rhetoric of market forces and the end of ideology.

    As the ogre of dictatorship matured, Nigeria also came under the spell of the intellectual clones of the neo-con, a strange African hybrid evolved from the American militarisation of the entire globe, the militarisation of post-colonial Nigeria and a corresponding militarisation of the thinking faculty.

    These are hard men and women mouthing empty platitudes like military recruits drilled into senseless obeisance. If ever one can have the daring oxymoron of intellectual zombies, here they were.

    As apostles of mindless economic and political violence, they were to receive their official canonisation as the Obasanjo regime drifted farther and farther to the right in a fruitless and futile search for relevance and western endorsement.

    This is not Castro or Cuba’s turf, and both have given us a wide berth. Despite the declining national revenues, despite the economic blockade, despite the massive propaganda and the seeming unpopularity of rigid centralization, Cuba has refused to go under.

    Bloodied, battered and brutalised, this heroic nation, in fifty years of revolutionary turbulence, has achieved full literacy and comprehensive medical service for all, a feat still in the realm of an impossible dream for many western nations.

    Whatever may come after him, Castro has changed Cuba forever for the better. He has laid the foundation of a great nation from the marsh bog of corruption and sleaze.

    His gift to Nigeria at this time could not have been more symbolic and damning. A nation can continue to ape western ideologies until the kingdom comes, as long as the political elite do not get their act together, the country will be marooned in the limbo of underdevelopment.

    After fifty years of oil revenues, Nigeria has to rely on a small island off the American coast to boost its supply of doctors, no thanks to a string of maniacally corrupt rulers.

    Being a gifted ironist, Fidel Castro would understand that there are leaders and there are leaders.

    Here is thanking the old man of Havana once more for his thoughtful medical assistance to a diseased nation.

    ( First published in June, 2007)

  • The Beach of Dead Whales

    The Beach of Dead Whales

    *Mama Igosun runs riot

    *On the banality of evil

    Tatalo Alamu

    It was while swimming off the sandy beach at Tarkwa Bay that a group of boys first beheld what looked like a monster creature thrashing about the turbulent seas. It was a huge monster, which appeared like a jumbo fish, a sea-dwelling animal and an amphibious prehistoric bird all rolled into one. It was luminously black and its lustrous hide glowered in the brilliant sunset creating the effects of an optical illusion. It was a whale.

    As the strange creature dived and banked in the shallow waters in obvious distress, the boys abandoned their tethered canoe and took to their heels. The ripples were powerful and strong enough to throw a big ship off course. At night and still trembling under his mother’s murky bed sheet, one of the boys told the matriarch about the strange sighting. She hushed him up. “You fool, when I told you to finish the malaria potion you refused. Now, it has returned”, the harassed woman screamed at a delinquent son.

    No one has sighted or seen a whale in these climes before. There was not even a name for it either in antiquity or contemporary parlance. The odd stray shark has been sighted in adjacent waters. Occasionally, the carcass of the solitary sea lion or off-message seal has been washed ashore. Once in a long while, a miniature version of the piranha has been known to tangle with the fishing trawl. And awed by its massive size, the local people named the hippopotamus the water elephant.

    Still, no word on or about the real thing: the whale. Up till that historic moment, its existence belonged in the realm of intrepid dreaming or the malarial imagination. But since the whale is a migratory mammal, it is quite possible that it had learnt to give these shores a wide berth because it was hunted to extinction in an earlier epoch.

    On the other hand, since scientific legend has it that the whale once lived on land but went back to water when the going got too rough, ancient caution might have led it to avoid the old killing shores of West Africa. Even for savage mammals, the fear of these shores is the beginning of wisdom.

    All this became the stuff of airy speculations as citizens of the crazed megalopolis woke up that rain-soaked morning to find the troubling reality of a beached whale as their august guest. By the mid-morning, a huge crowd had gathered to take a look at the mammoth monstrosity.

    No one had seen anything like this before. Those who thought the elephant was the ultimate creation could not believe their eyes. What was this thing that was more massive than ten huge elephants combined? But the monster simply ignored everybody occasionally emitting a rumbling sound that drove the fear of the lord into the crowd.

    By the next morning, the stranded behemoth had been joined by two other mammoth whales. This was no ordinary coincidence. Something new was happening in this turbulent part of Africa. No one had seen a whale before not to talk of three jumbo whales at the same time. A huge portion of the rehabilitated Maroko beach was now occupied by beached whales.

    Upon hearing the news of the strange visitants which spread like wild bushfire in the harmattan, the entire interior of the country emptied into an already besieged mega city. Very soon, things took on the colour and atmosphere of a beach carnival of the oppressed and the unfortunate. The people were having a whale of a time. For many upcountry vagrants and joyless hobos, it was their first chance to see the city in its glittering opulence matched only by the feral nastiness of its slums and its decaying infrastructure. It was like Havana before the Cuban revolution.

    In fairness to the government of Mallam Mansa Musa, it quickly assembled a team of experts to study the strange visitation. In view of the urgency of the situation, they were given one year to submit their report, with a provision for multiple extensions in case they wanted to travel abroad. These chaps were notable scientists and consultant oceanographers who had seen action off the coast of New Zealand and on the island of Okinawa.

    They had worked with merchant whalers and other offshore buccaneers. They measured the bulk and breadth of the bulbous invaders and came to the conclusion that by regular standards, these were no regular whales. They recommended that they must be towed back to the ocean depths without any further ado.

    But there was an immediate problem. In the history of the country and throughout its length and breadth, there was no, and there has never been, such a towing tug. Up till that point, the nation had lived on miracles and survived by miraculous reprieves. Ever since its birth, the nation has flirted with suicide often getting to the brink of an apocalypse before being dramatically delivered by the God of the Blackman.

    In 1992 September when the cream of the nation’s middle ranking military officers perished in one of the most infamous aeronautical scandals of the century, the traumatised citizenry had to wait for a whole twelve hours before help came from a German company based in the country. By then it was too late for the boys.

    It was not the impact of the crash in the shallow marshes of Ejigbo that killed the boys. Most of them actually survived the headlong dive. The survivors died of strangulation and asphyxiation. Throughout the night, the inhabitants of outlying slums heard the wails and cries of the brave chaps as they thrashed about and struggled to wrench themselves free of the iron coffin.

    It was like being buried alive. When they were eventually brought out, many of them had the residue of the first aid treatment they had applied to themselves in the sulphurous entombment. The nation had lost the cream of its future generals and marshals.

    Oh boy, did the corpses of those illustrious chaps stink. On the day of burial, the whole of Abuja stank to high heavens like the abandoned abattoir that the nation has become. What are we going to tell the children of Major Sam Mesaba Ogbeha, a first class officer and gentleman, or the newly promoted gentle giant, Colonel Taiwo Ogunjobi and many others?

    None of the ranking echelons in the military high command saw it fit to resign at this epochal disgrace of the black being. They were too consumed by the vicious power play that was to lead the nation to the brink of disintegration.

    Meanwhile on the beach, things took a more dramatic turn. More whales turned up as if in a historic reunion of distressed mammals. The whales were piled so hard and high that the entire coastline took on a dark, deathly hue. An observer from the nation’s last surviving military helicopter, in a strange turn of imagery, described the scene as resembling a huge offshore warehouse of whale waiting to discharge its cargo.

    Something began to give. While some of the whales lay still in terminal lassitude, others plunged their head deeper in the sand in fretful distress. All began discharging some gory substance. Then the very first one, now driven into the main road by the bulbous pile, let forth a frightful bellow and lay still. It was dead. Others quickly followed and the entire beach soon became a tangled mass of dead and dying whale.

    Many people, now convinced that the whales were a harmless mass of protoplasm climbed the skyscraper of soft, appealing meat, frolicking and sliding at will. Then one man brought out a jack knife and with the cry of “na better meat” heaved out a huge slab from the dead whale. It was like a divine signal. Thousands of hungry and famished humanity descended on dead and dying whales with all manner of crude instruments. In a moment, the entire beach became a huge abattoir foaming with blood and gore.

    As the news of this biblical bounty spread to the interior, many descended on the beach to have their share of the national whale. Salivating with apostolic relish, the nation’s leading spiritual merchant described the whalefest as “manna from heaven”. Urging his despairing congregation to take full advantage, it was God’s way of showing that he would never abandon his own, the man of God added.

    Then divine disaster struck, and for a nation that has lived at the edge of the abyss, it was massive and merciless. In the tropics, things flourish and perish very quickly. Obeying the iron tropical law, the whales began to decompose very rapidly. By the following evening, the entire coast had been taken over by a suffocating smell of decay and decomposition. Worse still, many who had taken the strange meat started vomiting and dying after a violent seizure.

    Disoriented by the septic stench, the entire populace started fleeing in all directions. As the pestilence took hold, the remaining institutions collapsed and the politicians, soldiers, clergymen, traditional rulers and judges took to their heels, heading for the airports or the interior. Unfortunately for them, a human sandstorm of refugees had taken over all the airports, while dead whales had taken over the seaports.

    In three brisk days, it was all over. The entire land lay still and quiet like a vast sepulchre. But this is not the silence of lambs. Born a human disaster and fed by a series of man-made disasters, it has taken a natural disaster to overwhelm the nation. A plague has seen off another plague. When politics and science fail nature triumphs. That is the iron law of human evolution. The early morning sun shone brilliantly.

    It is a beautiful day on the Marina Quayside. (First published on this page in August 2008.)

     

     

    Mama Igosun runs riot

    After days of dreary and dismal weather, it was a different Friday morning. The sun rose early and shone with remarkable vigour as if to make up for the forlorn weather of preceding days. Some ebullience and optimism had returned to the nation. After five weeks of a distressing lock-down as a result of the raging pandemic, the heart warmed at the prospects of a partial relaxation.

    Snooper himself has been in a pernickety mood. The possibility of some prized delicacies returning to the menu, baring Okon’s penchant for sadistic mischief, sent one virtually swooning with expectations. The last time the crazy fellow had been sent to the market to get fresh eggs, he had returned with something looking like miniscule coconut which turned out to be Iguana eggs.

    The mad boy had told his boss that that was what was available in the market and he should just get on with it. Snooper was so enraged that he threw the frying pan at the crook, which he ducked and which caught a dozy Mama Igosun pat on the ankle whereupon that one went ballistic berating yours sincerely for not being in control of his household.

    All of a sudden, the fragrant and aromatic smell of sandal wood and some ancient pomade invaded the entire space. Yours sincerely thought the aroma faintly and quaintly familiar, a throwback to ancient times in the village when damsels and debutantes prepared themselves for Christmas festivity. As snooper sniffed the wondrous aroma while wondering where it was all coming from, Okon crashed through the door panting and heaving with fright.

    “Oga, oga, mama’s head don catch fire. He don set himself ablast and ablaze. Na dem kainkain and dem Red Indian taba him dey smoke go finish dem woman ooo”, Okon shrieked in fear and terror.

    “Where, where, oh my God?” yours sincerely screamed as he crashed down the stairs and swept through the kitchen into the backyard only to be met by arguably the most surreal spectacle of his adult life. There was the ancient stormy petrel sitting straight and ramrod amidst the receding fumes as she beheld herself in smiling self-admiration from an ancient mirror of Ottoman Turkish provenance. In the background were the dying embers from the damsel’s inferno and the red-hot native iron comb the old woman had been plying back and forth through her hair.

    “Akanbi, wetin be matter? Wetin dem kukuruku boy tell you?” Mama Igosun asked calmly and with a mischievous glow in her face. “I don whack him coconut head dis morning”.

    “Mama, what is all this?” snooper asked, deflated and crestfallen.

    “Wetin be wetin?” the old woman shot back. “I been dey fire and iron my hair. Na the thing wey I been dey do with your mama over seventy years. That’s how your papa see am come say better dey there. Old age no mean Kusimilaya no dey again. Akanbi, dem say arugbo (Old woman) no dey Ghana”.

    “Mama nobody does this kind of thing anymore. You can go to the hairdresser.” Snooper remonstrated with the ancient troublemaker.

    “Which hairdresser? Wetin him dey dress? Dem wound my head?” Mama snarled in mock anger.

    “ When you burn the house, you will be happy”, yours sincerely sulked as he retreated.

    “Wo (look) make him burn patapata, dat one no concern me”, mama sneered at snooper’s heel.

     

     

     

    On the banality of evil

    (Mallam Abba Kyari and the Adolf Eichmann paradox)

    This column has been inundated with requests to comment on the passing of Mallam Abba Kyari. There has been a rash of inquiries about our opinion. Even when this columnist objected that we never met or sighted the late eminent public bureaucrat, notable Nigerians insisted that column-writing is a public obligation not a question of private desire.

    An irate fellow pointedly asked whether columnist could not make a link between the shoddy nature of the president’s last speech and the fact that the master is missing. Abba Kyari himself was known to have confided in his friends that it was when something happened to him that people will know how crucial he had been to preventing the country from sliding into chaos and ungovernability.

    It is with public order in mind that this brief intervention is imperative. If we are hoping to build a sane country ruled by rationality and modern ethos, the impact of a public career must not be judged by private testimonies and personal affirmation of sophomoric friendship. The peddlers of this shameful betise are ironically reaffirming how much Nigeria is in the throes of feudal anomie.

    The politicization of obituary that we have witnessed shows how polarized Nigeria has become and an ironic evidence of how polarizing and divisive a figure the late Kyari himself was. While his numerous friends and admirers lined up to celebrate a man they have always known for his humility, his Spartan self-denial, his kindness and his spectacular acts  thoughtfulness, others demurred while a few went for his jugular. There were also significant silences.

    When Hanna Arendt, the late Jewish philosopher, arrived in Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, she was so horrified by the ordinariness and provincial mediocrity of the defendant that she wrote an essay titled, The Banality of Evil. When they give their life to a power project of complete domination over other people, ordinary-looking people are capable of acts of extraordinary wickedness and cruelty.

    The evidence of scandalous preferment, institutional chaos and presidential disorder left behind by Kyari calls for a structured and rational template for that post.

     

  • Mama Igosun runs riot

    Tatalo Alamu

    After days of dreary and dismal weather, it was a different Friday morning. The sun rose early and shone with remarkable vigour as if to make up for the forlorn weather of preceding days. Some ebullience and optimism had returned to the nation. After five weeks of a distressing lock-down as a result of the raging pandemic, the heart warmed at the prospects of a partial relaxation.

    Snooper himself has been in a pernickety mood. The possibility of some prized delicacies returning to the menu, baring Okon’s penchant for sadistic mischief, sent one virtually swooning with expectations. The last time the crazy fellow had been sent to the market to get fresh eggs, he had returned with something looking like miniscule coconut which turned out to be Iguana eggs.

    The mad boy had told his boss that that was what was available in the market and he should just get on with it. Snooper was so enraged that he threw the frying pan at the crook, which he ducked and which caught a dozy Mama Igosun pat on the ankle whereupon that one went ballistic berating yours sincerely for not being in control of his household.

    All of a sudden, the fragrant and aromatic smell of sandal wood and some ancient pomade invaded the entire space. Yours sincerely thought the aroma faintly and quaintly familiar, a throwback to ancient times in the village when damsels and debutantes prepared themselves for Christmas festivity. As snooper sniffed the wondrous aroma while wondering where it was all coming from, Okon crashed through the door panting and heaving with fright.

    “Oga, oga, mama’s head don catch fire. He don set himself ablast and ablaze. Na dem kainkain and dem Red Indian taba him dey smoke go finish dem woman ooo”, Okon shrieked in fear and terror.

    “Where, where, oh my God?” yours sincerely screamed as he crashed down the stairs and swept through the kitchen into the backyard only to be met by arguably the most surreal spectacle of his adult life. There was the ancient stormy petrel sitting straight and ramrod amidst the receding fumes as she beheld herself in smiling self-admiration from an ancient mirror of Ottoman Turkish provenance. In the background were the dying embers from the damsel’s inferno and the red-hot native iron comb the old woman had been plying back and forth through her hair.

    “Akanbi, wetin be matter? Wetin dem kukuruku boy tell you?” Mama Igosun asked calmly and with a mischievous glow in her face. “I don whack him coconut head dis morning”.

    “Mama, what is all this?” snooper asked, deflated and crestfallen.

    “Wetin be wetin?” the old woman shot back. “I been dey fire and iron my hair. Na the thing wey I been dey do with your mama over seventy years. That’s how your papa see am come say better dey there. Old age no mean Kusimilaya no dey again. Akanbi, dem say arugbo (Old woman) no dey Ghana”.

    “Mama nobody does this kind of thing anymore. You can go to the hairdresser.” Snooper remonstrated with the ancient troublemaker.

    “Which hairdresser? Wetin him dey dress? Dem wound my head?” Mama snarled in mock anger.

    “ When you burn the house, you will be happy”, yours sincerely sulked as he retreated.

    “Wo (look) make him burn patapata, dat one no concern me”, mama sneered at snooper’s heel.