Tatalo Alamu

 

AS the Coronavirus pandemic finally clamps on the entire country, there has been an outbreak of gallows humour everywhere. There are crooks selling “anti-coronary” health formula which wards off the deadly virus. Ladies’ undies originally stolen by ritualists suddenly surfaced in the market as magic face masks that kill the virus in situ. There are new born babies named with the dreaded Koro prefix.  When pronounced with a devious inflection, the name Obanikoro suddenly acquired the status of a satanic royal contretemps.

On Thursday morning, seventy two hours after the national clampdown, boredom and ennui finally began to take their toll on citizens as the bizarre and the outlandish took front stage. Having lost her celebrity status as a native raconteur and ancient wit, Mama Igosun could no longer abide by the restriction and technical incarceration.

It was a beautiful morning with early sunshine. Spring has been advancing with ferocious intent and empty, evacuated streets welcomed the glorious weather. Snooper opened the shutter to let in fresh air only to be confronted by a most colourful sight.

There sat Mama Igosun in the patio, dressed like the priestess of an Egyptian deity puffing from a massive ancient pipe and swigging from a bottle of illicit gin which she clasped close to her bosom as she acknowledged cheers from essential workers and errant passers-by who had defied the clampdown.

“Wey dem Ekolo boy abi wetin dem call him name sef? Now dat I don fire pounded yam and cobra meat, I dey kampe like dem Owu boy”, the old devil snorted as she picked her teeth with her fore finger with stylish insouciance.

“Mama rere. Ogbologbo Aje ti hunrungbon l’ete”. (Good mother. The strange witch that sports a lush beard below her lip) one man said and prostrated with exaggerated respect.

“Okare omoluabi. Obinrin lo nkesi. (Well done. Yoruba gentleman. You are hailing a great woman). Wey dem Kooroona dem say de kill people? Kuruna no dey kill, but you fit scratch scratch your body finis “, the old woman slobbered as she gulped from the bottle.

“Kuruna baba jigger”, one man dressed like a pastor began to sing.

“Foolish man, dem never tell you for your jibiti church dat dis one no be Kuruna? Dis one na Coronavirus”, one hefty man spat in contempt as he approached the man of God with intent.

“Kai, dem devil disciple boku here. Corona na ogbonge Corolla. Dat one na real corollary. Make man come begin waka go”, the man of God muttered as he began walking away. Mama Igosun appeared momentarily mystified and unsettled by the exchange but the half-crazed dustbin woman came to her rescue.

“Ha mama, he better make you dey inside make Calabar boy make alligator pepper soup for you. Dis thin no be Kuruna at all. Dis one dem dey call Coronavirus and he don kill dem finish for dem Aso Rock. Dem police dey arrest everybody for road and dem dey smash and dem dey break bottle for Oshodi and dem dey push old women inside dem vehicle and dem dey whack dem bottom with bilala as dem come dey remove dem tobi and dem jagbajantis”, the crazy woman chanted breathlessly as Mama Igosun sprang up and seized her walking stick.

“Awusubillahi!!!” Mama Igosun cursed as she back-heeled into the house.

 

*A ballad for the merry bard

Tatalo Alamu

 

Corona!!  What a beautifully seductive name. It is such a desperate paradox of history that humanity would be finally dismounted from its horse of high civilization by such a sweet and superbly alluring name.

But we live in desperate times. We live in a time of stunning ironies. As we said of the new plague a fortnight ago, not even the Chinese could have wished for more interesting times.

For the second time in a fortnight, the attention of the columnist has been diverted by what is in effect the first truly global plague the modern world has seen and its devastating consequences.

As the world finally comes to term with what has hit it, as Coronavirus, otherwise known as Covid- 19, sinks its brutal and nasty teeth into the corpulent flesh of humanity, it is now obvious that we are entrapped in a crisis of world-historical dimensions.

Earlier plagues were all restricted and ultimately local in nature. For example, the Bubonic plague which originated with the importation of rats into Europe from medieval China by traders and other sojourners was a strictly intercontinental affair.

There is no record that it ever crossed the Mediterranean Sea into mainland Africa, unlike an earlier edition of the pestilence which originated from Egypt as a result of rats feasting on flea-infested grain sent to Constantinople as a tributary from a recently conquered territory.

Pestilential famines have been known to visit certain European communities in the past which led to mass emigration. The arrival of Europeans on the newly discovered continent of Latin America led to plague-like diseases which almost wiped out the entire indigenous population. The Potosi mines in contemporary Bolivia are a particularly notorious example.

But all these ancient examples are likely to pale into insignificance when compared to the impact of the Coronavirus and the consequent devastation wrought on Western societies. Not even the most brutal and terrible of human conflicts that we have experienced in the past could have engendered such a total shutdown of human space in all its possible dimensions such as we are witnessing.

Oil prices have tumbled to a record low. The hospitality industry is facing a certain collapse. With local journeys in certain countries reduced to the barest minimum and the very essential and with international travels virtually abolished, the world is beginning to look like a global ghost city. The lockdown is severe and strangulating.

In just about a week, the damage to global economy has been more severe than the combined damage of the five years of the Second World War.

It has led nations such as France and Australia to declare a national emergency and to place their countries on the equivalent of a war-footing.

This Saturday morning, the American army is out on the streets of New York to enforce compliance.To have imagined such possibility a few years back even in a work of art would have been to invite accusations of arrant misanthropy and irresponsibility.

Yet here we have the real thing thumping us in the face. The irony of it all is that it has taken a series of interlocking paradoxes  in which initial triumph often turns into drastic failure  to get us to this sticking point and what is in effect a perfect storm.

First is the triumph of globalization which has summarily abolished all borders and geopolitical restrictions in the very process of speeding up the process of human interaction and societal integration. The whole world has become a global village, to put it in a trite formula.

Second are the stunning advances in scientific and medical discoveries and the consequent rat race for new inventions which could have led to critical mishandling of sensiti

ve materials in a way and manner that could have eventuated in a non-nuclear Armageddon such as the world is facing.

Finally is the possibility that the longevity and durability that are the result of striking advances in medical sciences are about to face their most severe test from a virus from a part of the world where people are known to live into advanced age as a result of culture and diet.

In the traditional society of Western Nigeria, it is said that what does not have listening capacity and is incapable of talking back must not prove to be wiser than human beings.

Twenty years into the twenty first century and almost five hundred years after the advent of the post-Westphalia nation-state paradigm, it has taken a virus to up-end centuries of relentless human achievements and inventions.

The gains of globalizations in opening up the world and internationalizing relations, the conjoining of hitherto autonomous human communities, the virtual abolition of time and space, the clockwork movement of capital and forces of production across the globe, the simplification of complex business relations and the radical restructuring of capitalist productive mode engendered by this revolutionary shift of paradigm, are all in danger of a sharp reversal.

Added to this are the threats to decades of impressive statesmanship and the human ingenuity that went into laying the foundation of a new European and world order based on inter-national cooperation and the exploration of mutual interest for the overall good of humanity.  With the EU accusing America of acting unilaterally in closing down its airspace, the special relationship between Europe and the USA appears to hit a rough patch.

One’s concern for one’s own safety particularly in the face of dangers real and immediate is the process of a rational mind. In Europe, there has been a sharp retreat into one-nation nationalism as a result of the lethal consequences of the Corona virus. The Schengen initiative that abolishes internal restrictions on the movement of Europeans has collapsed.

As conservative and right wing Austria shut its borders, others swiftly followed. What has taken almost half a century of visionary and painstaking statesmanship to put together and to nurture into enviable maturity took only a few days of a rampaging pandemic to rend asunder. While it takes quite a while to build, it takes seconds to destroy.

Passing by Heathrow Airport this last Thursday morning, one could see the terrible effects of the pandemic. Even the flight from Lagos was a joyless and cheerless affair.

There was a sense of foreboding everywhere. Until the aircraft actually took off, no one was sure the flight would not be aborted by a last minute order from above. There had been too many contradictory and topsy-turvy orders emanating from high above in recent days.

In the event it was not surprising that the whole of Heathrow Airport and the greater London vicinity were enveloped in a saturnine gloom this wet Thursday morning in late winter. The spate of cancelled flights flashing intermittently on the screen board told the story of a major crisis unfolding in the aviation industry.

It felt like Christmas morning at the British Airways’ Arrival Lounge. Business was conducted with polite, vacant stares. It was like being caught in the abyss of going but not arriving, or the void of the flaneur just flowing with the human motion and with nowhere in particular to go.

Dreaming of leaving while daydreaming about never returning is a cruel dilemma. In London proper, the major supermarkets looked like farms devastated by locusts, emptied and hollowed out. With the most extreme of panic buying, famine looms.

Yet it is this kind of emergency, of unusual adversity and global tribulation that bring out the deep streak of heroism in humanity, their abiding civility and sense of obligation to their fellow human-beings.

In London, it was the heroism and civility that were more evident last Thursday: from the polite Airline officials who answered questions with kind solicitousness and pointed the way out of the quandary with empathy and emotional intelligence, to hotel management staff who cheerfully offered refunds without any penalty or generous vouchers towards future rebooking without any hidden fees.

As the world roils in pandemic calamity, governance everywhere has taken on a deeply humanistic hue. Even leaders not known for their compassion for the poor and the wretched of the earth are revealing a humane side rarely glimpsed.

In America, Donald Trump is giving away trillions of dollars in aid and a one thousand dollar cheque to American citizens. In Britain, Boris Johnson is releasing billions of pounds as soft loans without any interest to jumpstart the prostrate economy. In Hong Kong each citizen is to receive ten thousand Hong Kong dollars which is a little below a thousand pounds.

Cynics can argue that these are deft moves by smart aleck politicians to shore up their vast dwindling image and reputation as well as to restore the redemptive and ameliorative capacity of human governance.

Whatever it is, something more fundamental and politically significant may be going on. Even in America, the ultimate emporium of free market warriors, the advocates of rolling back the state permanently might have rejoiced too soon.

The brief but remarkable resurgence of Bernie Saunders is a pointer to the fact that out there in the bastion of liberal democracy and free market, there are millions who still believe in the old-fashioned capacity of the state to solve fundamental problems or to restore hope to humanity in times of pandemic catastrophe such as is unfolding.

Unfortunately, it is in Africa where the interventionist state is badly needed to resuscitate fragile nations suffering from post-colonial traumatic disorder and to deal with emergencies such as the Corona Virus that the modern state has proved a historic laggard.

The response of many African nations to the Corona crisis, with the possible exception of Ghana, South Africa, Rwanda and probably Nigeria has not only been grossly inadequate but hopelessly lackadaisical. The Nigerian post-colonial state is a risible monstrosity crying for urgent and radical restructuring. As such, and as we hinted a fortnight ago, Nigeria in moments of pandemic crisis usually relies on its legendary luck as well as the capacity of individual officials for personal heroism.

It is not nearly enough. But sometimes it works. It is this capacity for individual heroism that has been at play in the past one week. In this regard, we must single out the proactive stance of the Lagos State government and officials of the Health Ministry, particularly the able and dynamic Commissioner for Health, Professor Abayomi and of course many doctors across the country who braved the odds to be with compromised contacts and potentially infected persons.

There is need for love and charity in this time of Corona Virus. When the danger recedes, we can always resume our battle with the government. For now, all hands must be on deck to see off the greatest threat to humanity and civilization since the discovery of the nuclear bomb.

 

---

A ballad for the merry bard

 

It has been tributes galore for Odia Ofeimun who turned seventy this past week. This time around, no one can accuse the grizzled wizard of words of poetic license or of being economical with the truth.  The old boy has truly joined the club of senior citizens.

This column joins the numerous well- wishers and admirers in ushering Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s former Private Secretary to the league of old people. At the age of seventy in 1979, Chief Awolowo had only eight more years to conclude his earthly labours. We hope that the word-lord will be  luckier.

It has always been very hard to imagine Odia Ofeimun as a star graduate student of Political Science in the hallowed department of Political Science at the University of Ibadan in the mid-seventies. Yet this was what he was before he decided to pack it up.

It may well be that the budding poet found the life of the professional political scientist too constricting and constipating for a man of his immense feel for words and their associative possibilities. The poet squashed the political scientist.

Till date the typical Ofeimun essay is characterized by a barely suppressed poetic exuberance; an expansive warmth and vitality; a luxuriant overgrowth of phrases and proliferating clauses as well as a Bohemian contempt for the constraints of time and space. All of which would have raised the red flag in any department of Political Science worth its salt.

“Bardolatry is at the barricades!” the alarm bell would have sounded from the crusty custodians of custom and tradition. Where the poet intuits his way to personal epiphany, the political scientist sifts and sieves his way through sheer rigour of thought to clinical clarity.

In a comparison of the different trajectories of thought process of both Chief Awolowo and the late Uncle Bola Ige, this writer noted that while Bola Ige relied on the brilliant intuition of the gifted poet, Awolowo, the talented intellectual, advances through the rigour and density of dialectical reasoning typical of philosophers and social scientists. Often, they both came to the same conclusion, with the poet arriving earlier but the dialectician with surefooted self-assurance.

It will be hypocritical to deny this but this writer does not always arrive at the same conclusions as Odia and neither do we agree with many of his stated positions on national issues. For example, there was a bitter falling out over Odia’s overt and undisguised support for Jonathan’s re-election bid and his (Odia’s) quixotic quest to become the governor of Edo state.

But all this notwithstanding, there is a selfless generosity of purpose and nobility of gesture about Odia  Ofeimun which does not fail to shine through the dark clouds of muscular disputation.

Yours sincerely had been writing for several years in quiet self-isolation and without drawing any attention to himself until Odia barged into his office one day in 1988 to announce that in his capacity as the Secretary of ANA, he had fished out this writer’s first novel from a leading publisher and had submitted it to the ANA panel for consideration. “ Oh boy, you cannot be writing all this good stuff and be hiding yourself”, Odia admonished before he left.

While still in that manuscript form, the novel went on to win the 1988 ANA/Cadbury Prize for Prose Fiction. Thirty two years and one other major ANA prize after, snooper continues to write in self-isolation and deliberate anonymity.

Anybody familiar with this columnist knows how he holds in complete disregard and utter contempt those who push and press their claims as writers, intellectuals, scholars etc. Here is thanking Odia for that kind gesture and many happy returns.

Tatalo Alamu

 

FORGET about all the grammar and prognostications. Character is fate. In the end, nothing could have captured the tragedy of Lamido Sanusi with gripping accuracy and more arresting simplicity than the old saying of the ancient Greeks. There are certain aspects of our character which lead us inexorably to a certain fate.

What you are going to be and what will become of you are already determined by the ineluctable law of genetic inheritance. There is little room for manoeuvre in this iron cage of immutability.  As the Arab saying goes, to flee your fate is to rush to find it. A man is always a prisoner of his own peculiar peccadilloes.

This is what has just played out with his royal Eminence, Muhammad Sanusi II, the Emir of Kano, and with the good people of the heaving metropolis and fabled terminus of the ancient trans-Saharan route which led all the way to Baghdad. In the early hours of Monday, 9th March, fate called out on the 14th Fulani emir in the lonely splendour of his palatial abode. It was the end of a short, turbulent and explosive reign lasting six eventful years.

For the colourful and controversial descendant of Fulani ancestors, it was a royal red card flashed with the awesome paraphernalia of the Nigerian post-colonial state.  In the unstable dynamics of the post-colonial nation, the smiling state agent of the day before would have transformed into the stern state enforcer of the new dawn. Lamido and his dynastic clan have been beneficiaries of its legendary and perverse largesse, now he was at the receiving end of its impregnable and implacable malice.

The impersonal terror machine that is the Nigerian post-colonial state often acts with abstract rigour and equal opportunity bravura.  As we noted, the Sanusi royal lineage has been a beneficiary of its munificence and malevolence. It was said that when the late Lawal Isa Kaita arrived at the Prime-minister’s lodge to acquaint Sir Tafawa Balewa of the Sardauna’s decision to dethrone and banish the old emir and Lamido’s grandfather, the latter’s plea of caution, tact and restraint fell on deaf ears.

Rumour also has it that it was Lamido Sanusi’s father, Ambassador Aminu, a courtly diplomat with calm admirable manners, that was pencilled down to take over as Governor of the Central Bank by the Murtala administration.   “Give it to Ciroma”, the tempestuous Kano warlord was known to have blurted out. But due to garbled transmission, the Ciroma of Kano was mistaken for Adamu Ciroma. And that was that.

Yet despite our deep reservations about his person and posturing, this column will refuse to gloat over the fate of the deposed king. Certain perceptive readers of this column have drawn our attention to the “brilliant clairvoyance” with which it predicted the end at the very beginning.

But there is no joy in being proved right particularly where it has to do with a Shakespearean tragedy of epic proportions and with a potentially great person brought low by his own foibles.  However that may be, there are important lessons to be learnt by both royal clan and hegemonic feudal nationality.

Too much hubris and haughtiness, too much devotion to excessive personal vanity and immature self-lionization  prevented the deposed emir from focusing on the ball rather than the swooning adulation of the fickle crowd of impotent admirers who could not lift a finger for him as the final confrontation unfolded.  For them, rather than the arrival of the twelfth imam, it was a mere play of giants which does not accommodate audience input.

But now that Lamido has been removed, the feudal contradictions which he drew attention to in his own ungainly, self-righteous and opportunistic way and which eventually consumed him will not go away in all its fetid and festering anomalies. Rather than set to work with quiet grit and gruelling determination, Lamido simply laid on the glitz and glamour of royal appurtenances on a decaying feudal order. He was too much of a royal feudalist to be a genuine modernizer. The contradiction ensured fatality.

Napoleon Bonaparte famously noted that a throne is only a bench covered with damask. The Sicilian brigand should know. After the French famously discarded their royalty in a horror film of grisly beheading, the great warlord simply collected the crown and made himself emperor through sheer daring and the audacity of artillery.  It was the first formal coup d’etat in the history of modern Europe.

But after his hubris and audacity finally ran their course in the aftermath of the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon found himself a prisoner of war, banished from his throne and exiled to the lonely, isolated British island fortress St Helena to begin a new life. He never returned or recovered the military initiative. His hitherto swooning and adulating compatriots simply took it in their stride.

It has been advanced by military historians that the lesser genius prevailed at the Battle of Waterloo. But that was because the greater genius had by then squandered and frittered away all his military, political and strategic advantages through sheer recklessness and unrelenting brinkmanship.

On an ordinary day, Authur Wellesley, latterly the Duke of Wellington, ought not to be a match for Napoleon’s glittering gifts but he ended up supervising his military and political defenestration. As a British wag would later put, the Battle of Waterloo was won and lost on the playground of Eton College.

With little modification, it will be said of the deposed emir that he also played into the hands of people he held in utter disdain as intellectual inferiors and upstarts from the slums of Kano metropolis through his reckless bravado and lack of strategic deftness. They simply sat back, watching him commit one unforced error after the other until it was time to deliver the terminal sucker punch.

Lamido was simply too voluble, too loquacious for his own good and for the good of the feudal order he was supposed to personalize. He talked too much.  This is the problem with those endorsing him from the perspectives of their own subliminal cultural affinities. The feudal throne is not a Travelling Theatre.

The archetypal feudal baron is the epitome of icy reserve and glacial imperturbability. But not so Muhammad Sanusi 11. There was a hint of psychological instability, of inner turmoil, of disordered childishness and of the vengeful irascibility of someone with royal scores to settle even within his own larger feudal clan.

Real feudal slights and imagined royal condescension might have hurt him as a youth and it was obvious that he had never lived down the banishment of his grandfather. The northern feudal establishment is indeed a smouldering cauldron of envy, resentment and mutual hate even among descendants of the same royal lineage. As it has been the case with the Sokoto caliphate itself, so has it been with Kano, Gwandu, Katsina and Suleija.

Perhaps it should be added that this is the brutal hallmark of the feudal mode of political production anywhere in the world. The collapse of a particular royal line either through self-immolation or state assisted suicide is usually an occasion for savage intrigues and bloodfest among brothers and siblings.

His wiser royal brethren in the larger northern Nigerian feudal community would have viewed Lamido’s antics with great apprehension and consternation. For them, the social hell-raising of the former emir could only end in radical anarchy which would have consumed everybody since he possessed neither the military might to impose his will nor the political wherewithal to dominate his environment. However uncivil to the authorities, he remained a civil servant.

It is a fundamental contradiction for a person duly crowned as emir to transform overnight into a radical revolutionary. If he was so minded, Lamido should have availed himself of another route to power and prominence. In his later years as a politician, global statesman and former revolutionary, it was only Nelson Mandela’s courtly manners and refined royal bearing which reminded people that as a youthful prince, he was groomed to assume a position of power and authority in the tribal kingdom of his people.

This whole Katakata in Kano, Lamido’s feudal detractors would have grunted, was nothing but a classic example of grandstanding and fancy footwork steeped in hypocrisy and bad faith. How many of the so called Almajiris who mill around the outermost perimeter of his well-appointed palace did he bother to send back to school? In any case, why didn’t he dispose of his state of the art Rolls Royce and all the gaudy accoutrements of royal glitz in order to fraternize with them or commence the process of their rehabilitation?

At the end of the day, the former emir remains very much a feudalist at heart with occasional tipping nod in the direction of revolutionary rhetoric and radical hell-raising. It was the tormenting contradictions that would eventually unhorse him. Call no person happy and fulfilled until they have been able to live down the legion of contradictions that beset them in all their howling furies.

What remains to be said is the fact that whatever Lamido’s imperfections and the improper way and manner he went about things, the social and political contradictions of a feudal north trapped in medieval self-denial remains very much with us. Nigeria is a country in which a decaying feudal order is beset and besieged on all sides by forces furiously yearning for modernization and the political reconfiguration of the nation.

If President Mohammadu Buhari wants to take a measure of just how unsustainable this arrangement has become, he should go no further than study the outpouring of grief and disaffection of his compatriots emanating from the media outlets on a daily basis.

Many of them are barely restrained and it is obvious that many sectors of the nation are no longer willing to put up with the impertinence of a privileged elite group that relies on the political and economic retardation of the country for the maintenance of an anomalous status quo.

Once again, this column restates the fact that to help it out of its misery, the north needs the help of sympathetic outsiders from analogous cultures who view things from historical perspectives rather than through the prism of ethnic or tribal malevolence. This was the original thinking behind the formation of the APC before the whole thing was hijacked.

The tragic irony of our situation is the fact that the more we try to hide from it, the more it thumps us in the face. That political retardation is very much evident in the process that led to the banishment of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi after his dethronement. It is straight out of the colonial museum of atrocities which has no place in a modern nation.

No one is sure of what transpired between the federal authorities in the hours and days preceding the dethronement and summary banishment. General Buhari runs a Law and Order administration. There are overwhelming security reasons for removing the deposed emir from the Kano vicinity.

But for the federal authorities to insist that they had no hand in the banishment is stretching the fabric of state fabrications beyond its elastic limits. Dethronement should not be accompanied by penal banishment. Where does Governor Abdullahi Ganduje derive the authority to banish the ill-fated former emir to a remote outpost well beyond his state and suzerainty from?  Is he now the Governor General of the entire north?

While Nigerians mull over what to do with the terror and the unitary malevolence of the post-colonial state as a matter of national emergency, we should refrain from fuelling its excesses. Now that the authorities have granted the deposed emir some restricted freedom, the offensive clause that underwrites the banishment of free citizens of Nigeria must be expunged from our constitution.

Tatalo Alamu

 

AS soon as the passing of Areoye Oyebola, former Editor of the Daily Times, author, teacher and community leader, was made public Baba Lekki had gone into a protracted mourning mood lamenting the gradual disappearance of great men and genuine visionaries from this society. In his peculiar admixture of fact and fantasy, the old Alekuso contrarian had let it be known to anybody who cared to listen that he was a childhood buddy of the great man.

Drawing inspiration and hellish fumes from his massive pipe brimming with prohibited weed, the old Trotskyist narrated how he used to hunt rabbits from the suburban bush of Agugu all the way to the thick forests of Omi-Adio with the great journalist as his adjutant. “He was great with the catapult and he could take down a bird from a mile”, the old crank sulked.

Oyebola was one of the glorious early products of the Babatunde Jose visionary scheme of graduate recruitment which revolutionized the profession of journalism from the late sixties. Learning the rope very fast, the Ibadan-born textbook author quickly transformed from a classroom teacher to a popular pen pusher.

Yet in an irony of ironies, it was his subsequent career that would test Jose’s vision to the limits of its wisdom and practicality. Must the editor be a reclining intellectual and retreating scholar like Oyebola, or a massively connected, intrepid newshound and a man of urban ubiquity like Segun Osoba? Ideally, it ought to be a subtle combination of the two. But the actual world is far from an ideal place.

In the turmoil that followed the Murtala coup in July, 1975, Oyebola was nowhere to be found and Jose promptly plumped for Osoba who was at his inspired and swashbuckling best, sparking off a historic fire fight in Daily Times which would critically affect the career of some of the nation’s best and brightest journalists. Jose himself, at the age of fifty, would opt for diplomatic retirement having been critically wounded in the nasty melee.

It would appear that Oyebola never made a full recovery from the traumatic fiasco. He shunned the limelight and maintained an aloof dignity from politics and everything political concentrating instead on his publishing ventures. Yet he remained a man of calm introspection and considerable intellectual verve. The plight of the Black person brought out the fiery polemicist in him. Nigeria has lost a great pan Africanist. May his soul rest in peace.

By Tatalo Alamu

TO Aginlinti,  a rural outskirts on the road to Ogombo, where the Lekki Peninsula hugs the sea and the lagoon in precarious splendour. Our destination is the Aimasiko Bar where snooper often plays draughts before engaging the local cognoscenti in verbal fencing riddled with recondite Yoruba wisdom.

The bar-owner is Atingisi Omowon, aka Gbabi-magbabe, an old acquaintance of yours sincerely who had dropped out of secondary school in Igbo Elede after beating up Reverend Peter Morris, the revered British principal and veteran of the Second World War. Despite this educational reversal, Atingisi remains as sharp-witted as ever and a celebrated master of the game of draughts where he could anticipate ten moves in a sequence before unleashing a devastating counter offensive.

If you are looking for a good old-fashioned beer parlour still serving the ancient Yoruba pepper soup of crocodile meat, buffalo and alligator all washed down with a generous measure of raffia palm wine, Aimasiko Bar is it. After that, you can philosophize till daybreak with the local dialecticians and masters of open-ended ambiguities otherwise known as amphibology.

With Amotekun nationalism and Lukumi nativism on the ascendancy, snooper has decided to hone his considerable skills as a native raconteur. This is not the time to take any social or political risks as one may be forced into instant recital if stranded between the national army and the armies of enemy nationals. Snooper also decided to take Okon along so that he can appreciate the deep wisdom of the Yoruba people and their immense verbal facilities in case he might need them.

The fireworks had already started at Aimasiko Bar on this wet and soggy evening. A deep riddles’ session was already underway. It was a modernized and more challenging version of the old Yoruba riddle-solving. Somebody would get up and mention a word or a phrase. The successful challenger is then expected to fill out the allegorical flesh.

“Worukutindintindin…….. worukutindintindi”, one short and stumpy man suddenly blasted.

“Beans!!!  Kosi awo kankan l’awo ewa. There is no riddle to eating beans, my friend,” a fair-skinned man with deep tribal marks rallied with a cynical guffaw. There was mild applause.

“Esurugudu, majority boys”, a dandy-looking man with abetiaja cap croaked with immense self-assurance. There was pin drop silence. Will this agrarian mystery man get away with his arcane mumbo-jumbo?

“It is football, and I think that song was either by Aka or Ojindo”, Atingisi responded, rubbing his hands together in relish and affected self-importance.

“Thank you very much sir. May elders live long in this land”, the deflated man noted and sat down.

“Excuse me, if Yoruba want to succeed and leave dis yeye Kontri dem better let us know, all dis surugudu surugudu bizness na juju”, Okon suddenly screamed to snooper’s mortal embarrassment.

“Shut up!! Who put your Okampi mouth for elders’ matter? “one stout-looking local enforcer screamed and began making his way towards Okon.

“Amodemaja, leave am, na small boy and him head no correct”, Atingisi pleaded, eyeing Okon with avuncular disgust. The session resumed with a tall distinguished-looking Lagosian.

“Oribande!” the Lagos man crooned as if he was about to start singing.

“Okoto okun. That is the Okoto game on a sandy beach which relies more on luck than skills”, the dandy-looking man noted and sat down.

“Hmmm ogbologbo, afinju amugbo to nle tiro”, his admirer chanted. It was at this point, determined to break the dead lock, that Atingisi got up.

“Osenatu…Osenatu”, he began in a sing-song manner like a possessed musician. Baffling silence everywhere. Nobody seemed to have a hang of the riddle. After the silent count-out, Atingisi began to sing as if he was in an old NCNC rally.

“Osenatu….Osenatu Iyawo olope t’adelabu gba nijosi o ti bimo…” (Osenatu, the wife of the Action Grouper that Adelabu took some time awhile has delivered a bouncing baby) the mad fellow crooned to deafening applause.   As the din subsided, a lean and hungry-looking man sprang up.

“Koronatu, Koronatu!!!” the man screamed.

“Kai, oga, dat one na Coronavirus. Na corona two be dat one I dey go home”, Okon boomed as he leapt up. Everybody scampered for safety. There was commotion everywhere. As snooper fled towards the car, somebody shouted at his heels.

“Don’t bring this IPOB lunatic here again ever !!!”.

By Tatalo Alamu

As the world comes to grip with its latest pandemic, what began as a joke provoking a rash of comical responses has now become a troubling reality. The fear of Coronavirus, or more properly speaking Covid-19, is the beginning of wisdom. Places as far flung as Chile, Argentina, Iran and Japan have come under the deathly claws of the vicious virus.

At the latest count, more than one hundred thousand cases have been reported with over four hundred and fifty fatalities spread across seventy three countries in five continents. In Iran, a top adviser of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has died and the country’s Vice President as well as the Deputy Health Minister are suspected to have contacted the virus. Italy has followed Japan in temporarily shutting down their school systems. The Tokyo Olympics is threatened.

In Nigeria, Chikwe Ihekweazu, a top Health official who volunteered to join the WHO team on a fact-finding mission to China, has been ordered to go on self-isolation upon his return. What President Donald Trump, with characteristic haste, had dismissed as a hoax, has now reached the shores of America with vengeful fury, provoking the impressively proactive American authorities to declare a global emergency.

It is the wise and inscrutable Chinese themselves who famously admonished us to pray to live in interesting times. And what times could be more interesting than this particular one. The economic indicators point to a looming dip on the global chart. The IMF has predicted a general economic downturn. Some conspiracy theorists are already fingering a neo-Malthusian plot to cull the human population.

The real Yellow Peril is here with us. Corona may well be the spirit of the ancient Chinese civilization taking its vengeful toll on modern western civilization for earlier infractions and humiliations.  The seizure of Hong Kong penultimate century may well be one of these.  One of the rumours abroad is that the Corona virus is a tragic spin off of a Chinese experimentation with how to bring the rebellious people of Hong Kong to heel through viral bombardment. With their courtly smiles of devious gratitude, the Chinese never really forget.

For many who harbour anti-Chinese sentiments, the handshake has truly gone beyond the elbow. In Wuhan where the virus originated and in many parts of Europe, the old handshake has now been replaced by what can only be described as a kick-start which looks like some ritual preparation for kung-fu fighting. The end of the bear hug and the warm embrace as we know them may well be nigh.

As it is usual with humanity, the outbreak of coronavirus has provoked extraordinary acts of heroism accompanied by the normal dose of human villainy with quacks, mountebanks and the devil’s apothecaries looking to profit from human misery. Nigeria has registered strong presence in both departments, with a notorious pharmacological charlatan better known for electoral jiggery-pokery claiming to have patented a cure for the pandemic. This is not the first time.

Penultimate week, a Canadian family of five flying to Paris were forcibly taken off the flight after passengers complained of the protracted coughing of their daughter, despite the testimonial of doctors that the poor child only had common cold and was safe to travel. Almost seventy years after, Albert Camus, the great French Algerian novelist, would have strained to find enough evidence to warrant his eloquent testimony to the inherent nobility of humanity under desperate pressure as evident in his allegorical novel, The Plague.

In the event, not many are surprised that the Chinese and American authorities still have time for their hegemonic feud as each tries to outdo the other with countervailing narratives about the Corona pandemic and its true provenance. Having initially dismissed the whole thing as a hoax, the American leadership quickly ratcheted things up, accusing the Chinese of a massive cover-up as part of a botched plot to unleash a viral warfare on America.

On their part, the Chinese have only come short of accusing America of being behind the pandemic in a bid to hamstring the resurgent and rampart Chinese military and economic might. The auld enemies are truly at it and in the process the real truth is in danger of becoming a casualty of ideological warfare between two contrasting visions of human society and its future.

In this war of meta-narratives, or what the WHO Director General famously denounced as “infodemic”, the Chinese seem to have an edge. Their authoritarian suzerainty over the entire Chinese society allows a complete lockdown of the Chinese mental space which facilitates their power and ability to control and modulate the narratives at will whereas the American mental space because of its overriding egalitarian outlook will not brook or tolerate any official attempt to impose a monolithic consciousness or monological narrative on its denizens.

It is a question of national pride. All human societies are basically the same. What differentiates them is the system of governance and the national ideologies encoded as the organizing principle which gradually insinuate themselves into the national DNA is a result of prolonged naturalization and habituation.

America is a land of immigrants with an overriding Judaic/ secular code wired into the DNA, whereas China is not a land of immigrants and has remained the same for more than a thousand years, with the people merely exchanging the docility under classical feudalism with the docility imperative to communist state capitalism.

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

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

China’s sterling achievements in the last seventy years of state capitalism cannot be controverted. It is the very first time in the history of humanity that a ruling elite have succeeded in lifting so many people out of the poverty trap within so short a time. As a result of prudent and disciplined management of national resources, the Chinese leadership have turned China into a legendarily rich and well-provisioned country beyond the imagination of its people.

Within a time frame, the Chinese Communist Nomenclatural have transformed their country from a feudal backwater which was the butt of savage jokes and derision by western societies to a magnificent modern society replete with all the glittering and dazzling paraphernalia of a modern nation on its own terms. From a vast, chaotic and primitive land whose more powerful neighbours took turn to rape and humiliate, China has become a first class military power and leading economic stronghold.

This is a modern miracle story which is as stunning as it is staggering. But it is not the entire story. Despite the rapid modernization, there are still pockets of primitivism and fetishism embedded in the vast Chinese landscape. It is obvious that there are areas of China still living in the sixteenth century in all their hideously unsanitary conditions that modernity has not been able to work over.

Whether this is a deliberate oversight on the part of the authorities to preserve some aspects of pristine Chinese culture or an indulgent nod in the direction of aboriginal Chinese customs as a psychological fillip to appreciate where they are coming from remains to be seen, after all America itself boasts of some pristine communities marooned in the Allegheny mountains and the Yalla enclave of former runaway slaves in South Carolina bristling with superstitious bunkum.

Whatever it is, this is what is responsible for the Coronavirus debacle. Even from the hellholes of post-colonial Africa, anybody who has watched the viral video of the Wuhan market for wildlife will feel sorry for humanity. This is a relapse into the Stone Age or something before modern hominid first emerged from its odoriferous caves to lay the foundation of a truly human society.

Modernity cannot accommodate this fetid anomaly or it is bound to infect the rest of the world with its dank and horrific seepage.  Ironically it will be helped along by the willy-nilly rampaging momentum of globalization. This is why at the last count, far more countries have succumbed to coronavirus beyond its originating summons. Surely, if the Chinese want to enjoy their newfound wealth and prosperity this is not the way to go.

The second point to note is the fact that despite modernization and modernity there is a persistence of racism and structured xenophobia in every segment of the Chinese society. As a result of its isolation and self-enclosure for centuries, China is not very welcoming of foreigners. In every material particular, China remains a cultural autarky with the dynamism usually engendered by the influx of immigrant talent largely missing.

As a result of ancient myths and ancestral prejudices, the Black person is regarded as a devil from outer space in most segments of the Chinese societies and often viewed with contempt and cruel condescension, whereas in neighbouring Russia there were outstanding nineteenth century writers with Black ancestry who were considered the toast of the society.

All this will have to change, if China were not to suffer a drastic reversal of fortunes in the coming epoch. As for a heterogeneous and ethnically diverse post-colonial nation like Nigeria marooned between rampart feudalism and struggling modernity, the Chinese Example ought to have shown that modernization is not a tea party. It is now more than clear that something will have to give.

In national emergences such as we saw during the Ebola crisis, Nigeria relied on its abundance of individual heroism and committed nationals rather than institutional bulwarks. But this is not nearly enough for national mobilization in the face of a truly determined pandemic.

As we have seen with the Chinese Example and American Exceptionalism, a nation requires a national ideology by whatever name it is called, driven by core values in order to face existential exigencies. This is the lesson our moribund ruling class has refused to learn and it will continue to haunt us.

 

Tatalo Alamu

 

TO  the outskirts of Majidun where Pabanbari, a hit and run mobile radio station given to incendiary early morning broadsides against the authorities , is hosting Mama Igosun to a question and answer session sponsored by Otito Koro (The truth is bitter) a local self-determination movement known for its no-nonsense fiery denunciation  and bitter invectives against the status quo.

Mercifully, the long expected rains had arrived in the dead of the night clattering on the rooftop like a noisy burglar. As a result of the downpour, the whole world felt calm and sedate unlike the scalding heat of the previous week which sent tempers flaring at short notice.

As a result of a domestic infraction, the whole thing would have been a no-show. Yours sincerely had woken to the noise of verbal artillery erupting from the kitchen. Okon and Mama Igosun were embroiled in a fearsome altercation over breakfast menu with the old amazon from the forest of a thousand goblins insisting that the huge plate of beans and dodo she had just gobbled up was a mere appetizer to a more elaborate meal.

“Oponu, abi wetin dem call dat your yeye name sef, I say set dem table before I whack your kukuruku head with dem stick from Asejire Forest”, the old woman hollered.

“Mama, I think say you don chop, abi wetin be all dis dem jeunkoku chop and quench stuff?” Okon chided the old woman.

“Na your papa’s grandma go chop ewa aganyin for breakfast. If you no set dem table quick quick, your head go catch better fire like dem foolish man who come carry gedu timber with dem mad wasps”, the irate woman threatened as she suddenly swung her walking stick over Okon’s head.

“Okay mama, he don do. Wetin make I prepare? Cook get him own people na distance dey suffer am”, the boy responded with his peace offering.

“Give me dem hot pounded yam felifeli with dem woorooowoo vegetable and porcupine meat”, the ancient lady demanded licking and lapping her tongue like a mischievous toddler. A second childhood had truly descended on the relic of ancient warriors.

“Mama I don tell you say nobody dey chop dat kain yeye nonsense again for colony. He don tay since dem mala and dem white people drive dem Yoruba people comot from dem old kingdom for Iseyin”, the mad boy crooned with relish as an irate mama Igosun pursued him round the kitchen with her antique walking stick. Eventually they settled for the more modern compromise of bitter leaves and cassava flour which the old woman walloped with wild relish as she rounded up proceedings with a big glass of the strange concoction she brought from Igosun and had kept in the fridge ever since.

“Hen hen now dat old woman don chop belleful I dey ready for dem radio people. If not for dis dem ogbologbo drink he don dey reach time for old woman. I go dey fall for street like you great grandma for Abakaliki”, the old woman croaked as she was helped into the waiting Uber car.

Flush with the latest victory over Okon, the old woman was in a feisty mood as they eased her into a huge chair straight out of a royal palace. The rogue station had set up an elaborate reception in a ravine hidden from the main road to Ikorodu. The way they fretted over and feted her, Mama Igosun felt like a true royalty.

All of a sudden, mama sat up on the chair and her formidable visage took on a regal frown.

She eyed everyone with indulgent disdain. “Hen hen ma pikins. Dis feferity don do, me I no dey like too much feferity. Wetin you say make I come do for dis Agugu forest? Make you talk quick, quick. Na my people dey say if you wan osculate mad woman, make you do am quick quick and sharp sharp before dem mad woman dey bite your nose off”, the old woman noted with a crooked smile. The entire forest erupted in laughter and wild jubilation. Amidst the din, one man raised his voice.

“Mama thank you. Na so so amotekun dis and Amotekun dat. Wetin dis dem amotekun mean gangan sef? Abi na amotekun we go chop?” the man demanded with a hint of impatience.

“Ha, you see my boy. After dem Yoruba people finis hunting and chopping dem tiger for dem forest they come see say na only tiger brother remain. So dem come say Amo na ekun too. Amotekun means say tiger don finish but tiger still remain, like dem Oguntoyinbo, Shangotoyinbo, Ayantoyinbo, Oyatoyinbo people. So Amotekun na Yoruba power. Tiger die but tiger no die. You hear me?” the old woman demanded as if in a trance.

The whole place erupted in a pandemonium of wild dancing, singing and crazy celebration. In the orgy of frenzied jubilation, a Dane gun accidentally went off and people began scampering in different directions.