The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tatalo Alamu

  • Okon wows and worships Kool Linda

    The World Cup has now come and gone. But not so its ripple effects. On the political scene, the breath-taking extravaganza, the choreographed precision and the joyous atmospherics of national solidarity and feel-good factor all confirmed Vladimir Putin, a former KGB apparatchik, as the new undisputed Tsar of modern post-soviet Russia. And quietly and melodiously flows the Don all over again. After quietly aping the west for centuries in a bid to foreswear its Asiatic scaffolding, Russia now looks like a moderately affluent European nation.

    There was nothing pristinely Russian or original about the word Tsar or Czar as the case may be. It was just a Russianized version of the Roman word Caesar meaning supreme leader. It journeyed through Germany as Kaiser. But it was only in Russia, because of its native tradition of strong and powerful women, that the word developed a feminized prototype: Tsarina. The Russians love their rulers as protective father-figures. In the aborted revolution of 1905, the protesters were shouting father, father even as the Tsar’s dreaded secret police mowed them down.

    But by far the greatest revelation of the World Cup was a Croatian playmaker known as Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic. On and off the field, the charismatic Croatian president held everybody spell-bound by her stunning beauty, her alluring presence and exemplary display of emotional intelligence.

    It was said that on a flight out of Zagreb, the Croatian capital, to Moscow, she was discovered flying economy class to watch the national team play, just like everyone else. She was all there, cheering the team and bonding with the players even in drenching rain. It was leadership at its most sublime and inspirational. It was not surprising that a wave of Kolindamania swept through the civilized world.

    You can trust Okon not to be left out of action. A few days after the curtain was drawn, snooper began hearing some strange gurgling noise, akin to the noise of terminated pleasure, coming out of Okon’s room in the early hours of the morning. On Friday morning, the noise graduated to a prolonged groan of orgiastic self-indulgence. Yours sincerely was left with no alternative than to force the door open.  Lo! There was Okon writhing with pleasure on the floor beside a giant poster of Kolinda.

    “Oga, why you come disturb now when I dey pray?” The mad fellow asked with a sheepish grin with embarrassment writ large on his face.

    “Stupid fool. And which kind of prayer is this one? By the way, I hope you know that the woman is a trained marksman”, snooper cautioned. Okon jumped up on hearing this.

    “Ah oga if she be trained markman, me I be trained markwoman. As she dey mark men, naim I dey mark women too. Equation don balance”, the mad man boy snorted with savage relish.

    “Okon, you are a fool. Your madness knows no bound. A trained marksman is a hired killer”, snooper noted.

    “Oga, dat one na exaggeratement. When women dey fire men, men no dey die but when men dey fire women dem fit die. Three Lagos women don kaput like dat for Okon”, the crazy boy sniggered.

    “Okon, since you want to kill yourself, her husband is a trained body builder”, snooper observed.

    “Oga dem never get anything like body builder. Body builder na bricklayer. As dem Yoruba dey say na respect dey make dem call one man as foreman. Foreman no be four men.” Okon chortled.

    “And the man is a professor, How many professors are there in your family?”

    “Oga dat one na yeye title. Abi no be dem professor dem dey fire dem small small girls for dem varsity? Better men like Okon dey wire big obonge madam like dem Kalinda lady, no be mosquito girls like dem Taiye for Mushin”. On that perilous note, snooper quickly shut the door on the mad fellow.

  • An Officer and gentleman at 80

    To the becalming and somnolent Uber-city of Ibadan penultimate Saturday for the eightieth birthday celebrations of Brigadier-General Joseph Olayeni Oni, soldier, statesman and lately spiritual warrior. In service, Brigadier Ola Oni was a model officer and gentleman. Out of service, he has seamlessly transformed into model citizen, elder statesman and servant of the church.

    When this column strolled in almost twelve years ago, one of its driving concerns was to seek and pull out unsung heroes and forgotten avatars of the Nigerian narrative. This is a strategic imperative. If we allow those who have turned Nigeria into a criminal enterprise to impose their version of history on us, neither the heroic dead nor iconic living are safe.

    Ola Oni, as the retired Brigadier is popularly known, is one of the unheralded heroes of the Nigerian narrative, particularly the traumatic interlude otherwise known as the Civil War. The civil war was a very uncivil and savage fratricidal contention indeed. The crack combatant commanded the most forward brigade at the tail end of the war. It was to him that a secessionist officer eventually turned to with the offer of surrender.

    Yet despite this historic role, mum has been the word from the Ipoti- Ekiti born general. Except among his military cronies and colleagues, you will never hear the general speak about his war service. It is as if he is foresworn to an oath of permanent silence. He does not carry himself with a military swagger or martial swashbuckling. If you meet him, you are likely to think that he is a retired civil servant or a ranking apparatchik of the informal economy.

    In the general, humility and self-effacement are carried to the extreme of self-abnegation and virtual self-erasure. It is one thing if you do not want to draw attention to yourself, it is another if you will anonymity to a point of self-obliteration. This is extreme military discipline. Twice, yours sincerely has had to extricate the general from awkward social situations, the last occasion being at the wedding of the son of his former boss when the great man decided to slum it out among a crowd of locals with snooper insisting that he was having none of that. The quietly bemused Brigadier was eventually persuaded to avail himself of a more befitting sitting arrangement.

    Perhaps social background matters a lot in this business. Born in Lagos to an Ekiti father, Emmanuel Dada Oni, and a Lagosian mother, Abigail Remilekun Richards, on 5th July, 1938, the future general combines the simple piety and fierce integrity of his Ekiti forebears with the good breeding and delectable manners of the old Lagosian coastal elite.

    But it is in his subsequent struggle and heroic determination to succeed in life despite poor cards dealt him by fate that this man should serve as a beacon of hope and inspiration to all Nigerians and a role model for this generation and future generations. It is a story of grit and gruelling endeavour to make something out of nothing. It is here that we unlock the secret of genuine human distinction and its accompanying humility and temperate forbearance.

    With the death of his father while he was fourteen years of age, the young Olayeni became an orphan, having lost his beloved mother six years earlier while he was only eight years. Perhaps it is meet to note that the army was not his first choice of calling. Having completed his secondary school in 1960, the future general was studying for his A-levels at the Federal Emergency School of Science while working as a Clerical Assistant Officer at the Federal Ministry of Aviation, Marina and Valuation Assistant Officer at the Lagos Town Council.

    But he was forced to abandon his studies due to a crippling shortage of funds among other domestic challenges. He subsequently enrolled as a Cadet Officer in training at NMTC Course 5 in 1962 and was commissioned into the Nigerian Army in January 1963 at Mons Officer Cadet Training School, Aldershot, England.

    Once he chose the army as career, he gave it his very best short, rising to command the army premier Division in Kaduna as well as its intellectual bastion otherwise known as TRADOC in addition to his exemplary war service. This is in addition to having served as a military governor and member of the highest military ruling body twice.

    This was the man we all came to honour on this cool rainy Saturday morning in the city of iconic Yoruba warriors of the post-empire order. The commodious bowel of the iconic All Souls Church was filled to near capacity. So was the Professor Ogunlesi Memorial  Events’ Centre where the reception proper took place later.

    Dignitaries from all walks of life came to honour the distinguished soldier and statesman: military kingpins, academics, distinguished administrators, famous journalists and top servants of God. At the church, snooper found himself being waved to a seat next to the great editorialist, Felix Adenaike, by Auntie Bola Alo, a screen diva of an earlier generation, who sternly warned that no snooping around by any footloose columnist would be tolerated. Thank you ma, but there is a difference between snooping and scooping.

    In the event, it was Adenaike, the famed musketeer, a justly acclaimed repository of Nigeria’s history and its unsettling details, who supplied the missing political, social and military details. Boy, what a country and what a people! But if all this was quite entertaining and riveting what followed was profoundly illuminating for the light it threw on the celebrant as a man of character and nobility of spirit.

    It was time for testimony. Speaker after speaker and from different spheres of life and human endeavour rose to testify to the humility, humanity and compassion of the celebrant. His military colleagues paid tributes to his devotion to duty, his self-effacing proficiency when it came to core military chores and his selfless pursuit of the welfare of others even at his own expense.

    General Ike Omar Sanda Nwachukwu paid glowing tributes to a man who was a trusted comrade in war and a dependable confidant in peace. Such was the camaraderie and espirit de corps in the old Nigerian army before war and booty took it apart. According to the general, although Brigadier Ola Oni was his military senior, he did not hesitate to support him when he wanted to buy a car even though Ola Oni himself did not even have a bicycle.

    But most moving and absorbing was a private testimony by Brigadier Ola Oni’s former boss, beloved friend and wartime commander, General Ipoola Alani Akinrinade. On a chance visit from the war front to the Governor’s Lodge of the old Western State where the youthful Major Ola Oni was serving as ADC to the then governor, General Adeyinka Adebayo, Akinrinade had dropped the casual hint that there would be a big hole in the officer’s service record if he did not have a stint at the war front.

    Akinrinade did not know how much Oni took this to heart. A few months after, Oni showed up at the war front and in the sector commanded by the intrepid warrior. In order to put him through his military pace, Akinrinade sent the would-be Montgomery to the hottest section of the war front. But Ola Oni quickly distinguished himself as a man of great personal courage and resourceful military commander.

    Fate had much more in store for the two men. In the early hours of 14th January, 1970, around 4am to be precise, the then Colonel Akinrinade was roused by Major Ola Oni that a secessionist officer wanted to see him. As the Brigade Commander of the most forward unit, Ola Oni should know what he was talking about. But then war does many things to officers and men, not the least weary disorientation and hallucination.

    After crosschecking the fact, a tense argument ensued between superior and subordinate over who must risk his life to go the rebel enclave with Akinrinade insisting that he must be the one and Ola Oni pleading that he could not afford to risk the more valuable life of his commander. The argument was won through a combination of superior logic and military diktat with the senior commander insisting that he was only there as operations supervisor and that it was the lot of the Brigade Commander to be with his troops.

    As a parting shot, the Yakoyo-born general had instructed his loyal subordinate that should he not be back at an appointed time, it should be assumed that he had succumbed and the final push into the rebel-held territory should be operationalized promptly and without any further delay. Mercifully, this fearsome bombardment of an enclave swollen with war refugees was not to be. The civil war had virtually concluded at that point. It was only waiting for the historic laying down of arms.

    Even in the horror theatre of war, honour, self-sacrifice, selfless heroism, nobility of spirit and some of the finest instincts of humanity often shine forth. Brigadier General Ola Oni personifies these instincts. In the current climate of political debasement and debauchery, these are redemptive tropes and resources for building a new Nigeria.  Here is wishing an exemplary officer and true gentleman many happy returns.

     

  • Baba Lekki refines his theory: Defection is shifting cultivation

    And whilst we are still on the subject of defection, it is meet to report that Baba Lekki has had to revise his theory of political migration. As the tsunami of political infidelity and associational treachery threaten to overwhelm the weak ideological foundation of the Fourth Republic, Baba Lekki has been forced to revise his theory in the light of rowdy reality. On Friday morning, the old contrarian shambled in clutching a file containing frayed sheets of paper.

    “Baba no let dis yeye kontri kill you ooo. Dis one day you dey look like person whose head don defect patapata”, the mad boy crowed as he eyed the old man with cynical glee. The old man ignored him and went straight to business.

    “Okon, sit down. In Agricultural Science, political migration is known as shifting cultivation. When you farm a piece of land to infertility and barrenness, you leave it for nature to reverse the ecological damage”, the old man began.

    “Kai baba, dis your brain na Agama..” Okon began drooling but Baba Lekki cut him short.

    “But you see, in political migration there is a difference between sedentary defection and nomadic defection. In sedentary defection, the defectors come back after the land has regained its vitality and resources, but in nomadic defection, the defectors never come back after destroying the cultivation and the culture. They are permanently seeking greener pasture leaving in their wake destruction and great chaos.”

    “Baba, no be dis dem pastor Dele dey call parable?”.

    “ Nonsense. Okon, this is not a parable. This is science”, Baba Lekki shouted as he stormed out.

  • Defection goes viral as dustbin women sweep everything

    Defection has hit the country like the Bubonic plague. Like an over-subscribed contrivance that has been damaged beyond repair, defection itself has become defective. Once a useful travelling kit for Internally Displaced Politicians traversing the length and breadth of the country in search of the next meal ticket, it has now become a weapon of first choice in the hands of Eternally Displeased Political Prostitutes in search of the next promiscuous party. But since all parties are frustrated in their ambition and undernourished in their electoral pleasure, the talisman of defection has lost its power and potency.

    “Oga, dis one na buy and see. Talisman don become tally woman, “Okon summed up things with savage relish.

    “Leave dem, defection go end when everyone don defect from yeye Kontri”, Baba Lekki glumly concluded.

    But you can trust the crazy one to latch on to the defection train. Ever since defection became a buzzword in the nation, Okon has cottoned on to the act with mirth and malice. All acts are laced with defect and defection. Okon could barely conclude a transaction without bringing in the dreaded word.  When his wife gave birth to a baby girl recently, the crazy boy solemnly informed snooper that Sikira had added a defector to the family.

    On Friday morning, Okon slouched into the sitting room clutching his midsection even as his face glowered with mischief and relief.

    “Okon, what is the matter?” snooper demanded.

    “Ha, oga!!! I just go defect for them uncomplete building”, Okon moaned with quiet relief.

    “And what is that?”

    “Ha, oga I go do shot put, as dem Ebonyi people dey call am”.

    “Look Okon, be serious. I have no time for early morning nonsense. What is shot put?”

    “Oga shot put na hot shit, he dey drop gbim. He dey drop kawtawkawtaw”, the mad boy snorted.

    “Ho silly idiot. You mean defecate? That is defecation, not defection”, snooper corrected.

    “Oga, haba, abi devacate no be when dem cancel dem vacation for dem sinators and housassins? Dat one go be expensive shit and he go happen when dem senate dem come resume shitting”, Okon crowed.

    “Ha, Okon on that day defecting train go jam defective locomotive. Na Hiroshima be dat,” Baba Lekki interjected with icy disdain.

    “Ha, oga, Baba don come again oooo. I never sabi say train dey shit oo. And no be when crazy man de drive train dem dey call am locomotif?”.

    It was at this point that the mad dustbin woman lunged into the sitting room with broom in one hand and umbrella in the other. Everybody made a dash through the kitchen.

    “Ha wait now. Sebi defection sweet for your mouth, abi? Wait make I defect your head with dem broom or umbrella” the crazy woman scream

  • Anubis Resplendent

    Further notes on organic crisis

    TO political novices and other captives of the Ancient Mariner, the current gale of political defections—— or what a wag has dismissed as economic deflections— might appear interesting, entertaining and even absorbing. But that is only until you scratch below the political surface. You then discover that it is not funny at all if only because it is all taking place amidst a grave organic crisis of the Nigerian post-colonial state. Nigeria is in the grip of political, social, spiritual and ecological anomie.

    Lest we forget, an organic crisis occurs when a national ruling class appears to have failed in a major project for which it has mobilized and enlisted the support and patience of the people. It could be a war of national self-determination, a national project of social and economic redemption, or a crusade for the democratic and political validation of the populace.

    Of its own volition, the old military oligarchy promised Nigerians a New Deal; a project of democratic and political empowerment of the nation.

    On the way to this promised land, Nigeria witnessed a crass annulment of the national will which sent the nation into a five-year low-intensity warfare.

    The 1999 Settlement which inaugurated the Fourth Republic offered a new way forward: a militarized democracy and informal diarchy which may well be the lot of multi-ethnic and multi-religious traditional societies in a state of traumatic transition from authoritarian rule to popular rule.

    While the project of formal demilitarization has succeeded to a great extent, it is all too obvious that Nigeria has run into a severe storm as far as the democratic and economic empowerment of the populace is concerned. This is because you cannot give what you don’t have. Non-democrats can never serve as the guardian and guiding angels of a truly democratic nation.

    To economically transform a nation, you need leaders steeped in the knowledge society and its transforming possibilities. Unfortunately, structural contingency trumps human agency in Nigeria and makes it difficult to produce genuinely transformational leaders. By the time they have been put through the grinding and grilling mill, only a particular type of leadership remains for the perplexed and powerless electorate to choose from.

    But since time waits for nobody, the endemic crisis of nationhood festers and the tumours of underdevelopment metastasize. Before our very eyes, and between 1999 and this moment, Nigeria has slipped behind India in the misery index and the number of people living below the poverty line. Faced with economic annihilation, the youths of the north are up in arms in a genocidal frenzy while the south combusts with social warfare.

    Meanwhile unable to detect the tectonic tremors rumbling under the surface, Nigeria’s traditional powerbrokers and their pawns are fixated on defections and personnel changes at the very top. This is the only talisman of transformation known to them, and they have been at it forever without making a dent on the nation’s fundamental crisis.

    Four times in the life of the Fourth Republic, 2003 with Obasanjo, 2010 with Yar’Adua, 2015 with Jonathan and now in 2018 with Buhari, the Nigerian ruling mafia has tried to dismantle its own leadership choice. It succeeded thrice. Yet this tunnel vision and perpetual dance of the forest have hardly affected the tragic trajectory of the nation.

    According to philosophers of organic crisis, if the forces of change and progress are too weak, too disparate and dispirited to impose a solution on the crisis, a solution would be found for them by better organized and more coherent conservative right-wing forces who may then push the nation in the direction of fascist repressive rule.

    In General Buhari, the nation has slipped into the ultimate conundrum of a person elected on a left of the centre mantra of progressive change and structural reform trying to impose a right of the centre solution based on the conservative moral fervour and fundamentalist piety of one-nation unitarism. Thrice he attempted to rule the nation on this right wing template and thrice he failed.

    But having finally come to power on his fourth try, the fundamental contradiction of platform and provenance is proving a disorganising and disorienting reality forcing him to swing between full scale coercion and full blown conciliation. When he tries the former, his barely refurbished democratic credential is rent asunder, and when he attempts the latter, his integrity and political probity are laid to waste.

    In effect, never in the history of Nigeria has a leader been so trapped by his own contradictions. If it is not too late, General Buhari will have to go back to the drawing board. The past masters of Nigerian succession game are watching while their latest prey roils in the iron cage. It is some cruel sports, but politics in Nigeria is a cruel game indeed.

    If he continues to temporize on important state matters, he risks political defenestration. But if he resorts to full blown repression, he risks the nation suffering an implosion under him. There is only so much a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural nation on edge can take.

    For those who may consider this as a mere storm in a tea cup which will soon blow over, or just some apocalyptic hell-raising that bears little consequence on actual reality, what you are about to read must serve as a reality check, and a warning reminder for those who ignore history that history will not ignore them.

    When the piece below was published on this page ten years ago this week, there was no Boko Haram; no Chibok or Dapchi abduction of Secondary school girls; no dismissal or actual killing of emirs or assassination attempt on the most notable of them; no mass-murder of Nigerian citizens by armed militias; no herdsmen imbroglio titling towards massacres that invite comparison to genocide; no kidnapping on an industrial scale in the south; no social cannibalism or sadistic disregard for the sanctity of human life.

    Ten years ago, the piece you are about to read concluded with the ominous warning that unlike their European counterparts an epoch earlier, the Nigerian youth is unlikely to go under meekly and quietly. Now take a look at the girl in this picture who claims to be a professional assassin with four down. What is most chilling is the fact that for her killing is a cold, unemotional act once the target is within her rifle sight. If the apocalypse is not upon us, we wonder what this is.

  • Gregor Samsa was here

    You must remember Gregor Samsa. But in just in case you don’t , Gregor Samsa will not forget you. He was a good child, a dutiful and obedient son and a kind and cheerful provider for his mercenary family. But he was also a universal symbol of human bestiality. In every human heart abides a Gregory Samsa, and every human space abounds with the Gregory Samsas.

    In case you are still wondering who on earth Gregory Samsa is, well let us just say that he is one of literature’s most remarkable creations. He was the guy who went to bed hale and hearty only to wake up to discover that he had become an insect, a beetle dung to be precise. He was the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. It must also be added that the only thing heroic about him was his resolute disavowal of heroism.

    There are many who insist that in Gregory Samsa the neurotic and alienated Kafka was merely portraying himself, and that the name Samsa itself is merely an anaphoric reformulation of Kafka. There were many similarities between creator and character. Kafka himself lived at home and worked as an insurance clerk for many years. A chronic consumptive, he was also dogged by ill-health throughout his adult life. Needless to add that he was a model celibate.

    Kafka has been described as the classic representative of the age of anxiety, the age when you feel that no matter how hard you try, something will go wrong. The human psyche had taken a battering as a result of the First World War and events preceding it. The whole world had become a vast wasteland.

    Kafka himself was a multiple victim of the ensuing multiple displacements. He was a German speaking Czechoslovakian Jew, an instance of classic alienation. Not to speak the national language of the country you find yourself as a result of arbitrary demarcation is enough affront and humiliation. But to be a Jew in such an environment was the murderous icing on the cake. So what to do in such absurd circumstances?

    Kafka, in his loneliness and alienation, resorted to writing strange tales of nightmarish absurdity, the most outlandish of which was The Metamorphosis. After all, just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are not going to get you. When he was asked to explain why he wrote the way he wrote, Kafka glumly retorted that it was because actual reality was unrealistic. It means that the world that confronts us is a world of unbelievable cruelty, a horrendous nightmare. Consequently, the artist has to come up with portraits of superior revulsion.

    In philosophy this is called the negation of a negation. You cannot confront negativity with the positive and hope to get any decent result. You confront the negative with superior negativity. There are astonishing similarities between Kafka’s world and contemporary Nigeria, and between Gregor Samsa and contemporary Nigerians. But let us not race ahead of this consuming story. Let us not forget that there is a guy in bed who has been turned into an insect. Gregor Samsa expects….

    As he trundles about in bed, panic seizes Gregor’s family. What were they going to do with a man who has become a beetle? There is something self-serving and selfish about the panic. The prospects of the family breadwinner being permanently incapacitated are more troubling than his metamorphosis. A quiet desperation overtakes the family.

    Meanwhile despite his shattered state, Gregor’s consciousness is hardly altered. Despite the fact that he has taken the form of an insect, his mind operates like that of an adult . He knew he has to get to work, despite his parlous state. He knew that his bosses were not going to take any excuse. In many years, he has not missed work for a single day. Let him become a hippo, he has to get to work.

    As a grim reminder, the overhead clock ticks away with a harshly mechanical efficiency, reminding the stricken Samsa that time waits for nobody and that punctuality is the soul of business. In the modern world, the clock is a classic symbol of alienation. Designed to regulate time, it has taken over as the regulator of the regulator. Humanity has become a slave of the clock. Yet the oceanic plenitude of time such as we have in traditional societies is the enemy of progress and prosperity.

    It is useful to point out that The Metamorphosis is an anticlimactic tale. The bulk of the action has already taken place before the story begins. Gregor has already become an insect. The terse opening sentence announces and confirms Gregor’s fate with fatalistic certitude. The rest is an anticlimax sustained by Kafka’s literary ingenuity. It is a tour de force.

    It is also important to draw attention to Kafka’s style which thrives on not drawing attention to itself. So assured was Kafka of the grim fate that awaits mankind that he adopts a quasi-scientific and detached style. Despite the hair-raising and hysterical nature of the business at hand, despite the fact that a man has become an insect, Kafka assumes an Olympian pose of calm rationality. The technique has been called the naturalisation of the unnatural, in which case what is unnatural becomes natural and rational.

    It is obvious that Franz Kafka was born in the wrong place and at the wrong time. He could easily have been a prophet of the contemporary Nigerian predicament. There is so much bestialization of humanity going on in contemporary Nigeria, so much naturalisation of the unnatural, so much normalization of the abnormal, that what we may be witnessing is an evolutionary reversal on an industrial scale.

    Our manners have gone to the dogs. Taking a cue from our rulers who routinely brutalise us, we also routinely abuse ourselves. There is so much incivility and discourtesy in the land. Go to the public space and the stomach churns at the verbal aggression and sheer vitriol that often attain the height of artistic genius.

    Yet several constituting nationalities of Nigeria have codes of civil conduct enshrined in their culture. But this has been lost in the anarchic combustion of failed nationhood leaving in its wake a veritable human zoo. Yet everything appears normal, as if Kafka has been at work.

    There is partying and rejoicing everywhere and every week. The nation may be under-developing but religion has been industrialised. Such is the normalization of the abnormal that even the electorate, like so many vexing and troublesome insects, have been summarily vaporized. And nothing seems amiss.

    The perpetrators and beneficiaries of this historic heist, rather than showing regret and remorse, strut about the land in boisterous buffoonery. The same week that an American of African extraction was making history trying to redirect America to its youthful radical dreams, the same week that the Nepalese parliament was voting to abolish a three-century monarchy, the Nigerian lower house was conspiring for the fourth time to throw out the Freedom of Information bill.

    But let us leave with a historic wager. The Nigerian is not going to depart meekly like his east European counterpart of the early twentieth century. This is where Kafka might have got things wrong. The Blackman, when roused to venomous fury, is not exactly like his European kinsman.

    Despite his seeming docility, the average Nigerian is not going to go under without disturbing and disrupting global peace. Like a nasty and turbulent toddler, there is going to be a lot of hollering and caterwauling from these climes before the murky curtains fall. This time around, the world will know that Gregor Samsa was here.

     

    • First published in July 2008

  • Baba Lekki solves defection riddle

    Okon: Baba, wetin be difference between dem defection and dem deflection?

     

    Baba Lekki: Ha yeye boy, so you no sabi dat one? Defection be when dem wan assassinate sitting gorbment and deflection be when dem sitting gorbment wan assassinate dem assassinators.

     

    Okon: Thank you baba, make I go collect garbage.

     

    Baba Lekki:  Ha Okon, baggage be when gorbment collect corrupt politicians and garbage be when dem dump gorbment.

     

     Okon: Thank you baba, I don see why refuse come be refuse now.

  • Sweet and stale palm-wine from Ekiti

    Fresh palm-wine is sweet. When the foaming and frothing stuff is cooled by Harmattan, nothing can be more appealing to the drinking palate. But stale palm-wine is more potent and potentially far more destabilising. Nature converts the sugar into more alcohol which heads straight for the seat of reason. The Yoruba have a proverb which captures the mystery. Pounded yam, even when it is twenty years old, can also burn with severity.

    Ekiti, the land of rolling hills, rugged mountains, wonderful topography and equally wonderful people is also the land of palm-wine and pounded yam. It is the forest of a thousand professors  where brave hunters (Ogboju Ode) prevail and predominate. The place had been in the news of late, but for the wrong kind of reason. How one had wished that it is for the academic exploits of its children, or the famed industriousness of its native people that Ekiti has been in the news.

    The state gubernatorial election has now come again. But not so the controversies that erupted shortly before and immediately after the election. The sight of a weeping governor, floored by fistic adversity and drooling like a baby, is a new low in the demystification of democracy in Nigeria. Each day brings new revelations. Where one had expected a clear victory for progressive forces, however badly disunited, it has been an electoral cliff hanger. Where one had expected a departure from old electoral norms, it has been a consecration of impunity and electoral infamy. Old pounded yam can be very scalding indeed.

    Let us now cut quickly to the chase. This is a matter of utmost importance to the Ekiti people, the Yoruba nationality and the Nigerian nation. It is a matter beyond the contending gladiators of the moment. How this matter shapes up will determine the democratic destiny of the nation and the relevance and suitability of our current democratic model to the extant historical consciousness of our people.

    It will now be hypocritical and dishonourable to aver otherwise. Kayode Fayemi was not the automatic candidate of this columnist as far as the APC flag bearer in the last Ekiti State election was concerned. It was not that one had any candidate of choice in the matter. But one felt that it would have been better and healthier for the party, and in the greater interest of the people and the nation if the slate had been wiped clean and the board cleared of the mutually antagonistic debris both within and outside of the party.

    That way it would have been easier to forge a new beginning based on elite consensus in the state and the commonality of poverty among the people. At a point, it seemed as if the party local leadership was groping and intuiting its way towards the idea of a consensus candidate before federal force majeure took over the proceedings.

    It is not easy to have a sense of equanimity over being electorally humbled and humiliated in one’s domain as a sitting governor. This is more so when it was then discovered that the electoral advantage was procured through substantial fraud and chicanery. Right from the beginning, the Fayemi campaign was projected as a grudge match with the governor-elect himself famously being quoted as saying that Fayose would be caged on Election Day. Looming in the background was an unforgiving presidency very much embarrassed not to say embittered by Fayose’s endless taunts and often ill-bred tirades.

    The grudge match has now produced a grudge mandate with the whole state badly polarized and bitterly divided. Never in the history of Nigeria has a homogeneous sub-national people been this fractured and factionalised. Fayemi and the Ekiti elite have their work cut out for them. Ranged against the enlightened educated class and the outraged salariate that made Fayemi’s return possible are a grumpy section of the elite fired by reverse nationalism, casual riffraff on the fringe of society and the vast homophobic underclass spawned by unemployment and the de-industrialization of the state.

    Whether one likes him or not, Fayose has shown himself to be a man of extraordinary political dexterity; a consummate conman and ham actor given to boisterous theatrics and relentless rabblerousing. A robber baron himself without any qualms or scruples, the Afao-Ekiti born politician has managed to reinvent himself as a champion of the masses even as he contributed to their plight and pervasive poverty.

    It is this combination of gifted charlatan and social shaman which makes Fayose a particularly dangerous customer. He has also managed to tap into a deep well of elite resentment and frustration with the unfortunate anti-restructuring stance and seeming sectionalist bias of the federal authorities.

    The old ACN had perfected a strategy of containing him by trying to keep him inside while pissing outside rather than leaving him outside to piss inside. But this strategy was bungled by the politically short-sighted in the wake of the ACN fusing into APC. Eventually the bad boy returned to give his tormentors a good run for their money.

    Those who care should also note that within the larger restructionist lobby of the South West, Fayose, whatever his antecedents, remains a Yoruba notable. Indeed if he were to surface at an Afenifere gathering with his electoral conqueror, it is obvious that it is the rogue populist who will be wildly lionized ahead of the triumphant victor.

    What this suggests is that the Yoruba Question, like the National Question, is too deep and fundamental to be resolved by mere elections. Desperate political competition for desperately scarce resources is not amenable to electoral resolutions.  No matter what happens to the current arrow head in the next three months, the Fayose tendency will continue to rear its head in Ekiti politics for a long time to come until the root cause is tackled, and comprehensively too.

    Geography also matters in this business. Landlocked and hemmed in by a rugged mountainous terrain, Ekiti had for long endured and enjoyed the bucolic bliss of an isolated agrarian community surviving a on subsistence farming, its principal assets being a passion for western education and the celebrated pristine integrity of its denizens passed on from generation to generation and buoyed by the stirring tradition of heroic resistance to tyranny.

    But for industries to thrive and survive, there must be fiscal empowerment of the populace and massive infrastructural development which remain the remit of a visionary state and patriotic political class. Without this, the only industry that can thrive is the industry of degraded and degrading politics in which pauperized voters are offered money to surrender their electoral suzerainty. The peonization of democracy requires extreme poverty to flourish.

    It should be obvious that what Ekiti people require to spring the trap of electoral peonage is nothing short of a New Deal;  a comprehensive blueprint for economic emancipation and the emasculation of pervasive poverty. Compare this forlorn fate with the geographical luck of their aristocratic neighbours to the south, the Ondo people, whose centuries-old access to the sea and its riches has allowed them to invest their wealth in the economic emancipation of their people.

    It has now become economically imperative that Ekiti nation must break loose from its geographical isolation . A massive drive to open it to the outside world must be the priority of its elite in cooperation with the government. For starters, there ought to be a railway loop that connects the state with the Lagos-Port-Harcourt line or the Lagos-Abuja track. The Omuo-Kabba ; Ado-Ikare; Ado-Aramoko; Ado-Omu-aran via Ifaki and Ado-Akure via Ikerre gateways ought to receive immediate attention either through eventual dualization or fastidious  rehabilitation.

    There is opportunity in every crisis. The sweetness of the APC victory in Ekiti state lies in the fact that for the first time since the First Republic all the core states of the old West have now come under one political umbrella. This is a unique opportunity to drive regional economic integration and a comprehensive economic blueprint which is specific to the needs and aspirations of the region.

    In the Second Republic under the leadership of Obafemi Awolowo and the surviving stalwarts of progressive governance there was an umbrella union of LOOBO states which drove regional cooperation and integration despite the unitary constitution bequeathed by the departed military administration.

    But with all energies currently concentrated on the deadly power struggle at the centre, it is hard to see how this can become a reality. Indeed with the current anti-restructuring and counter-devolution mantra of the federal authorities, such ideologies of regionalism are likely to be viewed as politically suspect and surplus to electoral requirements. This is more so since the APC victory is federally inspired and driven by an obsession with unitarist centralization and conformity with statist principles.

    The west may well be in more political trouble than it has ever bargained for.  Rather than coming together to pursue the agenda of regional integration, what we are likely to witness is a relentless subversion and deliberate undermining of regional authority by state viceroys who are more beholden to central authority than to any regional leader. They may choose to humour them from time to time, but that is as far as it will go unless the regional leadership chooses to press its luck.

    If this lack of synergy were to be the case, the ensuing regional discontent coupled with the fallout of the herdsmen imbroglio may just be enough to tip unitary federalism into terminal crisis in Nigeria. As usual with their earlier history, it is always at the point when the Yoruba people think they have achieved the greatest feat of integration that the sparks of disintegration begin to fly. Ancient pounded yam can burn the palms indeed. But let that not debar the good people of Ekiti from enjoying their pounded yam and palm wine this fine morning.

     

  • On Kylian Mbappe’s paternity

    May the good Lord spare one from the offensive of one’s offspring. While some people enjoy the fruits of their misbegotten labour, others must endure the labours of their misbegotten fruits. While there are orphans who know their father, there are also fathers who know their orphans. It was said that when Karl Marx was brought back to the world a hundred years after to witness the revolutionary convulsions triggered by some of his intellectual descendants, the great bearded one cleared his throat and then intoned: “I thank God that I am not a Marxist”.

    It was said that on his deathbed, wracked by pains and miseries arising from huge swellings on his body, the greatest philosopher of the nineteenth century swore to make the much reviled bourgeois class pay for every one of the carbuncles that have turned life into an impossible torment. And how well did they pay for it!

    While joyous fans and soccer-mad aficionados were soaking up the wonders of the modern Russian city of Ekaterinburg, they might have forgotten a minor historical detail. It was here that the last Russian Tsar, Nicholas, and his entire family were horrifically done to death by furious revolutionary soldiers some months after the revolution.

    In the course of a long, event-suffused teaching career spanning the whole gamut of education from primary school, modern school, teacher training, polytechnic to the university, yours sincerely has collected quite a number of former students. One of these, a former two-term governor in a core northern state, was so miffed by snooper’s claim of being his former teacher that he stormed out to make an urgent phone call. Upon return, he was smiling sheepishly and apologetically.

    But of all these miserable descendants, none has been as unsparing, as unstinting and as hell-bent as a fellow columnist on this paper. Thirty five years after first encountering him as an impossibly bright but recalcitrant undergraduate, Olufemi Macaulay, a scion of the iconic Macaulay family, often barges into snooper’s office, just as he did then, to hone his literary skills and to engage in Socratic dialogue that pushes the English language to the edge of semantic impossibilities.

    It is quite a time-warp; as if time had stood still for this chap and his bemused former teacher. Nothing daunts the fellow, not even snooper’s occasional disobliging frown and stony glare. Macaulay saunters in like an infamous goblin, his face glowering with intellectual mischief and profane merry-making. Occasionally, this Okon-like creature would ask for a sip of his favourite beverage which he gulps down only to ask for an immediate refill, hinting that his spirit was low. The boy takes frightening liberty with a snooper well past his pugilistic prime.

    Last week, Macaulay was on top of his irreverent form as he barged into the office with intent, his face glowering with impish irreverence. He immediately fastened a discomfiting gaze on snooper’s cranium.

    “Sir, have you by any chance noticed a striking similarity between yourself and…..” the chap opened.

    “Between myself and whom?” snooper charged, cutting him dead in his track.

    “Ha, between yourself and Kylian Mbappe”, the fellow retorted with a mocking grimace.

    “And who is Mbappe?”snooper screamed pretending to be oblivious of the French teenage prodigy and new global soccer sensation. But Macaulay pressed on, ignoring his teacher.

    “I have studied the shape of your head, your complexion and your peculiar laugh and the evidence is overwhelming”, the chap insisted.

    “Which evidence? And which complexion?” snooper shouted, asking Macaulay to take his leave or face physical expulsion from the office. Macaulay loitered around, muttering some insensate nonsense about French leave and Dutch courage. Later that night, yours sincerely began arduous research into Mbappe’s background. Anybody would be proud to have such a gifted boy in the family. But it turned out that Mbappe is actually a product of Cameroonian and Algerian parentage.

    When this incontrovertible evidence was presented at an editorial gathering a few days later with the selfsame Macaulay maintaining a stony impassive silence, another impish fellow retorted that Mbappe actually has Yoruba names in addition to his baptismal name. Snooper quickly took his leave. To our relief, the CNN later showed a picture of Mbappe’s hometown with a cameo of his parents. Man pikin no be man pikin. May the good Lord save us from our abami and abamo children (monster and misbegotten) whose feet drag on the floor as you try piggy-backing them.

  • The life and times of Mallam Adamu Ciroma

    On leadership recruitment and institutional dysfunction

    With the death of Mallam Adamu Ciroma last week at the age eighty four, the Northern Nigeria political establishment has lost one of its most respected and influential voices. Adamu Ciroma was in every sense the ultimate feudal aristocrat. In a brilliant tribute this past week, Mamman Daura, the reclusive power broker of Aso Rock and octogenarian nephew of the current occupant, captured the essential Ciroma: his brilliance, his integrity and his justly celebrated forthrightness.

    There would have been nothing to add to this and the equally moving one by our old friend, Sully Abu. But then Adamu Ciroma was no ordinary person. In fact if subjected to clinical analysis, his life mirrors the aspirations and post-colonial trajectory of the northern master feudal class in all their contradictions and power plays.  This column intends to do this in the coming weeks as we square up to the myth of northern hegemony in Nigerian politics.

    Adamu Ciroma carried himself with regal restraint. There was something about his air of natural authority, his frugal reserve and calm deportment which hints at a person of the highest birth in the order of feudal nobility. But this is in fact not the case. Neither did he belong to the dominant ethnic nationality in the feudal north. He was from the minority of minorities in terms of origin.

    But his brilliance, intellectual distinction and competence stood him out as a person destined for the highest rung of the leadership ladder. The Northern Establishment catapulted him to the top of his profession. But as he was to find out twice when he made a bid for the ultimate leadership, there was a stone ceiling under the glass ceiling. A tree trunk does not become a crocodile simply because it has spent some time in water.

    But despite the betrayal and disappointment, Ciroma took it all in the chin. He had been trained never to rock the boat. He took it all with a calm, fatalistic bemusement. His life was devoted to the project of order anchored on a conservative feudal ethos. As you are about to read in the following piece published four years ago, this was the basis of Ciroma’s ambivalent attitude to the June 12 struggle.

    There is an immediate lesson to be learnt from the career of Mallam Ciroma, particularly by the South West political caucus.  Up to a point and in order to preserve the system, genuine feudalism allows genuine talents to flourish.  Modernization rapidly expands the base and basis of leadership recruitment as the middle class swells with new entrants rescued from the poverty log-jam. When you try to hoodwink or rebuff their claims, it leads to rancor and rebellion in the system.

    Contemporary Nigerian politics and its leadership recruitment are gridlocked by several mutually unintelligible modes of political production. Some of them are aberrant historic developments the result of traditional societies groping and intuiting their way forward towards some form political modernity. Others are the bizarre manifestations of societies stranded in a no man’s land between feudalism and modernity.

    Trapped between degraded feudalism and aborted modernization, the South West is perhaps worst-hit with its current leadership facing a growing storm. The current feudalization of leadership recruitment in which recruitment to leadership position is based on paddy -paddy considerations and other incestuous deal-making rather than on competence and qualification is a reflection of bastard feudalism of the worst kind. When you send a private soldier to man the post of a general, you must expect disastrous reverses on the front. This is when institutional hybridism hurts most. May Allah grant the great man eternal repose.