Category: Tatalo Alamu

The Nigerian medical society shook to its foundation last week with the passing of one of its star professors and a medical colossus in every sense of the word, Professor Emmanuel Adeyemo Elebute, CON, former Provost of the College of Medicine, University of Lagos between 1977 and 1980 as well as Chief Medical Director of LUTH, 1978 to 1980. He was also Secretary of the Association of Surgeons of West Africa which was later converted to the West African College of Surgeons, a position he held between 1967 and 1971.

Snooper deeply mourns a friend of this column and a gentleman in the truest sense of that word. Exquisite breeding is difficult to hide even when it is coolly understated. There was always something of the old Public School boy about the distinguished professor. He was courtly, courteous and cultivated. Like a typical English country squire, he wore his hat and opinion lightly.  He carried himself with the patrician grace and unruffled distinction of the old Lagosian coastal aristocracy. But he was an elitist and aristocrat with a sense of obligation to the society.

Perhaps as a result of this deep empathy for the plight of the poor and the underprivileged, the late professor’s generosity of spirit never ceased to amaze. It was pleasant to discover that this nobility of outlook is a gene that dates far back in the family. It was in his grandfather’s premises that Ijebu-Ode Grammar School took off in the third decade of the last century. Thereafter the colonial magnate and famed philanthropist donated the premises to the school.

Snooper has never wielded the surgeon’s scalpel. Any endeavor in that direction would certainly have ended in mass murder. But the late professor wielded both the pen and scalpel with dexterity and equal distinction. His biography of the late Marine captain Labulo Davies, a freed slave who was later to take active part in the naval bombardment of Lagos is destined to become a classic of its genre whenever civilization and a proper reading culture return to Nigeria.

Labulo’s life reads like the stuff of magical fiction. Like the late Prince Haastrup who was destined to become the Owa Ajimoko of Ijeshaland, Labulo was also abducted by slave raiders and sent on the journey of no return before his ship was intercepted by an anti-slave trade naval squad and forced to dock in Freetown. From there, Labulo as a young boy began to plot his way to the top until he became a leading light and plutocratic entrepreneur in colonial Nigeria having serving as an officer in the British Navy.

It was on account of this book that our path crossed. After reading a few pages, yours sincerely sat up all night to finish it. It was an engrossing read.  Elebute wrote the English language with verve and arresting felicity. The late professor would easily have distinguished himself as a writer had he not chosen the medical profession.

The Nigerian medical professoriate actually boasts of closet literati; outstanding men of letters and distinguished writers. If snooper is pressed any further, they will be outed. The gifts of sensitivity and clinical detachment, the power of acute observation, are the hallmark of the outstanding medical practitioner as well as the outstanding writer. Sigismund Freud hailed Fyodor Dostoevsky as his master and pathfinder.

Professor Elebute was a master and pathfinder in his own right. He was one of God’s gifts to humanity. There was something quite touching and profoundly endearing about his exquisitely refined bearing, his civility, his politeness and his urbane diffidence. He leaves behind his equally distinguished wife, Oyinade of the famed Adenubi family of Ijebu-Igbo and four highly accomplished children.  May his gentle and noble soul rest in perfect piece.

It was the strange one who once famously dismissed democracy as a demonstration of craze. In times like this and while waiting for the final outcome of the presidential slugfest, it is meet to recall the life and times of Nigeria’s most illustrious social gadfly, cultural iconoclast and iconic musical mega-star, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.

Fela’s concrete contributions to the concept of mental decolonization are as legion as his nasty melees with the military authorities. At a point, Fela had to take an advert in a small corner of a national newspaper to direct readers’ attention to the fact that he had not worked in over a hundred days due to military invasion of his rogue Republic known as Kalakuta. Ironically the enclave itself, magically cordoned off by the sheer power of narcotic fumes and verbal fulmination, was a favourite watering hole of many of the leading lights and lightning rods of military oligarchy.

For many who grew up around Mushin and Idi –Oro in the sixties and seventies, the sight of a brand new Mercedes car with its roof carriage laden with firewood cruising around leisurely for all to see was a symbol of wealth demystification at its most outlandish. It was Fela’s stunt. He did not stop at that. Gradually, the dress began to come off until only the briefs remained. And even the briefs became briefer. This was a classic instance of the authentic anti-colonial class covertly waging its last war against the emergent pro-colonial class of cultural slaves and carpetbaggers.

Anikulapo means he who carries death in the pouch of his machete. Fela also carried a deadly wit in his ancestral verbal pouch. Like his Yoruba people who are celebrated verbal warriors, Fela sometimes managed to kill two birds with one stone, often directly shooting at a target while making a sly dig at another opponent. This morning, we bring you a few snippets from Fela’s famous pouch of wit and verbal wonder.

(1)     To a fan, heckling him during a torrid performance: Who be dat one wey him mouth big past  Aikhomu’s mouth? (Admiral Augustus Akhabue Aikhomu was military vice president to General Ibrahim Babangida)

(2)     When the late icon, Tai Solarin ran into trouble after choosing to serve on the board of People’s Bank , Fela responded with friendly fire: Kai, kai, government na wicked people. Dem know say baba don old and him head no correct again. Dem come put am for one yeye bank so dat him go dey sleep and dem mala boys go dey thief money yanfunyafun.

(3)         When it was rumoured that a famous Yoruba juju musician has put Dele, his lead singer, in the family way, Fela burst into a famous Yoruba ditty: Esu l’ons’onimoto to pami l’aja, esu lons’onimoto to pami laja ooo. Aja ti mofi p’oya meta meta, dende oro re…. (May the devil take the soul of the motorist who has killed my favourite hunting dog.)

(4)     When he was told that the former boss of NDLEA, the dreaded, no-nonsense General Bamaiyi, wanted to have a word with him in his office concerning drug abuse, Fela asked the emissaries  to tell their boss to forget the nonsense. As everybody should know, Bamaiyi the elder was a fierce and fearsome old Zuru warrior who rose through the ranks and was as touchy as he was irascible. Reaching for his charms and favourite military pistol, Bamaiyi began preparations for his last military offensive. When Fela was informed that the portentously mustachioed war veteran was about to personally carry out his order, he (Fela) quickly changed tack and got the message across that he was going to honour the invitation. But trust the Abami Eda to have the last words. Ha you see, dis one no be Bamaiyi ooo, dis one na baamaayi, he explained to his retinue.

Eight days that shook the nation

Nigeria is a remarkable movie. This is not the first time we shall be making this observation in this column. Some years back, yours sincerely sat back to listen to a lecture on electoral reform delivered by the late Dr Abel Guobadia, a former boss of INEC between 2000 and 2005. It was part of the public enlightenment activities of the Obafemi Awolowo Institute of Government and Public Policy.

In the course of the lecture, Guobadia made an observation which has continued to haunt this columnist. According to the late mathematician and diplomat, a nation which does not keep a proper record of birth and death among other vital state documentations cannot hope to conduct a free and fair election. At the last count, it was rumoured that at least a million dead people have browbeaten their way to the Nigerian Voters Registration List. There have been many obituaries of the living.

In the post-colonial necropolis, the dead comingle with the living and to survive among political cannibals, you may sometimes have to fake your own death. In other words, it is not inconceivable that the dead will determine the outcome of yesterday’s presidential elections. The purveyors of magical realism can go and look for somewhere to sit. The real thing is here in Nigeria.

But let us thank God for small mercies that the nation has been granted a brief reprieve from those who are bent on setting it ablaze over the outcome of federal elections.  Despite the reprieve which attests to Nigeria’s legendary run of luck, it has been a close run thing. The omens are still dire. It has been eight days that have shaken the nation to its foundation.

Every day has brought tales of outlandish horrors, and of murder and mayhem reminiscent of a society on its last contacts with human civilization.  From the Adara imbroglio in Kaduna state, the mayhem in little known Igangan in Osun State, the horrendous massacres that have become the standard fare of ISWA operations in northeast Nigeria, and renewed herdsmen-local farmers’ imbroglio, it is clear that something will have to give eventually.  A person named Folorunso cannot continue to climb a palm tree with banana straw. It will not be long before fate finally intervenes.

To be sure, some of these are old wounds left untreated that have now gone completely septic and suppurating. But it is also obvious that elections are adding to an already tense situation. Whichever way you look at it, these bungled elections are a manifestation of deep fissures within the nation and symptomatic of a profoundly dysfunctional polity.

A nation that has suffered a major electoral annulment and three sequential postponements of elections within a spate of twenty five years cannot be said to be on the same page with modern civilization or human advancement in other climes.

More populous or territorially bigger nations such as the United States, India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Indonesia regularly and routinely achieve this casual feat of logistics that has so far eluded us without even resorting to any form of self-congratulation.

Electoral disorder is merely a symptom of a more fundamental disorder. Nigeria is in the grip of a profound crisis of modernization. As we noted in this column this past week, the veneer of political modernity bequeathed to us by our colonial masters, particularly the template of competitive politics, law, justice, electioneering rules of engagement and modern bureaucracy, is not shaping up to the disruptive anomalies of the post-colonial polity.

As the old African realities reassert themselves in combination with unforeseen contradictions, the enfeebled and disoriented “modern” nation-state simply tips over. Elections are part of the collateral damage and until our institutions are modernized in an organic and original manner, it will be a tad optimistic to hope for free and fair elections.

Although it has been said that man cannot live by bread alone, humankind remains principally homo economicus. One must feed before one can philosophize. Without food, there can be no political activity whatsoever. Politics exist to protect the food chain and to give a semblance of order and authority to the hierarchy of consumption and the feeding arrangement.

Do not be fooled therefore, whenever a principally economic argument is framed as a political argument, or whenever a question of economic survival is posed as a question of political survival. Even arguments about the continued viability of a nationality in the multi-ethnic coliseum that is Nigeria are survivalist queries.

For example, it is not the presidential election that finally held yesterday that is the problem. Many factions of the political class have survived worse political inquisitions in their chequered career. Elections have been rigged against them and they have rigged elections against others. The real problem is what General Buhari’s principal opponents consider to be a form of economic genocide: the authoritarian rather than authoritative allocation of federal resources which many believe politics is all about.

By its very nature, authoritative allocation has the full weight of ethical authority  and fairness behind it, whereas authoritarian allocation of resources echoes the feudal mode of production in its classical state. The omnipotent and omniscient ruler or prebend sits atop the resources of the society in taciturn and miserable splendor glumly doling out largesse to minions and other preferred royal sidekicks while shutting out other power players with equally pressing claims.  It is not about social and economic justice but about power in its purest and most unforgiving essence.

In classical feudal states, political marginalization followed closely on the heels of economic marginalization with the excluded squeezed to a point where suicide is seen as an attractive option to total emasculation. In modern states, there is more room to manoeuvre with the possibility of cooptation and rehabilitation once the rebel forswore his rebellion often in circumstances of ritual humiliation and self-abasement.

Even though they can be said to be a bit unfair to Abubakar Atiku who has never been found guilty of the theft of public money by any law court or tribunal, some international observers crystallized the moral ambiguity for Nigerians by reducing the presidential slugfest to a contest between a confirmed autocrat and a certified kleptocrat.

It doesn’t get more interesting, but it is also splendidly and profoundly ironic. Autocracy and kleptocracy are classic instances of grand larcenies and thievery committed against the people. It explains why Nigeria is split down the line and polarized along ethnic and cultural fault lines.

In a modern nation-state, an autocrat is a political tyrant who steals people’s liberty to the advantage of a superintending cabal, whereas a kleptocrat is an economic tyrant who steals the commonwealth blind for the benefit of his friends and cronies. Both autocracy and kleptocracy——a rule of thieves by thieves and for thieves—are the two sides of a very bad coin.

Yet It just happens that in a multi-ethnic nation and multi-sectored society, there are people, groups and factions who prefer to live under an autocrat, believing that they have the stamina, the political wherewithal and the sophistication to surprise and eventually checkmate autocracy, whereas there are also groups, people and societies who believe that they have the resources, the economic wherewithal and the sheer ruthlessness to outwit and outsmart the most desperate of kleptocrats.

Since this is a question of different and mutually countervailing political habitus, it is bound to be a violent collision of cultural altars with neither side understanding or making sense of what the other is up to. Inevitably, allegations and counter allegations of betrayal, treachery and perfidy   are bound to fill the air. The treachery and betrayal lie in the mutual hostility of contending worldviews and mutually exclusive historical trajectories.

This is the foundational problem of the post-colonial nation in Africa. Yesterday, the people of the old west, in the main, would have plumped for General Mohammadu Buhari. No argument would have swayed them to the contrary. On the other hand, the people of the east would have rooted for Atiku Abubakar.

Neither candidate is a safe and sure bet for the economic transformation of the nation or its democratic empowerment for that matter. But what cannot be discountenanced is the fact that General Buhari’s statist aversion for political disorder and economic indiscipline resonate a lot with the core Yoruba romance with old empire, whereas Atiku Abubakar’s economic daredevilry —to put things with diplomatic nuance— is grist to the core Igbo mill of freewheeling enterprise and fierce political individualism.

Apart from base ethnic calculations and jostling for immediate political advantage with little or no bearing on actual reality, what this shows is that people will rather identify with what is known and familiar even when faintly threatening than take outlandish risks with strange and unfamiliar choices. It also shows the formidable obstacles militating against the emergence of an authentic critical mass that will grow an organic national will and cultivate authentic core values for the nation.

If post- election chaos and anarchy are averted, whoever emerges on the presidential saddle will preside over a badly divided and bitterly polarized nation. If he does not move in the direction of forging an authentic national consciousness and a pan-Nigerian spirit that abjures nepotism and narrow provincial insularity, the discrete entities that currently float together under the rubric of Nigeria are likely to harden and coagulate further to separate monads and blocs seeking their own national identity and international recognition.

No nation can continue to serve as a torture wrack for its own citizens without the frustrated populace rising at a point to remove their millennial yoke. Election or no election, this is the point Nigeria has reached after decades of presidential incompetence and lack of vision. Let us get this election thing quickly behind us and rejoin the real struggle for the redemption of the nation.

Just after this column put to bed at 3 am on Saturday morning and the writer himself was put to bed by fatigue and allied misfortunes, the phone began to ring.  Surely there must have been some mistake, or some agent of the Deep State was at the other end. Yours sincerely chose to ignore the insistent caller. It turned out later in the early hours that INEC had postponed the election thus setting the stage for national confusion and an apocalyptic electoral meltdown.

Readers of this column must remember that this past week, the column warned the nation to beware of the ides of February. Let us repeat that in Roman mythology, Februarius is the month of purification. On the dot of February 15, INEC struck, setting the stage for subsequent massive voter apathy, technical disenfranchisement and a calamitous electoral backlash.

Why does this nation persist in walking with its eye wide-opened towards disaster and with the sedate assurance of a sleepwalker? This is surely not the first time elections have been postponed in the history of the nation. But this is the first time an election is being postponed after its opening stages have been operationalized. It is akin to aborting a fully formed baby. What was INEC waiting for?

This nation must avoid the banana peel in the coming weeks. With the postponement announced by INEC, the vultures of electoral decomposition are already circling. There are ominous hints from some quarters that having already failed the elementary test of integrity and credibility, the outcome of the presidential contest has been rendered null and void ab initio. That is the road to Caracas.

Pardon my petulant perversities.  It has become the obsession of this writer to find, at the end of every year, the single most powerful metaphor of our national condition – 1986, if you still remember, was the year of pepper soup.  The pepper soup man himself, in case you have forgotten, soon became one more variety of the delicacy – thanks to our culture of political cannibalism.  His remains, on the way to final rubbishing, were sent to the land of pepper soup – thanks again to our macabre sense of humour.  1987 was the year of soccer, when our two supreme artists of political football collided without either being carried off the field.

1988?  Well, 1988 was the year of several formidable symbols:  From the symbol of the great exodus of professionals which left the nation slightly brain-less, the symbol of the great NEPA strike which left the image of a nation in absolute darkness, to the symbol of a clinically-dead naira which made it possible for us to be officially admitted to the prestigious league of the poorest nations.  No symbol, however, seems to press its claim more powerfully than the symbol of the solicitor.  The lawyer as a warrior: law as the continuation of war by other means.

We are, of course, talking about Gani Fawehinmi, Nigeria’s indomitable and tempestuous legal Spartacus.  Marching, storming, stomping, eternally darting in and out of our law courts, sometimes as the complainant, more often as the accused, Fawehinmi has become the major protagonist in the frenzied drama of our national existence.  A tragic figure to behold in these tragic times, Fawehinmi reminds one of those equally formidable and noble personages in the mythology of his people.  These were men who chose to dare, who chose suicide as a profession.

It is possible that to his less visionary colleagues, Fawehinmi might be nothing but a squalid nuisance.  He might even have come across to them as an incorrigible self-promoter.  The question we ask of them is this: is it possible for a man to sustain a pose for 20 years – especially where such a pose invites pain and discomfort?  Let any of this man’s detractors exchange the cosy comfort of his stately bedroom for a night in the cell.

One event which brought this writer close to tears in 1988 was the sight of Fawehinmi celebrating his 50th birthday in the dock.  The matter is, of course, sub-judice – as they say.  But let us observe that the event has a profound symbolic significance.  For, in that supreme moment of history, Fawehinmi became savant, servant, and slave of law all rolled into one.  For a scene with an equal symbolic power, one must reach back to one of the numerous legends about the Russian revolution.

A privileged lady of the time, on seeing her father’s law chamber set ablaze by a revolutionary mob, screamed: “The law books! The law books are burning!”  To this, a member of the mob replied: “No! It is the law itself that is burning”.  Those who still believe that it is Fawehinmi, rather than our entire legal system, that is on trial, had better book an urgent appointment with an ophthalmologist of history.

The crisis of our legal system has been long in coming.  Fawehinmi has nothing to do with it.  Those who accuse him of bringing our legal system to disgrace and disrepute are only structurally adjusting the truth.  The real culprits are not hard to fish out.  A quick glance at the infamous Second Republic will suffice.  It is now part of history that our entire legal system was complicit in the scandalous depravity of that era.  It was a period when many of our lordships, with their fatally underdeveloped sense of history, hid under empty legal technicalities to wreak havoc on our political system.

It was a period when the entire land was awash with tales of huge envelopes dramatically changing hands.  It was a period when our legal titans turned the law and themselves to asses by defending white in one breath and black in the next.  The inevitable military coup merely gave muscle to a popular vote of no confidence in our political and legal cultures.

If after this tragedy, many of our learned friends had gone home to do some anguished reflections on their less than patriotic role in it, the nation might have been grateful.  But no sooner had the military come with a firm determination to punish the crooks of the Second Republic, than our learned friends rushed out again with their empty legal technicalities.  This, precisely, was the moment Fawehinmi stepped out not on the side of “law” but on the side of justice.

Given this background, it is a great irony that a military government which, at least, has not publicly renounced its predecessor’s attempt to right the wrongs of the Second Republic should find itself at mortal odds with a man willing to risk the status of a pariah in his own profession for the sake of the military.

It is even a greater irony that a man of Fawehinmi’s political acumen could not foresee that in its heroic but inevitably flawed quest for justice, the Buhari regime, sooner than later, was bound to shoot itself in the foot, that this had to be so because the military itself is not exactly innocent, and that the only solution to this dreadful impasse is a quick return to legal technicalities, to “civilized” procedures.

It should be obvious that this dreadful impasse, because it is itself only a part of the many contradictions eating away at the very fabric of our society, cannot be settled in our law courts.  This is part of the contradictory significance of Fawehinmi for our emerging civil society.  And it is not for nothing that Fawehinmi himself as the exemplary symbol, should be steeped and drenched in contradictions: a self-confessed autocrat who has become the rallying symbol of democratic awareness; a man who favours the military route to development, who has become the instrument for showing up the limitations of the military; a legal guru who has become the nemesis of the law.  This is the man and this is his season.

• Newswatch, February 27, 1989

Nigerians, beware of the ides of February. In ancient Roman mythology, Februarius is the month of purification. The auguries are dire and portentous. By the time readers are reading this column next week, Nigeria would have elected its next president. Never have the circumstances been more unpropitious. Never have the political elite of this nation been this split down the line and the nation itself bitterly polarized and badly divided.

The irony of it all is that the presidential contest is taking place between two gentlemen of essentially the same ethnic extraction: the one is a Kanuri-Fulani while the other is Mumuye/Fulani. So, what is the problem with the various hired mourners and paid hacks?

Whoever wins next week has his job cut out for him of bringing solace and succour to the injured and traumatized of the land. This is not the same nation that voted for MKO Abiola in the epoch-making presidential election of June 12, 1993. That was obviously another country. The arrowheads of the unjust annulment and their conniving paterfamilias are now telling Nigerians who to vote for after suborning the electoral will of fourteen million Nigerians. Hell, they shall not pass.

Never in the history of this unfortunate country has an election taken place under such a din of hate and hysteria. The primordial frenzy is powered by out of job political jobbers and other political wannabes, fresh recruits to the lobby of ethnic supremacists who believe that Nigeria owes them a living. They do not appear to have learnt any lesson from the Rwandan holocaust.

We have said it a million times in this column that neither General Mohammadu Buhari nor Alhaji Atiku Abubakar is the best for the job at hand. But this is how structural contingency trumps human agency in a polity structurally rigged against rationality. As we have noted in this column a fortnight ago, this capillary malice of enforced choice without free choice is why the Nigerian presidency often looks like a royal infirmary of reluctant presidents, accidental presidents, accidented presidents and supine viceroys.

These are some of the indignities a people have to put up with in a society in traumatic transition from authoritarian rule to passable democracy. The alternative is anarchy and chaos until the arrival of a pan-Nigerian critical mass which can determine its own electoral fate and shape its own political future away from the anti-democratic populism which has given a section of the country the power of electoral veto over the rest of the country.

Whether this can be obtained through peaceful incremental reform and democratic evolution within the current lopsided structural context of the nation or through inevitable social convulsion in the affected areas is what should be of utmost concern to genuine patriots rather than fixation with mere elections. Fixation with election is mere electoralism, a symptom of a political class looking for quick fixes rather long-term devotion to political modernization.

There are pawns and powerbrokers in this game. This past week, the military dimension of the game surfaced with a whopping seventy one retired generals trooping to Aso Rock to pledge their loyalty. What was left unsaid is that this was a firm military riposte to the coalition of service grandees spearheading the drive to oust Buhari from power.

This the height of military war-gaming in a democracy and certainly the most portentous the nation has witnessed since the advent of the Fourth Republic. The news abroad is that Atiku Abubakar will be nothing but a naïve political neophyte if he were to take the purported endorsement of the old generals as unflinching approval.

It is said that being masters of camouflage and subterfuge, they are merely using the poor man as a cat’s paw to pull the chestnut out of fire. According to this theory, Atiku is seen by the military aurochs as the only person with the means and material to checkmate Buhari and drive the presidential elections to the perilous frontiers of inconclusiveness. That is when the real game will kick in.

There are ominous hints of a hung presidency, of a Venezuelan parallel in which central authority is grandly bifurcated between arms of government in a situation of compelling anarchy and confusion and of a sharp and surgical foreign intervention which can lead to asymmetrical civil war and the radical disintegration of Nigeria as we know it. The Onnoghen conundrum, Nasir el-Rufai brazen stitch up of western authorities this past week may well be part of the opening gambit.

We have entered injury times. The powerbrokers think they know what they are doing. The pawns do not. But in the game of post-colonial chess, not even the knight is a free agent. Its movement are ultimately constrained and restrained by the immutable structure of the game.

In the current circumstances, given the objective reality at play and despite one’s profound reservations about the primordial proclivities of the government and rumours of crippling ill-health, there are three compelling reasons why this should be called for General Mohammadu Buhari.

First is the danger of an apocalyptic security meltdown in the case of a forcible liquidation of the status quo. Second, the fact that the northern dominant establishment should be allowed to serve out its remaining four years in the way and manner it deems fit.

Thirdly, the dominant mood of antiseptic abhorrence of corruption in the old West which tends to favour an anti-corruption drive however severely flawed and partisan over laissez faire dilatoriness and soporific collusion with graft in the name of free enterprise. May the good Lord deliver the nation from its fractured essence.

 To the magnificently draped Banquet Hall of The Sheraton Hotel at Ikeja this past Tuesday with Okon in tow for the grand unveiling of a new-look The Nigerian Tribune and the celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the iconic legacy of the founding visionary, Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

You may not always agree with the editorial direction of the famed newspaper; you may not be on the same page with a seeming lurch to the conservative right as an inevitable consecration of capital overtakes political idealism in a business-hostile environment. But there can be no doubt that The Nigerian Tribune is one of Nigeria’s rare success stories: a great tribute to courage, endurance and visionary heroism.

Famously dubbed Tetebuyan ( quick to abuse people) by the rapier-thrust wit of the inevitable SLA during the Western Nigerian uprising which eventually upended the First Republic, there can be no doubt that the newspaper has earned its spurs and the enduring affection and awe with which it is held by its core constituency.

There was great nostalgia in the air this cool, rainy morning as you approached The Sheraton Hotel complex located in the bustling business district of Ikeja. Yours sincerely had been invited to grace the occasion as a special guest and nothing was going to prevent one from attending. It is a labour of love and gratitude.

It was here that yours sincerely first cut his professional teeth in what is turning out to be an odyssey of intellectual and journalistic exertions. It was while at The Nigerian Tribune that yours sincerely penned and published his first op-ed piece titled Enoch Powell and the Coloured Immigrants. That was in February 1971 when one was still very much a teenager. Forty eight years after, yours sincerely is still very much at it.

The Nigerian Tribune of those days was very much a journalistic and political warfront. Hard men abound, particularly recuperating veterans of the Wetie uprising. It was not a rare sight to glimpse amulets dangling precariously from rumpled pockets brimming with native incendiaries and other prehistoric fireworks.

There was a man known as Alekuso who combined typesetting with rowdy gladiatorial exertions in Beere and Mapo Hill. There was Pa Ajibade, a bearish-looking Action Group stalwart, who would launch into tirades and tantrums if you happened upon him secretly penning his famous column, Alapara Ibadan for Irohin Yoruba.

There was the Editor-in-Chief, the iconic and mysterious LKJ, who would have promptly arrived at his desk well before 8 am, having journeyed from Lagos through the old route.  There was the immediate past editor, Ayo Ojewumi, aka Pen Atlanta, who combined fulltime Law studies at Ife with writing inflammatory editorials. And there was the boss, Olukayode Bakre, a suave gentleman with nerves of steel.

These men were all united by their adulation and affection for the political wizardry and organizational genius of the unforgettable Awo. The Yoruba race owes these heroic exemplars a debt of gratitude. Appropriately and in dangerous symbolism, The Nigerian Tribune was situated near a rowdy and turbulent stream at Adeoyo known as Agbadagbudu.

The pleasant early morning reverie was suddenly shattered by a commotion at the entrance of the hotel. Kingsley Moghalu’s convoy had arrived and was trying to wangle its way through but the Sheraton security people were having none of that. A tense and testy confrontation ensued which was eventually resolved in favour of Moghalu’s crowd.

The young shall grow indeed. Snooper has known Kingsley since his days as Personal Assistant to Ray Ekpu at Newswatch shortly after his NYSC. The young man has since gone on to do wonderful things, including a long stretch at the UN, a stint as Deputy Governor of the Central Bank all culminating in a professorship of International Business at the prestigious Fletcher School of Tufts University in the US.

In a political climate marked by hysteria and hogwash, Moghalu’s calm deportment and wonderful clarity of mind recommend themselves as political tonic for a traumatized nation. Unfortunately, it will take the arrival of a pan-Nigerian critical mass to recognize and appreciate the likes of Moghalu.

And the young shall grow indeed, whether we like it or not. Omoyele Sowore, the other notable presidential aspirant, used to drive snooper through the dark alleys of New York, particular the threatening caverns of Queens and Brooklyn, to Nigerian eateries and beer parlours as an accessory before the fact of grand stupor.

An abstemious teetotaller, the poor chap would sit patiently as Nigerian economic and political exiles engage in frenzied arguments about the fate of their country in the dead of the night. A former sterling students’ union leader who once wrestled Admiral Michael Okhai Akhigbe to the ground in a nasty melee over examination time table, Sowore would sit quietly while snooper engaged in political sparring until he (Sowore) was directly referenced by some of the Yoruba supremacists on ground.

Kind, gutsy, plucky and bristling with abrasive candour and integrity, Sowore is the kind of person you would like to have in the trench with you. Unfortunately, contemporary Nigerian politics is not a trench war but an open bazaar of buccaneers who do not give a hoot about political niceties. Nigeria will hear more about these young people, if not now but certainly in the onrushing future.

By this time, the Tribune event was in full swing. The guest lecturer, Bishop Hassan Matthew Kukah, had arrived to spontaneous applause.  Okon was eyeing everybody with bemused self-importance, a misconduct which attracted a furious stare from snooper. But the mad boy was completely unfazed.

“Oga, abi you think say na becos of you, I waka come? Awolowo na my papa’s friend when dem godogodo people send am to Calabar. Na me dey buy snuff for am”, the mad boy snorted.

“Okon shut up I say!!” snooper screamed. But by this time, Bishop Kukah had opened a new front. As soon as he saw snooper, he accosted him with a playful mien.

“Come, I didn’t see Okon last week”, the man of God noted as he made to pass.

“Your Lordship, Okon is bedridden”, snooper responded. But as yours sincerely made to pass, the mad boy charged.

“Oga, why you say I dey bed riding? Okon no dey ride bed at all sam sam. Na women I dey ride oo”, the impudent boy snorted. Snooper testily ignored the loony crank. But by this time, Bishop Kukah opened another flank as he reached the homeward stretch of his epic treatise.

“By the way where is Professor (name withheld) seated?  In fact, he should be known as Okon”, Bishop Kukah hollered as yours sincerely squirmed on his seat.

“Oga, you no see say man pass man? Houseboy don become house master for Lagos”, the crazy boy sniggered.

“Okon, another word from you and I will have the security people throw you out”, snooper rumbled with distemper. This seemed to have calmed Okon down considerably. But as soon as he overheard snooper discussing the chances of SDP with Professor Tunde Adeniran, the mad boy was back on the offensive. “Oga, tell am say market don finish”, Okon whispered conspiratorially and then got up.

“Where are you going?” snooper demanded.

“I dey go do shot put for the back of dem yeye Sharatu Hotel”, the mad boy announced.

“And what is shot put?” snooper demanded.

“Ha shot put na human javelin. Him no dey travel far but him dey smell far far”, the mad boy intoned as he began pushing his way through the crowd. Snooper decided to follow his delinquent ward . But as soon as he got to the foyer where refreshment was to be served, Okon exploded.

“Bia, bia neba. Abi na dis yeye bread and Siniga pancake you wan give people? Wey dem oporoku and dem point and kill pepper soup?” Okon screamed. It was at this point that the mad boy was pounced upon by security people. It was a great and glorious day for the Awolowo clan and The Nigerian Tribune.