The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • On the banality of evil

    On the banality of evil

    Tatalo Alamu

    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.

  • The life and times of Richard Akinjide

    The life and times of Richard Akinjide

    Stars of the current plague

    Tatalo Alamu

     

    For most of his later years, the name “Mr Twelve Two-Thirds” clung to Richard Osuolale Akinjide like a limpet. When he passed on this past week at the ripe old age of eighty nine, it was this image of a legal fixer of electoral conundrum that loomed large in the popular imagination.

    But the part cannot be greater than the whole. The Ibadan-born politician was much more than this. He was a master political strategist, an accomplished historian, anti-colonial intellectual, gifted raconteur, wit and a legal prize-fighter of exemplary forensic brilliance.

    Yet if the truth must be told, whatever Akinjide’s glittering gifts in other departments of human endeavour, it is the picture of a talented but reactionary lawyer; an enemy of his people in the service of a feudal/military complex that prevails in folk memory. The sum total is far more complex and intriguing to say the least.

    There is a reason for this and it can be located in the fierce tussle for power among Yoruba elite, ancestral political animosities and sub-ethnic cultural tensions which often spill over to the canvas of contemporary politics. Yoruba post-colonial politics is merely the continuation of the old pre-colonial civil war by other means.

    For over half a century, and having qualified as a lawyer well before the age of thirty, Akinjide was a major political gladiator and principal arms bearer in the turf war. With his death this past week, Nigeria has lost one of the last surviving members of the old master-class politicians.

    It was an era of titans and great political combatants. The curtain is virtually closing on this generation and Akinjide’s death represents the last flicker of its dying ember.

    On the surface, Chief Akinjide’s politics seemed to have rotated on a fixed fulcrum: an abiding personal animus for Chief Obafemi Awolowo and an even greater aversion for his brand of politics. But it could be deeper than this and even less personal.   Right from the word go, there is no record of public affection or a private meeting of mind between the two titans.

    Akinjide’s formative years were spent under the tutelage of the combustible Adegoke Adelabu and the Mabolaje Grand Alliance with its “up and at em” hell raising and combat-joyous exertions, whereas Awolowo, no less deadly when roused to political confrontation, appeared outwardly more restrained and sedate.

    It was a mode of politics that hugged the fault lines of old pre-colonial cultural divisions in the Yoruba nation and embraced the contours of sub-ethnic supremacist battles for political hegemony among the emergent Yoruba political elite. Akinjide who regarded himself as a scion of a master-class of political strategists and Empire philosophers did not hide his inclination for right-wing patrician politics.

    He never mastered how to rouse the rabble. This was to prove fatal to his dynastic aspirations in the post-military garrison politics of Ibadan. But since he bought into the logic he could not complain about the logistics or the end-product particularly if it favoured former thugs and muscle-men.

    For Akinjide, the centre of the Yoruba universe was to the north of Ibadan and not to its south east towards the coast where Chief Awolowo and his people were erupting in one remarkable burst of energy and drive.

    Yet it was when this unstable coalition of clashing worldviews and conflicting ideologies coalesced into the Action Group through the visionary and integrative Egbe Omo Oduduwa that the Yoruba recorded their greatest modern achievement, a development which pushed them almost beyond the portals of modern civilization in one frenzied and frenetic surge. It is needless to add that it also contained the seeds of future destruction.

    Perhaps it is the the cultural affinities with a feudal north and an ancient Yoruba empire that convinced Akinjide that Awolowo was not only politically wrong but wrong-headed in his egalitarian politics and his attempts to isolate the Yoruba nation from the mainstream of Nigerian politics however grossly misconfigured the architecture of the new nation may be.

    As far as this vision of politics is concerned, it is not only at the personal level that politics is about the allocation of resources, it is even more so at the level of the multi-ethnic nation where there is a permanent run on the national canteen. It does not matter if this allocation takes place in a condition of great inequity or against a background of unsettling poverty and misery. Every empire must have its own slaves. It is the immutable law of human history and nature.

    Tales abound of Richard Akinjide’s derring-do as a youthful Federal Minister of Education as he fought and strove to give the Yoruba nation a fair share of the national cake. An older colleague who became a notable librarian of a prominent university narrated how Chief Akinjide made this possible against all odds. The logic is that if you do not register your strong physical presence at the food hall, you cannot begin to question how the meal was shared.

    With such contrasting and conflicting visions of the nation and the Yoruba place in it, and with neither side willing to yield position, a collision of altars was inevitable. Even after the political conflagration that consumed the old west, the old divisions continued.  The attempt to unite all the warring Yoruba political factions under Chief Awolowo proved a bridge too far.

    In the event, the advent of the Second Republic signalled resumed political hostilities among the Yoruba combatants. The military interregnum was just an opportunity to restock and sharpen their political daggers. A bad-tempered televised debate between Chief Akinjide and Chief Bola Ige foreshadowed things to come. It ended in a fiasco.

    Richard Akinjide had pooh-poohed the free education programme of the Awolowo school of thought, dismissing it as the ideal breeding ground for thugs and jailbirds.  But in a rapid return of fire Bola Ige challenged him to name any member of his family that could be so described. The legal luminary stormed off but not before murmuring something about the mental status of his opponent.

    Having been resoundingly trounced in the election by the UPN, Akinjide now turned all his attention and considerable legal skills to preventing Awolowo and his acolytes from capturing power at the centre.  Tension was already building up even before the Second Republic had fully commenced.

    The political puzzle thrown up by the technically inconclusive federal elections provided a perfect cover for the legal wizard. Richard Akinjide unfurled his celebrated magic formula to upend Awolowo’s long standing ambition to rule the nation. Once again, political infighting among the Yoruba political elite had cost one of their most illustrious sons his ambition to rule the nation.

    Ten years after in 1989 when everything had ended up in smoke once again and Chief Awolowo had gone to join his ancestors, yours sincerely found himself a regular visitor to Chief Akinjide’s magnificent pile in suburban Stanmore, London. Having spent eighteen months in various prisons and detention camps in the aftermath of the first coup, Akinjide was not going to take chances when the soldiers came back in 1983. He scampered into safety and exile.

    Somehow, he got wind of the fact that I was around Birmingham on a sabbatical leave and he invited me over. The legal titan appeared pleasantly surprised at my family background. Perhaps a full disclosure is appropriate at this point. I write this with considerable filial trepidation. Chief Akinjide was a colleague and party associate of my old man going back to the early NCNC days.

    But having committed caste suicide as a youth by renouncing all right-wing affiliations and their perquisites, this columnist has never looked back. The perils of caste suicide can be more severe than ordinary class suicide. In class suicide, at least you have the comfort of solidarity with the great unwashed. But in caste suicide, you are a washed up refugee in a political orphanage.

    Chief Akinjide was warm, urbane, gregarious and a magnificent host. But he was also a man of oracular reticence. One moment, he could be chatty and wittily irreverent, only to become taciturn and tongue-tied the next moment. He could be cagey and measured in his responses to my probing queries. He surely knew a lot, particularly every sarcophagus in Nigeria’s vast catacomb of the politically expired.  But he also knew that survival depends on self-restraint and auto-recoil.

    Once when a former head of state wrote a book containing indiscreet disclosures about the 12 2/3 saga, he was asked for his views. “I will not respond”, he began with a sad, wistful look. “Now that he is going about shooting his mouth, what if I were to bring out my own confidential files on the matter which shows that I was already a consultant to the military council on the matter?”

    The late legal titan could also be mercilessly caustic. He once dismissed a former Chief Justice in one of the western states as lacking in elementary proficiency in both English and Yoruba language. When he was asked how this could be possible, he retorted that the man was born and raised in Ghana.

    After some time, it was clear that the chief gave up on my anti-militarism and left of centre views. He was himself a militantly anti-colonial intellectual but his views on domestic politics remained nuanced, bristling with conservative complications. The invitations to visit declined dramatically. By the time he returned home in 1993 and to quiet legal collaboration with the Abacha regime over the Bakassi tango, all contacts between us had ceased.

    My last contact with him could have been a scene straight out of Yoruba political drama. At a meeting of Yoruba Leaders of Thought to harmonise the Yoruba position at the then impending Obasanjo Conference that took place at the main hall of Airport Hotel, Ikeja in 2005, Chief Akinjide swept in only to find yours sincerely sandwiched between the two Afenifere grandees, the late Sir Olaniwun Ajayi and Pa Ayo Adebanjo .

    He briskly ignored me and greeted the old men glumly. But he seemed to have immediately recovered his sense of humour. He rounded on the old men. “By the way, you this Ijebu people, what exactly are you doing with my boy?” he demanded from the duo.

    “Richard, who is your boy here?” Sir Olaniwun replied with his customary suavity.

    “Ha, it is that fellow sitting between you, or don’t you know that his late father was my good friend? This is how I heard from the grapevine that you are trying to recruit him into your moribund organization. You must desist from such political pranks, or have your people ever produced anybody who can write better than him?” the old Ibadan legal warrior rumbled.

    “What about Soyinka?” Chief Adebanjo demanded with hearty good humour.

    “Well, I don’t know about that one”, the legal juggernaut retorted and moved on.

    As the meeting wore on, one could sense that a great pincer movement in classic military textbook manner was unfurling against the aging progressives. But it turned out that they were willing hostages. It was to cost the Yoruba nation a coherent position at the Obasanjo Conference. There is no further need to spill tribal beans in the open.

    Richard Akinjide was an extraordinary politician and talented lawyer who was single-minded and focused in his pursuit of his brand of politics and the dividends accruing from this. There was always a hint of cynical pragmatism just bubbling below the surface.

    The logic is clear. If Nigeria was created to fail, it is not the business of anybody or any ethnic group to labour endlessly in correcting its fundamentally flawed structure. To a man of Chief Awolowo’s radical idealism and humanistic vision of society, this must be nothing but nihilism at its most destructive and berserk.

    For over seventy years, Yoruba people have killed and maimed themselves at the shifting frontlines of these conflicting ideals of the post-colonial nation. Akinjide, Awolowo and even Akintola may not be the issue after all.

    These heroic men are just external manifestations of the inner turmoil and contradictions of an ancient tribal formation as it tries to overcome its own weaknesses and align itself with the emergent realities of progressive modernity. After every alliance either across the upper Niger or the lower Niger, the Yoruba have always felt profoundly short-changed.  May Chief Richard Osuolale Akinjide rest in peace.

     

     

    Stars of the current plague

     

    Covid-19 has been trying everybody’s soul across the globe. Nobody expected a situation as dire and dismal as this. Sadness abounds everywhere and there is an eerie stillness abroad, as if the world has become one huge funeral cortege.

    After sustained incapacitation, the living are dazed and disoriented. It is hard to imagine how the post-Covid-19 world, or what they choose to call the new normal, would feel like. The normalization of the abnormal always comes with its own perils.

    Yet it is a fact of human existence that adversity often brings out the best and finest in humanity. The current eclipse is not without its sterling heroes. There has been a rash of noble conduct and exemplary selflessness which cuts across countries, races, religions and creed. Despite the poor conduct of a few, our collective humanity is roused again by collective suffering.

    A peep into the stars’ parade reveals a rainbow coalition of triumphant humanity. Please step forward, Captain Tom Moore, centenarian and veteran of the Second World War, who has raised several million pounds for the National Health Service in Britain by daily trudging across his estate behind a wheeler.

    His original aim was to raise a thousand pounds before his birthday. But the outpouring has surprised the wildest imagination. At the last count, it has topped twenty million pounds. Arise, Sir Tom? The British surely know how to honour their heroes. They must not keep the old man waiting.

    Across the globe in South Windsor, Connecticut, the bugle of honour has already sounded for Dr Saud Anwar, a Pakistani-American Muslim at the Manchester Memorial Hospital who devised a contraption that allowed a ventilator to be shared by at least seven people.

    This became very critical in saving lives during the acute shortage of ventilators in the US as the dreaded scourge rapidly proliferated. It was a thing of joy to watch Dr Anwar stand in solemn attention as the convoy of cars filled with grateful fellow Americans hooted their way past his house. This was a moment America renewed and revalidated its promise as a land of immigrants.

    There are so many more that cannot be mentioned in this brief tribute, particularly Nigerian-born health practitioners in the Diaspora who distinguished themselves in the course of serving their new fatherland. Quite a number of them did not live to tell the story. Among them was our own beloved aburo, Dr Kayode Adefolu Adedeji, who fell in North Wales in the course of duty. May their noble soul find perfect peace in the bosom of God.

    Tomorrow, the clouds will recede, darkness will be lifted and the world will smile again.

  • Stars of the current plague

    Tatalo Alamu

     

    Covid-19 has been trying everybody’s soul across the globe. Nobody expected a situation as dire and dismal as this. Sadness abounds everywhere and there is an eerie stillness abroad, as if the world has become one huge funeral cortege.

    After sustained incapacitation, the living are dazed and disoriented. It is hard to imagine how the post-Covid-19 world, or what they choose to call the new normal, would feel like. The normalization of the abnormal always comes with its own perils.

    Yet it is a fact of human existence that adversity often brings out the best and finest in humanity. The current eclipse is not without its sterling heroes.

    There has been a rash of noble conduct and exemplary selflessness which cuts across countries, races, religions and creed. Despite the poor conduct of a few, our collective humanity is roused again by collective suffering.

    A peep into the stars’ parade reveals a rainbow coalition of triumphant humanity. Please step forward, Captain Tom Moore, centenarian and veteran of the Second World War, who has raised several million pounds for the National Health Service in Britain by daily trudging across his estate behind a wheeler.

    His original aim was to raise a thousand pounds before his birthday. But the outpouring has surprised the wildest imagination. At the last count, it has topped twenty million pounds. Arise, Sir Tom? The British surely know how to honour their heroes. They must not keep the old man waiting.

    Across the globe in South Windsor, Connecticut, the bugle of honour has already sounded for Dr Saud Anwar, a Pakistani-American Muslim at the Manchester Memorial Hospital who devised a contraption that allowed a ventilator to be shared by at least seven people.

    This became very critical in saving lives during the acute shortage of ventilators in the US as the dreaded scourge rapidly proliferated.

    It was a thing of joy to watch Dr Anwar stand in solemn attention as the convoy of cars filled with grateful fellow Americans hooted their way past his house. This was a moment America renewed and revalidated its promise as a land of immigrants.

    There are so many more that cannot be mentioned in this brief tribute, particularly Nigerian-born health practitioners in the Diaspora who distinguished themselves in the course of serving their new fatherland.

    Quite a number of them did not live to tell the story. Among them was our own beloved aburo, Dr Kayode Adefolu Adedeji, who fell in North Wales in the course of duty. May their noble soul find perfect peace in the bosom of God.

    Tomorrow, the clouds will recede, darkness will be lifted and the world will smile again.

  • Covid-19 and its comorbidities

    Covid-19 and its comorbidities

    *Baba Lekki defends Jenifa in court

    Tatalo Alamu

    There is no adversity, however grievous, which does not leave some window of opportunity.  Despite the alarming death rate, which is regrettable and in some cases preventable, one of the good things about Covid-19 is the way it has helped to raise awareness about current political and economic realities.

    But more importantly it has helped to sharpen social consciousness about the post-Covid-19 world, the nature of things to come and why some things cannot just continue the way they are. In its wake, it has also brought looting, shooting and hordes of rioters to the deprived slums of inner Lagos.

    Their war cry— hunger dey kill pass corona—is a sharp and telling rebuke to Government incompetence, lack of originality and wholesale adaptation of measures taken in more developed countries without naturalising them to local condition. A swift execution by coronavirus is surely preferable to slow-motion dispatch by famishment. The world will never be the same again.

    The second blessing is the sheer plethora of words, medical jargons, concepts, phrases and new usages it has insinuated into popular vocabulary. For example, there is comorbidity, a word which sounds so morbid and ominous that you begin to imagine in the emptiness of self-isolation that it is a condition after actual cessation of life.

    Then there is triage, a word which one mistook for a misspelling of triangle until its full meaning strikes you in the face in all its brute brevity. Originally devised by a military surgeon in Napoleon’s army, it has now assumed a Napoleonic controversy on its own. As if to rub salt on an open wound, it has taken the Corona crisis for yours sincerely to learn that 5G is not some strange intel-speak but actually fifth generation technology.

    Meanwhile there is a debate going on out there among professors and notable sociologists as to whether physical-distancing is not a more accurate and precise word than social-distancing if we are going to avoid the careless habits of accuracy, as Oscar Wilde will put it.

    One noted egghead writing in The Economist admits to being “stunned at the many ways people have overcome social distancing while having to keep a physical distance”. In other words, maintaining physical distance does not prevent the most intimate of social interactions. Distance is no barrier to human engagement. There is often no armour against amorousness.

    Now consider the word comorbidity itself. In medical parlance, comorbidity is described as the presence of one or more additional conditions co-occurring with (that is concomitant or concurrent with) but usually independent of a primary condition.

    Coronavirus comes with alarming comorbidities. It has exposed the underbelly of a desperately afflicted human society. It is a sickness unto death. But the paradox is that without human civilization having made some startling progress as a result of human ingenuity, creativity and sheer innovative genius, we could not have come to this sorry pass.

    There is no record of human advancement which is not at the same time a documentation of human perversity and lack of compassion for fellow beings. Yet it is precisely when human beings appear to have reached the nadir of their fortunes that certain lodestars appear to point the way forward.

    We can go back in time to the ancient Greek civilization which was based on a slave-holding economy, the Roman Empire and its freight of African slaves, the Babylon of Hammurabi, the early Chinese emperors, the Inca civilization where human sacrifice first took on an industrial hue, the sheer cruelties of the Ottoman court, the Industrial England of Dickensian squalor, the Russia of Stalin, to the modern day indignities many countries visit on their own citizens.

    Until this past week when Donald Trump, the American president, summarily halted American subvention to the World Health Organization to universal outrage and puzzlement, nobody would have guessed the depth and scope of  the intersections between politics, local and international, and raging pandemics.

    While the WHO Director-General maintained a dignified calm in the face of the Trumpian storm, Russia rose swiftly to condemn the act as selfish. The African Union described it as unhelpful, while the UN Secretary General held it as regrettable. After some diplomatic taciturnity, the Chinese resumed the pursuit of their quarry with unaccustomed vehemence.

    The comments betray an underlying concern and anxiety about the psychological stability of the increasingly irascible American president and his capacity to withstand more mental torture and punishment in face of the slow-motion upending of his economic calculations and chances for re-election. But there is no evidence that they understand the underlying conditions and the comorbidities which have made Covid-19 particularly dangerous to the wellbeing of human civilization.

    The spat between America and the rest of the WHO community is an accentuation and amplification of the Health care divide among the rich countries of the world and more importantly between the rich countries and the very poor countries.

    While the rich countries, despite the initial tardiness, have come up with well-coordinated and coherent strategies for combatting the scourge, poor countries tend to rely on haphazard, ad-hoc measures and sheer luck simply because there is no foundation all the way down the line.

    The economic implication of this divide is scary. Given the swift, fleet-footed nature of globalization and its pervasive invasion of all nooks and crannies of the world, it is only a question of time before the population suffers dilution from voluntary and involuntary emigration as all that is racially solid melts into thin air again. The resulting trauma may sink further prospects of international cooperation and brotherhood among nation.

    But far more injurious to societal health is the exacerbation and intensification of the fault lines of age, race and class differentiations in the wake of Coronavirus. An international magazine calls it the grim calculus which recalls the hard choices a people or  a nation have to make when confronted by an existential conundrum of a tormenting and confounding nature.

    There are times when a society benefits better from hard-headed pragmatism, seeming cruelty and callousness than mushy sentimentalities. For example, each society is forced to determine whether it is not more beneficial for Coronavirus to burn its way through the populace and then expire rather than a protracted lockdown in which the economy finally collapses taking more severe human toll. Hunger dey kill pass Corona, as they say in Lagos.

    Consequently, the battle against Covid-19 has seen a conscious effort in the west to weigh health facilities and actual treatment in favour of youth, its potentials and possibilities rather than on the side of advanced age and its declining advantages. This has no doubt presented many doctors with a cruel dilemma with some of them openly weeping about the hard choices they have to make.

    There are whispers making the round that those over sixty who are unfortunate enough to be hospitalized for symptoms analogous to Coronavirus are just given analgesic and encouraged to die rather than become a burden on the living.  Yet the concept of triage itself has come under severe scrutiny. Preferential treatment based on a brutal on the spot evaluation of horrific injuries cannot be said to conform to the finest standards of ethics and morality.

    The African psyche and mind-set neither used to disrespect for old age, nor modern warfare and its industrial bloodletting, must find all this mind-boggling in its sheer brutality and casual disregard for the age-long tradition of honouring elders. Yet as the Corona crisis has clearly indicated, immersion in ancient customs and age-long tradition does not confer any special status of modernity or development on any people or nation.

    These are some of the comorbidities accompanying Coronavirus and it is obvious that they are going to shape and define the post-Covid-19 world. It is a horoscope of impending disaster which can only be averted by human creativity and ingenuity. As economic collapse looms on the African continent, predatory and incompetent governments long accustomed to reining in their restive people will find it harder to pull off.

    The Coronavirus crisis has revealed deep fissures in American society as well as a fracturing of the organic vision of governance that used to bind its ruling elite. A major constitutional fracas may be shaping up as many governors find the will to resist Donald Trump’s autocratic menace and serial constitutional infractions. If Trump manages to win re-election against all odds, there may be a renewed and more determined bid by some states to leave the union entirely.

    But all this may well be small beer compared to the monumental problems facing Africa and Nigeria, its flaunted economic powerhouse. When Shakespeare famously noted that youth is a stuff that will not endure, he probably had the future colonial contraption in mind. What the Avon bard meant was that youthfulness is a phenomenon that should be handled with care, caution and affection because it is a wasting asset, just like oil.

    Every nation worth its salt must hope for a youthful population which is usually considered as the engine room for progress and accelerated development. The tragedy of a country like Nigeria is that as a result of the mismanagement of opportunities, the massive shift in favour of a youthful population has now resulted in a demographic nightmare with hordes of disaffected and unemployed youth going on destructive rampage.

    What Nigeria has going for it at the moment is that these forces of urban and rural rebellion are too weak and de-linked, too ethnically and culturally fractured, too organically alienated from a corrupt and compromised labour organization to offer any coordinated resistance to a post-colonial state primed to punitive and pre-emptive exertions against its own people.

    Nigerian authorities must find it within their means and will to buy into Youth Empowerment Schemes, retraining and retooling programmes, massive funding of tertiary education and urgent resuscitation of Farm Settlement Initiatives based on transparent profit sharing in order to avert the massive social catastrophe looming.

    If the rampaging youth were to stumble on inspired leadership from above under the current combustible circumstances, the anarchy will be unimaginable. Thanks to Covid-19, even the most visually challenged can sense that there is a ticking bomb out there which requires the urgent attention of experts in controlled demolition. Otherwise given the underlying conditions and the comorbidities, the coming crisis may overwhelm the nation as a single entity.

     

     

     

    Baba Lekki defends Jenifa in court

    To the Magistrate Court in Ilubinrin where Baba Lekki is holding the rudimentary staff to ransom over his insistence on entering a nolle prosequi plea on a matter that had already been determined by another court of competent and equal jurisdiction. It was the celebrated State Vs Jenifa palaver. Despite the fact that the famed actress had already accepted the guilty verdict, paid her fines and sensibly commenced community service, the old stormy petrel was insisting that the verdict was entered in error as there was no case to adjudge in the first instance.

    Despite the massive Covid-19 clampdown, how the ancient rebel managed to beat the tight police surveillance around the Third Mainland Bridge remained a mystery. But the old contrarian is a master of political brinkmanship often brushing past bayonet-fixed anti-riot police whenever he is possessed by revolutionary demons.

    Earlier that morning, he had been sighted at the interchange between Ilubinrin and Ebute Metta running rings around a police patrol time that had accosted him to find out what essential duty could have brought an old man out so early in the morning.

    “Ma pikin, me I no dey do essential commodity. Na Buhari and dem Idiagbon dey do dat one”, the old man chortled as he eyed the fierce-looking cops with a merry glint in his eyes.

    “Baba, please mind yourself. I said essential duty and not essential commodity”, the policeman snapped, eyeing the old man with distrust and suspicion.

    “Ha, young man, in that case justice is the first precondition for civilization and law is the essence of duty. That is the only official duty we recognise even in times of corona”, the old codger summarized as he switched into perfect and flawless English to the befuddlement of the police patrol team. Not to be browbeaten, the outspoken one among them moved with a swagger towards the old man.

    “When I crash this horsewhip on your kwashiorkor back, all the Giringory grammar will disappear”, he neighed with a sadistic hiccup as he stretched out his whip. It was at this point that their superior officer who had been watching the whole drama from the other end of the bridge rushed upon them.

    “Ha Ebele don’t try it! Don’t kill yourself. The baba get brain pass all dem government”, he shouted at his subordinate. Even before he could finish, the old man was already sauntering towards the Lewis Street loop.

    As he swept past the lone policeman dozing off on sentry duty at the court premises on Friday morning, the old man was till in a quietly euphoric mood. When the Corona lockdown began, he had predicted the end of the world as we know it and had disappeared into a gaping hole somewhere on the Island. But when the apocalypse did not materialize, he had emerged from his self-entombment at the head of a rampaging mob of urchins hurling insults at the authorities.

    But for a handful of clerks and one or two minor officials, the court was eerily empty. But this did not deter the great hell-raiser.

    “Gentlemen and the lady”, he opened solemnly. “I am here to reopen the case of Jenifa versus the State. There is no statute of limitation for an assault on human freedom. The case is not justiciable because it is not the intendment of the framers of the constitution to sacrifice personal liberty at the altar of popular hysteria. The janitor state is long passé. In the celebrated case of Walker versus Crown…”

    It was at this point the lady decided to cut him short.

    “But baba, you can see that the court is not in session. All the courts are closed”, she pleaded.

    “The court of public opinion is always in session. The court of public opinion is never closed”, the old man shot back. One of the clerks, a short fellow with cynical manners and a sinister grin, was obviously enjoying the surreal drama. He brought out his pen and a sheet of paper.

    “Amofin agba (old lawyer) Let me take down your plea”, he pleaded.

    “You may think this is a joke, but by the time I put your governor through his pace, he will collapse in court”, the old man snorted.

    “Haba, baba but there is no weight of evidence here”, the man sneered.

    “The person you are quoting wrongly was a man of much legal weight but without any moral substance”, the old man shot back. It was at this point that the dozing policeman let forth a volley of shots that sent everybody scampering for safety.o the Magistrate Court in Ilubinrin where Baba Lekki is holding the rudimentary staff to ransom over his insistence on entering a nolle prosequi plea on a matter that had already been determined by another court of competent and equal jurisdiction. It was the celebrated State Vs Jenifa palaver. Despite the fact that the famed actress had already accepted the guilty verdict, paid her fines and sensibly commenced community service, the old stormy petrel was insisting that the verdict was entered in error as there was no case to adjudge in the first instance.

    Despite the massive Covid-19 clampdown, how the ancient rebel managed to beat the tight police surveillance around the Third Mainland Bridge remained a mystery. But the old contrarian is a master of political brinkmanship often brushing past bayonet-fixed anti-riot police whenever he is possessed by revolutionary demons.

    Earlier that morning, he had been sighted at the interchange between Ilubinrin and Ebute Metta running rings around a police patrol time that had accosted him to find out what essential duty could have brought an old man out so early in the morning.

    “Ma pikin, me I no dey do essential commodity. Na Buhari and dem Idiagbon dey do dat one”, the old man chortled as he eyed the fierce-looking cops with a merry glint in his eyes.

    “Baba, please mind yourself. I said essential duty and not essential commodity”, the policeman snapped, eyeing the old man with distrust and suspicion.

    “Ha, young man, in that case justice is the first precondition for civilization and law is the essence of duty. That is the only official duty we recognise even in times of corona”, the old codger summarized as he switched into perfect and flawless English to the befuddlement of the police patrol team. Not to be browbeaten, the outspoken one among them moved with a swagger towards the old man.

    “When I crash this horsewhip on your kwashiorkor back, all the Giringory grammar will disappear”, he neighed with a sadistic hiccup as he stretched out his whip. It was at this point that their superior officer who had been watching the whole drama from the other end of the bridge rushed upon them.

    “Ha Ebele don’t try it! Don’t kill yourself. The baba get brain pass all dem government”, he shouted at his subordinate. Even before he could finish, the old man was already sauntering towards the Lewis Street loop.

    As he swept past the lone policeman dozing off on sentry duty at the court premises on Friday morning, the old man was till in a quietly euphoric mood. When the Corona lockdown began, he had predicted the end of the world as we know it and had disappeared into a gaping hole somewhere on the Island. But when the apocalypse did not materialize, he had emerged from his self-entombment at the head of a rampaging mob of urchins hurling insults at the authorities.

    But for a handful of clerks and one or two minor officials, the court was eerily empty. But this did not deter the great hell-raiser.

    “Gentlemen and the lady”, he opened solemnly. “I am here to reopen the case of Jenifa versus the State. There is no statute of limitation for an assault on human freedom. The case is not justiciable because it is not the intendment of the framers of the constitution to sacrifice personal liberty at the altar of popular hysteria. The janitor state is long passé. In the celebrated case of Walker versus Crown…”

    It was at this point the lady decided to cut him short.

    “But baba, you can see that the court is not in session. All the courts are closed”, she pleaded.

    “The court of public opinion is always in session. The court of public opinion is never closed”, the old man shot back. One of the clerks, a short fellow with cynical manners and a sinister grin, was obviously enjoying the surreal drama. He brought out his pen and a sheet of paper.

    “Amofin agba (old lawyer) Let me take down your plea”, he pleaded.

    “You may think this is a joke, but by the time I put your governor through his pace, he will collapse in court”, the old man snorted.

    “Haba, baba but there is no weight of evidence here”, the man sneered.

    “The person you are quoting wrongly was a man of much legal weight but without any moral substance”, the old man shot back. It was at this point that the dozing policeman let forth a volley of shots that sent everybody scampering for safety.o the Magistrate Court in Ilubinrin where Baba Lekki is holding the rudimentary staff to ransom over his insistence on entering a nolle prosequi plea on a matter that had already been determined by another court of competent and equal jurisdiction. It was the celebrated State Vs Jenifa palaver. Despite the fact that the famed actress had already accepted the guilty verdict, paid her fines and sensibly commenced community service, the old stormy petrel was insisting that the verdict was entered in error as there was no case to adjudge in the first instance.

    Despite the massive Covid-19 clampdown, how the ancient rebel managed to beat the tight police surveillance around the Third Mainland Bridge remained a mystery. But the old contrarian is a master of political brinkmanship often brushing past bayonet-fixed anti-riot police whenever he is possessed by revolutionary demons.

    Earlier that morning, he had been sighted at the interchange between Ilubinrin and Ebute Metta running rings around a police patrol time that had accosted him to find out what essential duty could have brought an old man out so early in the morning.

    “Ma pikin, me I no dey do essential commodity. Na Buhari and dem Idiagbon dey do dat one”, the old man chortled as he eyed the fierce-looking cops with a merry glint in his eyes.

    “Baba, please mind yourself. I said essential duty and not essential commodity”, the policeman snapped, eyeing the old man with distrust and suspicion.

    “Ha, young man, in that case justice is the first precondition for civilization and law is the essence of duty. That is the only official duty we recognise even in times of corona”, the old codger summarized as he switched into perfect and flawless English to the befuddlement of the police patrol team. Not to be browbeaten, the outspoken one among them moved with a swagger towards the old man.

    “When I crash this horsewhip on your kwashiorkor back, all the Giringory grammar will disappear”, he neighed with a sadistic hiccup as he stretched out his whip. It was at this point that their superior officer who had been watching the whole drama from the other end of the bridge rushed upon them.

    “Ha Ebele don’t try it! Don’t kill yourself. The baba get brain pass all dem government”, he shouted at his subordinate. Even before he could finish, the old man was already sauntering towards the Lewis Street loop.

    As he swept past the lone policeman dozing off on sentry duty at the court premises on Friday morning, the old man was till in a quietly euphoric mood. When the Corona lockdown began, he had predicted the end of the world as we know it and had disappeared into a gaping hole somewhere on the Island. But when the apocalypse did not materialize, he had emerged from his self-entombment at the head of a rampaging mob of urchins hurling insults at the authorities.

    But for a handful of clerks and one or two minor officials, the court was eerily empty. But this did not deter the great hell-raiser.

    “Gentlemen and the lady”, he opened solemnly. “I am here to reopen the case of Jenifa versus the State. There is no statute of limitation for an assault on human freedom. The case is not justiciable because it is not the intendment of the framers of the constitution to sacrifice personal liberty at the altar of popular hysteria. The janitor state is long passé. In the celebrated case of Walker versus Crown…”

    It was at this point the lady decided to cut him short.

    “But baba, you can see that the court is not in session. All the courts are closed”, she pleaded.

    “The court of public opinion is always in session. The court of public opinion is never closed”, the old man shot back. One of the clerks, a short fellow with cynical manners and a sinister grin, was obviously enjoying the surreal drama. He brought out his pen and a sheet of paper.

    “Amofin agba (old lawyer) Let me take down your plea”, he pleaded.

    “You may think this is a joke, but by the time I put your governor through his pace, he will collapse in court”, the old man snorted.

    “Haba, baba but there is no weight of evidence here”, the man sneered.

    “The person you are quoting wrongly was a man of much legal weight but without any moral substance”, the old man shot back. It was at this point that the dozing policeman let forth a volley of shots that sent everybody scampering for safety.

     

  • Baba Lekki defends Jenifa in court

    Tatalo Alamu

    To the Magistrate Court in Ilubinrin where Baba Lekki is holding the rudimentary staff to ransom over his insistence on entering a nolle prosequi plea on a matter that had already been determined by another court of competent and equal jurisdiction. It was the celebrated State Vs Jenifa palaver. Despite the fact that the famed actress had already accepted the guilty verdict, paid her fines and sensibly commenced community service, the old stormy petrel was insisting that the verdict was entered in error as there was no case to adjudge in the first instance.

    Despite the massive Covid-19 clampdown, how the ancient rebel managed to beat the tight police surveillance around the Third Mainland Bridge remained a mystery. But the old contrarian is a master of political brinkmanship often brushing past bayonet-fixed anti-riot police whenever he is possessed by revolutionary demons.

    Earlier that morning, he had been sighted at the interchange between Ilubinrin and Ebute Metta running rings around a police patrol time that had accosted him to find out what essential duty could have brought an old man out so early in the morning.

    “Ma pikin, me I no dey do essential commodity. Na Buhari and dem Idiagbon dey do dat one”, the old man chortled as he eyed the fierce-looking cops with a merry glint in his eyes.

    “Baba, please mind yourself. I said essential duty and not essential commodity”, the policeman snapped, eyeing the old man with distrust and suspicion.

    “Ha, young man, in that case justice is the first precondition for civilization and law is the essence of duty. That is the only official duty we recognise even in times of corona”, the old codger summarized as he switched into perfect and flawless English to the befuddlement of the police patrol team. Not to be browbeaten, the outspoken one among them moved with a swagger towards the old man.

    “When I crash this horsewhip on your kwashiorkor back, all the Giringory grammar will disappear”, he neighed with a sadistic hiccup as he stretched out his whip. It was at this point that their superior officer who had been watching the whole drama from the other end of the bridge rushed upon them.

    “Ha Ebele don’t try it! Don’t kill yourself. The baba get brain pass all dem government”, he shouted at his subordinate. Even before he could finish, the old man was already sauntering towards the Lewis Street loop.

    As he swept past the lone policeman dozing off on sentry duty at the court premises on Friday morning, the old man was till in a quietly euphoric mood. When the Corona lockdown began, he had predicted the end of the world as we know it and had disappeared into a gaping hole somewhere on the Island. But when the apocalypse did not materialize, he had emerged from his self-entombment at the head of a rampaging mob of urchins hurling insults at the authorities.

    But for a handful of clerks and one or two minor officials, the court was eerily empty. But this did not deter the great hell-raiser.

    “Gentlemen and the lady”, he opened solemnly. “I am here to reopen the case of Jenifa versus the State. There is no statute of limitation for an assault on human freedom. The case is not justiciable because it is not the intendment of the framers of the constitution to sacrifice personal liberty at the altar of popular hysteria. The janitor state is long passé. In the celebrated case of Walker versus Crown…”

    It was at this point the lady decided to cut him short.

    “But baba, you can see that the court is not in session. All the courts are closed”, she pleaded.

    “The court of public opinion is always in session. The court of public opinion is never closed”, the old man shot back. One of the clerks, a short fellow with cynical manners and a sinister grin, was obviously enjoying the surreal drama. He brought out his pen and a sheet of paper.

    “Amofin agba (old lawyer) Let me take down your plea”, he pleaded.

    “You may think this is a joke, but by the time I put your governor through his pace, he will collapse in court”, the old man snorted.

    “Haba, baba but there is no weight of evidence here”, the man sneered.

    “The person you are quoting wrongly was a man of much legal weight but without any moral substance”, the old man shot back. It was at this point that the dozing policeman let forth a volley of shots that sent everybody scampering for safety.o the Magistrate Court in Ilubinrin where Baba Lekki is holding the rudimentary staff to ransom over his insistence on entering a nolle prosequi plea on a matter that had already been determined by another court of competent and equal jurisdiction. It was the celebrated State Vs Jenifa palaver. Despite the fact that the famed actress had already accepted the guilty verdict, paid her fines and sensibly commenced community service, the old stormy petrel was insisting that the verdict was entered in error as there was no case to adjudge in the first instance.

    Despite the massive Covid-19 clampdown, how the ancient rebel managed to beat the tight police surveillance around the Third Mainland Bridge remained a mystery. But the old contrarian is a master of political brinkmanship often brushing past bayonet-fixed anti-riot police whenever he is possessed by revolutionary demons.

    Earlier that morning, he had been sighted at the interchange between Ilubinrin and Ebute Metta running rings around a police patrol time that had accosted him to find out what essential duty could have brought an old man out so early in the morning.

    “Ma pikin, me I no dey do essential commodity. Na Buhari and dem Idiagbon dey do dat one”, the old man chortled as he eyed the fierce-looking cops with a merry glint in his eyes.

    “Baba, please mind yourself. I said essential duty and not essential commodity”, the policeman snapped, eyeing the old man with distrust and suspicion.

    “Ha, young man, in that case justice is the first precondition for civilization and law is the essence of duty. That is the only official duty we recognise even in times of corona”, the old codger summarized as he switched into perfect and flawless English to the befuddlement of the police patrol team. Not to be browbeaten, the outspoken one among them moved with a swagger towards the old man.

    “When I crash this horsewhip on your kwashiorkor back, all the Giringory grammar will disappear”, he neighed with a sadistic hiccup as he stretched out his whip. It was at this point that their superior officer who had been watching the whole drama from the other end of the bridge rushed upon them.

    “Ha Ebele don’t try it! Don’t kill yourself. The baba get brain pass all dem government”, he shouted at his subordinate. Even before he could finish, the old man was already sauntering towards the Lewis Street loop.

    As he swept past the lone policeman dozing off on sentry duty at the court premises on Friday morning, the old man was till in a quietly euphoric mood. When the Corona lockdown began, he had predicted the end of the world as we know it and had disappeared into a gaping hole somewhere on the Island. But when the apocalypse did not materialize, he had emerged from his self-entombment at the head of a rampaging mob of urchins hurling insults at the authorities.

    But for a handful of clerks and one or two minor officials, the court was eerily empty. But this did not deter the great hell-raiser.

    “Gentlemen and the lady”, he opened solemnly. “I am here to reopen the case of Jenifa versus the State. There is no statute of limitation for an assault on human freedom. The case is not justiciable because it is not the intendment of the framers of the constitution to sacrifice personal liberty at the altar of popular hysteria. The janitor state is long passé. In the celebrated case of Walker versus Crown…”

    It was at this point the lady decided to cut him short.

    “But baba, you can see that the court is not in session. All the courts are closed”, she pleaded.

    “The court of public opinion is always in session. The court of public opinion is never closed”, the old man shot back. One of the clerks, a short fellow with cynical manners and a sinister grin, was obviously enjoying the surreal drama. He brought out his pen and a sheet of paper.

    “Amofin agba (old lawyer) Let me take down your plea”, he pleaded.

    “You may think this is a joke, but by the time I put your governor through his pace, he will collapse in court”, the old man snorted.

    “Haba, baba but there is no weight of evidence here”, the man sneered.

    “The person you are quoting wrongly was a man of much legal weight but without any moral substance”, the old man shot back. It was at this point that the dozing policeman let forth a volley of shots that sent everybody scampering for safety.o the Magistrate Court in Ilubinrin where Baba Lekki is holding the rudimentary staff to ransom over his insistence on entering a nolle prosequi plea on a matter that had already been determined by another court of competent and equal jurisdiction. It was the celebrated State Vs Jenifa palaver. Despite the fact that the famed actress had already accepted the guilty verdict, paid her fines and sensibly commenced community service, the old stormy petrel was insisting that the verdict was entered in error as there was no case to adjudge in the first instance.

    Despite the massive Covid-19 clampdown, how the ancient rebel managed to beat the tight police surveillance around the Third Mainland Bridge remained a mystery. But the old contrarian is a master of political brinkmanship often brushing past bayonet-fixed anti-riot police whenever he is possessed by revolutionary demons.

    Earlier that morning, he had been sighted at the interchange between Ilubinrin and Ebute Metta running rings around a police patrol time that had accosted him to find out what essential duty could have brought an old man out so early in the morning.

    “Ma pikin, me I no dey do essential commodity. Na Buhari and dem Idiagbon dey do dat one”, the old man chortled as he eyed the fierce-looking cops with a merry glint in his eyes.

    “Baba, please mind yourself. I said essential duty and not essential commodity”, the policeman snapped, eyeing the old man with distrust and suspicion.

    “Ha, young man, in that case justice is the first precondition for civilization and law is the essence of duty. That is the only official duty we recognise even in times of corona”, the old codger summarized as he switched into perfect and flawless English to the befuddlement of the police patrol team. Not to be browbeaten, the outspoken one among them moved with a swagger towards the old man.

    “When I crash this horsewhip on your kwashiorkor back, all the Giringory grammar will disappear”, he neighed with a sadistic hiccup as he stretched out his whip. It was at this point that their superior officer who had been watching the whole drama from the other end of the bridge rushed upon them.

    “Ha Ebele don’t try it! Don’t kill yourself. The baba get brain pass all dem government”, he shouted at his subordinate. Even before he could finish, the old man was already sauntering towards the Lewis Street loop.

    As he swept past the lone policeman dozing off on sentry duty at the court premises on Friday morning, the old man was till in a quietly euphoric mood. When the Corona lockdown began, he had predicted the end of the world as we know it and had disappeared into a gaping hole somewhere on the Island. But when the apocalypse did not materialize, he had emerged from his self-entombment at the head of a rampaging mob of urchins hurling insults at the authorities.

    But for a handful of clerks and one or two minor officials, the court was eerily empty. But this did not deter the great hell-raiser.

    “Gentlemen and the lady”, he opened solemnly. “I am here to reopen the case of Jenifa versus the State. There is no statute of limitation for an assault on human freedom. The case is not justiciable because it is not the intendment of the framers of the constitution to sacrifice personal liberty at the altar of popular hysteria. The janitor state is long passé. In the celebrated case of Walker versus Crown…”

    It was at this point the lady decided to cut him short.

    “But baba, you can see that the court is not in session. All the courts are closed”, she pleaded.

    “The court of public opinion is always in session. The court of public opinion is never closed”, the old man shot back. One of the clerks, a short fellow with cynical manners and a sinister grin, was obviously enjoying the surreal drama. He brought out his pen and a sheet of paper.

    “Amofin agba (old lawyer) Let me take down your plea”, he pleaded.

    “You may think this is a joke, but by the time I put your governor through his pace, he will collapse in court”, the old man snorted.

    “Haba, baba but there is no weight of evidence here”, the man sneered.

    “The person you are quoting wrongly was a man of much legal weight but without any moral substance”, the old man shot back. It was at this point that the dozing policeman let forth a volley of shots that sent everybody scampering for safety.

     

  • The Rise and Rise of Idriss Deby Itno

    The Rise and Rise of Idriss Deby Itno

    The Fragrance of Francesca

    And mama Igosun becomes police counsellor (1)

     

    Tatalo Alamu

     

    AN event scantily reported but of great significance occurred this past week. In a multi-national trans-border military operation which makes nonsense of territorial integrity and the whole paradigm of post-colonial nationhood, Idriss Deby, the Chadian strongman, swept into Nigerian territory to give the Boko Haram insurgents a staggering body blow.

    It was a grim replay of the events of thirty eight years earlier when the then Major General Muhammadu Buhari as the GOC of the Third Division, against the presidential directive of his Commander in Chief, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, also struck deep into Chadian territory to pursue some ragtag militiamen fomenting trouble around the Lake Chad precincts.

    At that point in time, Nigeria could boast of an army with three well-provisioned and well-armed divisions making up arguably the sleekest fighting machine in the whole of West Africa.

    On the other hand, Chad could boast of four thousand five hundred soldiers up from the four hundred and fifty men comprising solely of demobilized veterans of French military campaigns in Vietnam and Indo-China that made up the Chadian army upon independence from France in August, 1960.

    But the table has since turned and by the time Idriss Deby was done last week, scores of Boko Haram fighters and their commanders lay dead and dying in scorching sand. Shekau, their monstrous and bloodthirsty leader, was literally gasping for breath while begging Idriss Deby for a respite. But the Chadian strongman was having none of that nonsense from the berserk brute.

    In a terse broadcast, Deby ordered Shekau and his demoralised troops to surrender or be summarily eliminated. In all this, the main regret of the warlord was that Nigerian soldiers were nowhere to be found to hold on to their territory recovered so that he can continue his march deep into Nigerian territory to flush out the insurgents.

    Deeply humbled as a fighting force, the Nigerian military command could only make some feeble noise about fighting on in some adjacent territory even as the territorial integrity of the nation lay in tatters.

    But by the end of the week, the noise of gun battle had receded. All was quiet again on the Ubangi-Chari front.  Around Wednesday, a triumphant Chadian military convoy clattered through the rusty streets of the capital.  There was no further word on Boko Haram and Shekau. Yet in a bizarre redefinition of post-reality, the Chadian embassy in Lagos was by the weekend insisting that nothing like this ever took place even as footages from the confrontation was being shown by credible international media outlets.

    If anybody had thought that the slippery and coldly calculating Deby was interested in saving Nigeria from military humiliation or political disintegration, such a person is a neophyte. With his military machine poised to punitive exertion by decades of relentless fighting, Deby could have gone all the way to Abuja if he had minded. But that is not part of his calculations.

    A master-warrior with the purest fighting instincts, Deby is not to be dared or lightly crossed. He had shown such brilliant brinkmanship before when he sent his Darfur military proxies all the way to the gates of Khartoum in retaliation for Omar el-Bashir’s support for a rival militia gang that almost overthrew him.

    Much earlier in 1987, in a lightning military operation reminiscent of the German blitzkrieg, he had sent his mounted pick-up vehicles all the way to the remote Aouzou strip to put Ghaddafi’s military nose out of joints as Libyan troops beat a disorderly retreat all the way back to Tripoli.

    Idris Deby’s only military credentials are his commercial pilot’s certificate and some rudimentary training. But he had shown enough fighting pluck and brilliance on the battle field to be named as Chief of Staff by Hissene Habre, the former Chadian ruler and bloodthirsty warlord. As this column once noted, in asymmetrical warfare the untutored generalissimo is the master of the trained general.

    For a man who only ten years ago was dismissed by the influential and authoritative Foreign Policy magazine as a “ lonely tyrant” with a few days left in office before being thrown into the trashcan of history, Idriss Deby’s staying power and brutal capacity for survival is the stuff of magical fiction.

    With thirty years in power and still counting, Deby, now self-renamed Idriss Deby Itno, has lived by his will and wits surviving scores of coup attempts and assassination bids to become the preeminent warlord of the old French Equatorial territory stretching from Aouzou Strip in the far north and Southernmost tip of Libya to Congo Brazzaville in the deep south.

    On that particular occasion when he had his back to the wall, Deby managed to survive through a combination of bluff, daring and sheer daredevilry. Holed up in his marble presidential palace in the heart of the capital city with gunshots crackling outside from rebels who had fought their way to the city centre, the Chadian ruler refused the offer of evacuation even from his French military advisors which would have spelt his end.

    It was only after that face-off that the French, having realised that the man from the Bideyat clan of the Zaghawa people is not for easy turning, began to plot how to neutralize the armed hordes at the gate.

    The fractious nature of his enemies was also of immense advantages. With sure victory starring them in the face, the ragtag opposition coalition could not agree on who to lead or what to announce to their fellow compatriots. From there the initiative fizzled out and the rebellion collapsed.

    In a cruel and fundamental sense, the dilemma of the Chadian military rebels and their inability to come together as a unified front is also the dilemma of this arid country that straddles the Equatorial belt and the Sahara Desert. France regarded its central African possession as a useless stretch of barren territory and left the war-like tribes and clans to fend for themselves.

    So bad was the situation that at independence Chad had no paved road or modern facilities to talk about. As if to emphasize the benumbing poverty, the Independence Day speech had to be read in parts with torchlight by Andre Malraux, General Charles de Gaulle’s representative and world famous novelist.

    What the French did was to carve out the Sari-dominated and fertile southern tip of the country for cotton-farming and designate it “the useful Chad” while letting the arid bulk get on with it. It was a recipe for permanent chaos.

    In the event, it was no surprise that the first president and founding father, Francois Tombalbaye, a Sari supremacist, took to heavy drinking and a savage repression of his people. Cruelty and savagery seem to unite most of Chad’s post-independence leaders.

    Apart from consolidating a Sari hegemony in the military, the civil service and other arms of government, Tombalbaye’s other claim to fame was a dubious policy of authenticity most probably freighted over from Mobutu’s Zaire and which saw the former school teacher changing his first name to Ngartha.

    By the time the rogue tyrant was killed in 1975 by officers from his own Sari ethnic group, Chad was gradually transforming into a vast garrison of armed men and arms bearers. It was—and still is—a war of all against all.  In the absence of a viable national economy and within the context of excruciating poverty arms-bearing becomes the only respectable profession.

    Unfortunately in the absence of a viable civil and political society, the democratization of arms and the weaponization of politics lead to a full militarization of the society. Have gun and fully armed militiamen and you will travel far. FROLINAT had to rely for its take-off on arms abandoned by General Ernst Rommel and his Panzer Corps in 1943.

    This was the case in Chad by 1979 as the Goukoni Weddeye –led FROLINAT fought its way to the gates of the presidential mansion in Ndjamena in a determined bid to overwhelm General Felix Malloum, Tombalbaye’s military successor.

    As it ever happens in a country beset by protracted war along ethnic lines, the national army had been de-nationalized and had become just one regional force among so many contending regional forces.

    In a deal brokered by Nigeria, Malloum was exiled to Kano and replaced by a broad-based coalition headed by Weddeye with Hissene Habre as his Defence minister.

    In a repeat of what has happened in Nigeria, Togo, Benin, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote D’Ivoire and Zaire, the underdeveloped but more militarily determined north has stream-rolled and overwhelmed the more developed but less cohesive south.

    Yet despite this, the infighting and factional clashes continue in Chad. The ruling coalition at the centre disintegrated and Hissene Habre and his faction took up arms against their former leader.

    In 1982, Habre and his men fought their way through the streets of Ndjamena to overwhelm the forces of Weddeye who promptly fled. It was the first time in the history of Africa, outside of the anti-colonial struggle, that a civilian militia will be overpowering a government backed by a regular army.

    Hissene Habre, aka the devil of Samangudu, is probably the most vicious and brutal ruler of Chad. In a turbulent eight-year reign marked by savage repression and widespread violation of human rights, the tyrant jailed and killed at will depending on his volatile mood.

    In one instance of state infamy which will be remembered for its grotesque barbarity, the vindictive sadist was known to have had his opponent pushed in the direction of the rotating propeller of a chopper and to instant decapitation.

    After a few years of violent protests and equally violent suppression even Habre’s original French sponsors were exhausted by the murderous antics of the man they thought was going to be a model of Gaullist rectitude and sobriety.

    Opposition to Habre peaked with the desertion of three of his lieutenants in an open declaration of rebellion. Of the three that made a dash for Darfur, only Idriss Deby, survived. The other two were brutally hacked down.

    But Habre’s time was up. In early December, 1990, Idriss Deby began his characteristic blitzkrieg towards Ndjamena from Darfur. Within a few days, he had arrived at the Presidential Gates, and Habre was history. Thirty years after, Deby is still ensconced in the state house. But the more things change, the more they remain the same.

    The Chadians have merely exchanged an alligator for a crocodile. In a replay of history reminiscent of the times of the founding father, Deby’s  Zaghawa people have since replaced the Saris as the top dogs and hegemonic group while the repressive ferocity reminds one of the times of Francois Ngartha Tombalbaye. It is the ultimate logic of ethnically divided societies ruled by arms and warlordism.

    The beauty of contemporary Nigeria lies in its negative equilibrium and a micro-pluralism of power which does not allow any side to lord it over the nation for long. This is as a result of what philosophers will call overdetermination of contending forces, a situation in which no power group is dominant enough to determine proceedings for any length of time. Those who tried to tip the scale in the past have had their fingers burnt as they will in the future.

    So, those members of the Nigerian intelligentsia and aficionados of chat groups hailing Deby’s triumphant forces as they rumbled  through the dusty streets of Ndjamena after routing Shekau and his renegade group must begin to appreciate why Nigeria’s problem and failure are of a different order. Happy Easter to all our readers.

     

    The Fragrance of Francesca

     

    Just as we were about to send this off, the news struck like a thunder bolt out of the blues. A big elephant has departed the Nigerian forest. An elephant has no gender in the long run.

    It is with considerable pains in the heart that snooper received the passing of a national icon of excellence and distinction, paragon of beauty and brains, an administrative legend, a dancing diva, ballerina of international repute, great actress and fashion queen, Francesca Yetunde Emanuel.

    There are some people who have become such a regular fixture of the more sublime aspects of our national life that they often appear indestructible.

    Mama was one of these. On her last birthday when some of her relations and admirers nudged her to do a few steps, Mama responded with a stunning performance of such grace and agility that her guests responded with a standing ovation.

    Little did we know that it was the last hurray of the great lady of dance and song. In the coming weeks after she has been properly interred, snooper will return with a full compliment. Goodnight, mama.

    And mama Igosun becomes police counsellor (1)

     

    And while one great Amazon departs, another antique one is in excellent if contrary spirit. As the Coronavirus lockdown stalemates into a protracted lock-in, the weariness and sheer boredom appear to be inducing some strange pathology particularly among old people.

    After enduring the domestic detention for another three weeks, Mama Igosun finally lost the plot. One morning, there was a bang on the bedroom door and there she was fully dressed.

    “Mama, where are you going? There is curfew in town, you know?” snooper pleaded.

    “Curfew ko, coffee ni. When did I become your papa’s eleha? (Purdah woman)”, she screamed.

    “Mama is there no food at home? I think Okon bought new supplies of Hippopotamus meat yesterday?” snooper observed with a devilish grin which further infuriated the ancient gourmet.

    “Shut up, na only food we go chop?” the ancient contrarian shouted and then lowered her voice into a conspiratorial tone. “Akanbi, he get one question I wan ask you. Abi I don die? This sleep, sleep, sleep dey tire me. I come dey see dead people sotey. I dey see, S.A, my husband, I dey see M.O your father, even my yeye sister, your mother, him dey abuse me every time”, she whimpered as yours sincerely quickly shut his door at the antique troublemaker.

    The following morning, the neighbourhood woke up to a most outlandish sight. There was Mama Igosun sitting outside and resplendent in her husband’s ancient PWD uniform with native pipe and a bottle of illicit gin at hand waving solemnly at passing policemen who probably confused the uniform with the ceremonial dress of a superior colonial officer and promptly saluted.

    “Mama rere, Ogboju Irunmole t’igbe awujo omo enia ( a dreaded spirit that lives among human-beings) , the senior police officer hailed the old woman.

    “Ha oga, this mama be abami eda. He get one king like dat for my village. He come old sotey and him no die, so him head come knock, so every morning dem dey bring him out make dem sun iron am well well “, the police constable sniggered.

    “Shut up, Yekinni, abi you wan die?” his boss hushed him up.

    “ Policeman, I hear you well well, na your great, great grandfather, baba nla baba baba e niyen. If you say dat again o you no fit remove your uniform when you get home”, mama swore.

    • Continued next week.

     

     

     

  • And Mama Igosun becomes police counsellor (1)

    Tatalo Alamu

     

    And while one great Amazon departs, another antique one is in excellent if contrary spirit. As the Coronavirus lockdown stalemates into a protracted lock-in, the weariness and sheer boredom appear to be inducing some strange pathology particularly among old people.

    After enduring the domestic detention for another three weeks, Mama Igosun finally lost the plot. One morning, there was a bang on the bedroom door and there she was fully dressed.

    “Mama, where are you going? There is curfew in town, you know?” snooper pleaded.

    “Curfew ko, coffee ni. When did I become your papa’s eleha? (Purdah woman)”, she screamed.

    “Mama is there no food at home? I think Okon bought new supplies of Hippopotamus meat yesterday?” snooper observed with a devilish grin which further infuriated the ancient gourmet.

    “Shut up, na only food we go chop?” the ancient contrarian shouted and then lowered her voice into a conspiratorial tone. “Akanbi, he get one question I wan ask you. Abi I don die? This sleep, sleep, sleep dey tire me. I come dey see dead people sotey.

    I dey see, S.A, my husband, I dey see M.O your father, even my yeye sister, your mother, him dey abuse me every time”, she whimpered as yours sincerely quickly shut his door at the antique troublemaker.

    The following morning, the neighbourhood woke up to a most outlandish sight. There was Mama Igosun sitting outside and resplendent in her husband’s ancient PWD uniform with native pipe and a bottle of illicit gin at hand waving solemnly at passing policemen who probably confused the uniform with the ceremonial dress of a superior colonial officer and promptly saluted.

    “Mama rere, Ogboju Irunmole t’igbe awujo omo enia ( a dreaded spirit that lives among human-beings) , the senior police officer hailed the old woman.

    “Ha oga, this mama be abami eda. He get one king like dat for my village. He come old sotey and him no die, so him head come knock, so every morning dem dey bring him out make dem sun iron am well well “, the police constable sniggered.

    “Shut up, Yekinni, abi you wan die?” his boss hushed him up.

    “ Policeman, I hear you well well, na your great, great grandfather, baba nla baba baba e niyen. If you say dat again o you no fit remove your uniform when you get home”, mama swore.

    • Continued next week.

     

  • The Fragrance of Francesca  

    Tatalo Alamu

     

    Just as we were about to send this off, the news struck like a thunder bolt out of the blues. A big elephant has departed the Nigerian forest. An elephant has no gender in the long run.

    It is with considerable pains in the heart that snooper received the passing of a national icon of excellence and distinction, paragon of beauty and brains, an administrative legend, a dancing diva, ballerina of international repute, great actress and fashion queen, Francesca Yetunde Emanuel.

    There are some people who have become such a regular fixture of the more sublime aspects of our national life that they often appear indestructible.

    Mama was one of these. On her last birthday when some of her relations and admirers nudged her to do a few steps, Mama responded with a stunning performance of such grace and agility that her guests responded with a standing ovation.

    Little did we know that it was the last hurray of the great lady of dance and song. In the coming weeks after she has been properly interred, snooper will return with a full compliment. Goodnight, mama.

  • Silent days

    Silent days

    *The passing of a legend,  Alagba Dele Odebiyi

    Tatalo Alamu

    As conspiracy theories swirl around, an awful silence has descended on the world at large. From the epicentre of hallowed western civilization to its extreme peripheries in Africa, Asia and South America, there is utter numbness everywhere. Nowhere and nobody is left untouched; whether rich country or poor country; affluent person or destitute mendicant. There is a solidarity of human beings in global affliction.

    No one is willing any longer to dismiss the strange funereal silence that envelopes the entire universe. The chilling stillness abroad sends freezing spasms right into the veins. The hitherto bursting and blustering streets are emptied of life and living, as if humanity has finally decided to evacuate itself from the scene of its own crime. The few who remain on the street walk past each other in compulsory compliance of self-distancing, like anaesthetized zombies. April may yet be the cruellest of months.

    In an extraordinary homily at a Special “Urbi et Orbi” Blessing penultimate Friday, this was how Pope Francis captured the apocalyptic meltdown:

    “For weeks now it has been evening. Thick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities.; it has taken over our lives, filling everything with a deafening silence and a distressing void that stops everything as it passes by; we feel it in the air, we notice in people’s gestures, their glances give them away. We find ourselves afraid and lost…”

    Needless to add that the homily ended in a rousing affirmation of the human capacity to weather any storm and steer the sinking boat aright eventually. Pope Francis will not be the leader of the Christian world if he fails to rally the troops to the mast of faith and eventual regeneration. And how brilliantly the Argentine-born cardinal does it!

    But never in modern human history have we witnessed anything remotely resembling this. This may well be the time humanity rediscovered its mission on earth and fulfilled it accordingly. Or it may well be a sneak preview of a universe without humanity after we might have done ourselves out of the deal as a result of wanton foolishness or absurd overconfidence.

    It was not without considerable reflection that Claude Levi-Strauss, the great French structuralist anthropologist, famously rued that the world began without humans and will definitely end without them. It is just as simple as that and there is no need fabricating any happy ending just to ameliorate our horror at the random contingencies and utter meaninglessness of life.

    As proof of humanity’s vulnerability to a web of terrestrial and extra-terrestrial conspiracies, Levi-Strauss directed attention to Sigismund Freud’s doleful ruminations on the fate of dinosaurs. Rather than leading to the logical triumph of humankind, history is just one damned thing after another—as a British historian would put it, or just a long-drawn process without an ending as the structuralists concluded.

    But while we are at it, there is opportunity in every crisis. The forced seclusion and its deadening incapacitation should provoke interesting reflections and ruminations on the part of those who care enough about the fate of mankind.

    This is a novel kind of reality and it is understandable if some societies goofed in their initial response. It is a new kind of war against a common enemy of humanity but which cannot be fought on a common front as a result of the extant paradigm of nation-states. The nation-state paradigm thrives on cut-throat competition and murderous rivalry among nations. This was the spur of its tantalising success but also the germ of its impending failure.

    Donald Trump, the erratic and hyperbolic American president, got it right when he declared himself a war-time leader. It would be foolish to underestimate America’s capacity for brutal exertion and its ability to wage war against its real and perceived its enemies. But this is not a war America can wage and win with all the arsenal of war acquired in all the decades of relentless warfare. It requires a new kind of arsenal.

    The new enemy is not the old implacable Japanese Samurai war-caste or the human waves of the Chinese that sought to overwhelm by sheer multitude; nor is it the German last-ditch Wehrmacht warriors. This time around, it is not a conventional army but a deaf and dumb virus that has given a bloody nose to the imperial might of America and its western allies.

    Unlike conventional armies, Covid-19 does not leave unspeakable carnage in its wake. It leaves horrendous human toll in its silent trail. It does not pulverize infrastructure but goes after human structure. Let us see how the infrastructure can operate when its human overlord has been vaporized. The entire world is in mourning. Priceless talents have been wasted.

    In the circumstances, it is hard to fault the sinking feeling that the American president’s hubristic and pedestrian imagination is still operating at the level of the old conventional war paradigm. If this hunch is right, then we might as well conclude that with Donald Trump America has truly missed the boat.

    It will then be hardly surprising that at the beginning of the Coronavirus crisis, Trump insisted that it was nothing but a hoax. Historians of the future may well pinpoint this period as the precise moment the most powerful nation the world has seen finally lost the plot in the perpetual struggle to advance civilization. It has been long in coming.

    The original struggle began in Africa several millennia ago. It is generally agreed that it was in Africa that our ancestors took the first steps towards civilization. As it has been noted rather acerbically, humankind first civilized in Africa, but he has not continued to do so there. It was also in Africa that humanity began to employ the idea of mass emigration as a solution to some pressing existential problems, be it war, famine, genocide or sheer lack of breathing and breeding space.

    It is impossible for one individual society to carry the touch of civilization forever. There will always be a tipping point when a contradiction develops between what is on ground and historical possibilities. In such circumstances, there are certain societies or a cluster of societies that see farther than other societies.

    Modern western civilization with its changing arrowheads of Portugal, Spain, Holland, England and the United States of America did just that by defining and refining for us the templates of nascent capitalism and the nation-state paradigm which have carried human civilization to the shores of unprecedented prosperity and development.

    But it is not a uni-linear story of human advancement. The course of human evolution and civilizational advancement can hardly be grasped as a straight geometrical progression. The point to note is that while western civilization was defining the course of history for the rest of humanity, it is not as if other societies were sleeping.

    They might not be at the cutting edge of civilization but they were neither stagnant; proceeding and progressing according to their own internal logic and specific cultural order. Russia, China, Japan, India, Dubai and the Asian Tigers are clear examples.

    The Covid-19 pandemic is a novel crisis for humanity and it is just as well. It is just as well because it is a metaphor for human incapacitation at the level of new ideas to move nations and humanity forward. In civilizational advancement, great changes are always preceded and foreshadowed by a catastrophic collapse of human imagination.

    As we have said, this is a new kind of war that cannot be won by the old paradigm of war. All the frenzied arms stockpiling  and frenetic war-gaming of the past eighty five years after the great war; the thirteen trillion dollars America is known to have spent fashioning fearsome instruments of human domination, may have come to naught.

    The enemy is not another nation as the Americans have been wrongly conditioned to believe. The enemy is not even a human. It is a homophobic virus which cares little about the nation-state paradigm, economic status or racial identity. It is an equal opportunity terminator.

    It bears restating that America was not conceived by its visionary founding fathers as a warrior-nation. The working out of the nation-state paradigm led it astray. If a fraction of the national resources America has spent on the most lethal weapons of war in the last two decades has been spent on capacity boosting and the development of human infrastructure, it might have been able to forestall the advent of the deadly virus or at the very least would have been more proactive and decisive in confronting it.

    The Chinese who did and succeeded spectacularly could afford a smirk on their face. While Trump as recently as the end of January was dismissing the Corona menace as a hoax, the Chinese had already mastered its genetic sequencing. While America was stumbling and struggling with the vicious virus, the Chinese were able to deploy their knowledge towards a clinical decimation of the menace.

    By last week, the Chinese were beaming paradisiacal pictures of a Corona-free Wuhan where it all originated to a distraught and distressed Western audience still very much at the mercy of the plague and a boiling Donald Trump about to go berserk with apoplectic rage. It was a tactic of cold war propaganda the wily Chinese seem to have learnt and mastered very well.

    This is not an ideological beauty contest.  In any case, whatever the laxity and laggard incompetence of the west, there is not much to recommend the malevolent and slippery ways of the Chinese. It was in China’s Hubei Province that the Coronavirus first originated. After suppressing the information from the rest of the world, they went ahead to foist a maximum lockdown on their own populace which would have been impracticable in western societies.

    The Chinese Way with its total and authoritarian control of the intellectual, social, religious, economic, political and physical latitude of its citizens does not commend itself to non-oriental societies in which personal freedom and individual liberty that go with democracy are the outcome of centuries of struggle against royal despots and autocratic rulers. The habitués are not likely to tolerate that even it means certain death.

    Towards the end of the week, citizens of Spain and Italy were already bristling and chafing from the protracted lockdown. Long accustomed to freedom and individual responsibility, it does not matter to them that the lockdown was ordered in their own interest and the greater national interest in the first instance. All they could see was the infringement of their personal freedom.

    This is why this novel crisis of humanity cannot be resolved by showcasing which religion or ideology is better, or which way of life is superior to the other. History will answer that, if it is not already doing so and it is not going to be a simple and straightforward answer.

    What is now required is the ability to think out of the iron cage of the nation-state paradigm in such a way that allows us to see the problem of humanity  as a human problem first and only secondarily in terms of nations, religions and ideology. It requires a shift of dialectical gears which allows us to see the problems of humanity in a novel and startling dimension.

    Every intelligent political elite fashion out which political system suits best the crying need of their people and the stage of their development. America and China, and to a lesser extent Russia and Iran, must lead the world out of this logjam of the human race which foreshadows a new global order based on cooperation and mutual respect in a world of competing and countervailing cultures.

    For over a century , statesmen and great politicians intuited the way forward out of this logjam only to lapse into the false consciousness of supra-national organizations such as League of Nations, United Nations, EU, NATO, G-Seven, OAU, Bric etc.

    It is a reflection of a political imagination trapped in the prison house of the nation-state paradigm and its discursive formation. The current crisis has shown why and how it cannot work. It is time to rethink the world anew. This may well be the major fruit of the Corona adversity.

     

     

    The passing of a legend,  Alagba Dele Odebiyi

    It is with a heavy heart that snooper announces the exit of his kinsman and former Chairman of the Lagos State Chapter of the Nigerian Union of Journalists, Dele Odebiyi who joined the celestial procession this past week at the age of seventy eight. A remarkable village legend, gifted journalist, outstanding raconteur, talented footballer and mentor, Odebiyi was also an author of considerable repute and a teacher at several levels.

    A great dancer and formidable masquerade in his youth, the talented observer in this quiet and unassuming man would have noticed the great irony of having to exit in such a moment as the time of Coronavirus. He would have taken it in his stride, laughing at grief as his Roman noble visage mocked at adversity. He was a man in whom there was no guile or bile. There was no pettiness or nastiness about him.

    He took all the slings and outrageous arrows of misfortune in his stride. Despite the straitened circumstances of birth, he never allowed poverty or the poor cards dealt him by fate to slow him down in his quest to become somebody in the society. What he would not take was any attempt by anybody to put him down on account of the circumstances of birth or social berthing. He wore his childhood penury with elegance and an admirable elan.

    He was the quintessential self-made man, pushing his way through primary and secondary modern schools after which he combined teaching with studying to pass his Ordinary and Advanced Level examinations. At this point in time, his one-room abode was filled with so many private correspondence texts and tutorials that it felt and smelt like a cramped printing press. His extraordinary defiance inspired many. As an apprentice autodidact, yours sincerely should now.

    After gaining admission to the University of Lagos in the early seventies, he succumbed to the Owosho Virus in all its genocidal severity and had to beat a tactical retreat. But he rallied heroically never allowing the setback to destroy him. He returned almost a decade later to complete his degree. Such was the stuff of this exceptional man.

    Snooper recalls happier times in the bucolic village just before and after independence when we gathered at his feet as he regaled us with brilliant sports commentaries and tales of soccer derring-do from the cities. Despite being hard up himself, no session was complete without a remarkable gesture of hospitality. He was such a delightful elder to be with. Here was a genuine role model and mentor. May his soul rest in peace.

     

     

  • The passing of a legend, Alagba Dele Odebiyi

    It is with a heavy heart that snooper announces the exit of his kinsman and former Chairman of the Lagos State Chapter of the Nigerian Union of Journalists, Dele Odebiyi who joined the celestial procession this past week at the age of seventy eight. A remarkable village legend, gifted journalist, outstanding raconteur, talented footballer and mentor, Odebiyi was also an author of considerable repute and a teacher at several levels.

    A great dancer and formidable masquerade in his youth, the talented observer in this quiet and unassuming man would have noticed the great irony of having to exit in such a moment as the time of Coronavirus. He would have taken it in his stride, laughing at grief as his Roman noble visage mocked at adversity. He was a man in whom there was no guile or bile. There was no pettiness or nastiness about him.

    He took all the slings and outrageous arrows of misfortune in his stride. Despite the straitened circumstances of birth, he never allowed poverty or the poor cards dealt him by fate to slow him down in his quest to become somebody in the society. What he would not take was any attempt by anybody to put him down on account of the circumstances of birth or social berthing. He wore his childhood penury with elegance and an admirable elan.

    He was the quintessential self-made man, pushing his way through primary and secondary modern schools after which he combined teaching with studying to pass his Ordinary and Advanced Level examinations. At this point in time, his one-room abode was filled with so many private correspondence texts and tutorials that it felt and smelt like a cramped printing press. His extraordinary defiance inspired many. As an apprentice autodidact, yours sincerely should now.

    After gaining admission to the University of Lagos in the early seventies, he succumbed to the Owosho Virus in all its genocidal severity and had to beat a tactical retreat. But he rallied heroically never allowing the setback to destroy him. He returned almost a decade later to complete his degree. Such was the stuff of this exceptional man.

    Snooper recalls happier times in the bucolic village just before and after independence when we gathered at his feet as he regaled us with brilliant sports commentaries and tales of soccer derring-do from the cities. Despite being hard up himself, no session was complete without a remarkable gesture of hospitality. He was such a delightful elder to be with. Here was a genuine role model and mentor. May his soul rest in peace.